Asides

Folklore: Review of Benh Zeitlin's "Beasts of the Southern Wild

The folkloristic dimension rests not so much in the myth and magical realism that pervade the film (the piece that reviewers often point to when invoking Zeitlin’s folklore background) as in the unvarnished (and profoundly ethnographic) portrayal of the details of their everyday lives.

Review of Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

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Cisco and the Spy Cloud

Cisco/Linksys – Don’t get caught. Cisco once rand the best router company in the world, now they are Selling Out Customers As A Service (SOCAAS)

As someone who has purchased MANY millions of dollars of Cisco products over the years

(across numerous startups) I have to say that I am not very inclined to consider their stuff in the future.
This DOES make me sad. For example, Digex ran joint advertising with the Cisco of OLD when we deployed
nationwide infrastructure with these guys; I remember then very fondly… we went through the good and the
bad with them, and in the end, they got us where we were going…….
But if they really feel that now they have to not “Sell” but “Sell_With_Benefits” their products, to
unsuspecting end-users, under the cheap guise that the customers router needs to have a “cloud” now,
then they should change their name from Cisco to Gestapo and just put it right out there that they are
going to be selling all of your internet access behavior data to people who do not have your best interests at heart……
Selling Out Customers As A Service (SOCAAS)
John Chambers, seriously, and with great respect, your company is stooping very very low here. You once
ran the best router company in the world, an innovator (sometimes in spite of itself) at the dawn of this new
internet reality; now the only “cloud” that is real here is the one that is over the Cisco brand.
Is it too late to ask you guys to see the light and become a force for good AND profitability?
CEO – Digex (Nasdaq:DIGX)
CEO – Cidera
CTO/Founder – CORE Location LLC
(and others)
To followup Doug’s fine response to the Cisco/Linksys situation:

Cisco Systems, the parent of the consumer router brand Linksys, is backing away from some creepy terms-and-conditions language that accompanied a recent upgrade to some of its routers.

and

While most people tend to ignore the T&C statements, some smarter people happened to read them, and quickly generated some consumer outrage and negative media coverage. This prompted Cisco to revise the language. […] It also issued instructions for how to roll the router back to its previous state, and to disable the automated updates.

Me being the cynical curmudgeon though, since Cisco Connect Cloud itself is staying, and anyone (savvy or not) that opted for automatic firmware updates when they set up their new Linksys router would get the Cloud Connect update, what’s really stopping them from continuing to collect the information that their T&Cs now say that they won’t?
If they can monetize this data, all they have to do is ensure there’s no way to track the data back to them (read: Don’t Get Caught).
Perhaps that’s an overly cynical stance, but heck, they showed their hand. This was part of a business plan and if I were them, right now I’d be evaluating the cost of a potential lawsuit vs. the profit to be made from selling the data on the sly.

~ Justin D’Onofrio  |  Director of Operations  |  Freeverse, Inc.  |  http://freeverse.com