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Jernej Prodnik

Why I'm quitting Facebook - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Why I'm quitting Facebook By Douglas Rushkoff, CNN February 25, 2013 -- Updated 1502 GMT (2302 HKT)
  • (CNN) -- I used to be able to justify using Facebook as a cost of doing business. As a writer and sometime activist who needs to promote my books and articles and occasionally rally people to one cause or another, I found Facebook fast and convenient. Though I never really used it to socialize, I figured it was OK to let other people do that, and I benefited from their behavior. I can no longer justify this arrangement.
  • Today, I am surrendering my Facebook account, because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book "Present Shock," I chronicle some of what happens when we can no longer manage our many online presences. I have always argued for engaging with technology as conscious human beings and dispensing with technologies that take that agency away.
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  • Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we're not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation -- I call it "digiphrenia" -- would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the "likes" and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable.
  • Douglas Rushkoff Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time -- our "social graphs" -- into money for others.
  • We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the "big data" research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us -- from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.
Katja Kotnik

Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Google is not only the world's largest search engine, it's one of the top three email providers, a social network, and owner of the Blogger platform and the world's largest video site, YouTube. Facebook has the social contacts, messages, wallposts and photos of more than 750 million people.
  • The site also lists my most recent sent and received emails (in both cases a "no subject" conversation thread with a colleague).
  • The big relief comes when I note Google isn't tracking the internet searches I've made on my work account
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  • only around 29% of the information Facebook possesses on any given user is accessible through the site's tools.
  • The Facebook extended archive is a little creepier, including "poke info", each instance of tracking cookies they possess, previous names, and full login and logout info
  • Looking through anyone's list of searches gives a distressing degree of insight into odder parts of their personality.
  • how much do the internet giants really know?
  • sell us stuff
  • picked up by hackers
  • how much the internet giants know about us.
  • Google isn't totally unhelpfu
  • Every event to which I've ever been invited is neatly listed, alongside its location, time, and whether I said I would attend .
  • One piece of information – a supposed engagement to a schoolfriend, Amy Holmes – stands out. A Facebook "joke" that seemed faintly funny for about a week several years ago was undone by hiding it from any and all Facebook users, friends or otherwise (to avoid an "… is now single!" status update). The forgotten relationship helpfully explains why Facebook has served me up with badly targeted bridalwear adverts for several years, and reassures me that Facebook doesn't know quite everything.
  • This is the core of the main comfort
  • despite their mountain of data, Google and Facebook seem largely clueless, too – they've had no more luck making any sense out of it than I have. And that, for now, is a relief.
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

Apple and Samsung smartphone patent row set for new jury trial | Technology | guardian.... - 0 views

  • battle between Apple and Samsung over smartphone patents
  • is not quite over yet.
  • the jury decided that some Samsung products had copied the appearance of Apple's iPhone 3GS
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  • Samsung used to be Apple's biggest supplier for phone parts, and Apple its largest customer. But in 2010, Steve Jobs, then Apple's chief, vowed to go to "thermonuclear war" over what he saw as copying of iPhone features by Android phones.
  • Samsung meanwhile became the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and the second most profitable behind Apple. Together, the two companies produce around half of all the smartphones shipped worldwide.
  • Samsung has mounted a series of complaints against the jury decision
  • Apple meanwhile is seeking to have the damages increased.
Maj Krek

Slaves to the Internet » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 3 views

  • his description of modern slaves cum “hostages” is particularly applicable to our relationship to the internet.
  • Moreover, much of non-work related internet use is actually work insofar as it generates wealth for others.
  • as well as networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that we are held hostage.
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  • Yet, most people cannot permanently quit these sites, let alone the internet as a whole, as doing so would introduce huge practical burdens – as well as social alienation
  • better virtual company than none at all
  • the more people there are who try to make it only ensures that relatively fewer will
  • The internet’s exponential acceleration of capitalist penetration means that we’re all hostages now
  • workers’ vulnerability, making them work harder while intensifying competition and reducing wages for everyone. Notably, Yelp affects small businesses more than large ones, and
mancamikulic

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world
  • They weren't due to get them until last Friday
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing"
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  • from "mainframe" computers
  • Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it
  • "OK, Glass, take video!"
  • The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head.
  • And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass
  • the question of privacy
  • how will we behave in groups
  • David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially
  • Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything
  • Joshua Topolsky
  • have tried out Google Glass
  • This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private".
  • forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends
  • use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.
  • So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • Oliver Stokes
  • ou could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming
  • Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at.
  • Song Chaoming
  • nalysing mobile phone records
  • how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map
  • Social media
  • Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google
  • Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.
  • Twitter
  • we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues.
  • this is a live issue,
  • One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things
  • how will we behave with each other?
  • hows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps
  • Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard
  • they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything
  • we get too deeply involved with our technology
  • she pointed out how smartphones change us:
  • Topolsky
  • It brought something new into view
  • the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."
  • how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts
  • Glass makes you feel more powerful
  • Hurst
  • is likely to be annoying
  • here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
  • body language change
  • model seems to require voice control
  • how much are we going to share with others
Meta Arcon

Internet Marriages on Rise in Some Immigrant Communities - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • With a red embroidered veil draped over her dark hair, Punam Chowdhury held her breath last month as her fiancé said the words that would make them husband and wife. After she echoed them, they were married.
  • Normally one of the most intimate moments two people can share, the marriage had taken place from opposite ends of the globe over the video chat program Skype
  • These are called proxy marriages, a legal arrangement that allows a couple to wed even in the absence of one or both spouses.
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  • Such convenience has also raised concerns that it will facilitate marriage fraud — already a challenge for immigration authorities — as well as make it easier to ensnare vulnerable women in trafficking networks.
  • All people applying for American citizenship through marriage must first be interviewed by officials from the Homeland Security or State Department who are charged with rooting out fraud. Officials said that if the spouses were to explain they had been married thousands of miles apart over the Internet, it would quite likely raise a red flag.
donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
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  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
Blaž Gobec

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology | gu... - 1 views

  • ou're not paying for your presence on the web, then you're
  • just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you
  • When you use a free web service you're the underclass. At best you're a guest. At worst you're a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It's a cliché but worth repeating: if you're not paying for it, you're aren't the customer, you're the product.
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  • Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they'll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don't like it you're welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you, and even if you can, all your URLs will be broken.
  • if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You'll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don't need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it'll pay off in the long run.But it's no longer that simple.
  • Anyone who's ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, but getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you're a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won't have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you're a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time, it's considerably harder.
  • Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context.
  • Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.
  • But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve.
  • es, that's nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company.
  • What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it's a third party to the deal. It doesn't need this data to run its own services.
  • orst o
  • all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you'd need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook's activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they're doing with your data.
Anja Vasle

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

  • At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
  • We understand pretty well the factors that determine the fortunes of companies that make things people buy – which is why, for example, one can predict thatApple won't be able indefinitely to sustain its huge profit margins on its iDevices.
  • This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers.
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  • The two key factors that will determine Facebook's future are the power of network effects and the "stickiness" of its service – ie, the extent to which it can dissuade users from leaving.
  • he key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits.
  • Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly.
  • How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit?
  • n fact, it is now so dominant that millions of people around the world think that Facebook is the internet.
  • At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet.
  • But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small.
  • in the technology world one can go from zero to hero is a very short time
  • Google has a well understood and currently profitable business model and a huge technical infrastructure but ultimately is vulnerable to a well-resourced competitor armed with better search technology.
  • A telephone network with a million subscribers is infinitely more valuable then one with only 10. In technological ecosystems, network effects are very powerful: they explain, for example, how Microsoft came to dominate the market for desktop operating and office systems.
  • If you put your faith in network effects, therefore, Facebook looks like a good investment because it'll be around for the long term.
Neža Zidanič

Ignore the scary tales about internet fraud. It's quite safe, honest | Technology | The... - 0 views

  • A recent television news report focused on the security of online banks following recent attempts to defraud Egg. For the average viewer it must have been scary stuff as the report appeared to demonstrate how relatively easy it might be for a hacker to infiltrate a computer and access passwords and other confidential information.
  • In many cases, the situation is not as serious as the media make out.
  • It is not that hackers are not an issue
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  • One important element of this is the security of the service itself. Although the consumer rarely suffers directly when online services are exposed, scary media stories do mean that everyone in the dot.com world has to work that bit harder to build the necessary trust.
metapavlin

Kim Dotcom in his own words | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • On how Mega differs from MegauploadThere are quite a few innovations that Megaupload didn't have. For example, we have built in upload-download acceleration in the browser, which is technology that only became available nine months ago. We have on-the-fly encryption to protect our users' privacy – because of my own experience having been spied on, and also throughout the proceedings, the US government looking into the files of users, without a warrant …
  • I think privacy is a very important topic, and more important today for users than ever, because you read about all these privacy violations, and reaching out from companies like Facebook and Instagram, and expanding their rights on what should be yours. We want to create a service that gives you fully automated, real-time, one-click, on-the-fly privacy.
  • I see myself in a role now of someone who has been put in this impossible situation, and I'm not only fighting just for myself but for the rights of everybody.
petra funtek

EBSCOhost: RIAA, MPAA, and the Digital Piracy Issue: Comparing Public Relations Strate... - 1 views

  • The downloading of copyrighted content has been a common concern for the motion picture and music recording industries, but their public relations response has been quite different.
  • A significant, moderate correlation of attributes used to frame this issue was found between the RIAA press releases and media coverage, but not between the MPAA press releases and the media.
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