What happens next is beyond mere irony — Amazon’s prizing bots take over:

The plot of my book is about how un­derstand­ing com­put­ers is the first step to tak­ing con­trol of your life in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Now I don’t know what to be­lieve.

It’s pos­sible that the opt­im­al price of Laur­en Ipsum is, in fact, ten dol­lars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tat­tooed hipst­er who wrote Amazon’s pric­ing al­gorithm. After all, I have no choice.

A very amusing account of happenstance that sounds all but too much like straight out of a Kevin Slavin talk.

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Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”

I think this idea has tremendous value and would love to see it happen. Imagine you had a complete revision history that tracks changes as legislation moves through the legislative process. And imagine the relief people in administrations would feel if they not had to work with MS Office inline track changes anymore.

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Thinking Cities explores the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society. Some of the world’s leading city-thinkers are interviewed for the film, including Geoffrey West, physicist and professor at Santa Fe Institute; Mathieu Lefevre of New Cities Foundation and Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT Senseable City Lab.

“For the first time in history, 52% of the world’s population live in cities,” explains Lefevre. “There are 200,000 new urban dwellers every day. That trend is accelerating, particularly in Asia, Africa, Latin America. By 2050, six billion people will live in cities.”

Sounds like a pretty familiar pitch to me.

Anyway, make sure to watch the video below.

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Indeed, by what right do Disney and the BBC get to adapt Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sherlock without paying the descendants of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, and Arthur Conan Doyle?

Beautiful satire over at the Telegraph.

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As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

The gist: Target can offer baby related products to customers, sometimes even before the immediate family knows of the pregnancy.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

We should keep in mind that, with all the discussions about Do-Not-Track and Address Books, data gathering and analysis is wide-spread, is being used and is not happening strictly online. Further, with more and more signals being picked up and available for analysis, the potential for finding valuable patterns increases tremendously.

But it is really the part about pattern formation that’s the most interesting. Nobody says, it should only be companies that collect this information about us. Analysing that data for our own benefit² should enable us to develop habits that we find beneficial.

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[…] fledgling app developers do everything they can to increase their chances. Because Apple provides extremely easy access to address book data, the pro — that is, using the data to improve user experience, increase virality and growth, etc. — outweighs the con. To stay on equal footing, larger apps, like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare, have to follow along.

I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers. The expectation of Address Book privacy is obvious[.]

Are you kidding me?

Just because Apple doesn’t expressly forbid, by technical means or App Store policy, that this data should not be used, it’s a free-for-all? I don’t buy this “If everybody else is doing it, we should as well do it also.” That’s exactly the lameness that is the “It’s current industry standard”–defense. That doesn’t count.

Yes, Apple should have restricted access to this data. They did not, and that’s bad. This does not, however, absolve any app developer that uses this.

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company’s database has Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’ cell phone number.

Shouldn’t that be worrying?

Meanwhile, Path announced they deleted all harvested contact information.

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I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path.

Dave Morin is reacting in the comments:

We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

While I welcome the addition of Opt-Out functionality, not being notified, never mind asked about this kind of data disclosure leaves a bitter taste. Address books are very intimate and confidential data sets.

Arguing that:

This is currently the industry best practice.

only goes on to show how corrupting facebooks practices have been to the industry as a whole.

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mainstream media cannot encourage reform, either of politically poisonous ideas such as corporate personhood or of personally poisonous ideas such as drug advocacy that is not driven by medical professionals, without fundamentally advocating for the obliteration of as much as 7% of their total revenues.

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[Honeywell] had developed and tested learning thermostat technology, like the kind Nest has introduced, but that it had decided not to commercialize the learning tech after weak user response.

On of the Patent in question covers “Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller”. Taking a look at what Honeywell is offering this seems like another of those incumbent industry player seeks to prevent competition in his market by overly broad patent claims.

I hope this turns out OK for Nest Labs.

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Hello,

I see that you attempted to purchase How to Fix Copyright while in a different country than the United States listed on your Amazon account. Certain Kindle titles are not available everywhere. We’re concerned about the activity on your account and are reaching out to you for information to ensure the best possible service for your account.

If you have moved to a different country, you can easily update your country for your Amazon account at http://www.Amazon.com/manageyourkindle.

If this is not the case, and you’re actually residing in the United States, please fax us any of the following at 001-206-266-1838 when faxing from outside the US, or 206-266-1838 from within the US:

• Passport
• Military ID
• Permanent Resident Card
• Driver’s License
• Other state photo identity card

We want to assure you that we handle this information in a secure manner: these are dedicated fax lines, staffed in an area with limited employee access. The fax is never printed, just converted to an electronic image that is used to check the country, then the image is deleted.

If we do not receive a fax with the information requested above, we may need to limit your country setting at http://www.Amazon.com/manageyourkindle to Germany.

Thank you for your assistance.

It is absolutely clear that this has to do with regional licensing¹ of the titles. Publishers often hold the rights to titles for the US market but not the European markets or vice versa. Amazon’s in a legal bind there. However, they could make it possible for Kindle devices to change which store they’re associated with.

I’m now waiting to see what happens if I don’t supply any of the above mentioned forms of proof of residency.

It’s sad, really, to see the publishing industry make the exact same mistakes as the recoding industry before them. You’d think they’d be able to learn.