techyum ::

No doubt about it, the guys at Stalqer must love the news this week: Facebook just made their jobs easier and much more interesting. This week the Wal-Mart of social media (Facebook) launched their “Places” feature in a gambit to enter the location-based “check-in” craze (combining it with a couple of other lifestyle social media tools they’ve weakly imitated into their corporate cover for data collection and resale). It was hailed by tech blogs who love special personal invitations and will blow polar bears for press access — but it may be the first time a social networking feature has been introduced and been immediately received with a combination of blogger blowjobs and a serious reaction of outrage and disbelief from the ACLU (link: ACLU’s Places statement, aclunc.org). Immediately, helpfully (but only for those who know about it), Read Write Web published this step-by-step walkthrough to at least help users of the social media site to find the multiple places in their accounts where you can disable some (but not all) of Places ability to reveal, or to fake, your location at any time.

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng writes,

(…) Several privacy advocates say that the settings are unnecessarily complex and that users could have certain personal info exposed without their consent.

“There is no single opt-out to avoid location tracking; users must change several different privacy settings to restore their privacy status quo,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center said in a statement on its website. The organization also notes that it and many other consumer privacy organizations still have complaints pending with the FTC over Facebook’s “unfair and deceptive trade practices, which are frequently associated with new product announcements.”

Indeed, there are multiple settings (that are not all grouped together) in which a user must specify his or her preferences when it comes to Places, making it slightly more confusing than necessary. However, there’s one Places-related situation that is not even controllable via settings, and could expose people’s addresses to the world. (…read more, arstechnica.com)

Not all bloggers swallowed the problems with Facebook Places wholesale — at the press announcement some bloggers decided to take Facebook to task out of the starting gate for overlooking glaring privacy issues. These issues (which could prove dangerous for, say, women coping with domestic violence and/or stalkers) were already present for users with the services Facebook proudly partnered with, namely FourSquare and Gowalla. The first question for Zuckerberg, his lead engineer, and the FS/G heads was from indie blogger, podcaster and Slide employee Rod Begbie, who simply wanted to know how to get his home address off the service if someone else put it online on Facebook. Not only was he passed off, the engineer lamely told him he could try to get people to “flag” it for review and deletion, and in the video, we can audibly hear one of the guys from either FourSquare or Gowalla expressing annoyance at the question.

Here’s the video; this is a link to the transcript where Rod Begbie comments, explaining exactly how the Facebook engineer lied to him in the video.

The “venues” (addresses/locations added and created by users) are not only visible to friends, they are in fact, publicly visible… Oh, if only Facebook was as fast and efficient as an online stalker.

A lot has happened with anonymous commenters and forced legal disclosure in recent months; today there’s a new development. In April a judge sued the Cleveland newspaper for revealing her as a (formerly) anonymous commenter? Revealing identity is one thing, though the judge had been playing dirty pool threatening to jail one of the paper’s reporters for not giving up a source, while the judge had been leaving snide comments about the case on case-related articles. In July there was the North Carolina judge who ordered a blog to disclose the identity of its anon commenters: this was a case of suing anonymous commenters for libel. In late July, a NC Superior Court ruled that commenters have First Amendment protection a law journalistic shield laws in a particularly gruesome murder case where information came from an anon comment.

Today in a case involving the ACLU, at least one Pittsburgh man won access to IP info on anon commenters who made death threats against him. The role Comcast plays in this is worth reading about. Here’s a snip:

(…) That action follows an announcement Tuesday night by West Mifflin Area school director Albert Graham, who vowed to take legal action to obtain the names of individuals who he said had posted threats against his life on the West Mifflin page of the discussion board Topix.com.

Web service providers have protection from comments made by third-party posters under a federal 1996 telecommunications law. But some courts require them to release the names of posters’ identities if a strong enough case is made for defamation.

The ACLU’s actions in the Forward case followed a July 22 ruling by Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. that information about the individuals who made the postings about Mr. DeRosa be turned over. The ACLU will not file an appeal in the case, said Sara Rose, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

(…) While the IP addresses that were supplied to Mr. DeRosa don’t immediately identify the individuals, they do identify their Internet service providers and now Mr. DeRosa and his attorneys can petition those providers to release the names.

(…) Dr. Graham became a public target on the Topix website after his name surfaced in late April in an investigative report by the firm Gentile-Meinert, which outlined work alleged to have been done at his home by district maintenance workers during their regular work hours.

Dr. Graham said on Tuesday night that he is afraid to leave his home and he fears for the safety of his wife and three children.

However, West Mifflin police Chief Ken Davies said he did not believe the postings regarding Dr. Graham — one of which suggested a plastic bag be tied over his head and another that suggested he be thrown into his pool with a rock attached to his foot — posed imminent danger to Dr. Graham or his family.

“If they were more direct we would have taken action, Chief Davies said. (…read more, post-gazette.com)

This is especially interesting for me to watch develop, particularly as a writer who has had commenters (on SFGate.com) repeatedly make death threats against me in the comments — and much, much more, under the perception of anonymity. (I also went to the police.)

Image by pt.
The above image must be the best screencap of what may be Google’s biggest mistake to date, or the most significant instance of Google breaking the web yet: a search for “Google” at 9:43 am EST returning the top result being Google itself considered harmful. Is it becoming self-aware, as pt suggests? According to the Official Google Blog, the result coming up for every single website on the Internet was “simply human error” and in the post, speaking for Google Marissa Mayer states that “Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.”
But it also looks like it’s making things hard for webmasters to get their sites out of Google’s malware bucket, as seen in this post in Google’s Webmaster help, Question: PLEASE READ: Your site might not have malware where webmasters are being instructed on how they need to go in and try to get their sites un-malware labeled manually. No fun; I only discovered this neat fact via Twitter.
Ars Technia also has more coverage in Google broke the Internet: Malware detector went haywire.
This really raises some serious questions about the ownership of information distribution, doesn’t it?
Update 01.31.09 6:40PST:

In my inbox, Gmail has tagged Google emails as potentially malicious and untrustworthy. The conversation thread (a Google “vanity” alert) did not have that red warning banner on it this morning; when I got a new email from the sender an hour ago, the warning appeared.
To make a bad day for Google seem to get worse, I poked around the Official Google Blogs to see if there was any information about this and discovered that they had another, entirely different serious issue with Gmail today. The spam filters broke as well, sending some Gmail users’ legitimate mail into the spam folder. So do go check your spam folders, dear Gmail users… Something’s up with some sort of system-wide malware implementation — the Gmail spam folder issue happened at pretty much the same time as the search snafu — and perhaps it’s affecting more services than their search engine. This is not a fun day for Google.

Chinese propaganda poster, “Herdspeople love to read books by Marx and Lenin” (1976) from chineseposters.net.
Rebecca MacKinnon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches online journalism and conducts research on free expression and the Chinese Internet. As many of us know, starting this year China announced it would be saving “young minds” by silencing adult and “vulgar” websites — but it’s now becoming obvious that they’re simultaneously performing a social “cleansing” on adults. (Read China online porn crackdown: 91 sites down, thousands to go at Ars Technica for more information.) But MacKinnon has what looks like firm evidence in her blog post, Bullog.cn goes down.. unlikely due to smut. Feel “unpublished” much, punk? Snip:

China’s edgiest blogging platform, Bullog.cn, was shut down this afternoon.
Authorities launched an anti-Internet smut crackdown on Monday. Bullog was not among the websites cited for failure to control “low and vulgar” content.
A line about today’s shutdown has already been posted on the Chinese Wikipedia entry for Bullog:
2009?1?9?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Translation: “On the afternoon of January 9th, the domestic server for the Bullog network was shut down, and Bullog international was also inaccessible. Some people believe this shut down of Bullog may have to do with the recent major Internet rectification, signaling that China’s political climate has turned to the left.” (Here’s the correct edit history page in case it gets removed.)
On a Bullog fan page in the social networking site Douban, people have been buzzing with outrage and annoyance.
Bullog has been the favorite home for China’s edgiest public intellectuals and counter-culture types – as you can see from the links on Bullog’s still-visible Google cache page. (…read more, rconversation.blogs.com)

I think there is a lot to be learned — Americans, Australians — from MacKinnon’s posts about ‘net filtering, such as Circumventing censorship: issues of trust.
“To Read Too Many Books is Harmful” (Mao Zedong)
Update 01.19: China shut down 244 websites last week alone, bringing the total since January 5th to 726(news.xinhuanet.com). The claim, of course, is pr0n — and cryptically, “violating the top legislature’s regulations” but Chinese officials are not releasing the names of sites shut down.

Maker Channel 102 on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.
Above favorite: crazy veggie flute guy, *adorable* crabby robots, stunning latte image printer, and featured (local, San Francisco) Trouble Maker Todd Lappin showing us how to cheat at parking.
I’ve been watching a lot of Make:TV lately and perusing their upcoming schedule, and it’s got to be one of my favorite shows on the web right now. Make got the formula just right: a great host that doesn’t distract from the content but he *is* entertaining in a “Dr. Horrible’s Sing A Long Blog” kind of way, and they really focus on col and fun stuff. Real people making really fun things. I also love that — and I’m watching — they’re featuring as many, if not more female makers than male. YAY!
Also, I’d like to point out that they hit all points of win with distribution; you can get this show *anywhere* for free, and has made history by being the first TV show to launch its distribution via Bittorrent, while simultaneously launching on iTunes, YouTube and all the other usual suspects. That’s right: they debuted online, on public TV and Bittorrent. Hollywood’s old models of ownership just got a little more dirt on the coffin, all around. Which means yay for us. Free, user-individuated experience of the content, and original content with value. WIN.
I love this short segment of the VCR powered cat feeder (with test kitteh), PDF instructions available, watch:

Maker Workshop – VCR Cat Feeder from make magazine on Vimeo.
And my other fave is the maaajor bike geekery profile on art group Cyclecide, which you may have already seen:

Maker Profile – Cyclecide from make magazine on Vimeo.
The totally amazing segment on kinetic artist (I’ll profile his work in depth on art machines as well), Reuben Margolin:

Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.
Do check out their upcoming episode guide; it’s exciting. Robo stool! More Trouble Makers! I’m hooked.

This is like, the Josh Wolf pie chart of doom. It was only a scant few years ago when bloggers were still fighting for recognition as legitimate media sources — and if going to jail for reporting and disseminating information is any kind of validation, well, we’ve landed with a painful slam of the judge’s gavel and a door with metal bars. Nate Anderson at Ars Technica reports in Online journalists now jailed more often than other media:

If you think it’s tough to be a blogger because your Google AdWords revenue has been in the toilet lately, the Committee to Protect Journalists wants to remind you that Internet journalist—including bloggers—can and do suffer much more around the world. According to the group’s new report, Internet journalists now make up the largest single group of imprisoned journalists.
Of the 125 journalists imprisoned around the world for doing their jobs, 45 percent are “bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors.” China continues its ten-year winning streak when it comes to tossing writers into jail, with Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan next in line.
The numbers are down slightly from December 2007, but CPJ notes that the arrests are hitting freelancers the hardest. Without the resources of a major media company behind them, lone bloggers and freelance writers often lack the resources to mount a vigorous defense when they are detained. (…read more, arstechnica.com)

I’ve always hated internet number gaming, and thought anyone who put stock in things like Alexa are dopes. Anyone with a site knows to look at their own stats and compare the reality to those pagerank guessing mindfuck sites knows that there’s what things like Alexa says, and then there are what your own stats actually say. And there’s numbers — and there’s influence. Then there are the ad- and tech-authorities’ various arguments about views and the bullshit blogs pull to get clickthroughs for ads and impressions, and the debate in vlogging over pre- vs. mid- vs. post-roll, and while sure, *some* people are making lotsa money, it’s still all bullshit and conjecture. And guessing and gaming. I know from personal experience. And shit like Pay Per Post = FAIL. And remember when everyone thought you had to own exactly the URL of your brand or company to “make it”? Anyone could see ten miles away that it was content and meaning and authenticity and a human face and and delivery of goods/information to rise to the top — and stay there. Think about all the number gaming that has failed. The pagerank era is dying.
Still no one knows what the fuck they’re doing. And I may be broke, but I’m having fun. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s not *how many people* read your blog, it’s *who* reads your blog. The future is personality driven, and rocket-fueled by meaning. And that’s where the money will go, too.
That’s all my theory behind what makes this Data Mining post The End of PageRank so interesting:

(…) Of all the discussions, ideas and brainstorming that went on, one thing really seemed to emerge as a clear near/mid-term goal: transition from a web of documents to a web of people. I think this has been on the minds of many in both the research and industrial sphere. Issues of trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues, the content being in a sense an artifact of these individuals. The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement). Things are about to change! (…read all.)

A few days ago, I was excited to run across this article in my RSS feed on floating island of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Gyre. For a few days, the only thought in my head was taking over the island and starting a new country. Once that passed, I was able to start hunting around for information (either to make my dream a reality or to blog about it, does it matter now?) and was sad to find no pictures of a giant floating island of garbage, just occasional rotting milk cartoons and fish tangled in wire. The more I looked, the more I realized that all of the information on the net about this island of garbage were cross-referencing each other. Though cannibalism is in interesting proposal, I prefer my incest in medeival popes. Neither one should be the only ingredient of the news. All eventual trails to the story of the “island” lead back to a post from Greenpeace, though I can find no real evidence that the vortex has increased from the size of Texas to twice the size of Texas (as mentioned in recent articles on the subject).
The problem does exist, and there is a wonderful article in Harper’s on the subject, but we should all take in the great debris of the internet armed with a healthy dose of skepticism and snark. There is no island and the extent of the problem has not been adequately documented (yet).
If anyone can get me a nice photo from space of the island, or a nice flyby video in Google Earth to prove me wrong, you will be my second in command.

The upshot is health insurance (I have none), the downsides are needing a tech to negotiate adding a new tag to my sidebar cloud. And who exactly do we need negotiating powers with? MSNBC has the AP tip on the story, snip:
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
The effort is an extension of the blogosphere’s growing power and presence, especially within the political realm, and for many, evokes memories of the early labor organization of freelance writers in the early 1980s.
Organizers hope a bloggers’ labor group will not only showcase the growing professionalism of the Web-based writers, but also the importance of their roles in candidates’ campaigns.
“I think people have just gotten to the point where people outside the blogosphere understand the value of what it is that we do on the progressive side,” said Susie Madrak, the author of Suburban Guerilla blog, who is active in the union campaign. “And I think they feel a little more entitled to ask for something now.”
But just what that something is may be hard to say. Link. (thanks, Rick!)

I have a lot of personal, shamelessly snarky theories about why commercial wikis are typically doomed to fail; on CNN right now there’s a good opinion piece on the subject that’s well worth a read. Snip:

At the beginning of February, for instance, Penguin Books – one of the biggest names in the global publishing industry – launched a month-long, publicity-soaked project that attempted to get Web surfers to create a novel. The idea seemed destined to belong in the Web 2.0 hall of fame (or shame), as the most audacious (or most arrogant) use of crowdsourcing ever.
And eighteen months ago, the L.A. Times started a Wiki to open up its editorial page content to user-editing. (Wiki software allows a lot of people to edit the same document simultaneously, as with Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries). In January, Amazon (Charts) launched its “Amapedia” in a bid to create product pages that could one day replace, or at least enhance, Amazon’s product descriptions. Penguin opened up its Wiki novel at amillionpenguins.com in February.
But all of these efforts failed, to a greater or lesser extent. The L.A. Times failed spectacularly, as rampant, impassioned, and often obscene vandalism overtook its elegant op-eds. The Amapedia appears stillborn, as Amazon users stick with what they’re used to: individual, rather than collaborative, product reviews.

Link.