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.
The Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board discussed Facebook/MySpace and how two trial courts -- in New York and Pennsylvania -- have issued orders compelling parties to turn over their Facebook/MySpace passwords.
Here are links to the New York and Pennsylvania cases.
In these cases, I'll concede that the parties foolishly posted information relevant to their cases on the social networking site. Nonetheless, I am not sure I agree with the two judge's decisions. Just because the privacy policies of both these sites say that the information can be disclosed pursuant to a court order does not give a court carte blanche to grant someone access to someone's Facebook or MySpace profile. While people can choose to make information public on social network sites, they also might store personal information as well. In some ways, these sites are similar to any email provider. Gmail's privacy policy says something quite similar about disclosure.
The moral of this story, though, is that people should be very careful with what they post on MySpace or Facebook.
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.
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?
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.
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 have been going to concerts at the National Gallery of Art recently and, on my way back to the Gallery Place China-town Metro, I've been stopping at the front of the Newseum to view the newspapers that they have on display from across the nation and world. But, you don't have to make the trek to see them, because you can see them online too. Hopefully they'll keep this up after they open on 11 April, but it looks like they may not.
I don't fly that much, but I have had some experience with TSA, so I've found this blog interesting. One entry discusses the Macbook Air and an experience one traveler had when TSA was suspicious of his Macbook Air because it did not look like other laptops. Another entry discusses how, after implementing lanes for different types of travelers based on ski slopes (black diamond = expert, blue square = intermediate, green circle = inexperienced/family), they have seen a decrease in the amount of banned items that they see in the green circle lane at security checkpoints. I find this somewhat surprising, since I would have thought that by the time someone arrived at the checkpoint, they had already packed their bag with items they think are ok. I guess maybe someone who isn't feeling rushed by the people behind them may take the time to read the signs and realize "Oh, wait, I can't bring that shampoo on the plane with me!"
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 think it's great that Apple and EMI have agreed to allow people to download unrestricted music. I hope other record companies follow suit. One of the reasons I chose iTunes to download music (even before I had an iPod) was because, at the time, it was the only store (I think) to allow you to burn a song to a regular audio CD without any restrictions.
I've blogged before about how I feel about record companies. I still feel similarly. I think they are really greedy, but I suppose 30 cents may be a fair premium. Steve Jobs has claimed in the past, though, that the 99 cent price point was essential for consumers to buy music. Hopefully they won't raise prices for copy-protected songs.
There's an article that says that the idea of prices was EMI's, not Apple's.
What I would really like to see next is the record companies allowing people from other countries to download music. I like Canadian, British and Australian music, and it can sometimes be really difficult to download this music, because although Apple has licensed the music for the the other country's market, people outside of that market cannot download it. I can order a CD from Canada, Britain or Australia, but this sometimes takes a long time and also is pretty expensive (especially in Britain, where CDs cost 10 pounds which doesn't seem too bad until you realise how much 10 pounds is in dollars ($19.72, according to Google))
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.
I emailed Flickr technical support and got this email back. They win points for a sense of humour.
My Flickr name,
Just a quick email from Team Flickr to let you know that
we've successfully received your recent Help by Email query
and we hope to respond within 1 days.
We'd also like to take an opportunity to remind you that
one query is sufficient and multiple queries regarding the
same issue make the Magic Donkey cry.
[...]
The Flickreenos
[...]
No humans were involved in the creation of this email.
It is auto-generated, so please don't reply.
I was talking with someone online today and was thinking about the ID that I use for The New York Times and realized that it is probably the oldest logon ID that I still use. I've had it practically since I started using the Internet, before Mosaic and Netscape (and certainly before Internet Explorer), when you had to use a text-only browser called "Lynx". The link has a screenshot, but keep in mind that my Lynx was black and white. The second oldest ID that I use is probably my AOL Instant Messenger ID.
My cousins keep on switching their AOL Instant Messenger IDs, but I don't. In retrospect, I probably should have come up with a better ID, but occasionally old friends have used it to get in touch with me, after they haven't spoken to me in years.
As far as email addresses go, I have been less consistent with these. As I've moved around, I've switched email addresses a few times, but I still use my college one occasionally and plan to use my Gmail address for a long time.
Here is a link to more UK Mac ads. It's too bad PC's objection in the "Court" ad doesn't work in real life.
Update: Whoops. I suppose it would be helpful to include the link.
The stock scams that spammers use can actually raise the market price of the stocks, and the SEC has decided to do something about it. As a result of this, they have decided to freeze the trading of these stocks. I'm glad. I really hate spammers; I think that they should get substantial jail time. This is probably just a drop in the bucket, but I'm hopeful that the SEC will eventually put a stop to this stuff. From this link, there are some interesting (I think anyway) links to more information about regulations that have to be followed, etc. when a broker starts allowing people to trade on these stocks again.
My father's computer displayed a blue screen of death on boot-up the other day, and when we tried to boot from the Windows Install CD to troubleshoot, we got another blue screen of death, as discussed on this page on Microsoft's support site. Essentially, despite the fact that you are booting from a CD, Windows Setup still tries to mount (start re
ading and writing data to) any hard drives that are available. Following Microsoft's instructions, we had to create a set of four floppy disks to boot the computer. Then, we had to tell Windows Setup not to mount the hard drive by editing a configuration file. After doing all of these steps and running chkdsk, we were able to get my father's computer booted again. Fortunately he bought this computer with a floppy drive. And I thought that in the age of compact disc install programs, I would never see this message again.
Or is it Prii?
In any case, I heard a piece on NPR about how Priuses are very quiet, and this creates problems for blind people who try to cross the street by ear, because they cannot hear a Prius approaching.
You can now tell Flickr to email you when your contacts post photos.
See Flickr's blog entry.
Cingular -- after switching from AT & T -- is now switching back to AT&T. It's interesting how much weight the AT & T brand name has, although, by now, I think Cingular has its own reputation and weight. At the same time though, when I think of historic telephone companies, I think about AT & T (even though AT&T is not really what it used to be)
For awhile, I used to have a calling card that I used from them. For twenty-five cents a minute, I could place a call to anywhere in the United States, which, at the time, was a decent deal. I did not have a mobile at the time, so it was convenient. Unlike prepaid phone cards which made you wait through advertisements, it was really quick to place a call using AT&T. I dialed the 800 number, dialed 1 and the number i was calling, and then -- without waiting -- my calling card number and pin. After being thanked (quickly) for using AT&T, my call was placed. With a prepaid card, you have to wait for ads for the store where you bought the card and also wait for the computer to figure out how many minutes you have left. They got rid of the service about two years after I got it.
For people that do not have mobile phones, AT&T could do quite well for themselves if they offered a service with competitive rates that was fast like the AT&T calling card.
Steve Jobs posted an explanation of Apple's copy-protection scheme and his feelings on music that doesn't have copy-protection. It's worth reading as it explains why Apple doesn't want to licence their copy-protection scheme to other companies that sell other music players. If you believe Steve Jobs, it is not simply because Apple wants to sell more iPods.
