Interesting Snippets from 2012-10-06

• Who Made That Escape Key? - NYTimes.com

  The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.”

• The Economics of Surveillance - Digits - WSJ

  Much of the data being collected through tracking technology is used to make services more convenient or for other benign purposes. Companies that track Web browsing say that they only want to use the data to show better advertisements. “Online advertising subsidizes the free content and services that consumers value and enjoy today,” Interactive Advertising Bureau counsel Stu Ingis wrote in a recent op-ed lobbying against a Do-Not-Track feature that would let Internet users turn off tracking. But there are few regulations preventing sharing and sale of data once it is collected. Often it can be combined with additional information and used for other purposes. Many companies that collect data don’t associate people’s names with it, but data that once seemed anonymous can actually identify people if it’s pooled with other data sets. The hope among companies and governments alike is that more data will make their jobs easier and better. The more information they have, the more patterns they can see: Law enforcement could spot likely criminals, and advertisers could send the right message to the right person at exactly the right time.

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