Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Creative Commons just released Defining Noncommercial: A Study of How the Online Population Understands 'Noncommercial Use'. (pdf link).

I've blogged before about the impact of anthropomorphic interfaces and devices. I've recently written an article on the subject. In it I point out that we're using voice-driven and other human-like interfaces more and more. They grab our attention and free up our hands for others tasks. And they can help us accept machines---such as personal or service robots---for a whole new set of tasks.

Psychologists and communications scholars will tell you, however, that our brains are hardwired to treat these "fake" people as though they were real, including with respect to the feeling of being observed and evaluated. That means that we react to such technology, behaviorally and physiologically, as though a person were really present.

This could be bad for privacy. Privacy scholars will tell you that its not good for us to always feel like we're surrounded by others. We need "moments offstage," to use Alan Westin's famous formulation. It could also be good for privacy, particularly on the Internet. Using avatars instead of privacy policies that no one reads or understands could help shore up the failing regime of online notice.

You can view the article here. As of today, it's looking for a good home.

I write extensively in Chapter 8 of my new book,The Laws of Disruption, about the madness of prosecuting Lori Drew, a Missouri woman, for her participation in a cruel MySpace hoax that contributed to the suicide of a 13 year-old girl named Megan Meier.

From Valleywag (warning: heavily airbrushed and quite cleavagey model picture after the link): "...that's the thing about being impolite online: it might be needlessly abrasive 95 times out of 100, but those other five times it's awesome, conveying fresh perspective readers would not have seen were it not for the