• Disney Bets $180M on ‘Christmas’
  Apparently Disney thinks it’s a bright idea to spend $180 million on a remake of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey. That’s before prints and ads, apparently. You gotta wonder.
• Deja vu: Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target in DVD price war
  Because it’s all about ego, right?

• Music Industry Changes Tune of New Program to Fight File Sharing
  Interesting.
• Video: The bike tree – the 21st-century cycle shed
  This is pretty cool.

• SU – Drunk Frenchman Opens Bottle Of Wine With Shoe (VIDEO)
  This is the kind of important news we live to bring the world.
• EMI sues US music website over Beatles tunes
  Well, of course they’re suing. It’s really the only possible solution, right?
• The Boss’ book bonanza
  Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is expected to receive a $10 million advance.

• Collecting Headlines Funnier Than This
  The staff of The Onion devotes two days a week to creating headlines (then writing/assigning the associated stories). Would that major media put that much thought into the process!
• Exclusive: How I Unmasked @FakeAPStylebook (an Only-on-Twitter Story)
  Oddly, this wasn’t an unmasking we wanted, though it’s interesting. We love @fakeapstylebook.
• Weezer Snuggie Infomercial
  So many things wrong with this, it has to be right (YouTube).
• Gershwin Heirs Fight Over Copyright Royalties
  Because it really is about the money.
• 60 Minutes Puts Forth Laughable, Factually Incorrect MPAA Propaganda On Movie Piracy
  Because actual thinking is soooo 1978. Speaking of which, we’ll be linking to a similar scare story featuring Jack Valenti.
• Piracy news on 60 Minutes, from 1978 (video)
  It’s not a good day for 60 Minutes. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 of the Jack Valenti home video will kill us all piece. (though the links appear to be broken)
• Congress locks radio stations, record labels into boardroom
  Sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it?
• ATT to Verizon: “There’s a Lawsuit for That”
  As ATT customers, count us among those who believe the company overstates its coverage, voice and data. Nothing like entering the dead zone around ‘loper HQ.
• Illegal downloaders ’spend the most on music’, says poll
  This is not the first time this type of study has revealed increased purchases.
• MPAA Tells The FCC: If We Don’t Stop Piracy, The Internet Will Die
  Come for the headline, stay for the laughs. This stuff just makes the argument silly. Worse, of course, is the fact that Congress will take this more seriously than legitimate counter-arguments.
• ATT sues Verizon over ‘there’s a map for that’ ads
  ATT thinks Verizon’s coverage maps are misleading. The interesting thing about this dispute is that ATT’s coverage maps are equally misleading. Last year I entered into a 2 year contract with ATT with the understanding that ATT offered excellent coverage throughout my neighborhood (at least, that’s what the ATT maps said). In reality I’m lucky to get any service at all in or around my home and ATT now admits that there’s a service gap in my area.

• Quietube: A surprise proxy for the Middle East
  In which something unexpected is born. Love this.
• Latest Signs of a Dying Industry
  An interesting take on the Death of Newspapers: The World Series offers a startling barometer of how critical the health of the newspaper industry is in this country. It’s not yet on life support, but it’s getting there. The latest bleak picture is exhibited in the number of newspapers that are not covering the World Series.

• Al Katkowsky: The Book As App
  The iPhone just might be the future of self-publishing.
• Grant Hart: 2541
  I (k2) love this song. You should too.
• Monrovian Analog Blogger
  How long before the news agencies in Liberia sue this guy?
• The Shining declared ’scariest horror film ever’
  So many possible jokes, so little time.
• DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood
  Hint: no surprises here.

• RIAA Anti-Piracy Partner Clueless About BitTorrent
  Tracking piracy isn’t easy. First you have to understand the basics. If that doesn’t work you can just make stuff up.

In some cases I made either bad choices or misinformed decisions. For example, by way of Googling my name recently, I found my work phone number in the web archives of a members only listserv for people in my industry. I recall making the decision to put my phone number in my email signature because I was posting specific information that I thought would help guys doing my same job in other organizations. There are few enough of us that I figured I’d be happy to help if one of them were to call me to ask for more details or advice. The problem is that, while I knew that registered members (i.e., people in my industry) would be able to search the archives, I had no idea that the thread was going to end up on Google. That was just simple misinformed decision. But my initial settings on my Twitter.com account turned out to be a case of making a genuinely bad decision, then forgetting all about it.

Working in IT has made me pretty cynical about the usefulness and security of new technologies that take the world by storm. I avoided bothering to sign up for Twitter for longer than most people; Larry King was probably Twittering before I was. But suddenly, in mid-June of this year, I heard a news report about Iranian election protesters using Twitter to communicate the locations of antigovernment rallies and the IP addresses of sympathetic proxy servers for bypassing Iran’s web filters. I created a Twitter account in a hurry and began following the action as described by thousands of Iranian Twitterers in real time.

But the mistake I made was when I first created my Twitter account. I did not check the “Protect my tweets” box in the Account tab of the Settings page. I figured that if I was going to cheer for the good guys from the sidelines of this new use of Twitter then I should let everyone see anything I posted. Specifically, I was dissuaded from checking the box by the warning that, “…only those you approve will receive your tweets. You will not appear on the public timeline.” So I left it unchecked. I posted a few words of encouragement and advice over the next few days until I, and the rest of the planet, decided that the Iranian government must have by then, surely started to use or at least surveil Twitter to their own advantage.

That was the end of my Twitter usage as far as I was concerned. But a few months later some friends and I went to a multi-track IT security convention and agreed to communicate our locations and statuses to each other by way of Twitter. This is one of the best uses I’ve seen for Twitter. It worked out great for us. We were able to advise each other to avoid lame speakers, hurry to a certain room that was filling up fast before a popular speaker arrived, etc. Plus we could coordinate our after hours rendezvous each evening. Fortunately I did not tweet anything like “hey dudes I’m still @ the motel. I accidentally killed another hooker”, because, as I later found out, everything I posted to twitter ended up on google.

Back when I made the initial decision to not check the “Protect my tweets” box, I vaguely assumed that my tweets would be searchable by anonymous users on Twitter.com only. But I did not expect that when I chose to make texts searchable by other users that also meant Google. Worse, or rather, weirder, I’ve since discovered that my small collection of tweets have been indexed and linked to by several other sites, including some site that lists tweets associated with particular retailers. Apparently I am a good person to follow if you want to find deals at Neiman Marcus! WTF?

That last oddity is an example of a recent phenomenon of crawling and indexing the so called “deep web”. Basically, specialty websites post the results of hypothetical searches of other sites which have their own specific data. This is a big subject. It has other names too, and aspects other than what I describe here. I’m just now learning about how it works on the back end. But so far I’m seeing that these deep web links add a menacing and creepy feeling to the previously benign and narcissistic pastime of self-googling. One site listed my birth month and year, a few of my tweets, a research paper I co-authored, and my boss’ Facebook page. Yes, this collective and unintended dossier on me is invasive and aggravating. But if I was your 11 year old kid it would be time to panic.

But there is opportunity here too, for somebody. At least one site, Zabasearch.com, offers to remove a single public record from the web for $20. In my case it was the street address of an apartment I lived in during college. Will we see more of this in the future? Will we all be extorted into paying to have this kind of “deep web” data collection and correlation taken down from websites we’ve never even visited? Might it morph into a new spin on the old “protection” racket? I am not sure.

But one thing I am sure of is that, increasingly, the online identities and reputations we’re all cultivating, the deliberately crafted kind and the kind that accumulate haphazardly, will be yet another thing that somebody else owns the rights to.

• QA: A front-row seat for media’s meltdown
  What are the chances that movie and book professionals read this article and think it doesn’t really apply to them?

• A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades
  The picture tells the whole story.