Your Ad Here

December 7, 2008

Best of CRAFT

20081207bestofcraft.jpg

Here are some of my favorite posts this week from the Craft: Blog:


Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

Cereal box spectrometer

We've covered this simple kitchen-table science project before: how to make a spectrometer from a cereal box and a CD. Here, PopSci offers a 5-minute video on the project.

More:
A CD - cereal box spectrometer

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

MAKE Flickr pool weekly roundup

Flickrmosaic 10-7-08
From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Photography | Digg this!

Cold Sore Virus May Be Alzheimer’s Smoking Gun

Science Daily is reporting that the virus behind cold sores has been found to be a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers. Researchers believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of Alzheimer's in the first place. The research was just published in the Journal of Pathology (abstract).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Freelance Web Developer Best Practices?

SirLurksAlot writes "My last employer had to make a series of budget cuts, and I was laid off. I have been on the job hunt since then; however in the meantime I have begun freelancing as a Web developer. This is my first time in this role and so I would like the ask the Slashdot community: are there any best practices for freelance developers? What kind of process should I use when dealing with clients? Should I bill by the hour or provide a fixed quote on a per-project basis? What kind of assurances should I get from the client before I begin work? What is the best way to create accurate time estimates? I'm also wondering if there are any good open source tools for freelancers, such as for time-tracking and invoice creation (aside from simply using a spreadsheet). Any suggestions or insights would be welcome."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 2.0 Update To Remove Phishing Detection

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld and others are reporting that Firefox 2.0.0.19, the last security update to be released before 2.0 goes end-of-life, will remove the phishing detection at the request of Google. The browser is using an older version of the Safe Browsing protocol that Google will discontinue. According to the latest NetApplications report, about 25% of all Firefox users were still on version 2.0. This move ought to result in an increased adoption of Firefox 3.0 and other browsers, unless it goes unnoticed by most users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Young Mad Scientist’s Illustrated Alphabet Blocks: 26 FIVE engraved chunks o’ wonder — UPDATED


Xylocopa's Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks come in packs of 26 5, each engraved with an illustration depicting a different mad scientific discipline. This is how to get your kids started right:
A - Appendages | B - Bioengineering | C - Caffeine | D - Dirigible | E - Experiment | F - Freeze ray | G - Goggles | H - Henchmen | I - Invention | J - Jargon | K - Potassium | L - Laser | M - Maniacal | N - Nanotechnology | O - Organs | P - Peasants (with Pitchforks) | Q - Quantum physics | R - Robot | S - Self-experimentation | T - Tentacles | U - Underground Lair | V - Virus | W - Wrench | X - X-Ray | Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow | Z - Zombies
A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks (via JWZ)

Update: Andrew Waser (Chief Mad Scientist, Xylocopa Design) sez, " I wanted to make a small correction - the blocks actually come five to a set (with 26 unique illustrations), not 26 individual blocks. I don't want anyone to be disappointed if they order in confusion! You and your readers also might appreciate that the blocks have a super-secret built in encryption function - if you rotate any block 180 degrees, it'll encode to ROT13. If it's good enough for Adobe Acrobat, it's good enough for Mad Science!"

China’s .cn Now the Second Most Popular TLD

darthcamaro writes "In case you needed further proof of China's breakneck pace of growth on the web, InternetNews is reporting on data from Verisign that the .cn Top Level Domain (TLD) has now become the second biggest TLD worldwide, surpassing Germany's .de and second only to .com. The amount of .cn sites grew by 76 percent in 2008, which is significantly more growth than .com and .net, which only grew by 16 percent combined. A graph in the Verisign report (PDF) shows how quickly China's internet presence has grown in the past two years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Finding good trash

Thanks to Star Simpson (famous for exposing Boston Airport's absurdity) for this tip on a new wiki covering an important topic: where to find good trash. Trashwiki is still very new and sparsely populated, but it's a start. Please comment with any other links you have to trash- (aka treasure-) locating resources.

startrash.jpg
You too will be this happy when you find a bag of edible donuts in the garbage:)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

What the Papers Don’t Say About Vaccines

jamie tips an article in The Guardian's "Bad Science" column which highlights recent media coverage of the MMR vaccine. A story circulated in the past week about the death of a young child, which the parents blamed on the vaccine. When the coroner later found that it had nothing to do with the child's death, there was a followup in only one of the six papers who had covered the story. "Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow 'harmful to the immune system' and responsible for the rise in conditions such as asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time for evidence to appear. ... Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion with them about it. They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the people with access to all the information, who still choose, collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Net Neutrality Opponent Calls Google a “Bandwidth Hog”

Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, an analyst with ties to the telecom industry — in a baseless attack on the concept of Net Neutrality — has accused Google Inc. of being a bandwidth hog. Quoting: '"Internet connections could be more affordable for everyone, if Google paid its fair share of the Internet's cost," wrote Cleland in the report. "It is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity pays the least relatively to fund the Internet's cost; it is even more ironic that the company poised to profit more than any other from more broadband deployment, expects the American taxpayer to pick up its skyrocketing bandwidth tab."' Google responded on their public policy blog, citing 'significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions.' Ars Technica highlighted some of Cleland's faulty reasoning as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The space between Twitter and FriendFeed

A picture named 1984.jpgI'm a longtime Twitter user, and as you may know a very regular user of FriendFeed. Each has its strengths but if I had to choose, sort of like Sophie's Choice, I'd have to go with FriendFeed. I finally figured out why this is a few days ago as I was experimenting with a real-time photo-flow app. It could be done in either Twitter or FriendFeed, but in FF it's graphic and in color, in Twitter, it's like a command-line operating system. Then it hit me, Twitter is to FriendFeed (in 2008) what MS-DOS was to the Mac (in 1984). Have we come full circle? Amazingly I think we have.

In the 80s, MS-DOS users argued whether or not we needed a graphic operating system. "Need" was the big idea. They said they could do everything you could do with a Mac on the PC, and they were more than right about that -- they could do more on the PC than you could do on a Mac because there was more software for it. In 1984 the Mac had a lousy spreadsheet and a cheap word processor, and whole categories completely missing like databases. This is analogous to the correct argument that Twitter has more people to connect with, and of course that's the whole point of both products -- connecting with people. Twitter wins that one, hands-down, nolo contendere. And FriendFeed, even in its name, admits that this is the game, after all it's called FriendFeed, not CoolFeaturesFeed, although of course, that's why I like it. smile

A picture named icbmTilted.gifBut it's undeniable, when a picture shows up in FriendFeed it looks like a picture, not like a url. And when a YouTube video appears, yup -- it looks like a video not a url. MS-DOS users sniffed at WYSIWYG back then, as Twitter users today sniff at a visual twitstream, but the MS-DOS users were wrong, history proved that, and I think the Twitter users are wrong too.

I've been calling this The Graphics Gap, with a hat-tip to Dr. Strangelove, a satire of the nuclear arms race of the 60s and 70s, when the Russians and Americans worried about a missile gap, space gap, doomsday gap, and eventually (according to the satire) a mineshaft gap.

Now, on the other hand...

Yesterday I went into the city for a chat with tech industry guru Om Malik, a very wise man who, like all wise men, asks good questions. Of course the conversation turned to Twitter and FriendFeed -- Om said something I hear a lot. When he goes to FriendFeed he doesn't know what to make of it. I totally understand, there are still parts of FriendFeed that I, a devoted user, have never explored. It took me months to realize that "Like" was the feature I kept asking for. It's hard to find things I post there, even something I posted yesterday. An item I posted two months ago all of a sudden pops to the surface because someone commented on it or Liked it. Unless you're very curious, or devoted to understanding this category, as I am, FF often remains a puzzle, where -- as Om noted -- Twitter is so simple anyone can understand it in a few minutes.

Hence the premise of this piece. I believe that there is space between Twitter and FriendFeed for a service that's dumber than FriendFeed and richer than Twitter. Start with what Twitter does and add the graphics that FriendFeed has. I know some people will say that's Pownce, but it's not (though Pownce was pretty nice). I don't want full blog posts, I like the 140-character limit, and I can skip out on the discussion features that FF has that Twitter doesn't. But I think a graphic and visual Twitter would kick ass, the same way the Macintosh eventually kicked MS-DOS's ass in the 80s and early 90s.

H.M., amnesiac, RIP

H.M., an amnesiac whose condition opened new doors in the study of memory, died on Tuesday at age 82. A 1953 brain operation left H.M., now revealed to be Henry Gustav Molaison, with no ability to form new long-term memories. From then on, every time he met someone, or experienced something, it would be just like the very first time. His short-term memory was fine. From the New York Times:
“The study of H. M. by Brenda Milner stands as one of the great milestones in the history of modern neuroscience,” said Dr. Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. “It opened the way for the study of the two memory systems in the brain, explicit and implicit, and provided the basis for everything that came later — the study of human memory and its disorders.”

Living at his parents’ house, and later with a relative through the 1970s, Mr. Molaison helped with the shopping, mowed the lawn, raked leaves and relaxed in front of the television. He could navigate through a day attending to mundane details — fixing a lunch, making his bed — by drawing on what he could remember from his first 27 years.
"H.M., An Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82"

Cell Phone SIM Cards Lead To Terrorists’ Trail

Cliff Stoll writes "The Times of India reports that cell phone SIM cards used by the terrorists in Mumbai were purchased in Kolkata (Calcutta), using fraudulent papers. The papers belonged to the dead uncle of a 26-year-old man living in Kolkata; he is suspected of being a collaborator of the terrorists. The paper states that this highlights 'the continued vulnerabilities in the system which have repeatedly been exploited by the terrorists and their collaborators to obtain cell phone connections. "We've booked them for cheating and forgery as they produced fake documents to get the SIMs. We've also slapped conspiracy charges against them for they had an ulterior motive. The arrests will throw light on the Mumbai terror module," Kolkata police's Jawed Shamim said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Krampus for Christmas

Macula offers a downloadable papercraft of Krampus, a creepy companion of Saint Nicholas.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

Krampus for Christmas

Macula offers a downloadable papercraft of Krampus, a creepy companion of Saint Nicholas.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

UK ISPs Are Censoring Wikipedia

Concerned Wikipedian writes "Starting December 4th, Wikipedia administrators noticed a surge of edits from certain IP addresses. These IPs turned out to be the proxies for the content filters of at least 6 major UK ISPs. After some research by Wikipedians, it appears that the image of the 1970s LP cover art of the Scorpions' 'Virgin Killer' album has been blocked because it was judged to be 'child pornography,' and all other attempts to access Wikimedia foundation sites from these ISPs are being proxied to only a few IP addresses. This is causing many problems for Wikipedia administrators, because much of the UK vandalism now comes from a single IP, which, when blocked, affects potentially hundreds of thousands of anonymous users who intend no harm and are utterly confused as to why they are no longer able to edit. The image was flagged by the the Internet Watch Foundation, which is funded by the EU and the UK government, and has the support of many ISPs and online institutions in the UK. The filter is fairly easy to circumvent simply by viewing the article in some other languages, or by logging in on the secure version of Wikipedia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Battle Over Minimum Pricing Heating Up

The Wall Street Journal is covering developments in the gathering battle between manufacturers and retailers / discounters, especially online ones, over minimum prices. Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld the right of manufacturers to enforce price floors for their products. Since then, manufacturers have increasingly been employing service companies like NetEnforcers to snitch on discounters who offer goods below "minimum advertised prices" (or MAPs), and to send DMCA takedown notices to the likes of eBay and Craigslist for below-minimum offers. Separately, the Journal reports that a coalition of discounters and retailers is using eBay as a stalking-horse in a campaign to get consumers, and then politicians, fired up enough to pass legislation outlawing MAPs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Obama’s “ZuneGate”

theodp writes "Barack Obama supporters were left shaking their heads after a report surfaced that the president-elect was using a Zune at the gym instead of an iPod. So why would Mac-user Obama be Zune-ing out? Could be one of those special-edition preloaded Zunes that Microsoft bestowed on Democratic National Convention attendees, suggests TechFlash, nixing the idea that the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World would waste time loading Parallels or Boot Camp in OS X just to use a Zune."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Best of GeekDad - Carboard playhouses, podcast with Adam Sessler and more!

Playhouse1
Cardboard Playhouse is a Wonderful, Green Holiday Gift for Younger Kids
This Little Piggy's Playhouse, designed by an architect for their kid, is an all-cardboard playhouse, made in the USA from 100% recyclable materials. They come in regular cardboard brown, or white - all the better for coloring! And, I have to say, compared to similar items we've seen elsewhere, it's pretty reasonably priced.

10 Christmas Songs I’m Already Sick Of (and 10 Geeky Alternatives)
We are scarcely into the month of December, and I am already dreadfully tired of classic Christmas music and, for that matter, many of its more contemporary alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got Christmas Spirit™ to spare, but the relentless audio assault of this holiday-themed musical fare has long since crossed the threshold from seasonally appropriate and into the realm of the obnoxious.

GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide #5: Toys for Dads & Kids to Share
A long-winded title but it points out a truism: the best thing about being a geek are the toys, and the best thing about being a GeekDad is playing with your kids with those toys.

The GeekDads Episode 33: The Dragon Really is a Duck
The GeekDads talk about videogames for the whole family with X-Play host Adam Sessler.

Coming Soon: The Twelve Days of Geekmas
Starting December 12th, we at GeekDad will be celebrating the 12 Days of Geekmas (or 12DOG, for those in the know). We will be taking a look back over the amazing year we've had on GeekDad, and giving away some pretty awesome stuff, including special items from Wil Wheaton, ThinkGeek, Arts & Entertainment Television, and many of our HipTrax bands. So activate the nostalgia circuit, and stay tuned!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Kids | Digg this!

Hierarchy of Beards: the evolutionary history of face-fur


Wondermark's latest print, the "Hierarchy of Beards," depicts the evolutionary history of luxuriant face-fur.

Hierarchy of Beards Print, Hierarchy of Beards -- large image (Thanks, Dave!)

Trotsky meets Disney


Here's a little ditty about Leon Trotsky from The Duhks (cut from their latest CD), set to a perfect-fitting clip from Fantasia.

Trotsky's broom army (Thanks, Dad!)

Britain’s “Great Firewall” set to restrict access to Wikipedia

Seth Finkelstein sez, "Wikinews has learned that six of the United Kingdom's main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites. The filters appear to stem from accusations that Wikimedia sites are hosting what some would call child pornography. UK people might be interested in joining the article's discussion - this is a golden opportunity to reverse-engineer how the Great Firewall Of Britain works in practice."

This is the "voluntary" child-porn filter that we hear very little about. The process by which pages are added to the repository of child porn sites is secret, the list of child porn sites is secret, and the process for correcting errors is secret. At issue are images such as a Scorpions cover that shows the naked chest of a little girl, and a still from a 1938 documentary on the struggle to end child marriages.

British ISPs restrict access to Wikipedia amid child pornography allegations (Thanks, Seth

Rwanda bids to be an Internet hub

Mitch Wagner sez, "Remarkable video by our sister publication, Internet Evolution, about Rwanda's attempts to bootstrap its economy by becoming an Internet hub for Africa. Rwanda was the site of horrible inter-tribal genocide in 1994, as the Tutsis were massacred by Hutu militia. One of the people interviewed in this video -- a former officer of the Hutu military, who now leads one of the nation's leading telecoms -- says that he doesn't believe the genocide could have happened today, because the Internet would have gotten the world out. I wish I could be so sure. The video shows Rwanda to be a gorgeous, green country. "

Rwanda's Internet Revolution (Thanks, Mitch!)

Workers in Argentina taking over dead factories and running them democratically

As Argentine factories go bankrupt and shut their doors, workers are breaking in, starting the machines up again, electing their own leaders, and running the businesses themselves, putting up fierce resistance when the police try to evict them.
On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón ceramic tile factory, filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad...

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

"Occupy, resist, produce" (Thanks, Malgas!)

Balloon tank

 German Panther 2007 Luftballon Luft Kleber Balloon Air Glou 960 X370 X 300Cm-L
Balloon tank via NOTCOT.




Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

NSA Is Building a New Datacenter In San Antonio

An anonymous reader writes in with an article from a Texas paper on the NSA's new facility in San Antonio. "America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters... where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency's mission to identify terrorist threats. ... [Author James] Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages of 'having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.' The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable." The article mentions the NRC report concluding that data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorism, which we discussed a couple of months back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians gets the Mystery Science 3000 treatment from Cinematic Titanic


Cinematic Titanic -- the creator-driven successor to the fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- has a new installment just in time for the holidays: this month, the guys kick the crap out of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" (which has plenty of crap to kick!). For those of you who haven't been following this excellent series, the premise is simple: the five Cinematic Titanic comics are present in silhouette, superimposed over the picture, coming up with snappy jokes every second or so. I average about two belly laughs a minute, and about ten times more chuckles. The Cinematic Titanic guys are basically an artist-owned co-op who record and release this stuff off their own bat, direct to you at $15 a pop. Screw "It's a Wonderful Life," and to hell with the merely kitschy experience of watching "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" without commentary. It is only through the auspices of Cinematic Titanic that the holidays can truly be realized.

Cinematic Titanic: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)

iPhone projector graffiti

The Zeptotools blog posted this demo of an iPhone application they are hoping to release. I haven't used the application or seen it outside of this video, but I like the idea of adding whiteboard features to the iPhone by sending screen data to a nearby laptop with an attached projector.

What would really be something is if someone extended this idea to allow multiple iPhones to draw collaboratively to a single projector screen.

Zeptotools developers blog

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!

The Unforgettable Amnesiac

jamie found an account in the NYTimes of the life and death of one of the most important figures in modern neuroscience, Henry Gustav Molaison — a man who could not form memories. Molaison became an amnesiac after a brain operation in 1953. Known worldwide as H.M., Molaison was studied intensively for 55 years. Dr. Brenda Milner, a psychologist from Montreal, was the first researcher to visit Molaison. In 1962 she authored a landmark study demonstrating that a part of Molaison's memory was fully intact. "The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. ... Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pick up a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it. Soon 'everyone wanted an amnesic to study,' Dr. Milner said..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.

Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.

There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]

Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]

There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.

For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.

The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.

Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.

Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.

There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]

Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]

There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.

For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.

The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.

Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.

Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.

There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]

Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]

There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.

For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.

The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.

Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

Free Resources for Windows Perl Development

jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occuring during the month of December, etc., etc."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE Project Tin button box


In one episode of the Make: television show I do an Input >> Arduino >> Output demonstration to explain how the microcontroller reads a button press and plays a light pattern on some LEDs. To keep things clear visually, I mounted the buttons in one MAKE Project Tin, the Arduino in the middle, and the LEDs in another tin. I also used one of these tiny breadboards to wire it up (I ran out of time to solder anything). All hail the humble Altoid tin!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Altoids and tin cases | Digg this!

Helpful Links:

Internal Links:

categories:

search blog:

other:

Blogroll

archives:

December 2008
M T W T F S S
« Nov   Jan »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Recent Posts:

Stay Up-To-Date With Posts

eXTReMe Tracker

23 queries. 3.922 seconds