So this is our second reunion show, we loved the first one so much. It went to air on 1st October 2005. I haven’t put it in my feed as an enclosure, because its 30MB, and an acquired taste. If you heard the reunion show from a few weeks back, this one is much different and more like what the show used to be when it was regularly on air. Enjoy. Feedback most welcome. WBF_227.mp3

Privacy is dead, so get over it.

I came to this point in January 2005, and had written a scripted fictional video to drive the point home, but I never got around to producing it. No matter, its now October 2005, so I figured I better get the idea out there.

The way technology is heading, we will soon all be carrying around multipurpose handheld devices for phone, organising and audio/visual playback and recording. These devices will all be directly IP addressable on the Internet, meaning we will soon have the ability to broadcast 24 hour a day footage of our or other peoples’ lives. I could connect to your camera in real time, record, remix and make it available to someone else in real time.

With the digital age, electronic recording of personal details, and the countless surveillance cameras that film us every day of our lives, many of which are also now available on the Internet, governments started to put privacy legislation in place several years ago.

However the interesting thing is that governments realise that prevention isn’t the answer. These laws don’t hide and protect our personal information, they mostly only allow us to find out what people have already recorded about us.

Like was the case with DRM, the flexibility of the technology will eventually outweigh the right to privacy. Like region coding on DVDs, manufacturers will open up their device capability, because we want them to. There’s a market for small unrestricted cameras and audio recorders, and the market will certainly supply them.

So let us assume that privacy will inevitably be massively breached, and that we have no control over it. What happens next?

Well, because so much footage will be available on the Internet, people will begin to get used to it, and eventually not actually care that their lives are being recorded and made available to the public. With billions upon billions of personal videos available online, who will really care any more? And if that’s the case, then privacy is effectively dead.

The only reason we are precious about our privacy, is because we’ve always had it that way, and we’ve been brought up to think that way.

When I raised this at the Melbourne videoblogger meetup earlier this year, the response was that the public would eventually self regulate and stop privacy breaches. But as a pretty moral person myself, I have no qualms including other people in my videos without their permission, and I’m sure most videobloggers are the same. What happens when the immoral people start videoing? As video recorders become ubiquitous, the self regulating moral few will have no effect at all.

While current opinion is that a person’s privacy needs to be respected and protected, in the long run it won’t be, and we’ll just get over the preciousness of privacy. In the circles I’m in, I constantly meet people who no longer care about privacy and being filmed. When will you?

Privacy is dead. So get over it.

If you’re in Sydney today (Saturday, 1st October 2005), then you may be interested in listening to episode 227 of A Walk in the Black Forest, the comedy radio show that I do every so often. We’re on from 10pm to midnight, on 2RRR which is 88.5 FM.

I’ve finally changed my domain name from my ISP URL to a real URL. Please change any URL you have pointing to my old site (www.zipworld.com.au/~kashum), to my new www.kashum.com site.

Or for reference:

Site/blog/vlog: http://www.kashum.com

RSS (2.0) feed: http://www.kashum.com/rss2.xml

I’ll leave the old domain around for two weeks, so please change them as soon as possible in your reader or whatever client you’re using.

Changing URLs is annoying for you and me, and I realise its easier to just delete me than change me, but please stick with it, I promise I’ll be good (or bad, whatever you’d usually expect).

Special thanks to Nathan, who kindly donated the domain a few months back. I’ve only just had time to do make it all happen.

Propaganda propaganda, selections from The Propaganda Remix Project‘s web site. See my earlier video Propaganda from wikipedia.

A remix of Ian‘s Kyle video. All improvised in one take (for each voice). Seems to work OK.

I’ve had a few comments recently about my life and what I’m up to, so this might answer a few of those questions, particularly Ryanne’s. It is also the start of my search for a new door step at my new house.

I also mention Synop, who I used to work for. My old boss Nathan is now videoblogging, but he doesn’t include enclosures in his feed yet, so feel free to pester him.

Copyright infosheets

No icing for doughnut employees

For six years I did a comedy radio show called A Walk in the Black Forest, which was basically a panel show where we’d talk about current events, pop culture and weird shit from the Internet. That was ten years ago, and since then a lot of commercial radio shows have picked up on things we were doing. (yes, we’ve had people confirm their theft)

After a four year break, due to “creative differences”, the three of us got back together for a reunion show, which went to air on 6th August 2005, almost four years to the day. This enclosure is a copy of that show.

We’re currently thinking about whether we should start the show up again, but podcast it as well as broadcasting it on radio. What do you think? WBF is an acquired taste, and takes a few listens to get all the layers. I think that was part of the beauty of it, different people could listen and have completely different views of what happened. There’s also a lot of in-jokes, which people would only get if they listened from week to week. This show is no different.

While this reunion show wasn’t particularly good by our standards, it’s a fair indication of our style. We used to do a lot of special segments as well, but we didn’t for this one. I’d love some feedback, particularly from people outside Australia, where the humour may not go down as it would here.

Sorry about the size too, and the quality. The tracking went quite bad for the first few minutes.