Facebook’s Trapdoor

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m puzzled.

I can’t understand this quirk in Facebook that means I can’t politely brush off someone requesting my friendship without giving them access to all my friends and a lot of my info. 

Receive a friend request and you get this message:

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I have a rule that I don’t make buddies with people I’ve not actually met, or know online. Instead I divert them to LinkedIn, a sort of frat house for networking. Facebook is for friends. So I usually try to brush them off with a message.

Only you can’t do that anymore.

Click on the Send message button, and you get this text at the bottom of the message window:

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It says:

If you send xxxx a message, you will give them permission to view your list of friends, as well as your Basic, Work and Education info for one month.

In other words, you can confirm someone, you can ignore someone, but you can’t send them a message that says “do I know you?” or “not sure we’ve met, how about you email me on LinkedIn?” Well you can, but you’ve got to give them some of the biggest keys to your little Facebook kingdom first.

Why? What is the point of that? What possible benefit is it to me to allow that to happen? Why would I let someone I haven’t met, and who I have no friends in common with, have access to that kind of information? And, more importantly, shouldn’t I be a little bit worried that my Facebook friends are allowing this to happen? How many of us actually read those little notes?

I am trying to think of a logical reason for this. Why would Facebook make it impossible for someone to reply to a request with a message that does not commit them to giving access to their information?

The only reason I can assume, perhaps because of my conspiracy-addled mind and limited brain power, is this: If the person requesting the connection has access to that information, so do most of the applications he is using. Facebook doesn’t care how long the connections last between users; all it cares is that it has access to the data. Who cares if it’s only for one month? That information only needs to be grabbed once. In other words, my theory goes, that data is valuable enough for Facebook to create a sort of trapdoor through which unsuspecting folk might allow their data to be compromised.

Or am I missing something? I must be.

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Google Killer? A Clip Around the Ears, Maybe

By | November 22, 2011
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There’s a new search engine out there, according to the Guardian, and it sort of tries to figure out what you’re looking for. Which is good. Google searches are great so long as they’re simple. But is Powerset up to snuff?

Here are some searches I did (betraying my interests):

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Pretty good stuff. And how about me?

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Even less obvious matches seem to work:

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Also right on the money. Nixon got second place when I asked who was the first u.s. president to resign? which is good enough:

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Other searches tho — how many copies of Office 2007 has Microsoft sold? and how far is it from London to Sydney — weren’t any good at all.

Of course, Powerset is so far only parsing Wikipedia articles (only — there are 2.3 million of those in the English language). And ask Google the same questions and you’re also likely to get the answers high up (1st in the case of Nixon, Taser inventer, Suharto resignation, though nowhere on my own alleged career (fittingly). Sydney/London throws up a WikiAnswers page, and I’ve given up hope trying to find out how many copies of Office 2007 have been sold.)

Still, it’s early days for something like this. There’s no question that a better search engine will one day come along, perhaps belonging to Google, perhaps not. Will it need to parse every sentence for meaning? Who knows?

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Generating Meaning or Fluff?

By | November 22, 2011
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I love this: a mashup that generates great-looking ads from Flickr pictures and a computer. The conclusion: We realise how easily affected we are by words and pictures together, but how the mix often doesn’t mean very much, especially when they’re ads.

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

Of course, it also raises the question: At what point would it be cheaper and more effective to generate ad copy by computer?

THE AD GENERATOR

Burma’s Firewall Fighters

By | November 22, 2011
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Another good report on Burma’s failed efforts to stop information getting out, from the Commitee to Protect Journalists:

Those fears are driving Burma’s undercover reporters to become more innovative. DVB’s Moe Aye said his in-country reporters now check in with editors by pay phone at predetermined times to mitigate the risk of communicating on lines that may be tapped by authorities.

In-country journalists have their own clandestine procedures. One undercover DVB reporter secretly reported on the trial of a popular political prisoner by using his mobile telephone to record the detainee entering the courthouse. Later that day, he used the Internet to transmit the footage in time to meet DVB’s production deadline.

“They say, ‘Don’t ask me how, just wait and it will be there.’” Moe Aye said. “I don’t ask, so I can’t tell you how they do it. They have their own ways.”  

Although I still believe it’s important not to overstate the influence of the Internet in opening up a country and placing a brake on the brutality of regimes (Burma has shown no lack of appetite for repression, and can pull the plug on the Internet at will, firstly, and secondly information and images still found their way out even in the pre-Web uprising of 1988), it’s great to read of how young Burmese are finding ways to report on what’s going on there.

Burma’s Firewall Fighters

Sleazy Practices Cont.

By | November 22, 2011
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Fired up by Google’s move into the crapware domain by foisting an “updater” on customers who want to install (otherwise great) programs like Google Earth, I took another look at what was happening in the updater sphere.

Apple drew some heat for its own bit of underhandedness recently, when its own Apple Software Updater automatically included downloading the company’s Safari browser. After a backlash, it dropped the Safari from the “Updates” section to a “New Software” section, but still prechecked it:

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In other words, run the updater and not concentrate, and you’ll find yourself downloading 22 MB of browser you didn’t ask for, and didn’t have before.

So no, I don’t think Apple did the right thing here. Apple fans can protest as much as they like, but there’s a clear move here to get new software to users to install software they didn’t ask for and, if they don’t actively intervene, will have it installed by default. Browsers, like media players, are particularly significant because they will try to make themselves the default browser, and users once again need to act against the default process to avoid this.

Needless to say, Apple’s bid has been modestly successful, apparently at least doubling its modest market share for Safari. Still miniscule, but a start.

Of course, software is one thing, but it has to be used. For that it has to be visible to the user. No point in hiding the program launch icons somewhere they can’t be found. On Windows, there are three places you want to be: the desktop, the system tray, or the start menu. Apple is particularly smart about this, ensuring that all its products sit, not in some side-alley subfolder, but in the ‘root’ menu:

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and

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as well as on the desktop:

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(though not, interestingly, the Updater.)

Of course, Apple isn’t alone. Microsoft has long been doing this, as has Adobe.

Folk argue this is all besides the point, that users retain control over their computer and can remove all this stuff if they want. But to me it’s worrying that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Adobe et al think that this is OK, and, like their defenders, fail to understand that for the vast majority of users, installing software is not an everyday experience, and that these sleights of hand merely cause extra stress, confusion and uncertainty. That can’t be good.