The Gevulot

‘It’s a nice thought.’ He offers her his hand. ‘I am Paul. I got a little lost: all those moving streets. I was hoping you could tell me the way out.’ A trickle of emotion bleeds through his rough visitor’s gevulot: a sense of unease, a weight, a guilt. Xuexue can imagine the old man of the sea sitting on his back. It feels very familiar. And suddenly it is more important to talk to the stranger than to smile at the robot. ‘Sure I can,’ she says. ‘But why don’t you stay ...

 The Surveillance Ecosystem

Lifeloggers capture every instant of their existence for their own reference. XP stars live, love, and die with passionate abandon so everyone can enjoy it on demand. Habitats depend on constantly updated operational and environmental data as well as troops of transhuman observers to function seamlessly and provide the day-to-day necessities of transhuman life. Hypercorps, governments, organizations, and individuals safeguard the information they need to survive and seek out what they need to...

 Privacy is Impossible on the Internet

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him;105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. [...] Sure, we can take measures to pr...