Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

I IM’ed a friend yesterday to let him know I no longer used facebook.  He asked why, and I told him I no longer trusted facebook.  The truth is - I never really trusted them; it simply took a while for that to sink in and for me to take action.  I wiped as much as I could from my account & deactivated it - not surprisingly, you cannot delete your account. 

Trust is the single most important factor of any of my online activities.  Simple utility isn’t the differentiation any more, as there are many choices today for even arcane services.

I simply don’t trust facebook at this point. Beacon was designed as a social-spying program, etc… and Zuckerberg himself seems like the type of person ¹ I wouldn’t trust if he lived across the street. I’ve read a lot about him & the litigation around the formation of facebook, and one quote that stands out is "Just how many enemies he has collected at such a young age.”²

I think 2008 will be a watershed year for facebook in ways that the company isn’t expecting.  I can afford to be wrong - they can’t.

¹ http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1764.html

² http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071130/ironic-yes-but-zuckerbergs-privacy-violated/

Tags: facebook, trust

This is pretty interesting.  As the blogosphere started to get into this story, I (and many others of course) already knew the plot, the main characters, and the cliff-hanger ending to "today’s episode".

Kara Swisher: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/

Techcrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/plaxo-flubs-it/

How? Twitter. 

You mean this Twitter?  Um, yes, that one.  Twitter is about instant whatever.

Tags: twitter, scoble, facebook

Facebook’s new advertising program, Beacon, is so flawed with regard to its privacy controls that you shouldn’t use it. But since Facebook has waffled about whether & how you can actually opt-out of this, you should just block it.

Unless and until they change the technology, this simple technique will prevent Beacon from sending anything from your browser sessions to Facebook’s Beacon. Apparently, all the javascript that controls this is located behind a common URL: facebook.com/beacon

Using a URL-blocker with that in a rule should do the trick. Here’s where I learned about this:

http://tinyurl.com/2xjak6

I want one of these:

“Think of it as a 45-foot-long bb gun. Only in this case, the BBs are fired at 20,500 mph at spaceships. Sort of. All the gunplay takes place inside a physics lab at the University of Dayton Research Institute. The goal: to test the mettle of the composite fabric or aluminum skins on orbit-bound spacecraft. The materials are designed to protect the vehicles from the tens of millions of undetectably small — but potentially lethal — bits of space junk that constantly zoom around Earth at a hull-piercing 17,900 mph.”

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/15-10/st_bbgun

Tags: bbgun, science, spacecraft