Stocking up for the Fahrenheit 451 days

Huh. The "Listening to/reading/watching" function on my MySpace blog hasn't been working, and this morning it just disappeared. So, for the record: I'm reading a book on poems about Kali (my favorite so far is one by a devotee who's a little disturbed by the necklaces of human heads and over-all blood-spattered look, so she suggests a makeover for the goddess: "What harm would be in it?"); yesterday I watched the first half of Paheli (a folk love tale, partly told by haunted puppets, seriously) and a couple episodes of Dexter (OMG, the plot twists!). Right now I'm listening to the soundtrack for The Last King of Scotland, which I haven't seen, but the music is fine.

But there is a spot to enter a podcast enclosure. Nothing against the technology: my problem it with the label. Why do people keep using the word "pod" so egregiously? Haven't they ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? It's been remade multiple times for everyone's convenience. I once worked at a place where they tried to re-name the "teams" or "units" as "pods." And I was all like, forgive them for they know not what they do.

It was especially funny because a few of us called the company "the Borg Collective" in private...

Anyway, in other dystopian news, I noticed that the book Privacy Lost: How Technology is Endangering Your Privacy is available on the Kindle. A device which more or less watches directly over your shoulder as you read and stores your notes, your bookmarks, your page-turning history on their server. It's probably all fine, except for the part in the Terms of Service that always give me pause "Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right."

So if they go bankrupt, all the books you've "bought" could disappear, and it's officially not their problem. They also reserve the right to change their privacy policy at any time. Right now it states that "Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others." I read a forum where someone pointed out that nothing says they won't get in the business of selling it at some point, or doing whatever the hell they want with it.

Of course, I'm way more concerned with the possibility that they'll "upgrade" or change platforms, and the content on the device won't be transferable. Still, there is a nice parallelism in the fact that while some people there are trying to spy on what we read (maybe not Amazon, but some people), here I'm trying to share that same information with the world, and the handy link has disappeared off MySpace. Curious.