A pile of blog-like items to end the month

• Update: Apologies for the del.icio.us links spammage in the feed. Apparently my understanding of "no more than once a day" differs from feedburner's
• I think this sums up NYC's response to the latest news about Giuliani: Rudy got laid, New York paid
• Bank of America tried to tout its newly acquired local sensibilities in Chicago by featuring the iconic Sun-Times building in a full page ad: What's wrong with this picture?. Unfortunately for them (or their ad-agency), the Sun-Times building was torn down in 2004.
• Interesting essay Digital Reading, Subpoenas, and Privacy at O'Reilly Radar by Peter Brantley asks: Are you prepared to respect and reassert in a digital age -- an age in which the act of reading is inherently recordable -- the individual's control of privacy that has been maintained over the last 700 years?
• An essay by Sean Ammirati User Centric Identity: A Call To Action, which reminds me I need to write up something about Defrag. Related is this announcement for a Workshop: Computing in the Cloud by Ed Felten at Princeton University 14–15 January 2008.
• If you're American, it's unlikely that you've heard of the electoral upset in Australia over the weekend, where 10+ year Prime Minister and Chief Bush Buddy John Howard was kicked out of office (ok, upset implies that it was a surprise, and as far back as August when we were there it was clear that Rudd would likely win the election). One of the refreshing comments as the Australian government changes is that Rudd wishes to drive a culture shift across the bureaucracy to promote a pro-disclosure culture. People need to remember that their governments serve them, at least in democracies or alleged democracies. There is very little information which reasonable needs to be hidden from citizens. You'll hear but what if the terrorists learn shouted in reply and justification, and what if they do learn something that could potentially be exploited? Is that absolutely, necessarily worse than allowing the government to become secretive, to create "secret laws" and to detain citizens without due process? At what point do we (or did we?) accept living in fear of our government over the fear that potentially someone could do some sort of harm to us? (forgot the link: Not just the law but the culture needs fixing from The Sydney Morning Herald)
• Essay by Joshua Porter on Facebook’s Growing Design Problem (and a proposed solution) where he points out that his […] main concern was that Facebook and Blockbuster were talking at all. Made me recall the ACLU Ordering Pizza in 2010 campaign on government surveillance from 2002. I think Facebook has totally fucked up on balancing user privacy against the desire to collect and make money off its users. The bigger question is whether FB's typical users notice or care about such things?