Links for 7 Jan 2006: Deep stuff

After some weeks of silence, links for the day. I've collected enough of them over the past two weeks that I can afford to split the load. This batch is the stuff that will make you a better person. To wit:

• Bruce Schneier discusses the value of anonymity and how it differs from privacy, in a post rebutting Kevin Kelly's claim that anonymity is bad, with commentary from lots of others interspersed. The key issue seems to me to be balancing individual expectations of privacy with society's need to enforce the law. You ought not to be able to hide while you commit crimes.
• Bruce also led me to an article on automating the download of Amazon wishlists, then using the results for data mining. The erosion of privacy is surprising, sometimes. It's getting easier all the time to find, aggregate and analyze what you used to consider personal information. If you don't want it known, you ought to keep it off the web.
• Obsessed with digital privacy? Get PGPdisk.
  
• Feeding the geeks: Some quantitative data on the relative popularity of programming languages.
• Feeding the geeks a little more: One of the many top download lists for 2005 points you at software you might like, for free.
• I wrote about my hybrid Accord a while ago. There is some future-car research, on hyrdogen-powered vehicles, going on at Cal.
  
• Want to know how the search engines rank results? An article on search engine optimization answers that question, as a side effect of telling you how to improve your score.
• And the old one on the list: Jon Udell had a good article at the end of November on data synchronization and interchange. Sound dull? This is what Google and Microsoft are working on now.

These are the ones you'll read instead, though, because they're just more fun:

• Bump keys, if you don't have the patience to hone your burglary skills over time.
  
• It turns out we are living in the Matrix.
• Everbody loves Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, because the Trolls know that every OS sucks.
• Floam at home.
• Without Lego, there could be no great art.