In February’s Harper’s, Jaron Lanier—the man who coined the phrase “virtual reality”—uses a new phrase with sound bite potential. “Oracle illusion” as defined by Lanier, is the super-human validity attributed to text when authorship is suppressed, such as it is on sites like Wikipedia.
Concurrently, it seems WikiScanner, the brainchild a Virgil Griffith (a PhD candidate at Caltech’s Computation and Neural Systems department), is about to roll out its version 2.0. The project links the IP addresses of corporate companies to Wikipedia edits—so that effectually you can see when, for example, Kmart has edited their own entry or others.
via http://virgil.gr/
Back in September, I added Sexy Librarian to Amazon’s Kindle catalog, thereby subscribing to the terms and conditions of Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. Today I received an email that these terms would be amended in 15 days.
Here is a list of the changes, which, incidentally, I agreed to:
• Section 2: We modified the procedures for amending the terms of the Agreement.
• Section 3: We modified the termination provision, including by providing that you or we may terminate the Agreement at any time.
• Section 4: We added provisions relating to eligibility to participate in the Program, account information, and account security, including that you may only maintain 1 account at a time, and that if you have multiple accounts, you will have 30 days to consolidate your accounts.
• Section 5.1: We added provisions relating to delivery, content requirements, rejection, withdrawal, and reformatting of Digital Books.
• Section 5.3.1: We modified the provision regarding list prices for Digital Books.
• Section 5.4.2: We removed the obligation to have a U.S. bank account to participate in the Program, to allow international publishers to participate in the Program. We also added a provision for circumstances under which we are entitled to withhold payments for a period of time.
• Section 5.6: We added a provision regarding our use of geofiltering technology.
• Section 5.7: We added a rights dispute resolution provision relating to claims of copyright infringement.
• Section 7: We added a provision covering confidential information.
Right now I’m interested in:
