It’s been a while since my last Liberty Fund article, but I’ve got a new one on “Marlowe, Goethe, and the Faust Legend”. If you’ve read The Magic Battery or the related stories I’ve posted on this site, you know the Faust story fascinates me.
The story was posted to the Liberty Fund site about a month ago, after sitting with a promise of eventual publication since last year. I only found out when they paid me.
In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:
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EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs are familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Not many of you will have heard of another satirical songwriter, Georg Kreisler, if only because he wrote in German. If you’re American and have heard of him, it’s probably because of the striking similarities between two of his songs and two of Lehrer’s. Let’s take a look at them.
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