Cheerful Curmudgeon

Facebook added the proverbial last straw with its latest privacy faux pas. It has demonstrated, yet again, that in pursuing it’s goal of selling advertising, Facebook places very little importance on our personal privacy. Remember that, while Facebook ostensibly is a web site designed to help people connect with like-minded people, in fact Facebook is a business which derives it’s revenues from other businesses, not from it’s subscribers. In plain English: Unless you are paying big dollars to Facebook, you are not Facebook’s primary audience.

Don’t believe me? I just spent half an hour tightening up my Facebook privacy settings; it was a bewildering maze of pages and checkboxes and pop-up windows. I thought maybe I was just dim, that it couldn’t be as hard as it seemed to be. But no; it really is that hard. The New York Times counted the words and discovered that Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the US constitution!

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.

The last straw was discovering a page which allowed my personal information to be shared with third-parties (advertisers and other businesses) when my friends do stuff, not because of my own actions. Here is the page, after I turned everything off; all of the boxes had been checked when I first came to the page.

Just one example: I am perfectly happy allowing my friends to know my birthday but I was angry to discover that, when a friend of mine “visits a Facebook Platform application or website,” my birthday was revealed to the business running that “application or website.” That’s just not right; I did not give my permission for this. I do not want it to happen. Facebook added this “feature” and began giving out this information without asking me.

In response to that discovery, I have done a couple of things. First, I took the time to go through every Facebook privacy page and tighten up the settings. My friends can still see stuff about me. The friends of my friends can also see some stuff about me. To the extent possible, I have blocked business’ abilities to obtain my data. Second, I have removed all of the data which I do not want publicly shared. Since I cannot trust Facebook to keep it private, I no longer store those data in my Facebook profile.

If you are reading this on Facebook, you should know that Facebook is posting a copy of my original article. I actually wrote this on my own blog at www.CheerfulCurmudgeon.com and I invite you to visit the site directly. Facebook does not copy everything from the blog and you are missing good stuff by staying in Facebook and not coming over to the actual website.

I choose to control access to my data, sharing it only with the people that I trust. Facebook has proven, time and again, to be a very untrustworthy arbiter of our data.

Back when I administered VAXen running BSD UNIX at FileNet, “just” 25 years ago or so, we didn’t have a high speed internet connection to use in transferring files between computers. I used a bank of Racal-Vadic 2400 baud modems to run UUCP and shuffle email and usenet articles around. With five modems in the bank, felix the VAX 750 grew to be a modest UUCP hub in SoCal. Today we measure our internet connections in megabits or Mbps, millions of bits per second, instead of baud. I am typing this on a cable modem connection that just achieved 11.4 Mbps downloading data and 1.7 Mbps uploading data. By comparison, felix the VAX had about 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth, and downloading did not go any faster than uploading.

10.5" magnetic tape

We used to say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes. With just 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth available, it was completely impractical to transfer large files across “the net.” Instead, we would write the files to 10.5″ reels of magnetic tapes and drive them to their destination by car.

DEC RM03 disk drive

It would take several tapes, and several hours, to “back up” a single 67 MB, washing machine sized, RM03 disk drive. Once the  tapes were written, we would bundle them into  the nearest car and take a road trip across town to where they needed to be. Then would begin the (usually slower) process of reading the tapes into the new computer. It was way faster to move data by “station wagon” than pretty much anything else.

Flash forward to 2010. On Tuesday, I had 62,000 MB of files on a computer in a datacenter in Houston that had to be moved to a new computer in a datacenter on the east coast. I live in the middle of the country (St. Louis) and do not have ready access to either datacenter. Through the miracles of the internet, I logged into the Houston computer and typed one command:

rsync -az /backup/htn/ root@newmachine.com:/backup/htn

About eight hours later, with no intervention from me, all of the files had been replicated onto the new machine. I had just moved 1,000 times as much data as one of felix’s entire disk drives in a fraction of the time and with virtually no effort.

Yup… life is good.

As I predicted in Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (September 2008) and again in Step 2: Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (December 2008), Google is moving to replace the operating system, not just the browser. What changed two days ago is that Google is finally being up-front about it, instead of masquerading their plans as “only” a browser.

In Introducing the Google Chrome OS on the Official Google Blog, Google writes,

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends….

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010….

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web….

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year….

What does this mean to you? Several things, all good if you a) use your computer mostly for stuff on the web, and b) like to save money, and c) don’t mind that virtually all of your files will be “elsewhere” instead of stored on your own computer.

1. Turn on your Google Chrome OS based computer and, within a very few seconds, you will be up and running on the web (using Google Chrome, of course).
2. No (or at least few) worries about viruses and Trojans which exploit Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Office. You will have the security of Linux without the geeky requirements that you actually understand Linux.
3. You will be able to run this on existing hardware, which ought to breathe new life into old machines.

The kicker is that, in Google’s grand vision, all of your email, letters, documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc., will be stored on Google’s servers. You will use GMail for your mail and Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. If you are big, you will use the paid versions of these apps. If you are small, ads might be in your face all the time. It is not coincidence that GMail and Google Apps came out of “beta” the same day that Google introduced Google Chrome OS.

Is this good for you? How much do you trust Google? It is certainly cool technology, certainly priced right, and certainly convenient.

Researchers have found a strong correlation between newborn feeding patterns and the seemingly immutable “night person” or “morning person”  patterns which govern our adult lives. Dr. Emily Erudita of the Hatch Institute of Mamalian Studies reports in today’s issue of Pan Generational Physiology,

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

I am fed up with wasting clients’ dollars “fixing” web sites so that they look good in Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has been out for 2 1/2 years. IE8 is available as a free beta. There are lots of other browsers available for free. All of these browsers work better than IE6. If you still use IE6, it’s time to get over it and move on. Upgrade for free to something better.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

Do you remember when I predicted that Google Chrome would take over the world replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux? Here is the next step, to be released for CES which begins January 8, 2009.

If all you want from your computer is to read your email (Gmail) and surf the web and use the other applications that Google provides, it is just seven seconds away. No, that is not a typo. In less time than you have spent reading this article, you will be able to boot your computer and be doing useful stuff.

Of course, you could use this system for web-based applications other than Google’s, but how many people will bother. I wonder how long it will be until you can get a free, ad-supported computer with this operating system pre-installed.

I published my family tree on-line so that other family members and genealogists would have easy access. I never imagined that it would turn into a way to find long lost friends. I just received this email message:

A friend of mine from college was looking for me.  So, he googled my family name and saw me on your family tree.  So he got my married name and saw me on my work site and then he sent an email to them and they forwarded it to me.  It is truly amazing how the internet works….

Too fun!

Cross browser testing is always a pain to coordinate but at least it just got a lot less expensive. Amazon Web Services just released AMIs running Windows which means that you can now get Windows virtual machines for as little as $0.125 per hour. These beasties make great platforms for doing cross browser testing. The only hassle was that the default AMI only had IE7 installed on it.

I said “was” because I have created a new, public AMI with six browsers installed on it: IE7, IE6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 3.1, and Google Chrome 0.3. You are welcome to use it for free (well… you do have to pay Amazon their whopping 12.5 cents per hour). I hope it makes your web site testing life a bit easier.

Details at my Hen’s Teeth Network web site.

Internet TV—broadcasting live television over the internet instead of using radio broadcasts or the cable television infrastruction. Almost everybody has heard of it. Some people talk about it as the Next Big Thing in television. Many people figure that it will not happen for a long time for a wide range of business and technical reasons. Did you notice that a new player quietly entered the internet TV market this week?

Netflix posted New content to watch instantly on Wednesday,

Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year. Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. You can see all the newly available choices here.

If you click the “here” link, and look near the top, right corner, you will find “Live Starz TV Channel” quietly nestled in there. (Click on the images to see full-sized versions.)

Click the “Live Starz TV Channel” link and, without any fanfare, you are watching a live Starz movie channel.

How long until Netflix offers more of the Starz, Encore and MoviePlex channels? How quickly will HBO, Showtime and the rest want pieces of the action? We have always known that Netflix was positioning itself to deliver movies over the internet. Now we can see that its goal is to deliver all TV content, not just movies. Netflix already has a solid subscriber base and delivery infrastructure. It looks like we consumers will soon have a third alternative to cable and satellite providers.

EepyBird is back… with sticky notes this time. And to enhance your viewing pleasure, click the “HD is off” button in the right side of the video when it starts playing. Assuming you have a high speed internet connection, you will see a video which is much higher quality than what you are accustomed to seeing from YouTube.

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.