Related link: http://www.cspan.org

CSPAN was all about tech this weekend, and I spent the weekend listening to two interesting discussions while trying to write a Preface for an upcoming developer’s notebook. (Here is a hint.)

Yesterday on BookTV, there was a replay of Patrick Radden Keefe’s talk about Echelon and the NSA. I was half listening for only half the time, but it was interesting enough for me to add his book, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping to my wishlist.

Keefe’s discussion was followed by Robert O’Harrow, Jr. discussion of how data mining is used to track consumers and terrorists alike. This guy is interesting, his book looks to be an objective analysis of “identity mining” and it convinced me to buy a copy of No Place to Hide. Toward the end of the question and answer portion of this discussion, Robert O’Harrow starts to discuss ChoicePoint as a new private intelligence agency. He ends with some statements about how data profiling is creating a new power structure. Very interesting ideas.

You missed all of that stuff, it was yesterday. Regardless of your opinions, both of these books look interesting. O’Harrow specifically talked about the need for the Public to start discussing how much privacy we’re willing to live without. I’m starting to notice change for the better, authors and political figures are beginning to exhibit a real knowledge of the technical issues behind security and privacy.

Tonight at 8 PM ET, there is a Q&A with Markos Moulitsas the man behind a popular blog Daily Kos.

Let me guess, you missed it?

Related link: http://www.codezoo.net/

A new O’Reilly site, CodeZoo, launched today. CodeZoo exists to help you find high-quality, freely available, reusable components, getting you past the repetitive parts of coding, and onto the rest and the best of your projects. As we say in the welcome letter, it’s a fast-forward button for your compiler. (Okay, bad analogy. But work with me.)

Perl’s CPAN has long been one of the best features of the Perl community — a central service that provides easy access to tons of reusable code. Many other languages have plenty of free code, but no easy place to find it (short of Google). In the Java world, Apache Jakarta is the closest thing to CPAN, but it covers a limited set of components. CodeZoo is launching with a directory of Java components, and from there, we hope to move into other languages. Let us know where you think we should go next! (We’ve already gotten one request for Lisp…)

We’re not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we’ve hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects — whether you are an open source or commercial developer. CodeZoo lets you rate each component, and sort and select components that other users rate the highest. Your tips and code samples for using each component live right on the component page, making it easy to share hacks, workarounds, and optomizations that help you get more from the code. We want to help you find good code, and get to using it as quickly as possible.

Each component has a page containing links to O’Reilly Network articles and weblogs, Safari books (from O’Reilly and other publishers), conference presentations, and test and integration results from SpikeSource, our launch sponsor. We want to bring together all the material you need to get up and running with a component, and put it all on one page.

We hope you enjoy the site. Look forward more from this project — we think you’ll like how it grows.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02plug.html?pagewanted=all

NY Times: Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule - great story about Prius hackers getting huge gas mileage by plugging their cars into the electrical grid overnight:

Plug-in hybrid prototypes have been around for several years, but the idea of modifying a Prius stemmed from the curiosity of some Prius owners in the United States, Mr. Kramer said. They were aroused by a mysterious unmarked button on their Prius and discovered that in Priuses sold in Europe and Japan, the button allows the car to drive for a mile in electric-only mode. Mr. Hermance said the feature was disabled in Priuses sold in the United States because of complications it would have created in emissions-testing rules.

Mr. Kramer said “a bunch of engineers reverse-engineered it in the United States and figured out how to hack it.”

Company Bypasses Cookie-Deleting Consumers - This is great. A company makes a piece of spyware that tries to prevent you from deleting your own cookies. Check out the quote from the founder/CEO:

Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.

“The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works,” Tanembaum said.

(Emphasis added.) What a joke. It’s such a pain to even find the tool to delete cookies — no one would seek it out unless they were both proficient and motivated. This seems like a great reason to delete Flash to me. Macromedia, you might want to get on this. (I spoke too soon — Macromedia has already responded. See the comment below as well.)

On the other hand, it’s a cool and amazing stat that 58% of web users have deleted cookies. What does that say about consumer demand for privacy?