This link:
http://bit.ly/qeZ8de
is a useful article on changing your Facebook privacy settings so random people on the Internet who happen to be friends of one of your friends can't see posts on *your* profile.
Strangely, I think this ticker is very similar to the news feed that people got very upset about a couple of years ago. I think that our feelings about privacy may have evolved. My friend Jen posted this first.
Fastcase, whom I had not heard of before, has a free legal research app available if you use an iOS device. The download is free, and you can do whatever research you'd like it. It would be handy for doing research on the fly, if, like me, you do not have access to Westlaw/LexisNexis.
See:
http://bit.ly/eTh5VH
Princeton University has a nice article on their Network Systems website that, in plain language, explains why an iPod does not play nicely on their network (or other networks too). I'm disappointed that Apple has not fixed this, because it really is not good behavior.
In the process, they also explain how a typical wireless network (and often a wired network) works. It's good reading, and helps to explain why one sometimes encounters wireless networks that just don't seem to work properly. Often, I'm suspicious it is because the wireless network has run out of "leases" (connections) for new users.
Besides explaining this, it is useful for anyone with a wireless network to understand the principles of how it works for troubleshooting.
See:
http://bit.ly/ejy0hw
If you're bored over Thanksgiving, there's a Scrabble-esque game to keep you busy.
See:
http://wordsquared.com/
Mozilla (the company that runs Firefox) runs the website, I think.
With daylight savings time coming into effect this weekend, I thought I would post two websites about getting the exact time. This website will give you the precise time in every U.S. time zone. This website, on the other hand, will give you a more visually attractive clock, but won't show you the time in the U.S. It will show you Coordinated Universal Time (a/k/a Greenwich Mean Time), which is either five or four hours ahead of Eastern Time in the U.S., depending on whether you are on standard or daylight savings time.
Of course, if your computer is running Windows XP or above, or Mac OS X.4.x (Tiger) (and maybe even an earlier version of OS X, I'm not sure) or above, your computer is synced with a time server as well, so you can use your computer to set the exact time.
Google Scholar now has searchable legal opinions. They're not that comprehensive right now, but they have a primitive equivalent of Keyciting/Shephardizing.
Update:
Here's a link to Google's blog entry.
If you're on the Internet and don't want to wait to power up Acrobat reader, try Google Document Viewer on for size.
It can also create links for blogs. For example, IRS Publication 17.
I heard this piece on Marketplace the other day on downloading music illegally in France. While I think it's important that artists' rights are protected, I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the method that France is using. Summarily disconnecting someone from the Internet, without a court order, strikes me as a little bit draconian. The idea of monitoring someone's Internet use without a court order also strikes me as a little bit creepy. Comments?
One of the designers of Firefox did an interesting post on just how well-designed software should interact with the user. It's interesting to see how things that I really don't give much thought to in Firefox or Internet Explorer have quite a bit of thought put into them. It helps explain why Clippy was not the success that Microsoft wanted him (it?) to be. The discussion of their prototype for a new tab page is neat. It's pretty neat to see how far Internet browsers have come in the last few years.
Google has set up a status page for its applications (like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, etc.)
See:
http://www.google.com/appsstatus
They really ought to have had such a status page since the beginning of Gmail, but I suppose late is better than never.
There's been an interesting discussion in both the mainstream media and Facebook's blog (there have been two entries) about Facebook and copyright law. My three cents is that the only thing that Facebook needs a perpetual license to is an email that I send to a friend via Facebook. I think it's weird that they'd even need this, given the fact that one normally doesn't think of email as copyrighteable. If I send an email on Gmail to my friend on Yahoo!, am I really granting Gmail a license to copy my email and send it to my friend? Ordinarily, I wouldn't have the need to claim copyright on an email I sent. Even if I was sending my friend a manuscript for a book I was writing, could I then sue Gmail for copyright infringement? I don't think I'd have a cause of action.
Anything else that I post on Facebook, like a wall post or photo, can be deleted. Therefore, any license I give Facebook for posting something like that should be revocable at my will.
I wonder whether someone who sued Facebook for copyright infringement for redistributing his or her pictures would even have a cause of action (so long as Facebook posted them in compliance with his or her privacy settings). I guess Facebook is covering itself, but are they going over the top?
Flickr's terms of service are pretty clear. Once I remove my content from Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!), Yahoo!'s license to display and/or distribute this information is instantly revoked. Sometimes, as when I submit content to a Flickr-sponsored group, the license, by its terms (you'll need a Yahoo!/Flickr account to see these terms), expires at a certain time.
Google's answer to Flickr (Picasa Web), on the other hand, has much broader (and less favorable) terms for me as an end-user. If I upload a photo to Picasa Web, under the terms of service (Section 11.1), I give Google what essentially amounts to an irrevocable royalty-free license to display my information. As a result, I don't use Picasa much.
It's interesting to see what at tangled web is woven with all these license agreements. It also shows the importance of reading license agreements.
If you're bored, you can try going to Settings|Language in Facebook and picking English (Pirate) as your language. You'll have to scroll down through the languages, but it is there. Facebook's developers apparently had a lot of time on their hands. It looks like they rewrote the entire interface in Pirate.
Apple is being sneaky, sneaking applications onto people's computers without their consent. They say they're installing only iTunes, but then lots of other applications find their way onto the computer.
In March, I wrote how the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a criminal sentence of a spammer from North Carolina who used AOL's servers. The Virginia Supreme Court issued a new opinion on Friday, vacating the convictions based on the First Amendment and the spammers right to free speech. Here is a link to the summary (search for Jaynes within the page if you don't see it at the top). Here is a link to the opinion (a PDF).
I discovered a few plugins for Firefox, two of which are from Mozilla Labs. A disclaimer: These are all non-final versions, and therefore might be buggy. However, I have not had any real difficulty with any of them.
Ubiquity allows you to use the keyboard to quickly Google something, select text and email it to someone, or insert a map into an email and email it to someone, and more. But hitting
Second, a program called Auto Dial, which, based on your web history, builds a custom web page that opens each time you open a new tab, so that when you open a new tab, it will
Finally, a program called Ctrl-Tab allows you to switch between tabs easily, all the while seeing what tab you will be switching too.
If you're going to spam people, don't use Virginia ham in your spam. A North Carolina man who spammed people using AOL's servers had his sentence upheld recently. AOL is based in Virginia, which is how Virginia got jurisdiction over him. For those who don't want to read the opinion, there is a short summary here (search for Jaynes on the page if you don't see it at the top). Here's a link to the court's decision.
Compared to Microsoft, Apple has serious quality control problems with their software/system updates. For many of the updates that they release, there are significant problems with them. One firmware upgrade caused my computer to become unbootable, requiring me to hold down a combination of keys on my keyboard to make their computer useful again, if Apple Support knew that trick (which they didn't, they made me send my computer in for service). One of the updates caused my computer's speakers to make popping noises (it wasn't just my computer's speakers, other people had the problem too). Apple resolved this problem with another update. Another update caused people's optical drives to stop working. Apple removed that update. Yet another update causes applications that were not specifically built for Intel-based processors (Rosetta applications) to stop working. I could sympathize with Apple (somewhat) if these were caused by obscure applications. But they're not. Many problems occurred directly with Apple's hardware. (The first three problems I've listed). While Apple may have come out with with Intel-native applications, there are certain applications -- for example, this obscure application called Microsoft Word -- that run on Rosetta. I'd like to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but it is now at the point where if I see an update, I wait a week for Apple to iron out the bugs before I install it. For Microsoft updates, on the other hand, I install them instantly on my PC and, knock wood, have not had a problem with them.
Microsoft does not control the hardware that its updates are installed on, and yet still manages to have very few serious problems with their updates. Apple should improve.
I read on this blog that Dell -- one time only -- will give you a copy of the installation disks that came with your computer in case you lost them. I'm not sure if they charge you for the install disks (I don't see a discussion of payment on the initial page for it, and I'm not going to type in my information since I have the install disks already and I'd rather wait until I've lost them before ordering them)
Yet another reason I like Dell.
Flickr sent me another unusual email the other day, although it wasn't nearly as good as the last one.
This one said:
"New photos from friends
[Rene's screenname] has uploaded 1 photo in the last 24.139444444444 hours.
..."
Funny that someone at Flickr took the time to program this email to make the number of hours a variable and also calculate it out.
I run searches a lot, and often they are not just on Google. However, Google has come up with a really easy way to configure their toolbar to run searches on practically any website. You just right click on the search box and select Generate Custom Search. You can then, by clicking on the "Manage" option from the search pulldown menu, choose to have this search appear either as a button on your toolbar, or if you don't want that, as an available search from a pull-down menu, as you can see from the screenshot on the right. There is no coding required. The only tricky thing is that it uses the web page's icon, so if you have a web page that doesn't have a custom icon, you are limited to which ones you can show as buttons on your toolbar since you won't be able to tell them apart. Penn State has this problem, the icon shown next to PennStateFullName is what would show up if I put that on my toolbar as a button.
