The CIA thinks the Pope is Fonzie

Most home connections to the Internet are anonymous. They're tied to an IP address, and that IP comes from a generic pool at your service provider. Without a court order (or the RIAA breathing down your neck), your activities on the web are pretty much private. If someone tells you they have your IP address and know who you are, they're lying, unless they're your ISP.

It's a little different with large organizations and businesses. They typically lease a big data pipe and the IP pool is tied to their organization. Sometimes when I write a blog post about a movie I saw I get a visit from some movie house, Paramount for example, probably checking to see if I'm trashing their movie. Not that my opinion matters much, but they keep stats on that sort of thing. Speaking of stats, that's how I know it's Paramount. The IP is tied to them and I can pull the company from the remote host in the server variables collection.

This is where it gets funny. Wikipedia edits not tied to a user account at Wikipedia are still labeled by the IP address that did the edit. IP addresses are public, and in the case of large organizations, so is the organization's name. Some clever programmer decided to catalog many of the IP address edits made at Wikipedia over the years and link them to their originating company. Some of these links are outright hilarious.

Random examples:
Someone with an IP address traced to the CIA apparently is interested in light sabers and thinks the Pope is Fonzie. Someone at Pepsi doesn't want you to read the long-term health effects of drinking Pepsi, or read any criticisms.

The list goes on and on. In fact, check out the full list here. Highly entertaining.

You can't profile a prophet

I figured that if I'm going to go around saying that I know a thing or two about web design, I can't really get away with a minimalistic profile. So I set out to create a unique MySpace design that I can call my own. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and update my personal site as well.

Personal site. MySpace. Both are all about identity. So I got to thinking about identity in general and how one defines it. I came up blank. I can no more say what it is that makes me me than I can say what it is that makes you you. Heck if I know who I am. So I scrapped that line of thought.

I finally ended up thinking about identity like people do today, as records in a database, as a percentage chance that we'll fit some mold. Much of who we are is defined by statistics. I imagined going to a club and getting scanned, and all that information being right there on the computer screen. The bouncer's trying to decide whether to let me in. You know, Future Shock. The design also plays with today's ideas of privacy and the conflict between creating a personal site and trying to remain a private person.



The hand was a gimme. What's more personal than a hand? I was orginally going to go with just a fingerprint, but changed my mind after I put my hand through the scanner (the hand and face were shot separately). The lines on a hand are perfect for the metaphor. Fingerprints are truly unique because there are no two alike. But most of how people are identified has nothing to do with uniqueness. It's all about educated guesses. Predictions made on assumptions. In short, it's a lot like palmistry. It looks personal, but really it's nothing more than demographics. You've got a nice Heart Line there Jeremy. We'll put you on the A-list.

Fingerprints never change, and they've been there since birth. I like these "Life Etchings" better because you earn them.

When you get right down to it, profiles are a categorization of people. People that are truly unique (not saying I am one of them, of course) can't be profiled because they can't be categorized. You can't profile a prophet.