HolisticNetworking.Net: Thomas Belknap's Laboratory of LAMP

Thomas J Belknap’s Laboratory of LAMP

 

Mashable on Location-Based Services / HN on Privacy

Great article from Mashable author Ben Parr about the rise of LBS, or Location-Based Services. There have been location-based concepts floating around the Web2.0 sphere for quite a while, but as iPhones and other smart wireless devices become more robust and applications for them more ubiquitous, LBS is becoming the hot new ticket:
Location-Based Services: Are You Using Them?.
How this shakes out in terms of privacy will be interesting to watch. Privacy people are probably going to largely take a dim view of such technology, and its good to have them in the public discussing the security aspects of this. It’s [...]

Creepy Uncle Google’s AdSense Plan

I can’t imagine how much worse this could possibly be. Google’s new plan, announced on it’s AdSense blog, is to allow it’s widgets to read site user’s cookies and advertise to them based on their browsing preferences. To restate: visitors to your website will have their cookies read by a third party and then they will see ads based on their own search history rather than your website’s content.
Let’s walk through the reasons that this is a bad idea:
Site Content Integrity
While its certainly true that Google’s AdSense ads very often make almost no sense to your site’s content [...]