ReadWriteWeb

The goal of CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act – the latest cybersecurity legislation pending in the House of Representatives – seemed so simple in the beginning: From time to time, security companies need to provide information about possible threats to government authorities so they can take action. When you write that idea down on a napkin, it makes sense. When you base legislation on what you wrote on the napkin, it becomes the next target of the Internet rights lobby.

The problem is that we live in an era when almost any system that can be exploited will be. The Internet is one example. The law is another.

Quite a few people have been retroactively credited with the invention of the personal computer. One man who never claimed credit himself, but who would certainly be listed among Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair, Adam Osborne, and John Roach as original creators of the personal computer industry is Jack Tramiel - who passed away today at the age of 83.

Facebook says its Timeline "tells the story of who you are." That's lofty wording. It assumes that you share "who you are" on Facebook. It also assumes you share enough of yourself to make Facebook Timeline "the" definitive "story" about you. Similarly, Path version 2 calls itself a "journal."

While both these apps are ostensibly for sharing, they're also asking people to use them to store their own memories. Facebook and Path both put great effort into pretty presentations of these memories. But each could change tomorrow for business reasons. If we want to be able to reminisce about this early era of mobile tech, we can't depend on the free, hosted apps we use to share our lives now.

There are too many apps. "There's an app for that" has passed the point of cliché and become some strange kind of axiom. Path is the perfect example. We have an app for staying in touch with friends: Facebook. We have an app for sharing pretty photos: Instagram. We have an app for checking into places: Foursquare. We have approximately 9,182 apps for auto-tweeting what song we're listening to right now. And yet, Path.

For which "that" is Path the app? Is it the app for being all of those apps at once, but prettier? Is that a problem we have? Do we need an app to solve it? When Path pivoted into version 2.0, it called itself a "smart journal." That sounds like a nice thing. But after a good run, it doesn't seem so smart anymore.

You have a friend on Facebook who posts non-stop about all things politics. This friend is either a die-hard progressive, a staunch Republican or a total schizophrenic mixed bag who only posts outrageous political commentary to piss off other users.

With the Republican primaries in full swing, you may see more political-minded posts tend to gathering at the top of your news feed. Depending on how much or how little you care about politics, you'll either find yourself glued to the news feed or avoiding it all together. Politics and social networking sites, particularly Facebook, don't mix as well as you think. Keeping the conversation light means only posting about more benign subjects, like sports, news and the weather. When it comes to politics, you're bound to piss someone off. But chances are that pissed off user will remain silent. A new study from Pew finds that almost four-in-ten users discovered through postings by friends that their political beliefs were different than they thought. Some users even blocked, unfriended or hid those users' posts from the news feed because they so strongly disagreed, or they were just sick of seeing so many posts all the time.

Yesterday we wrote about the positive and negative consequences of living a hyperconnected life. One becomes more accustomed to multitasking, shuffling through personal and work-related tasks, and a heightened ability to pick out nuggets of information that are actually useful. On the downside, one can become obsessed with the Internet, and find themselves feeling sad and lost when they do leave the glowing screen(s). As we become more accustomed to being kings and queens of our own Internet worlds, our brains do quietly adapt to new stresses and modes of cognition.

But what of identity? How do we define who we are online vs. who we are offline? In our hyperconnected world, identities are fractured. Facebook wants to be your online identity's one true login. Studies have shown that we perhaps divulge more online than we otherwise would offline. Social networks are strange indeed.

Last week's online privacy fracas-of-the-week was about the revelation that Google (and other advertisers) had learned to circumvent Safari's settings to let third-party cookies track users more easily. Apple's browser's default setting messes with the way advertisers track users.

The gist is this: Cookies are set by the site you're on, but some allow third-party sites to set a tracking cookie through them. That's how advertisers (like Google) personalize ads for you all around the Web. By default, Safari allows cookies from the site you're on, but it blocks third-party cookies. Google and others found a way around that. That sucks... I guess.

It comes down to this fundamental question: How much responsibility do you want for the workings of your device? The religious divide between iOS and Android hinges on this point. There are nerds - and I always use the term affectionately - whose nerdliness depends upon that responsibility. Without it, they feel no control over their computer. There is no doubt that Android places more of that responsibility on the user than iOS does.

Without setting up straw men or comparing apples to oranges, I'll offer an observation: some nerds believe that Apple does not allow its users to achieve their full nerdly potential because it limits their responsibility. We should reframe this argument. Apple nerds do not believe that nerdliness hinges upon responsibility. We would prefer to concentrate our nerd powers on the things we do with our computers.

The morning after French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced he will run for a second term, several parodic Twitter accounts have mysteriously been suspended.

@_nicolassarkozy , an account created in September 2010 and clearly labeled as a satirical Sarkozy impersonation, was suspended on Feburary 16th.

Why do I feel like everybody is lying to me all the time? I cannot get around the idea that every technology company with a major platform is doing everything it possibly can to get as much data from me as it possibly can through any means necessary. No barriers go un-trampled in the quest to track me, cookie me and use my personal information to obtain the greatest level of profit ... from me.

Google gets a lot of blame for its tracking behaviors in relation to advertising and cookies. I stopped trying to hide data from Google a long time ago because I am not sure it is even feasible anymore. I am a denizen of the Internet, therefore Google knows everything about me. The undisputed king of tech, Apple, often gets a pass on privacy concerns because we all love our damned iPhone and iPads so much. Apple should get no such pass. It wants your data as badly as all the other tech companies and it does not want to share. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon? Yeah, you are in this discussion too. At some point I just throw up my hands and say, "you know what? Screw all of you."