With 70 percent of its more than 600 million members outside the United States, Facebook is creating its own foreign service, hiring a network of ambassadors from India to Ireland to represent the Palo Alto-based social network with foreign governments and cultures.

Facebook’s new global policy team will monitor the local political landscape and act as multilingual, TV-friendly communicators in countries and for cultures that, in many cases, have very different values and laws about privacy and personal communications than the U.S.

Facebook is confronting its emergence as a global organization whose membership is much larger than the population of most countries, and whose technology can antagonize both Middle Eastern dictators and European democracies fretful about privacy. The international directors of policy, as Facebook calls them, will grapple with those challenges.

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As part of this effort, Facebook is hiring policy directors for the Middle East, Britain, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe and other countries and regions. Among their duties, the policy directors will be Facebook’s primary contact with foreign government officials and politicians. That will be especially critical in places like Europe, where regulators are scrutinizing the privacy and data-handling practices of Google (GOOG) and other U.S. Internet companies.

“It’s hard to predict what 600 million people expect” for privacy across an array of countries and cultures, Facebook privacy counsel Ed Palmieri said Friday at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference in Santa Clara.

The new international jobs are part of a larger push by Facebook to beef up government relations both in the U.S. and abroad.

As state attorneys general become increasingly active in regulating Internet companies over privacy and antitrust issues, for instance, Facebook also is creating a job in Washington to deal with state government policy. Abroad, Facebook’s new Pan-European director of safety in London, as well as a policy director to be based in the home of the European Commission in Brussels, will help the company navigate Europe’s regulatory shoals.

Google created a similar international team in 2006. Facebook is stocked with ex-Googlers, from Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg on down, who witnessed the benefits of having staffers in other countries to flag executives about cultural problems before they blow up, and to direct damage control after they do.

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“Somebody forwarded me those (Facebook job) listings with a note: ‘Look familiar?’ ” said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of global public policy from 2004 to 2009. “We did exactly that same thing.”

McLaughlin, who left Google to become deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration, and who now is at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, said Google’s policy directors abroad were sometimes able to defuse crises before they happened.

For example, when the Google Talk instant message product was designed to permanently store all conversations, the company’s foreign policy staff warned that would cause privacy problems in Europe, McLaughlin said. Google’s engineers redesigned Talk to include a mode that does not store conversations.

“Was it useful? Totally,” McLaughlin said of Google’s foreign policy staffers. “You literally build a foreign service for the company, people whose mission it is to represent the company outwardly, but also to translate the policy environment back into the company.”

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Look at the technology we use. We’re cyborgs. We’re attached to our phones at ever-younger ages, while the phones have evolved forward. Most people don’t even have short-term memories anymore. We’re becoming machine people. I think superheroes are part of the vision of what we may become: Individuals with our own chest emblems. Something is going on there, a strange collapse. Like you said, more and more people want to become superheroes, even as comic-book writers and filmmakers have spent the last 10 years trying to make superheroes much more real, relatable and convincing.

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In the case VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017, the judge denied the Canadian adult film company access to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses do not equal persons, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.

Among other things Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the U.S. authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR’s case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either.

“The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber’s household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment,” Judge Baker writes.

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A Mexican dentist said he tired of paying a weekly extortion fee of 800 pesos, about $70, in Juarez, and, after suffering a beating for nonpayment that almost killed him, he made the move to El Paso.
He now runs a clandestine clinic in his El Paso home, using his car to pick up patients at a distant location and discreetly driving them into his garage, where he welcomes them to his office.
“Whether you agree, or disagree with this war, one thing is clear. This will go on for years,” the dentist said. “This clandestine office is Plan B for now.”

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Meanwhile, the Chinese colonies in Africa continue to grow at an extraordinary rate, shipping minerals and diamonds back to the mother country. Only the Indian Empire, which recently signed a trans-continental alliance with booming Brazil, comes close to rivalling China’s dominance of Eurasia.

Some experts insist that Chinese growth is unsustainable. But Beijing’s victory over Russia in 2028’s Four-Day War tells a rather different story. For years, tensions had been growing over influence in the crucial Central Asian oil states. But when border clashes escalated into open warfare, even military experts were shocked by the speed of the Chinese advance.

And culturally, too, the Chinese still make all the running. On the University of Beijing’s East Anglia campus (formerly Cambridge University), Chinese Studies remains by far the most popular subject.

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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster

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Bucky Fuller once said that people never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching. One of the reasons it is so hard to act on climate change is that most of us are afraid of what we’ll lose, but uncertain at best about what we’ll gain.

Yet, I’m convinced that the gains far outweigh the losses here. I think the gains are so great, we’d want to proceed with many of the boldest climate plans even if climate wasn’t the biggest threat facing humanity. In fact bold action on climate may be what separates the world’s most successful cities from ones that fail; in short, we’re going to love our carbon-neutral, zero-waste, leafy green, car-free, unrecognizably ecological, economically booming urban futures… or envy someone else’s.

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We don’t need another world above the clouds or in the past; the greatest marvels are found here, in our own world, in our own day- invisible to the eye which is dull, it is true, but clear and tangible to the eye that sees.

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