Local alternative dentist

BarefootGardener : Message: tooth care advice from our local alternative dentist: I was browsing through John's blog just now and read his rant about fluoride and
his search for alternative tooth care. I think I have a bit of information to
contribute to that which might be helpful to someone.

We are lucky to have right in our area an alternative dentist who not only
doesn't believe in fluoride, he also doesn't believe in conventional fillings.
Some years ago my husband and I had ours replaced by him with ones that are not
only less toxic, they are also white...makes it almost look like you've never
had a cavity. It has helped me with some of my chronic fatigue issues. I am
very glad I have had his procedure done.

His name is Dr. Behm and he is located in downtown Clearwater.
His website is:
http://www.saveyourteeth.com/

Read especially the page called "The Secret" for his take on how to care for
your teeth.

He also recommends removing the conventional fillings from your mouth because
they are a source of mercury poisoning. Dentists routinely experience the Mad
Hatter syndrome AND the hatter was mad because in his day mercury was routinely
used in the manufacture of hats. I will warn you that that is a very expensive
proposition, though.


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WAKE UP

AMERICAN - FREEDOM: Our institutions will not get
better, until more of the general population participates and takes responsibility for their piece in the revamping process.

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SO MANY PEOPLE are expecting Superman to show up and get everything done for them. Like electing the next clown to office. What a joke. Whether it's Ronald McDonald or Bozo will never change anything. What ever clown puppet they put in place will never change anything. The system is broken, our votes are meaningless when the media only props up clowns for us to choose from.

The 2-Minute Move That Will Elevate Your Personal Brand | Fast Company

The 2-Minute Move That Will Elevate Your Personal Brand | Fast Company: When it comes to building your own personal brand, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get all our digital love. However, for the majority of business professionals, the hundreds of people you're emailing day in and day out make up the most important social network you have.

Tools like Smartr help personalize the inbox experience, assigning photos, titles, and email history to names. Tout offers you the tools and templates you need to track and schedule your messages. What's missing for most people in this day-to-day email equation is a helpful and memorable email signature.

This precious real estate at the bottom of every message is often filled with either too much or too little information (or, worse, dead space). Sifting through my own inbox, there are few signature stand-outs among thousands of contacts.

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got this from their linkedin page:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/fastcompany.com

media military industrial complex

Robert Greenwald and Reporter Michael Hastings Take on the Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War Machine | | AlterNet: the “media military industrial complex,” is significant. And I do not think it's a question of just sort of attacking some bad journalists, although that can be done, but I'd like you to talk about the institutional way that Pentagon approaches this.

MH: Well, one point on Stephen Colbert's speech: it's now considered sort of this amazing speech because it was, but at the time a lot of journalists panned it. Oh, they hated it because it hit too close.

I mean, look, there are a lot of excellent journalists doing great, great work. But the reason I called it the “media military industrial complex,” and one of the sort of insights that I have had is that they call it the Pentagon Press Corps, right? And you sort of think, oh, well it means the people who kind of watch over the Pentagon and perform the media's watchdog function, but no, it's an extension of the Pentagon. For the most part.

I mean, when was the last time anyone at the Pentagon broke a story that wasn't pre-approved? It's very, very rare. And the reason why it's so difficult -- and this gets to the information operations and the public affairs -- it's a very difficult story to tell because you're lifting up the curtain on what have become very common practices for journalists to do.

And I noticed this first in Iraq when things were going horribly -- this is in 2005, 2006, 2007 when I was there. And the spokespeople in the military public relations apparatus would just lie to your face. Every day they would lie. It was general Caldwell who was one of the spokes people there who I would sit next to at these briefings and he would say everything's fine, you know? And there might have been four car bombs that morning.

And what's been scary is that these sort of information operations tactics ... most journalists consider them no big deal. And when you try to point out, 'hey, this isn't right.' you get your head chopped off.

I did a story about this information operations team trained in psychological operations that was being asked to spin and influence visiting senators. Did the media respond by saying, 'let's launch an investigation, let's make sure we don't do this?' No, they responded by attacking the whistle blower and then at the same time saying, 'oh, it's no big deal, this is fine. Of course generals use their information operations psy-ops guys to put together material, it's not a big deal, it's just normal public relations.'

But wait a second here. This is not just normal public relations -- there are entire operations in the Pentagon whose goal is not just to influence the enemy's population but in fact the more important goal is to influence the U.S. population. And the line that used to be, or was supposed to have been the red line between public relations and information operations, meaning one you use on Americans and one you use on the enemy, they are tearing that firewall down. So you have generals with public media handlers and they have these contracting companies that are collecting data on who's tweeting what and they have different Twitter “sock-puppets” that they've put up to try to manipulate all these different social media.

And at some point they're essentially waging this global information war against their own citizens. So that, to me, is the most disturbing trend of it all. And General Petraeus at one point said the most important thing about Iraq was information operations, information operations, information operations. And in the context he was saying it, he meant in terms of convincing the Iraqi people that things were going well. But the real people he was convincing were back in Washington. That's who the target of all the spin really is.

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Will the Young Rise Up and Fight Their Indentured Servitude to the Student Loan Industry? | | AlterNet

Will the Young Rise Up and Fight Their Indentured Servitude to the Student Loan Industry? | | AlterNet:

Will the Young Rise Up and Fight Their Indentured Servitude to the Student Loan Industry?

The solution to class exploitation and abuse is always the same: Get conscious, get angry, get energized, and get organized.

January 24, 2012 |

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In October 2011, the White House announced, “Currently, more than 36 million Americans have federal student loan debt.” By the end of 2011, student loan debt had exceeded $1 trillion. Two-thirds of college seniors graduate with student loans, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. According to the Project on Student Loan Debt, they carried an average of $25,250 in debt in 2010, but many have far greater debt than that average. And nowadays, with high unemployment, even higher underemployment, the inability to pay bills, and accumulating interest and penalties, the lives of student loan debtors can quickly turn into financial nightmares.

Indentured Servitude? I’ll be paying for my student loans for the rest of my life....A large portion of my earnings goes to the Wall Street elites that have commoditized and securitized my loans....I knew at the time I signed the student loans (again and again) that I would be responsible...what I didn’t figure was the cost to my children —Jeff Vincent, AlterNet

How outlandish is it to say that the spirit of indentured servitude has been revived in the United States? What can young people and their parents do to prevent student loan debt servitude, and what can all of us do to help liberate student loan debtors who are currently doomed to decades of financial misery?

Colonial Indentured Servants and Modern Student Loan Debtors

In colonial America, historians estimate that between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servants in England were in servitude typically for one year, while indenture in America was typically four to seven years. Today in the United States, student debt is an even longer debt commitment than colonial indentured servitude. The standard Stafford federal loan is, for example, 15 years, and with waivers and refinancing, it is not uncommon for Americans to be paying off student loans well into middle age.

In “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeffrey Williams concludes, “College student loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.” Williams points out that college loan debt, like indentured servitude, “looms over the lives of those so contracted, binding individuals for a significant part of their future work lives.”

Similar to students signing their college loan papers, indentured servants also “freely chose” their servitude. In colonial times, while the elite saw indentured servitude as a freely chosen and fair economic deal, the servants themselves routinely saw it as an exploitative system of labor, a form of time-limited slavery. Like colonial indentured servants who “freely chose” to sign papers agreeing that they would pay off their debt directly in labor, modern student loan debtors “freely choose” to sign papers agreeing to pay off their debt. However, this is a choice that the financial elite do not have to make.

Like colonial indentured servitude, the student loan contract is virtually unbreakable. Student loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and unlike most other forms of debt, student loan debt is almost never forgiven even in personal bankruptcy.

Similar to some indentured servants, some student loan debtors—most famously, Michelle and Barack Obama—do go on to prosper. However, half of those who attend college don’t graduate, and many college graduates do not get high-paying jobs and struggle to make debt payments for much of their adult lives.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 20, 2010) reported, “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants....The growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all.”

Conversations with Young People about Class and College

Several years ago, I was speaking to a group of high school seniors, and I mentioned that my experience is that the adult world tries to scare young people about so much crap, that the net effect is for young people not to take anything we say seriously. I told them that most mistakes are useful learning experiences, but that there are two things that should concern them because they are very difficult to overcome, and I then moved on to another topic. A sea of hands went up, and several students shouted out demanding that I tell them what the two things were. So I told them: One, it’s difficult to overcome driving drunk and killing somebody; and two, it also tends to drag your life down if you have a kid with someone you can’t stand.

These days, however, I’ve had to modify what I say to high school kids. My recent experience is that, for more people, even more depressing than having a kid with someone you can’t stand is running up a gigantic student loan debt. So, now I talk with young people in groups, individually, and their parents about student loan debt hell.

Many young people among the 99 percent, in my experience, have been socialized not to have “class consciousness.” So, we discuss how kids from 1 percent families can go to expensive colleges without any career plans, party, flunk out, go to another expensive college, and have no student loan debt—and can fall back on either the family business, a trust fund, or a career in politics. While the 1 percent can afford—without loans—to shell out whatever money is necessary for college, many of the 99 percent will have a “debt sword” that hangs over their heads for a significant part of their lives.

The 1 percent and the corporate media have succeeded in making the terms “class consciousness” and “class war” taboo, which is part of the reason why they are winning the class war and enslaving the 99 percent.

College Decision-Making for the 99 Percent

Today, high school students hear repeatedly that they are losers if they don’t go to college, and their parents are made to feel like failures if their kids don’t go to college. For the 99 percent, the truth is that it may make sense to go college, or it may not. College may make sense if you want to earn a living at something that requires a college-level certification. But college may not make sense, especially if you are not motivated for it, or your career desires don’t require a degree and certifications.

Exiting from the modern world-religion view that not attending college is sinful and shameful, let’s look at it soberly. Colleges offer 1) learning; 2) certifications and accreditation; and 3) partying and potential for meeting people.

While learning does take place in college, it is just as easy to gain knowledge outside of college. Most college learning is book learning, and one need not go to college to read books. Moreover, most of us have learned much of what we use to make a living and survive through experience, not through coursework.

It is true, however, that without a college degree and specific certifications, one simply will not be hired for certain jobs. While much of what I learned in my formal schooling was worthless or worse than worthless, I needed degrees for credentialing and licensing. The same is true for teachers and other professionals. But there’s little reason not to get that degree as inexpensively as possible.

High school students are intimidated by media, peers and even some guidance counselors to worry about the so-called prestige of an institution, and parents are guilt-tripped to pay for prestigious institutions. I tell young people and their parents that in more than 25 years of private practice, no client has asked me what university I went to before they made an appointment. Furthermore, no publisher or editor has ever asked me where I received my education before they published my books or articles. So if you need to get some certification, shop around for the most inexpensive financial deal.

Besides learning and credentialing, colleges do offer a certain kind of socializing and partying that one does not get via independent study. However, is the typical college partying worth the price tag? How expansive is the typical socializing that goes on at colleges compared with many other ways of mixing it up with the world that are far less expensive?

I have worked with many extremely intelligent young people who simply don’t like school. They can be shamed into going to college, or they can be exposed to a math that, from my experience, will very much interest them. Specifically, help them add up the money that will be spent on college. Add that to four years’ lost income from not working. What’s the total? $150,000? $200,000? More? Then consider financial resources—specifically, how much debt will likely accrue? How much money per month will that debt will cost? How long will that debt persist? If their parents were going to contribute some money toward their schooling, what could their children do with it instead of going to college? Use it to start up a business? Buy a home that is free and clear?

For the $100,000 price tag of four years of tuition plus room and board for the University of Cincinnati or Ohio State University (both public universities), one can buy two homes free and clear in a safe neighborhood where I live in Cincinnati, then live in one, rent out the other, and sit on them until the real estate market improves. I know intelligent, industrious and hardworking young non-academics who passed on college and student loan debt, and are now in their 30s and own their own homes, have money in savings, have successful businesses and are enjoying life, and whose major pain is sorrow for some of their student debtor friends.

Working with teenagers, young adults and their parents, I have discovered that the corporate media has given many of them a distorted sense of life with regard to risk. Specifically, many of them have been socialized to believe that the least risky path is the most prestigious college that one is admitted to. While young people have been socialized to be terrified of not having a college education or not receiving a degree from a prestigious institution, they have not been told about the risk of carrying huge debt.

The Political Battle: Liberation for Debt Slaves

Class consciousness is the starting point in both the prevention of and the liberation from debt slavery.

The 36 million Americans carrying federal student loan debt, the millions of others with private student loan debt, their parents who have co-signed on this debt, and other families who have been in this sinking boat or will soon be in that boat are an extremely large class. This group is actually a larger one than many other groups in American history that have won civil and economic justice for themselves through political struggle.

Some in desperation have urged for voluntary default on student loans. However, Occupy Student Debt views this campaign as ill-conceived, “We strongly advise anyone with student loan debt NOT to participate in this form of protest, especially given that the law, as currently written, allows lenders and collectors to profit from defaults.”

What have other victimized groups—from African Americans to Latin Americans to gay Americans—in U.S. history done that has worked to gain social and economic justice? For one thing, they have made it clear to politicians that they will not vote for any politician who does not take actions to correct their victimization. So to begin with, members of this large group of student loan debtors and their families should show up at all candidate forums—including Obama’s—and assault politicians with questions:

Do you think it is fair that gambling debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, but not the student loan debt of a working class person who tried to get a college education and couldn’t find a decent-paying job?

Why is it that public universities are not free or low cost in the United States when they are in many nations in the world?

Why is it that politicians don’t worry about the “moral hazard” of bailing out large banks and insurance companies, but are concerned about debt forgiveness for student loan debtors when such forgiveness would be a “stimulus package” for the U.S. economy?

Beyond confronting the politician clowns in the circus, pressure needs to be applied directly to the circus owners who have orchestrated current bankruptcy laws and who have a stake in higher tuition in public universities. In “Meet 5 Big Lenders Profiting from the $1 Trillion Student Debt Bubble” (November 28, 2011), AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe documents how Sallie Mae (originally called the Student Loan Marketing Association, the largest student lender in the United States, created in 1972 as a government-sponsored enterprise but fully privatized in 2004), along with Wells Fargo, Discover, NelNet, and JPMorgan Chase have ripped off students and their families. These giant corporations care only about are their stock prices; and student loan debtors and their families can threaten stock prices by creating nasty publicity, by bringing pressure on institutional investors to divest, and utilize other ways that compel concessions.

Over the last twenty years, the financial-industrial complex’s lackey politicians have altered bankruptcy laws so as to make it almost impossible for student loan debtors to declare bankruptcy, but these laws can be changed again to make student loan debt as easy to discharge in bankruptcy as is gambling debt. Also, if giant banks today can “buy money” from the Federal Reserve for almost nothing, then student loan interest rates should also approach 0 percent. Moreover, U.S. public universities were once free or extremely low cost, and that can be the case again, especially if the U.S. government stops spending trillions of dollars on wars that the majority of Americans oppose.

Part of class consciousness means recognizing the size of one’s class and thus its political power. Class consciousness also means becoming angry by victimization and using that anger to energize organizing. In much of the world today, as I detail in Get Up, Stand Up, the 99% can get a B.A. and even an advanced degree without accruing any debt, as tuition and fees in public universities in many nations are either free or extremely low. That can be true again in United States if the 1% had reason to recalculate that they better once again throw the 99% a bone or two to keep us from demanding real power. Today, the 1% is emboldened and unafraid to completely piss on the 99%.

The solution to class exploitation and abuse is always the same. Get conscious, get angry, get energized, and get organized. Then strategically threaten the wealth and control of the 1% so they are forced to make concession. Expect a counterattack from the 1%, and counter it with even greater pressure for more economic justice.

>Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

Startup culture starts to set down roots in Tampa Bay business community - Tampa Bay Times

Startup culture starts to set down roots in Tampa Bay business community - Tampa Bay Times: Startup culture starts to set down roots in Tampa Bay business community

By Robert Trigaux, Times Business Columnist
In Print: Sunday, December 18, 2011

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One of Tampa Bay's most transforming business trends in years is emerging amid this difficult economy. It can be described in two words. Entrepreneurial ecosystem. It's not my favorite phrase. Try saying it three times fast. But the words capture the momentum behind a new regional infrastructure for people who want to start businesses here and - just as important - keep them here, adding jobs as they grow. "It's like seeding the fields," veteran entrepreneur and University of South Florida Center for Entrepreneurship chief Michael Fountain says of propagating new businesses. "Some will take root." Why do we care? Because Tampa Bay has malnourished its entrepreneurs for too long. Regionally, we need larger numbers of new companies with smarter business ideas, quality management and better access to capital. Tampa Bay's economy is not built on Fortune 500 headquartered companies. It is a mix of back-office operations of distant corporations, mid-sized companies and an enormous number of small businesses.

Gov. Rick Scott and our own regional economic development groups focus heavily - with mixed success - on luring jobs, typically from other companies based in other states. Why not complement that strategy with a stronger culture to help businesses start and grow here? It makes economic sense.

Encouraging entrepreneurs is not some overnight fix. It won't produce dramatic numbers of new jobs quickly.

"You have to take a 20-year view," says serial entrepreneur Marvin Scaff, one of the veteran quintet behind the Gazelle Lab business accelerator that this year kicked into gear to help area startups.

Well, here's my own 20-year view from writing for decades about the Tampa Bay business scene: If this emerging regional entrepreneurial ecosystem proves real and sustainable, it may deliver a critical injection of fresh ideas, enthusiasm and new jobs into our sluggish economy.

Sure, some entrepreneurs have prospered here for years. Others have left for greener, friendlier metro areas. So the arrival of an infrastructure that helps startups gain traction here and acts as a community support system is an exciting prospect.

Given time, more startups here mean more and better jobs. It means a more dynamic business culture that will appeal to young and talented people who every day are asking: Should I stay or should I go?

Tampa Bay is still losing that demographics battle. We remain a net loser of sharp, younger adults to places like Denver, Dallas, Austin and Seattle - places where they sense better career opportunities and, frankly, find more people like themselves.

. . .

So what exactly is an entrepreneurial ecosystem?

It's a core of people in this region experienced in how to start businesses. It's people willing to share that knowledge, drive, discipline and connections.

It's people like Linda Olson, whose Tampa Bay Wave group, now a nonprofit, has become one of the chief gathering places for folks with early-stage startup ambitions.

It's people like Michael Fountain, kind of a father figure of entrepreneurial experience in Tampa, who has run USF's successful Center for Entrepreneurship in Tampa for more than a decade.

It's people like Daniel James Scott and Bill Jackson in St. Petersburg, who are driving forces behind training potential entrepreneurs through the USF St. Petersburg College of Business. Scott helps direct the new-this-year Gazelle Lab, an intense 90-day program for competitively picked business startups. And Jackson heads the new entrepreneurship major for USF business students.

It's people like lawyer Brent Britton, chairman of law firm Gray Robinson's emerging business and technology practice in Tampa. Britton combines a West Coast hipster style with legal experience on how startups must organize to be most efficient and most attractive to venture capitalists.

And it's people like Tom Wallace, a senior statesmen of Tampa Bay tech startups and a founder of his latest firm, Red Vector. He's increasingly lending his expertise and influence to further the entrepreneur network via his work at the regional group known as the Tampa Bay Technology Forum.

Rebecca White, a relative newcomer to the area, heads the University of Tampa's recent plunge into entrepreneurship. The UT professor and entrepreneur sees a surge in startup interest in the Tampa Bay area tied to this long stretch of bad economy and higher unemployment.

"It's more important today than in prosperous times," she says. "We are in a position where people who did not see themselves as entrepreneurs increasingly want to take responsibility for their own lives and careers."

White and Wallace want to see some Tampa Bay entrepreneurs deliver a home run or two. They want a few startups to grow to significant size, gain fame and generate investor wealth to put this region on the map.

That type of success should attract more investors and venture capital here. Startup financing has been and remains hard to find in the region.

In May, a Tampa startup called Wufoo, a maker of forms and survey documents, was sold for $35 million in cash and stock to another company called SurveyMonkey. That news heartened area entrepreneurs with their own dreams of success. The bad news is the buyer of Wufoo moved the business to California.

Tampa Bay wants the next generation of startups to stay here, whenever possible.

"What will be the tipping point for Tampa Bay?" White asks. Making this region a cooler place for young talent would help, she says. And that means getting this region's act together on quality public transportation and raising the bar on the our educational system.

There's another key piece of the business startup culture missing in Tampa Bay: the notion that it is okay to fail.

Business failures, White says, are sometimes more valuable to an entrepreneur than success. The Tampa Bay business community still needs to learn not to write off budding entrepreneurs because they failed.

"If you are not failing," says Wallace, whose many startups included Tampa's BrainBuzz.com a decade ago, "you are not taking enough risk as an entrepreneur."

Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@tampabay.com.

Some movers and shakers in the regional startup scene

Linda Olson

Founder of Tampa Bay Wave

Why: Nonprofit's captured a "cool" factor, lots of buzz in young entrepreneur network. About 60 members. Offers common space in downtown Tampa for startups.

Quote: "This is not just about job creation, but driving and inspiring more people here for higher-wage skills that companies need. We want to provide a clearer path for our fellow citizens to pursue entrepreneurial ventures if they want."

Tom Wallace

Founder and CEO, Red Vector, online education firm, Tampa

Why: Serial entrepreneur and senior leader in Tampa Bay Technology Forum entrepreneur network.

Quote: "It has never been a less expensive or better time to start a tech company. You can go out and get what you need through the cloud (online services). You do not have to invest in expensive hardware or software. That is a big difference. I am hopeful we will have some very successful tech startups come out of this area that go on to do great things."

Rebecca White

Chair of entrepreneurship program, director of University of Tampa's Entrepreneurship Center, UT's Spartan business accelerator

Why: Street cred, making a mark even though here only a few years.

Quote: "Our ecosystem needs informality and the ability to change. Add too much structure and you get bureaucracy. We want to create a coolness factor to attract entrepreneurs to stay here."

Marvin Scaff

Co-founder of Gazelle Lab business accelerator at University of South Florida St. Petersburg College of Business

Why: Serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley veteran, massive Rolodex.

Quote: "What needs to happen next? We must not get discouraged in the short term. Take the long view. There is so much wealth here. We need some of that capital to get interested in entrepreneurship."

Michael Fountain

Tampa director of University of South Florida Center for Entrepreneurship; chair in entrepreneurship, USF College of Business; also professor titles in USF's College of Engineering and College of Medicine

Why: Serial entrepreneur, major credentials, longevity (one of his students was Daniel James Scott, who now runs Gazelle Lab at USF St. Petersburg).

Quote: "The biggest challenge we face, and it is not unique to Tampa, is finding financing sources for early-stage companies. It's really difficult and it's more problematic in this tough economy than at other times. The challenge is: How do companies go from having five or six people to 20 or 50 people?"

.up Support system

Key pieces of Tampa Bay's entrepreneurial ecosystem

Tampa Bay Wave, Tampa: Grass roots nonprofit network for entrepreneurs. Visit tampabaywave.org/.

Center for Entrepreneurship, University of South Florida Tampa College of Business. Princeton Review ranks the graduate program No. 19 among top 50 entrepreneurship programs.

Visit ce.usf.edu.

Entrepreneurship Center, University of Tampa. Promotes business startups. Visit ut.edu/entrepreneurcenter/.

Gazelle Lab, University of South Florida St. Petersburg College of Business. Young, 90-day crash course in starting a business, offered twice a year. Must apply. Visit gazellelab.com/.

Degree in entrepreneurship, University of South Florida St. Petersburg College of Business. New undergraduate program. Visit usfsp.edu/cob/undergraduate_studies/entrepreneurship.htm.

Tampa Bay Technology Incubator, University of South Florida Tampa: Supports high-tech development. Visit usfconnect.org/Incubator.asp.

Tampa Bay Innovation Center, Largo: Fosters high-tech jobs, supports startups. Visit tbinnovates.com/.

Entrepreneur Network, Tampa Bay Technology Forum: Networking group for startups and young tech companies. Visit tbtf.org.

Career and Entrepreneurship Center, St. Petersburg College: Includes new "entrepreneurship certificate" program. Visit spcollege.edu/cec/academics.html.

BarCamp: Brainstorming weekends on technology ideas. Visit barcamptampabay.org/.

Startup Weekend: Launch a startup in 54 hours. Visit tampa.startupweekend.org/.

Florida Venture Forum: Building a pipeline to venture capitalists, investors for Florida startups. Visit floridaventureforum.org/.

Are You Being Tracked? 8 Ways Your Privacy Is Being Eroded Online and Off | | AlterNet

Are You Being Tracked? 8 Ways Your Privacy Is Being Eroded Online and Off | | AlterNet: 1. Tracking

The Carrier IQ controversy exposed the long-festering problem of the Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), 40-digit-long strings of letters and numbers that distinguish one device from another. Most troubling, it cannot be blocked or removed by a user. (A report by the Electronic Freedom Foundation details how CIQ works.)

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Some Facts About Carrier IQ

There has been a rolling scandal about the Carrier IQ software installed by cell phone companies on 150 million phones, mostly within the United States. Subjects of outright disagreement have included the nature of the program, what information it actually collects, and under what circumstances. This post will attempt to explain Carrier IQ's architecture, and why apparently conflicting statements about it are in some instances simultaneously correct. The information in this post has been synthesised from sources including Trevor Eckhart, Ashkan Soltani, Dan Rosenberg, and Carrier IQ itself.

First, when people talk about "Carrier IQ," they can be referring to several different things. For clarity, I will give them each a number. You can think of senses 2, 3 and 4 as being "layers" of code that are wrapped around each other.

1. The company, Carrier IQ, Inc.;
2. a core software library that is written by Carrier IQ Inc. and which is present on all of the 150 million handsets;
3. a Carrier IQ application or program running on a phone, which includes the software in layer 2, but also additional porting code written by handset manufacturers (sometimes called "original equipment manufacturers" or "OEMs"), mobile network operators ("telcos"), or baseband chipset manufacturers;
4. the entire Carrier IQ stack, which includes the program described above as layer 3, but also often includes other code within a phone's Operating System and Baseband Processor OS to send data to layer 3. Like layer 3, this code is written by handset manufacturers, telcos or baseband manufacturers.1

Graphic by Parker Higgins

The huge amount of disagreement about various points, such as whether Carrier IQ logs keystrokes and text message content, is a result of using the term "Carrier IQ" to mean one of these four different things, as well as the fact that layers 3 and 4 vary on depending on which manufacturer built the phone, and which network it was customized for. Finally, there is an additional configuration file (called a "Profile") that controls the behavior of layer 2 and determines what information is actually sent from the phone to a carrier or other Carrier IQ client. Profiles are programs in a domain-specific filtering language; they are normally written by Carrier IQ Inc. to the specifications of a telco or other client.

There is consensus agreement that layers 2–4 collect information that can include location, browsing history (including HTTPS URLs), application use, battery use, and data about the phone's radio activity.2 The Carrier IQ Profile that is active on the phone determines where this information is intentionally transmitted, under what circumstances, the way in which it is filtered or processed beforehand, and whether it contains unique phone identifiers.

Our client Trevor Eckhart (whose research set off the present firestorm) and his subsequent collaborator Ashkan Soltani have shown that on some phones, dialer keypresses and SMS text are being written to system logs by layer 4 code. However, it seems that only much more limited types of keystroke and SMS information can make their way down from layer 4 into the underlying layer 2 Carrier IQ software.3 Unfortunately, our current belief is that the layer-4 logging that has been observed, which goes to Android system logs, is in fact being inadvertantly transmitted to some third parties and otherwise made available to other applications on the device.4 This happens when crash reporting tools collect copies of the system logs for debugging purposes. The recipients of such transmissions are unlikely to have anticipated receiving keystrokes, text messages, URLs or location information through such channels, but that can in fact happen on some of the phones to which Carrier IQ has been ported. What this means is that keystrokes, text message content and other very sensitive information is in fact being transmitted from some phones on which Carrier IQ is installed to third parties.

The complexities of this situation explain the apparent contradiction between claims by Carrier IQ Inc. and researchers examining code written by the company, who have said that the company does not collect full keystroke data or the content of text messages, and others who say that they have observed this happening. People on all sides of this debate may be simultaneously correct.

The information that we need now is a complete history of all of the Profiles that carriers have ever installed on their customers' phones, to learn what the carriers meant to collect. This would be a good place for regulators and others to start their inquiries. Separately, and equally importantly, the carriers and the OEMs need to take the steps necessary, whether OS updates or better yet, removing Carrier IQ software entirely, to stop the overbroad logging and transmittal of sensitive user data out of their customers' phones.

• 1. Carrier IQ Inc. provides reference code for telcos, handset and chipset manfuacturers implementing layers 3 and 4, which is sometimes used and sometimes not.
• 2. Carrier IQ calls these observable variables "metrics". The metrics are effectively an API that layers 3 and 4 use to make reports down to layer 2.
• 3. Eckhart and Soltani have demonstrated this on phones that run modified variants of the Android OS as customized by OEMs and telcos, but we should stress that Android as an OS is not to blame here. Android's relative openness has facilitated research on the situation, but the Carrier IQ stack has been ported to iPhones, BlackBerry devices, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, and non-smartphones as well; we do not know what if any bugs exist in any of those ported versions of the stack.
• 4. The Android OS has a fine-grained permissions model in which any newly-installed software must disclose to the user that it may read copies of system logs before being installed. This is a good security design, but unfortunately, most users would not associate permissions to read system logs with permissions to read the sensitive information that some ports of the Carrier IQ stack are writing to the logs. Applications that come pre-installed on phones do not have the same install-time permissions dialog, but these apps at least sometimes use clickwrap dialogs. So we may face a situation where companies have taken some steps to try obtain consent from users for crash-reporting and debugging transmissions, without anybody being clear about how sensitive the data in those transmissions would end up being.

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