Link: Stowe Boyd predicts the future: Social iTunes in the Cloud
Stowe Boyd suggests a possible reason for why Apple hasn’t done anything with LaLa yet: a whole new social network needs to be built in the cloud for media sharing—he calls it The Orchard. I think…
The harvest has begun.. Ron Bowes is from Canada, and he is a security consultant. Just this week, Mr. Bowes changed the world as we know it, perhaps ever damning the word “privacy” into the trash heap of history. And how did he do it? Using the very data that people knowingly and happily gave up themselves on Facebook..
Bowes collated 100 million Facebook users’ names, addresses, and unique ID numberson a single 2.8 gig file and posted it online..Facebook also enabled this grand release of private data.
via coalspeaker.com
I would quit Facebook in a New York second if only I could convince my family and friends who treat the site like a religion to quit, too.
Maybe I should bite the bullet and set the good example. The problem with that is simple: FB as lame as it is, is great for networking. Plus, it saves me money on business cards—I barely give them out. I just tell them the socnets I’m on and they find me if they want to.
I just wish Zuckerberg wasn’t such a douche with our stuff.
“There is another point to be made about the broad effects of iPads and Kindles on our culture. The clues people give about themselves used to be displayed proudly, or not, on the shelves of their homes and apartments. At dinner or a cocktail party, just a few moments in front of a bookshelf or record or CD rack could provide the kind of insight about your host it might otherwise take years to develop. In a future world without bookshelves, we will have many of these clues all neatly contained in files in your pocket or backpack. But, a phone or kindle is private, and access to it is more intimate than a moment in front of a rack of CDs.”
—
Marc Ruxin: The Death of Touch and the Lost Joy of the Unexpected
While I, too, have some concerns about trading physical artifacts for digital, I totally agree with the comment below…but man, I think there’s a full blog post in response to this. Assuming there’s time today…
(via tedr)(via newspeedwayboogie)(via mikehudack)
This assumes that we still meet people by going to their apts. I’ve met several hundred fine folks right here online, and know their pets’ names, what kind of music/books/art/pop culture/food they like, who many of their friends are, and often even more intimate and revealing details of their lives that you would never stumble across staring at someone’s bookshelf. And if they’re local and want to grab some food or a cocktail, I feel as if I already know enough to carry on a decent conversation with them in a noisy restaurant.
The phrase “the broad effects of ______” is always a red flag for me. I would argue the opposite, honestly. Tumblr has brought the “joy of the unexpected” back into my life.
(via aatombomb)
(via mikehudack)
I agree with aatombomb when he mentions what is a red flag to him. Trying to define what the Internet (or any component part of it) is or does for everyone is absurd. You might as well try to define how everyone uses a hammer. Sure, the obvious use is for nails, but you can also pull nails out, then there are other types of hammering that can be done with it—from railroad spikes to tent stakes, to even, in a pinch, a home invader’s head. The point is, Kindles and iPads are just doing what was already being done by the computer—removing stuff from our shelves. However, blogs (not just Tumblr blogs), Twitter and other socnets replace our shelves. Nowadays, if you read a book that you are proud to have read, you do something far more effective than displaying it on your shelf for your apartment-visitors to see—you blog/tweet/facebook it on the web for everyone to see it. People will Google the book and stumble across your content. I know because I made a friend who found me after he Googled for an anime series I reviewed on my blog—we’ve been friends ever since.
A red flag for me is when people knee-jerk a negative reaction to some new thing that comes along. Wasn’t it Jack Valenti that said the VCR was to Hollywood like the Boston Strangler was to a young woman?
We need to stop being so afraid of the future.
What bad could come from technology???
I mean, aside from fueling wars fought over resources to build the technology and the exploitation of cheap Asian labor, stupid long lines for new gadgets and lots of hair-pulling when the gadget doesn’t work the way Apple the company who made it says it would?
Link: HTTPS Everywhere
HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.
I’m trying this add-on with Firefox on my Ubuntu netty. We’ll see how it goes!
“Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built upon it. The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth. In response, a FB spokesman told me: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Lyons, on Facebook (via newsweek)
But isn’t this the same with any ad-supported service? MySpace? GMail? Etc? Hell, even advertising on the old TV is built this way. It’s our behavior that is the product.
All that said, I wonder if most people understand this dynamic. No one is getting “free hosting services” for their pics and status updates—they are getting hosting services in exchange for their pics and status updates. Maybe not the literal content, but the behavior patterns behind the content is sold to advertisers. How else are these sites supposed to remain “free”?
Link: Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing
“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”
Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.
We think sharing is great! Except maybe not so much when you’re being pushed to do it by large corporations whose business model depends on convincing you to not value that information you’re sharing as much as advertisers do.
Yeah, for me this has always been about control, not privacy. I’ll share what *I* want and keep private what *I* choose. Thanks. Facebook has just proven that we need to question what we post to any network. Like anyone else’s bottom line is different from Zuckerdouche’s?
