Candleblog

The online journal of Vermont filmmaker, Bill Simmon.

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Technology Will Save Us All

For Emily’s birthday, I got her a nifty little device that really tugs on my techno-utopian bone. It’s called a Fitbit, and it’s a little doo-hickey that you carry around that contains a 3-D motion tracking accelerometer (sort of like a Wii controller) that infers all sorts of things about your behavior, and then generates [...]

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Defending the trolls

I had an op-ed piece in the Burlington Free Press today in which I defended the rights of anonymous internet trolls to be, well, trollish. I’m hoping the piece gets hounded by trolls so I can tell them how much they suck while defending their right to suck. Check it out.

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Freedom in Cyberspace

I spent all day last Monday at the Windjammer conference center in South Burlington with a TV crew recording a conference put on by the ACLU of Vermont called Thought and Expression in a Changing World. It brought together a bunch of lawyers who specialize in civil liberties case law to talk about how our [...]

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Have live TV studio, will travel.

VCAM is at the Vermont ACLU conference (Thought and Expression in a Changing World) today at the Windjammer in South Burlington, covering it with our cameras. My co-worker Seth decided on a whim to try and stream it online. We did no real planning for this, he just brought along a laptop and we figured [...]

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The Surveillance Society Made Manifest

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, population 55,000, is about to become the most surveilled city in the U.S. According to the LATimes, Lancaster is about to embark on a project installing 165 closed-circuit TV cameras in all of the city’s public spaces. That’s probably the highest number of CCTV cameras per capita in the U.S. and according to [...]

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