Category: Communications

Facebook Founder Completely PWN36* By Facebook Privacy Policy

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Bummer of a birth mark, Mr. Zuckerberg

I check Facebook every day or soo, and I feed my blog there, albeit imperfectly, so when the came up with a privacy policy update, I didn’t pay too much attention, until I heard lots of people complaining.

Management there said it was no big deal, but then about 300 personal photos of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were made public to the general public:

In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook’s recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users’ profiles, photos and friends lists available on the web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up.

Kashmir Hill, a blogger for True/Slant, first reported Zuckerberg’s new exposure, noting, “Either Mark Zuckerberg got a whole lot less private or Facebook’s CEO doesn’t understand the company’s new privacy settings.” Under the new privacy regime, user profiles are exposed to the web unless users are proactive about limiting access.

So, what did Morty make public?

  • His wall
  • His photo albums
  • The fact that he is a Taylor Swift fan
  • Graphic (!?!) photos of “The Great Goat Roast of 2009”
  • The time, date, and location of the Facebook corporate holiday party.

Oopsie.

*Owned.

From the Annals of the Thoroughly Unsurprising

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Click for full size

Maybe they could use the Amish …. Uhhhh … Never mind

Researchers, looking to “compare men who watch porn with those who haven’t encountered it,” have hit a snag.

They have been unable to find any men who haven’t sampled pr0n:

“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” the Telegraph reported Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse as saying.

“[But] we couldn’t find any.“

I was thinking that they might want to contact members of the Amish community, and then I went to google images, and typed in “hot Amish chicks“. (NSFW)

Crap That We Should Be Stopping

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If Barack Obama was supposed to be about anything, he was supposed to be about engaging in at least marginal meaningful antitrust and consumer protections, and Comcast buying NBC Eniversal, (NBC, Universal Studios, NBC Universal Television Group, NBC News, USA Network, Syfy, CNBC, MSNBC cable TV, NBC.com, MSNBC.com, iVillage, Bravo, qubo, Telemundo Television Studios, The Weather Channel, and Hulu according to the Wiki) is the antithesis of this.

My guess is that this sale will proceed without any major interference from Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™, because Barack Obama really isn’t about anything.

NASA: Lame Beyond Belief

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So, in an attempt to make NASA look cool again, they have signed up “The Rock”, the wrestler turned actor who now goes by his given name, Dwayne Johnson, in order to make space travel look cool again:

Perhaps space travel has become old. Perhaps people have come to take it for granted. It’s been seen in so many movies. So many space shuttles have taken off and returned to Earth that we think little more of them than we do of jumbo jets.

NASA therefore has to use its imagination to persuade tomorrow’s generations that space travel continues to be a large step for man.

One small step in this process is a new public service announcement featuring that fearsome space creature, “The Rock.” Dwayne Johnson himself, a man who has appeared in so many scientifically concocted movies such as WWF SmackDown, WWE Backlash, and WWE Crush Hour, is now telling kids that NASA is cool.

You know, going into space is cool, the fact that you have to lose an actor to convince people that it is is more of an artifact of your incompetence in running the space program than it is the fundamental coolness of space.

Learning to find one’s own ass with one’s own hands would be a good start.

Video below.

Did Dobbs Walk Away, or Was He Pushed

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The real problem here for CNN was that Lou Dobbs has gone completely around the bend, but crazy motherf$#@ers bring in ratings, (see O’Reilly, Bill), but it also means a hit to his credibility.

His exit was certainly abrupt, he announced today that this was his last show, and the reason that he gave, “some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day,” implies to me that he was pushed.

It sounds a lot like, “Spending more time with his family.”

He’ll probably end up on Fox.

Zimbabwe Update

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It’s been about 3 weeks, so it’s time to update everyone on the hell hole that Bobby Mugabe made again.

On the bright side, the UK is saying that they will give Zimbabwe $100 million in aid, though I wonder if recent developments (see below) may interfere with this.

First, we have the case of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett, who has been imprisoned on what are clearly trumped up charges, with an improperly filed indictment for, “possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry,” a crime that carries the death sentence. (See also here)

While he was finally granted bail, this was one of the proximate causes of Tsvangirai and his MDC-T
disengaging from the ZANU-PF, which means that they are no longer attending cabinet meetings.

It should be noted that Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara and his MDC-M are also participating in the boycott of cabinet meetings.

Tsvangirai is Trying to get the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene on what has increasingly become a phony power sharing arrangement.

Meanwhile, ZANU-PF harassment of the MDC and human rights activists continues apace with raids on MDC offices in Harare (also here) claiming that they were looking for arms…..Shades of Bennett’s kangaroo court.

Inter party talks between the MDC and ZANU-PF have broken off without a resolution, and the human rights situation in the country has gone straight into the twilight zone with Mugabe detaining, and then expelling the “UNHRC special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” Manfred Nowak.

Meanwhile, the Marange diamond fields, which are one of the few sources of hard currency available to Mugabe to keep his supporters paid off, are under a Kimberly process investigation for widespread torture, forced labor, and smuggling, which could lead to ban on the export of their gems.

The reports are that, once again, the Kimberly process will wimp out and do nothing , even after members of the Zimbabwe delegation to the meeting threatened and harassed witnesses at the meeting.

Finally, we have the ZANU-PF ordering the state run media to stop covering any MDC activities.

FCC Votes to Approve Network Neutrality

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The vote was unanimous, despite the fact that the phone and cable companies, <Sarcasm> who are so beloved by Americans,</Sarcasm> were lobbying against it:

US communications regulators voted unanimously to support an open Internet rule that would prevent telecom network operators from barring or blocking content based on the revenue it generated.

The proposed rule now goes to the public for comment until Jan.14, after which the Federal Communications Commissions will review the feedback and possibly seek more comment.

A final rule is not expected until the spring of next year.

Needless to say, one of the best barometers in the business, John Sidney McCain III, is trying to stop them.

How Do I Stop Aflac™?

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OK, so I posted my resume on CareerBuilder.com™, and it seems like every 3-4 days, I gett a call from some drone at Aflac™, I got three calls yesterday, trying to get me to sell insurance.

Let’s be clear: I don’t want to sell Insurance, Amway, or Girl Scout Cookies, I want work as a mechanical engineer.

Of course, they are all different franchises, so some new drone keeps calling, and my telling that drone not to call doesn’t stop the other folks.

Unfortunately, CareerBuilder.com™ does not have the capability of blocking specific employers, probably because jerks generate too much revenue, so my options are to make my resume private, which means that no one sees my resume, or for me to start filing FCC complaints.

When the revolution comes, it’s going to be telemarketers up against the wall.

Yeah, Deregulation Works…..

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The most deregulated telecommunications in the market is in the United States, and so is the most expensive cell phone market, and Finland, Netherlands and Sweden have the lowest rates. (OECD report here)

Surprise, surprise, surprise, when you deregulate companies that profit from making it difficult for consumers to switch services, and use the leverage to keep prices high, use this as their business model.

The problem in many areas of our economy is not too much regulation, but too little.

The Death of the Rock of Boston

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CBS Radio is shuttering WBCN to make space on the dial for yet another sports radio station in Boston.

I spent a year in Boston, and woke up to Charles Laquidara’s “Big Mattress”, and was down there nearly every week in my college days.

I know that when I talked with my brother, who still lives in the area, and some of my classmates from UMass, that it was a shadow of what it once was (thanks a lot, Oedipus), but it’s sad to see a part of my youth go.

Quote of the Day

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I love this quote from Harold Feld’s Tales of the Sausage Factory:

More and more, I’m feeling like a volunteer for the “Mark Sanford in 2012 Committee” finding out what “hiking the Appalachian Trail” really means.

What he is talking about is the fact that the broadband stimulus package is being manipulated by the incumbents and the regulators to make it next to impossible for non incumbents to compete.

Basically, the stim money is to go to “unserved” and “underserved” census blocks, but only the incumbent carriers will be able to use the actual broadband penetration to document this, because such data is “proprietary.”

Catch-22.

F$#@ Kindle, This is Something that Will Revolutionize Publishing

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It’s called the Espresso Book Machine, and it prints books on demand.

It literally prints the book and binds it in about 5 minutes from an order.

If you were to integrate a scanner/shredder to do book “returns”, you could eventually run a bookstore without any physical delivery, and only stock those books you sell, plus preprinting stock to put out on your shelves for the things that move faster.

Right now, it’s primarily handling out of copyright works, but the manufacturer is looking to add in copyright works.

List for the machine is about $175,000.00, but that should pay for itself fairly quickly, if just by generating sales that take 5 minutes to deliver, as opposed to 2 weeks, so the customer goes elsewhere.

The big problem, of course, is that book publishers will insist that this new technology will require an even higher profit margin on their part, just like record distributors did with CDs when they came out, even though they were cheaper than vinyl.

Unlike Amazon’s® Kindle®, they can’t turn a book into a $359.00 doorstop because you have a billing or return dispute.

Of course, XKCD was all over this:

Or not, but it’s funny.

Shoe’s on the Other Food Now, Huh Steny?

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House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is expressing concern over the wiretapping of house members, of course it wasn’t a problem when ordinary people were spied on, but not that it’s you and yours, there must be an investigation:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday he had “great concern” over news reports that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) was wiretapped during a federal probe into Israeli agents, and he vowed to personally look into whether there should be an investigation into wiretapping of Members of Congress.

“The stories that I’ve read give me great concern. I’m going to be in the process personally of finding out more about it and then, with the Speaker, determining what action, if any, needs to be taken,” Hoyer said Wednesday during a meeting with reporters.

Wanker.

Why the US Mobile Phone Industry is a Horrible Model for the Internet

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The advocacy group Free Press has filed a complaint with the FCC over Apple and AT&T’s ban on the use of Skype on their network.

The money quote on this is from a typically clueless AT&T spokesman, “Customers are free to download and use the apps they want, but we have no obligation—nor should we have—to facilitate or subsidize our competitors’ businesses.”

It sounds reasonable, but what is really going on here is that AT&T is using monopoly power, it is the exclusive licensee for the iPhone in the US, and it’s customers incur hefty roaming charges on other networks, in order to lock a potential competitor out on a service that their customers have paid for.

This is why network neutrality is necessary, and it is yet another example as to how the US privatized largely unregulated telco markets do not serve the consumer: it creates businesses whose model is largely predicated on creating, and maintaining, a monopoly.

New EU Scraps Net Neutrality

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It appears that the new EU telecommunications rules are likely to scrap network neutrality completely.

The big incumbent Telcos there are very much in support of this, because milking money out of their monopoly is really their only skill, same as in the good old USA, and the regulators believe that the market will cure everything, “This approach is backed by the European Commission, which argues that if consumers feel their content is somehow being compromised, they will switch to other providers.”

Because competition in such matters has worked so well in the most free market telco environment in the industrialized world, where the speeds are the slowest, and the rates are highest, and ISPs lie about their policies.