I started using Google Reader about a year and a half ago. It quickly became an invaluable part of my online toolkit. Yesterday, Google announced that it was going to be dropping the service. Charles Stross posted this as his reaction to the awful news, and I feel very much the same way:
March 14, 2013
February 16, 2013
“The mainstream news has become the Boy who Cried Internet”
Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: Facebook, Google, Newspapers, Privacy, SocialMedia, TV, Twitter — Nicholas @ 11:29
In Maclean’s, Jesse Brown explains why the mainstream media still doesn’t seem to “get” the internet or social media channels like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook:
While I was delivering some talking-head sound-bites on this item for a certain newscast, the reporter asked me why the Twitter hack was such a huge deal. I was stumped – it wasn’t. So she asked me why it was getting so much attention. I knew the answer, but held my tongue.
Here’s what I was thinking: it gets so much attention because print and TV news love to bash technology, especially social media, and can’t resist a scary story about how the people who use it should be very, very afraid. The truth is, despite years of fear-mongering stories about Facebook identity theft, Gmail phishing attacks and massive Twitter hacks, public interest and concern about these things remains very low. That’s because these things haven’t happened to the vast majority of us, or to anyone we know. For the small number of people this has happened to, the impact is typically minimal. The mainstream news has become the Boy who Cried Internet.
This is not to say privacy isn’t a valid concern when it comes to free Internet services. There’s much to worry about, but little of it has to do with Russian digital mobsters, Chinese military hackers or spammy Nigerian princes. The real data privacy danger – with social media, and beyond – comes from government.
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January 10, 2013
Narcissism on the rise (again) among college students
Filed under: Education, Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: Psychology, SocialMedia, Teenagers, University — Nicholas @ 09:04
I know you won’t believe this, but college students have an inflated sense of self-worth that has been further enabled by those new-fangled social media tools.
A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities — the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”
While the specifics of today’s worries differ, I’m reminded of this classic, attributed to Socrates (but not authenticated):
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
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December 19, 2012
Exiting gracefully from Instagram
Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Internet, Photography, Privacy, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 00:02
Lots of folks are furious about Instagram’s recently announced changes to their terms of service. If you’re an Instagram user and don’t want to sign up for the changed TOS, here’s Roberto Baldwin‘s recent Wired How-To on rescuing your Instagram photos and closing your account:
First you’ll want to download all of your photos. Instaport will download your entire Instagram photo library in just a few minutes. Currently the service only offers a zip file download of your photos, although direct export to Flickr and Facebook are in the works.
Once the photos are downloaded, you can upload them to another photo service. Some of the Gadget Lab staff is fond of the new Flickr app and service.
After you’ve removed your photos from Instagram, you can quickly delete your account and pretend you’ve never even heard of Lo-Fi filter.
But once you delete your account, that’s it. Instagram cannot reactivate deactivated accounts and you will not be able to sign up for Instagram later with the same account name.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
Update: Charles Cooper at CNET News:
From the outset, let’s note a couple of points that ought to be abundantly clear to anyone watching the unfolding controversy about the upcoming changes to Instagram’s terms of use.
A) Instagram — and thus by definition, Facebook, the site’s corporate parent — is entirely within its rights to change the terms of use governing how photos uploaded by people using the service get used.
B) Facebook’s management is comprised of incredibly smart folks.
Given that A and B are true, the powers that be who are running the company must either be amazingly tone deaf or crazy as loons.
It’s obviously not the latter, so we’re left with the conclusion that the people at the top, so impressed by the sound of their own voices, have lost touch with the people who helped turn them into gazillionaires — in other words, the users.
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November 14, 2012
Enter the real Facebook business model
Facebook is changing, and lots of folks have ideas about what it is changing into. Here’s Dalton Caldwell‘s interpretation of the new business model:
Several prominent people are up in arms about Facebook charging for access to users who have already Liked their page.
I believe this debate is missing the big picture, and what we are in fact witnessing is the unfurling of the full-fledged Facebook business model. Facebook is showing us how they will cross the chasm from low-CTR low-CPM ad-units into what investors have been waiting for since the beginning: a Facebook analogue to Google Adwords.
[. . .]
From a Facebook user perspective, we don’t really know how the algorithm works, and are already trained to understand that some things magically show up our newsfeed and some things don’t. If a normal user sees that one of their friends bought a LivingSocial deal at the top of their feed, they may/may not click on it, but they certainly won’t question how it got there.
Facebook newsfeed is an embodiment of our war on noise. We depend on the newsfeed optimizer to protect our limited attention span, and as a consequence, Facebook gets to choose what stories we do and don’t see, just as Google chooses which search results we do and don’t see. Conceptually, this seems very lucrative: Facebook is auctioning off our limited attention span to the highest bidder, as long as the bidder has a candidate newsstory to promote.
This is what Like-gate is about.
Welcome to the attention economy.
H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.
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October 23, 2012
The law, sexting, and shady website operations
Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: Internet, Pornography, Sexting, SocialMedia, Teenagers — Nicholas @ 14:41
Tim Worstall discusses the weird and disturbing online world of sexting teens, parasitical porn websites and the insanity of our current laws on the topic:
… the legal problems go much further than just young people losing control of images of themselves.
For we’re in the middle of a social hysteria over child pornography and paedophilia. And as is usual in such hysterias reactions desperately overshoot. For example, in my native UK it is entirely legal for a 16 year old girl to have sex with whichever consenting also 16 years or above human she wishes. Any thing from removing her top for her lover’s delectation through to any perversion you might care to think about. However, if said lover, with her full permission, takes a photograph of her without her bikini top on this is child pornography. Yes, even if they’ve been lovers for nearly two legal years a topless photograph of her at 17 and 364 days old is child porn. And it is here that the real legal problems start.
[. . .]
It gets worse, too. The general assumption in the law these days is that a picture on a computer is production of child pornography, not possession of it. The reasoning is that, before you looked at the picture there was one copy, on the server. Now, as you look at the picture, there are two. One on the server, the other in your browser (or cache, whatever). Thus there are now two pictures, you have made one of them therefore you are producing child pornography. And it’s not all that much of a surprise to find that the penalties for the production as opposed to the possession of such are markedly stronger.
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October 18, 2012
The rise of Britain’s cybercensors
Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: Censorship, FreedomOfSpeech, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 00:01
Brendan O’Neill in Reason on the sad state of online freedom of speech in Britain:
What country has just sentenced a man to eight months in prison for wearing an anti-police t-shirt, and another man to three months in prison for telling an “abhorrent” joke on Facebook? Iran, perhaps? China? No, it’s Britain.
Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain in recent years. The birthplace of John Milton (“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience”), and John Stuart Mill (“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service”), has become a cesspit of censoriousness.
The frequency with which the police and legal system now throw into jail anyone judged to have committed a “speech crime” is alarming.
On October 11, Barry Thew, a 39-year-old man from Manchester, was sentenced to eight months in jail—eight months!—for the crime of wearing a t-shirt that said, “One less pig — perfect justice”.
[. . .]
Social-networking sites are being subjected to the most stringent censorship. In July, a 17-year-old boy was arrested and questioned by police after he sent insulting tweets to British Olympic diver Tom Daley. The 17-year-old was spared jail but was issued with a “harassment warning.” In March, a 21-year-old student called Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in jail for making crude jokes on Twitter about a then very ill footballer called Fabrice Muamba.
Last year, following the summer riots that rocked many English cities, two young men were jailed for four years for setting up a Facebook page called “Smash Down Northwich Town,” a reference to the town in Chester where they lived. The page was all about how cool it would be to have a local riot. No one accepted their invitation to riot, though; there was no “smashing down.” Yet still the two men were convicted of a public order offense, criminalized for being fantasists effectively.
Update: Rowan Atkinson is calling for the censors to back off:
Rowan Atkinson is demanding a change in the law to halt the ‘creeping culture of censoriousness’ which has seen the arrest of a Christian preacher, a critic of Scientology and even a student making a joke.
The Blackadder and Mr Bean star criticised the ‘new intolerance’ behind controversial legislation which outlaws ‘insulting words and behaviour’.
Launching a fight for part of the Public Order Act to be repealed, he said it was having a ‘chilling effect on free expression and free protest’.
He went on: ‘The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.’
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October 14, 2012
“I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name”
Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: Facebook, Google, Internet, Privacy, SocialMedia, Teenagers — Nicholas @ 10:27
James Joyner on the phenomenon of internet privacy — and the growing reality that it’s pretty much an illusion.
In the first instance, a bad person is likely to have his real life — including his ability to make a living — upended by the conscious act of a reporter. In the second, two young people who did nothing more than join a school club had their biggest secret exposed by a well-meaning person who made the mistake of trusting Facebook, a data mining company that makes billions by getting people to give them their personal information.
[. . .]
I’ve been active online now since the mid-1990s and have, by virtue of this blog, been a very minor online public figure for almost a decade. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my professional career is one that encourages writing and publishing, I’ve done virtually all of my online activity under my real life name. As such, I’ve long been aware that my family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and prospective employers might read everything that I put out there. That’s the safest way to operate online, in that it avoids the sort of disruptive surprises that Brutsch, Duncan, and McCormick received. But it also means, inevitably, that there’s a subtle filter that makes me more cautious than I might otherwise be. That’s likely both good and bad in my own case.
But I continue to worry about what it means for a younger generation, for whom Facebook and other social networks are part and parcel of their everyday existence from their teenage years forward. By the time the Internet was a public phenomenon, I was a grown man with a PhD. I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name.
I have generally used my real name — or at least not tried to actively conceal my real identity — in most of my online activities. Some of this has been because there wasn’t a pressing reason to remain anonymous, but as in the writer’s case, it was a strong suspicion from the start that it would be difficult to maintain that degree of privacy over the long term (information wanting to be free, and all that).
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September 1, 2012
Digital “inheritance”: law has not caught up to our online lives
Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: Facebook, IntellectualProperty, Internet, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 00:01
As I mentioned in a post the other day, our laws are still designed for a world where most things have a physical presence, and the problems we see in intellectual property and patent law are just the start of the turmoil our legal system will have to face:
What will happen to your Facebook account after you are gone?
Dealing with digital assets after someone dies is becoming a challenge for families and the legal system alike.
Lawmakers are trying to clarify rules governing the passage of social-media and email accounts, along with other online assets that might have financial value. Several states have enacted laws to deal with post-death access to digital assets, and several more are working on similar legislation, says Gene Hennig, a lawyer at Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis and a commissioner of the Uniform Law Commission.
That group, which recommends uniform state laws, plans to come up with a recommended statute that more states could adopt.
“Eventually people are going to start putting in their wills what they want, and we need to know what’s allowed,” Mr. Hennig says. “In the olden days, grandma had a chest in the attic full of photo albums. Now, your chest of photos is in your computer.”
Update, 3 September: Bruce Willis wants his kids to inherit the music library he’s built up, but the iTunes licensing won’t let him do that.
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August 30, 2012
21st century problems: who inherits your digital property?
Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: Amazon, Apple, Movies, Music, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 08:37
Unless medical science has a solution up their collective sleeves, we’re all going to die (eventually). It may be an individual shock, but humans have been dying forever — it’s the unwelcome end of the trip. As a result, we’ve evolved ways to redistribute the property of deceased members of our families and communities. When the issues were as simple as who got Uncle Grog’s club and who got his loincloth, we came up with solutions.
Fast forward to our becoming-ever-more-digital age, and not all of our property is tangible: we’re becoming “owners” of digital property that may be as valuable as our physical possessions. What happens to our music libraries, e-book collections, social media accounts, and all the other non-physical things we’ve bought and used during our lives?
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.
And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”
Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files — but they don’t actually own them.
[. . .]
Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.
Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
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July 5, 2012
What do software developers and predatory bankers have in common?
Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: Competition, Computers, Internet, SocialMedia, Software, Twitter — Nicholas @ 09:02
In his regular column at The Register, Matt Asay points out that using another company’s API can be a quick and easy way to get going, but it carries significant risks:
In tech today, it has become a truism that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on someone else’s platform — or API.
Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has described APIs as “self-serve [business development]”. It’s a great story: open and document your API and watch a thousand businesses bloom, bringing you cash and legitimacy. All of which may be true, if done correctly.
But the other side of Graham’s “business development” is the difficulty of predicting the business planning on the other side of the API. Twitter was pretty free with API access in its early days when it was seeking adoption rather than income. Now that the company has grown up and continues to tighten its grip on how and where users interact with tweets, Twitter terminated its tweet syndication partnership with LinkedIn and has promised to clamp down even more tightly on how developers use its API. Twitter is doing this because it can, as professor Joel West points out, but also because it must: its advertising business depends upon it.
So where’s the banking similarity come in?
There’s one other thing to consider, as venture capitalist Bill Davidow opines in The Atlantic, and that is the very real possibility that this API mercantilism is a sign of how the technology world is changing, and not for the better:
At both Hewlett-Packard and Intel, where I next worked, money was important — but it wasn’t the top priority. The goal was to do the right thing and do it well. If you did that, over time, rewards followed and shareholders supported your efforts…
Many other things have changed in the valley over the past five decades. I’ve become increasingly concerned about one thing that is seldom discussed: the valley is no longer as concerned about serving the customer, and even sees great opportunity in exploitation. We are beginning to act like the bankers who sold subprime mortgages to naïve consumers…
Or sold developers subprime APIs?
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June 15, 2012
The Never Seconds flap reveals highly selective anti-authoritarian reactions
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Liberty, Media — Tags: Blogging, Children, NannyState, Scotland, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 12:52
Brendan O’Neill is happy that the petty authoritarians at the Argyll and Bute council have rescinded their ban on young Martha Payne’s school lunch blog, but points out that the Twitstorm that helped publicize her plight is remarkably selective in which kinds of official bullying they will oppose:
But what a shame that these decent folks’ opposition to council heavy-handedness in relation to school lunches is so spectacularly partial. What a shame, for example, that they haven’t offered solidarity to those millions of children who have been banned from bringing sweets and crisps into schools, which, as I once reported for the BBC, has given rise to a black market in junk food in school playgrounds. What a shame they didn’t speak out when councils, behaving like a Tuckshop Taliban, stormed into schools and shut down tuckshops and vending machines that sold chocolate or Coke. What a shame they didn’t have anything to say when mothers in Yorkshire who passed chips through the schoolgates to their children were slated in the media and depicted as Viz-style “Fat Slags” in The Sun. What a shame they didn’t complain when it was revealed that some schools are taking it upon themselves to raid children’s lunchboxes — made for them by their parents! — in order to confiscate anything “unhealthy”.
What a shame, in other words, that only one kind of authoritarianism in relation to school dinners is criticised — namely that which censors people from revealing how crap such dinners are — while other forms of authoritarianism, which control both what children can eat and even what their parents can provide them with, are tolerated. Like stern headmasters, it seems concerned hacks will only give their nod of approval to nice, polite, healthy schoolchildren, while withholding it from the rabble, from kids who eat chips and cake with the blessing of their stupid parents. Those kids, it seems, can be censored and censured and controlled as much as is necessary.
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June 6, 2012
Scattering that “social” pixie dust on mobile apps
Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: Android, iPhone, Smartphones, SocialMedia, Software — Nicholas @ 09:37
In the Guardian Technology section, Frédéric Filloux attempts to disabuse mobile developers about one of the “rules” for mobile apps:
Today’s hype leaves no other option but making an application as “social” as possible. This being the certitude du jour, allow me to think differently.
True, some apps are inherently social: when it comes to rating a product or a service, the “crowd factor” is critical. Beyond that, it should be a matter of personal choice — an antinomic notion to today’s the “Social” diktat. When you sign up to Spotify, the default setting is to share your musical taste with your Facebook friends and to suffer theirs. I can’t stand such obligation: I quickly dumped the application and cancelled my account.
The social idea’s biggest mistake is the belief in a universal and monolithic concept everyone is supposed to be willing to embrace with a similar degree of scope and enthusiasm. That’s a geeky, super-cartesian, Zuckerberg-esque view of society. Among my friends, some like opera (the singing, not the browser), others prefer heavy metal and I’m more into jazz tunes; some are tech-minded like me, others are more inclined towards literature. When it comes to sharing news, I tend to be naturally selective about the people I send a link to: I don’t want to swamp everyone with stuff they don’t care about. I might be wrong, but this is the way I see the social cyberspace: segmented and respectful of each other.
So, mobile app developers, if you find yourself trying to force-fit social features into a Solitaire app, think again.
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May 31, 2012
Old worry: the “digital divide”
Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: Children, NannyState, SocialMedia, Teenagers, TV — Nicholas @ 00:06
The good news is that the much-feared “digital divide” between the rich and poor never came to pass. Now the worry is rather different:
Remember the “digital divide”? Back in the 1990s, the problem was that poor people did not have enough access to computers and the Internet. Today the problem is that they have too much access. Evidently the digital divide has given way to the “time-wasting gap.” I shit you not. The New York Times reports that bridging the digital divide “created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government [naturally] now wants to fix”: “As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites.” Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure? Something must be done
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May 23, 2012
Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”
Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: Facebook, Justice, Racism, SocialMedia, Twitter — Nicholas @ 09:59
People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action:
It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people — well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate’s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. “Go suck a ni–er d-ck you f–king aids ridden c–t,” one read.
Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society’s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.
[. . .]
The context of Mr. Stacey’s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: “LOL. F–k Muamba he’s dead!!! #Haha.” That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society’s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.
Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year’s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey’s problem wasn’t “inciting racial hatred,” the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.
In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it’s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.
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