Quotulatiousness

May 8, 2010

Facebook’s business model

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Ryan Singel looks at where Facebook started and why it’s changed its privacy protections:

Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.

Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.

And Facebook realized it owned the network.

Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

Every time Facebook changes their privacy policies, well-meaning folks try to explain how to retain as much of your previous settings as possible . . . and every time, Facebook’s defaults have changed further towards exposing everything. There’s money in that information, money that Facebook is determined to obtain. Privacy? The inevitability of zero-privacy is Facebook’s unspoken motto.

May 5, 2010

Three reasons not to remove the Downfall parodies

Filed under: History, Law, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

3 Reasons YouTube Shouldn’t Censor Downfall Parodies

[. . .]

It’s understandable why Downfall’s production company, Constantin Film, might be upset that such a serious movie is being burlesqued, but pushing YouTube to ban the parodies is a terrible idea for at least three reasons:

1. It’s fair use! The parodies, which transform a few minutes of a three-hour movie, are clearly legit under existing copyright laws. Because they clearly transform the original and have no possibility of confusing viewers, the parodies are clearly protected speech.

2. This is free promotion! As George Lucas could tell the filmmakers, fan-generated videos help keep the original source material vital and relevant. Lucas used to try to police all Star Wars knock-offs, until he realized that his audience was promoting his films more effectively than he ever could. More people have surely seen Downfall due to the popularity of the parodies.

3. Let’s keep the Internet creative! The greatest cultural development over the past 20 or so years has been technologies that allow producers and consumers to create and enjoy an ever-increasing array of creative expression in an ever-increasing array of circumstances. This development is nowhere more powerful than on the Internet, which has unleashed a whole new universe of writing, music, video, and more. Indeed, YouTube is itself one of the great conduits of cyberspace. Pulling down the Downfall parodies may be within YouTube’s rights, but it nonetheless strikes a blow to the heart of what is totally awesome about the Internet.

Facebook obliterates the entire notion of “privacy settings”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

As someone noted the other day, when it comes to Facebook and their constant twiddling with privacy settings, you can just copy-and-paste the last outraged story you did and change the date. That being said, the latest Facebook changes are pretty bad:

“Connections.” It’s an innocent-sounding word. But it’s at the heart of some of the worst of Facebook’s recent changes.

Facebook first announced Connections a few weeks ago, and EFF quickly wrote at length about the problems they created. Basically, Facebook has transformed substantial personal information — including your hometown, education, work history, interests, and activities — into “Connections.” This allows far more people than ever before to see this information, regardless of whether you want them to.

Since then, our email inbox has been flooded with confused questions and reports about these changes. We’ve learned lots more about everyone’s concerns and experiences. Drawing from this, here are six things you need to know about Connections:

  1. Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections. [. . .]
  2. Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition. [. . .]
  3. Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information. [. . .]
  4. Facebook will continue to store and use your Connections even after you delete them. [. . .]
  5. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you “Like” something. [. . .]
  6. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. [. . .]

Overall, you’d have to assume that nobody in the Facebook architecture group has ever needed or even wanted to keep certain information private. Every change they make seems to make it harder and harder to restrict where your personal information will be accessible, and it’s not as though there haven’t been complaints: Facebook just carries on as if nobody cared.

I’ve still got a Facebook account, although I find I’m using it less and less (ironically, many of you reading this will have come here because of a link from Facebook . . .). Lack of ability to fine-tune the privacy settings is certainly one of the reasons I don’t use Facebook as much as I once did.

May 4, 2010

Spear phishing (test) attack on US Air Force

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

I’d heard the term “phishing” before, and I’ve reported at least a dozen various attempts to the appropriate parties (companies and organizations who are used in phishing attempts often have a reporting address set up so you can just forward the message to them). “Spear phishing” was new to me, and apparently it was also new to a large number of US Air Force personnel:

Offers to hire American airmen, stationed at an airbase on the Central Pacific island of Guam, as extras in the Transformers 3 movie, turned out to be an unexpectedly scary training exercise. First, keep in mind that there is no Transformers 3 filming scheduled for Guam. The email was a fake, used to test how well airmen could detect a hacker attempts to deceive military Internet users to give up valuable information.

The Transformers 3 email was a test to see how many airmen would fall for a “spear phishing” offensive. “Phishing” (pronounced “fishing”) is when a hacker sends out thousands, or millions, of emails that look like warnings from banks, eBay or PayPal, asking for you to log in (thus revealing your password to the hackers, who have set up a false website for this purpose) to take care of some administrative matter. The hacker then uses your password to loot your account. “Spear phishing” is when the emails are prepared with specific individuals in mind. The purpose here is to get specific information from, say, a bank manager, or someone known to be working on a secret project. In the Guam case, the targets of the spear phishing test were asked to go to a web site and fill out an application form to be eligible to be an extra. That form asked for information that would have enabled hostile hackers to gain more access to air force networks. A lot of the airmen who received the Transformers 3 email, responded. The air force won’t say how many, but it was more than expected. A lot more.

I doubt that many readers need to be told this, but no legitimate bank or financial institution should ever be sending you an email requesting you to follow an embedded link and log in to your account. If you get such an email, forward it to the bank’s security folks. If it’s legitimate, they can confirm it for you, but in 2010, no sensible bank should be communicating with you in this way.

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

April 29, 2010

Back to 1996

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:07

BoingBoing linked to this online time machine, which shows you what your website would look like (and sound like) back in 1996:

Presenting Geocities-izer!

April 21, 2010

When copyright goes bad

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

H/T to Cory Doctorow.

“The biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Andrew Orlowski looks at the overwhelming legislative victory for the music industry in the UK:

Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.

I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade, and the biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business. I’ve spent time talking to legislators and protagonists, and concluded that it was avoidable. Much of the argument was already lost when the Bill was introduced last November, admittedly, but campaigners’ tactics made a bad situation worse. This explodes the idea — sometimes called the ‘Overton Window’ in the jargon — that by adopting an extreme position, you pull the centre ground your way. The digital rights campaigners forced waverers into the music business camp, and hardened their support for tougher measures against file sharers.

In the end, the BPI wiped the floor with the Open Rights Group.

April 20, 2010

25 years on, the “Hackers” bestride the globe

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

Steven Levy revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution:

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.

I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.

I must have read Hackers during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.

April 15, 2010

The technical term is “totally insane”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Cory Doctorow has a horrible dystopian future in mind. No, it’s not the background to his next science fiction novel — it’s what the MPAA and RIAA think our future should be like:

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their master plan for enforcing copyright to the new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Richard Esguerra points out, it’s a startlingly distopian work of science fiction. The entertainment industry calls for:

* spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
* mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
* border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
* international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
* and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

There’s a technical term for this in policy circles. I believe it’s “Totally insane.”

I find the audacity of (as Cory calls ’em) “Big Content” to be breathtaking: it’s as if they’ve never heard of fairness or privacy. If they get their wish, we’ll never hear of ’em again either.

As Greg Sandoval points out, there’s almost no reliable data to quantify the problem all this draconian lawmaking and enforcement is supposed to address:

“Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies,” the GAO said. “Each method (of measuring) has limitations, and most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”

In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.

[. . .]

“Consumers may use pirated goods to ‘sample’ music, movies, software, or electronic games before purchasing legitimate copies,” the GAO continued. “(This) may lead to increased sales of legitimate goods.”

April 13, 2010

Why you should be worried about ACTA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

H/T to BoingBoing.

Surprise! Apple allows competing browser onto the iPhone

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

I guess even Apple has to trim their sails to the prevailing wind every now and again. Andrew Orlowski reviews the new iPhone implementation of Opera:

At last. Apple approved Opera’s Mini browser for the iPhone overnight, and in in a few hours it’s already attracted over 150 reviews. They’re not all positive, and not all accurate, but it’s an indication of how much interest there is in a better browser. While Safari was the jewel in the crown of the iPhone user interface, it hasn’t changed in three years. There are now 80 million iPhone and iPod Touches out in the wild, so some choice is long overdue.

What’s it like, then?

They said it was impossible . . .

Mini is fast, and Opera has sprung no surprises in the look and feel department. The font rendering and touch navigation — the mechanics of scrolling and zooming – aren’t quite as slick as we get with Safari, but they’re not far off. Mini also boasts also some very nice user-friendly features absent in Safari, such as saving web pages, searching inside a page, custom searches, and bookmark sync. And so it should . . .

Performance is the big draw, here. It’s always been the Mini’s signature feature: it was designed around speed and overcoming the obstacles to a good user experience on a mobile. Unlike the native version of Opera, Mini is really a lightweight document viewer, with the web page rendered on a proxy server, compressed, and sent down to the phone as a compact binary stream. The page is sent in large chunks, because TCP/IP’s chatty, bitty nature exacerbates the latencies that are a feature of 3G networks.

I’ll be downloading a copy as soon as I post this blog entry . . .

April 1, 2010

Gmail’s latest problem

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:57

March 31, 2010

Disciplining the customer

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

In what may yet turn out to be a groundbreaking method of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the US Copyright Group is suing 50,000 of them:

The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group (“an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance”) brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).

This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the “US Copyright Group” really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends’ lives have been ruined by litigation?

You have to wonder how they think this is a useful and creative solution to a problem they’ll be facing for the rest of their corporate existance. Suing your own customers would seem — on the face of it — as an unlikely way of persuading them to remain customers . . .

Some of the folks being sued are, undoubtedly, guilty of deliberate and repeated copyright infringement for purposes of personal gain. In a sample size like this, some of ’em will fit just about any profile you choose. Most of them, however, will almost certainly turn out to be teens and twenty-something students with no particular assets worth taking. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a cloud of gnats: you’ll mess up a few permanently, but most of ’em will not be touched.

March 26, 2010

Times to go pay-for-access in June

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

The editors of the Telegraph, Guardian, and Daily Mail rub their hands in glee, anticipating more page views from former casual Times readers:

The Times and The Sunday Times will become the first British newspapers to charge readers to access the titles online from June, Rupert Murdoch’s News International announced on Friday.

Customers will have to pay one pound for one day’s access and two pounds for a week’s subscription, in a move that will be closely watched in a newspaper industry suffering steadily dropping sales.

Both Times titles will launch new websites in early May, replacing the existing combined site, Times Online.

I rarely link to Times articles as it is, so their decision to pull everything behind a paywall won’t have much direct effect on my reading habits. If it’s a success (for varying values of “success”), other newspapers may follow suit. That might start to impact me, as I do link to articles from other British newspapers on a more regular basis.

Personally, I think this move won’t work, but it’ll be interesting watching the experiment happen.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress