I'm not sure how smart it is to give people advice on privacy and which software to use to avoid surveillance via a traditional book. I'd much rather get my advice from EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense or TTC's Security In-a-Box because they're online and can be updated easily if a critical bug is discovered with any given popular privacy or security software. Capabilities change over time and when they do, you can't update a book as easy as you can update a website. If someone relies on this books' recommendations and think that they're secure when they're not for whatever reason, that's incredibly harmful.
Reading the overview though, the book is also seems to be about history of obfuscation and protesting laws (?) so I guess it could be useful for people who're seeking that information, but I wouldn't recommend this or any book that acts like a tutorial to someone who's trying to learn more about online privacy.
Would it be less ironic if they published the information on a website supported by targeted adds? There aren't many privacy-friendly options to monetize content these days without resorting to donations.
Well privacy and content monetization do not play well together. The only option I can think would be a blog with 1 add a-la "Daring Fireball", but you need a huge amount of hits in order to make that a viable business, as J. Grubber does.
Obfuscation won't slow down data scientists. To see this in action open your gmail account and notice there's (likely) no spam in your primary inbox. Those spammers spend considerable resources to obfuscate themselves from Google's filters yet still fail.
Of course "fake behavior" could be dected if you have known real behaviour to compare it to.That also means that it is possible to simulate "real behavior" given the relevant data.
Whis is a win-win situtation, ad networks get to fight fake traffic, fake traffic becomes indistiguishable from real human trafic.
Aren't they two different things? The open software community has been, in general, a big supporter of human rights, but every author or artist should be able to decide how he or she sells or gives away their creations. (Am I missing some important point?)
It depends on the DRM. If the DRM is the type that identifies and reports on the identity of the user, then it is ironic. But if the DRM is user-neutral and doesn't report back to anyone, then you are correct.
The ebook version from MIT press is Adobe Digital Editions. It is also available (more expensive) in Kindle format: http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0135G71BG
I was already thinking about a whole industry that could be spawned based on this premise. You could hire people that would inject "noise" into the internet on your behalf, and you could ask (other) people to measure the signal-to-noise ratio that remained.
Reading the overview though, the book is also seems to be about history of obfuscation and protesting laws (?) so I guess it could be useful for people who're seeking that information, but I wouldn't recommend this or any book that acts like a tutorial to someone who's trying to learn more about online privacy.