RealityPrime

Two interesting stories from Wired this week:

Wired News: Runner-Up Takes on YouTube

This story, in light of another story yesterday about teens fleeing MySpace for Facebook because MySpace is no longer "cool," makes me really wonder how the Google YouTube acquisition will turn out a year or two from now. Did Google pay $1.65B for YouTube’s technology, but not its market share? Of course not. They wanted the eyeballs they were lacking for Google Video.

The problem, of course, is once YouTube has money, there’s some meat for copyright holders to sue. And the pressure has already begun. YouTube has started removing tens of thousands of videos — most of them were the kinds of videos I went to YouTube to watch (Daily Show clips especially). And the problem with that is that YouTube’s success was built on ignoring copyright. If the purges drive users away, Google may get stuck, like News Corp, holding an empty dated bag.

But they’re not quite that naive. The $1.65B dollar figure is thrown about like it’s a big deal, and it is. But remember it’s an all-stock transaction. This means if Google’s share price goes down, YouTube’s investors and founders lose money too. The deal seems almost as if Google backdated YouTube’s launch as if it was its own spin-off video service two years ago and took the resulting financial charge (unlike some other companies with their execs). That makes the $1.65B seem somewhat more reasonable, given Google’s stock growth (~6x since IPO) and makes it more like $280 million in my mind.

Wired News: Feds Leapfrog RFID Privacy Study

Either people get it by now or they don’t. The companies implementing RFID, like those making election machines, have shown that they simply don’t care about your rights, or they are simply too ignorant of good security practices to do anything about it. We are being treated just like any bottle of shampoo. We’re essentially just products, who also happen to be consumers, as if GE sold a "buy it, eat it, trash it" machine that sometimes breaks down or sometimes dares to think for itself.

This Wired story highlights some work within the government that was meant to fix the problems before they become widespread. But the powers that be would rather brush it all under the rug. The study, like the media ownership study at the FCC, gets buried or ignored.

And when we meet the privacy apocalypse, where crooks with gray-market scanners will be able to track you and even BE you at their whim, those same powers that be will undoubtedly claim "how could we have foreseen these problems?" just as the same people claimed "how could we have foreseen the levees breaking?"

The only solution is to throw them out of power.

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