Internet Kill Switch

Senator Joseph Lieberman has proposed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), a bill that would give the president the power to control or even shut down the Internet in emergency situations. Citing the need for cybersecurity, Lieberman said in a press release that the U.S.’s “economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies — cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.”

So here's the story. Apparently there's still a massive audience that wants to control the internet. Or perhaps, a bunch of executives that are a bit out of touch with reality. How likely is your everyday joe to support this bill? I'm curious. A large part of me says not very likely. Why does the president need a global internet kill switch when he can already do the same thing to the single offending web site by sending a squad of trained professionals (See: Police) to deal with criminal offenders? And what about foreign countries? Why would any sane foreign country give the American president power over their internet?

The bill requires that U.S.-based companies such as Google and Yahoo, as well as broadband providers and software firms, comply with any and all measures that the government sees fit in an emergency.

Now, why does it need the individual web hosts to comply when the purpose of a kill switch meant to kill the internet should only, in theory, need to turn off the providers. If nobody provides the internet, it's down, right? I don't like the vague feeling I'm getting from this short summary of the bill. It seems like they're taking more control than they need in the first place. To host a website, will I have to fill out government paperwork in the future? Will I have to submit to big brother watching over my shoulder? Will free web hosting such as http://webs.com or http://www.piczo.com be a thing of the past due to it being too easy for violators of this new bill to use them for illegal purposes?

It kind of seems like it, from what I'm seeing. I oppose this bill, seeing as it seems rather shady and wanting more than it needs or deserves in terms of power.

iPhone 4 has a "Retina Display"?

Let's skip straight to the section we'll be discussing with a quote from the original article.

The math discussed in media stories and blog posts about the iPhone 4 was enough to give many of us brain cramps. Nonetheless, others were inspired to jump right in and wrestle with the numbers to extrapolate real-world usage data. Among them was Phil Plaits, a scientist who spent a few years calibrating a camera on board the Hubble Telescope and who now blogs for Discover Magazine.

“My first reaction to the announcement and the ensuing coverage was interest and curiosity. I figured [Jobs] wouldn't lie outright, so what really is the limit of human vision as far as pixel size? The math is simple, if you know it, so I did the calculations, and found that while his claim wasn't perfect, I thought in context it was fine,” said Plaits, who helpfully provides charts and graphs illustrating the central concepts in his blog post about the iPhone 4’s display.

But as usual, the devil is in the details.

“It's easy to make assumptions about pixel size and distance, but then you have to take into account human vision--which is complicated--how the pixels are laid out, whether there is space between them, how they're refreshed, and so on,” said Plaits, who adds that he opted not to worry about slicing the data that finely.

“I just wanted to see if, given some simple assumptions, you could make a smooth, continuous-looking display. The answer is yes, and the new iPhone display will be pretty close to that ideal.“

Some experts, however, say more accuracy is warranted. Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies Corporation, which produces video calibration, evaluation, and diagnostic products, said that exaggeration over display specifications has been “building for many years and has now become outlandishly unreliable, with many of the consumer specs being exaggerated by 1000 percent or more.”

Blame it on the snowball effect: Once one manufacturer exaggerates its exacting specs a tiny bit, all the competing companies do the same. The stakes are raised again and again, and pretty soon that little innocent snowball has morphed into an out-of-control abominable snowman.

Basically, what I'm getting from tihs article is that Steve did in fact lie... However, we're being told it's forgivable. While I appreciate the opinion of such a renowned mathmatician, shouldn't it be for the consumer to decide when the truth is stretched too much? I don't see any reason there needs to be conclusive, factual decission over whether Steve lied. After all, I find that to be an opinion. Who can say for sure how far the truth has been stretched? If it's stretched bad enough, the backlash will be great enough to warrent the assumption that it was a lie. The offenders will be open to be sued, and it's really just that simple.

My personal opinion though, is that I'm tired of being tricked with this "forgivable" argument. Have you ever bought a hard drive advertising a certain ammount of gigabytes only to find out it has somewhat less than it led you to believe? That's the kind of dirty marketing trick we're looking at here. It's not a very trust inspiring move. They say one thing, but they lead us to believe another. I don't know about others, but I call this lying.

Updated Facebook app, broken?

It would appear there's some apparent problem with the app(s) for Facebook judging by this title. However, when I dived into the article I was continously surprised and dissapointed with what I found. So this article will unfortunately not be very positive. (Apple lovers, you've been warned.)

There was a time when Facebook was at the forefront of mobile app development. Before there was even an App Store, the web app Facebook put out that was optimized for the iPhone was brilliant. Then the App Store came and with it was a great Facebook native app. Then came version 3 of the app, which was even better. Those days, sadly, are long over.

 Huh, starts off good enough. Seems like it's on track. But then it jumps straight to this.

Everyone already knows that the Facebook Android app sucks.

 Really? I'm apparently living under a technological rock because I wasn't aware of this at all. But should I really expect anything less from an article evidently written by, what I'm going to take a wild guess, [Insert eye roll here]  Apple fanboy? Well...er...no, no I should not. I say this because the obviously biased remarks cross the border straight into what I found to be hilarity.

First of all, Facebook still has yet to release a native iPad app. This is pretty ridiculous considering that undoubtedly a high percentage of the millions of iPad owners have searched the App Store for a Facebook app, and come away with only imitations (which Facebook has demanded be taken down).

Exaggeration ignored, I find it amusing that people still think Facebook is their friend. Now, from a distant point of view I'd have to say Facebook doesn't feel like it need "us" (Because obviously I never trusted Facebook enough to use it, but the picture is clear.) anymore and therefore is not working as hard as it used to when it knew it's future depended on us. See the problem with this is that Facebook has definitely experienced a drop in users over it's attitude towards these same users. Obviously, Facebook's future still depends on it's users. But who would give up playing Farmville just because the website it's on happens to violate their privacy and give them the finger in the form of restricting mobile access to their site? Your faith in humanity might be saying, "haha nice sarcasm", but my faith in humanity took a long walk when I heard about Farmville addiction. Farmville just happens to be a ridiculously popular facebook game that is true to it's name.

Oh, and that wasn't the hilarity yet.

 Third, this update has at least one glaring UI bug. Sure, bugs are a part of the game, but how Facebook overlooked this one is dumbfounding. If you have new messages or friend requests on Facebook, load up the main screen in the app. There you’ll find certain areas badged to let you know there are updates for you to see — but these badges have a dark upper area that clashes badly with the light background of the main screen. I mean, it just looks awful. How did that get through quality control?

...Yeah, this is what all the hype is about here. This is what makes the app broken. A slight graphical glitch that does nothing but "clash". Here's a screen shot to demonstrate how insanely stupid this is.

You see those black edges on the upper half of the small red and white buttons "1" and "15"? The ones to the upper right of Inbox and Requests respectively? That's what is being complained about.

There's no loss of function. It just doesn't look nice to some. I don't even know what to say to that. It's just so... trivial.

Animated .png images? What!?

In late 2007, PHUG, an open source community had the opportunity to meet Andrew Smith one of the key developers of APNG. Eager to get involved and expand on the open source community, PHUG placed it's initiative into the contribution of the APNG open source project. Our goal is to educate both open source commercial developers and designers on the beneficial aspects of using the APNG specification. As this project evolves, we hope to expand and build on the ever growing open source community, with designers and developers devoted to producing APNGs, tutorials, workshops, and more. Our hopes are to eventually incorporate APNGs into much more than banners and ads, such as menu alternatives!

If you're anything like me, you're absolutely astounded that anyone would create an animated .png right now. Traditionally .gif files are what have been used for animations. Don't fret though. There's actually some good reasons for an animated .png! I'm going to discuss the advantages here.

First, let's discuss the difference between a .png and a .gif

A .gif is typically used for animations, and isn't that great compared to a .jpg for static images due to lower quality. .gif is rather low quality, and an extremely old standard for animations. Though some might say they love the .gif and I agree, it's very nice, an upgrade cannot hurt.

A .png is typically used for static images, and destroys a .jpg in terms of quality typically. From my experience, a .png will give you as near perfect quality as you can get these days out of the common file types.  It also supports transparency, unlike a .jpg. A .png's one weakness is that the file size is often significantly larger than other file type alternatives. It's not unbearable, but nobody likes loading an image with a huge file size.

Now on to why animated .png is an upgrade from animated .gif

Reason #1: Higher Quality
Rather obvious, the higher quality of a .png is a nice boost for making beautiful animations.

Reason #2: .gif actually only supports limited transparency
In a .gif, a pixel is either transparent or not. In a .png, however, a pixel can be, say, orange, and 50% transparent. This makes for far more flexible images and built in image opacity.

What about file size? I'm actually not sure what the relative file size is. I'd assume an animated .png will be larger than an equivelent animated .gif. However, it probably won't be unbearable and will still be an awesome new format for the web.

Did you know?
Firefox already supports animated .png. Unfortunately other browsers such as Chrome and IE do not. Try going to http://animatedpng.com/index.php/category/samples/ with Firefox to see animated .png in action. It will even give you some comparison's to .gif animations.

Here's a filesize of a direct comparison between the first animation comparison on the page.

.gif : 24.33 KB
.png 112.95 KB

As you can see, the png is a lot bigger. But 112.95 KB is still not that bad in today's world unless you're using dialup. This is why I say it will not be unbearable. Note that the .png version looks a LOT better. (Check the site for yourself!)

Wolfram Alpha - Diversity in the Search Engine world?

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine, the primary use of which is research. You type your question in, it analyzes it, and gives you an answer. What I think is the most impressive thing about Wolfram Alpha is that it works on older browsers, recognizes questions incredibly well, and has lots of info to give. Some of the most awesome things you can do with Wolfram Alpha are looking up dates, math of all sorts, geographic locations, and other things of the sort.

It's a source of information far more relevant in some instances than Google, Bing, or any of the older conventional search engines. That's not to say it stands a chance of  dethroning any of the other search engines from their respective thrones (or lack there-of). The new search engine doesn't really help you find websites, and it's image search capability is highly limited. It specializes in providing data, and while it does an incredibly impressive job if this it definitely doesn't have what it takes to be the search engine.

One thought however is that it could replace Google in things like schools, where Google can sometimes be abused to search for things irrelevant to the student's education. It could also earn it's own seat on the Search Engine scene, and though it will have difficulty dominating it, it can certainly hope to stand side by side with other search engines as being useful and advantageous to use regardless of whether you use other search engines.

I think that Wolfram Alpha has certainly earned it's place in fame, and that schools should take advantage of it's relevant, data-focused interface. A student can't find, say, video games on Wolfram Alpha. It can't find internet forums or chatrooms. It only handles data, and images directly relevant to the data searched for, such as graphs or maps.

Give Wolfram Alpha a try for yourself at http://www.wolframalpha.com/. Try searching your birth date, or finding a complex math formula for the site to evaluate. Even browsers as old as Internet Explorer 6 can handle the site, though just barely, and you will get a warning.

Pirate Bay still wins, again. Average citizen will probably suffer, again.

The entertainment industry has embarked in an all-out war against piracy around the globe, with the hopes of scaring would-be pirates from illegally obtaining digital media. But if the likes of the MPAA and RIAA plans on sinking the ship that millions sail throughout the Internet, they should think again.
The primary target for the entertainment industry, as it would seem, has been The Pirate Bay. It is far more than a website that enables users to acquire digital content of both legal and illegal variety. It is a symbol. It is a powerful message that the entertainment industry hates but many people, even those who don’t commit acts of piracy, agree is true: the system is broken.

 Welcome back to the piracy scene. I'm your host, nerdzilla, and we're here to examine Piratebay. Now, Piratebay is nowhere near the only site of it's kind, and quite frankly I personally have no idea why it is the only site under this much fire. Perhaps Piratebay is simply the most popular, or perhaps this is the entertainment industry's way of suppressing the people. Perhaps this is there way of threatening people, scaring people into doing what they want. However, Pirate Bay does a lot more than offer torrents that just happen to contain "ilegal" MP3s or videos.

I personally go to a less controversial site for my free, legal music.Consequently, I can't name a single popular band.

A defining issue that plagues the industry and, more importantly, consumers is draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques that everyone’s hearing about lately. This is why you can’t read that e-book you purchased on a competing device, listen to that MP3 anywhere you want to, watch that movie on your computer, or play that game without an always-on Internet connection. It’s these very techniques that drive paying customers to piracy (even yours truly has fallen victim to DRM gone horribly wrong).

 I was under the impression it was common knowledge that DRM is a torture device. (<-- satire) But since some people actually think it's an effective method of protecting things let's go over DRM. DRM is a method of security applied mainly to video games, music, and video by large companies with the intentions of making sure you don't do anything considered pirating. What it does however, is put vague limits on what you can do with what you bought with your hard earned money. Want to install your video game? Have you installed it more than 5 or so times with said CD-key? Whoops! No can do. DRM has now stepped in and you're no longer allowed to play that video game you bought, with money. Want to play the music you bought on Itunes on your Zune? on any other media player except iTunes? No sir. DRM says to take a hike.

DRM is essentially flawed to the core idea because it makes limits that it THINKS pirates are especially likely to break, but ignores completely that completely legal users can do so as well. Therefore, legal users are often victimized by the limits set by DRM.

If that wasn't bad enough, DRM is pretty weak in that it can often be removed, ilegally, pretty easily.

Yeah... right now a pirate is playing the game without hassle and you're labeled a pirate and not allowed to listen/play for no good reason.

This, is why most people hate DRM.

Beyond the technological advances that will keep illegal file sharing going for the foreseeable future, the one thing that matters more than anything else is the fact that many people actually participate in piracy and have no issue with doing so. There are surely those that feel no moral implication for their actions, and that number is probably growing.

It's disgraces like DRM that make it so that in your average private chat on MSN or even public chat on a chatroom, nobody will think poorly of you for admitting to pirate things. I've had friends I've met on forums pirate games to play with me, and not really cared. After all, I have a legal copy and am not helping them. I don't feel obligated at all to stop them. (Unless it's a game I REALLY like, in which case I may casually suggest paying for it.) Even then though. What am I supposed to do? Refuse to play with them?

The industry might sue someone like me though, simply for not being terrified of their little regime. It wouldn't be the first time they've done something horribly controversial to the little guys and quite frankly I wouldn't be able to win. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the court officials were biased. As some may know, that has already happened.

Like DRM, which victimizes the average citizen and only makes it slightly more tedious for the average pirate, the industry will probably once again do something that doesn't solve the problem in an attempt to win this hopeless war that will probably wind up offending everyone, again.

Massive drop in Facebook users, and why?

Now, some of your thoughts, if you're anything like me and secretly want to destroy Facebook wih fire, might be something along the lines of  "MUAHAHAHAHA!"...

Of course that doesn't make for a very interesting article. We're here to look at WHY Facebook users are leaving. This graph, pictured above, clearly shows that a major ammount of people are leaving. Only 31.14% of the answers were from people that were staying. 30.33% of the people were leaving due to "don't trust it with my personal information". I'd personally group the 7.12% that said "It sells my data to advertisers." with that.

Apparently 2.01% of people are leaving because of bugs! One of these bugs, which apparently just occurred recently, is something so terrible I don't think even Myspace has screwed up that badly before.

Last night, in an embarrassing glitch for Facebook that raises questions about privacy on the site, some users of the social-networking service began getting hundreds of personal messages that weren’t intended for them.

Yeah... that letter about how you like turtles just went to your boss.

In short, Facebook has really screwed up. People are leaving en masse. Now if only it was less of a civil war to delete your account.

Let's take a look at IE9

What is this? The above image is a test showing the speed that javascript is processed in. To the far left is IE8, at a disgraceful high. In the middle, green, a bit behind Safari and Chrome, is the IE9 Platform Preview. What you're seeing here is a major change, one that would provide a much faster browsing experience for those of us that honestly don't care if IE has yet to meet the other Browsers in speed yet.

I don't know about the readers, but I'd be glad to use IE more often if it stops being so... slow. For now, I'll be sticking with Chrome for the most part.

First, we showed IE9’s new script engine, internally known as “Chakra,” and the progress we’ve made on an industry benchmark for JavaScript performance. With the differences between script engines on benchmarks approaching the duration of an eye-blink, we described our approach for making real-world sites faster. Chakra compiles JavaScript in the background on a separate core of the CPU, parallel to IE.
We showed our progress in making the same standards-based HTML, script, and formatting markup work across different browsers. We shared the data and framework that informed our approach, and demonstrated better support for several standards: HTML5, DOM, and CSS3. We showed IE9’s latest Acid3 score (55); as we make progress on the industry goal of having the same markup that developers actually use working across browsers, our Acid3 score will continue to go up. As part of our commitment to the standards process, we submitted test cases to the standards bodies. We also made these tests available for everyone to try in any browser.

What this means, in short language that even someone like me that uses a browser rather casually, is that IE9 will be freaking awesome. HTML4 is what we've been using for the last...decade? That means it's time for an ugprade. HTML5 has it's sights on taking the throne from Flash, by providing some of the core things Flash is famous for such as videos in a much smoother, faster environment. All this while being integrated with the browser!

For those that aren't aware of exactly what Acid3 is, typing "define:Acid3" on a google search produces this simple definition.

Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain selected elements from web standards

In short, Acid3 is one of many tests on Browser functionality. The higher the score, the better. The maximum score is a 100. 55 isn't exactly beautiful, but IE8 got a 20. That being said, it's definitely an improvement.

HTML5 applications will need great script performance and consistent “same markup, same results” across browsers. Great HTML5 applications will build on that foundation and go further, providing game-like interactivity and movie-like graphical richness to the user experience.

HTML5 will also be allowing web designers to implement graphics not unlike those you'd expect in a video game into the browser. Basically, it's freaking sweet.

Today we also announced the availability of the first IE9 Platform Preview for developers, and our commitment to update it approximately every eight weeks. The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases.

 This is what looks to me to be Microsoft's own way of providing a public demo of their upcoming browser. I've yet to test it, but seeing as how it's free I will probably wind up installing and testing it sooner or later.



My recommendation is to look forward to the future, for IE9 is looking good. There is no currently known release date for IE9.

Chrome gets it's own 'app store'

Today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google showed off a preview of a major new product: the Chrome Web Store. Yes, this is an app store for the web.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/chrome-web-store/#ixzz0oUM6ZiVw

  Google Chrome, gets an app store? Suddenly, Chrome is taking the leap into being more than a Browser. They'll be offering games, and essential apps in this new store, though apparently some will be at a price. I am eager to see how this plays out, though I do not appreciate them imitating Apple. As long as they don't make the same mistakes as Apple, though, things should go well.

“Developers care about monetization. But they need more than just advertising,” Google VP Product Sundar Pichai said on stage. With the Chrome Web Store, Google has simplified the process of buying apps on the web. Once you sign in to your Google account, apps are just one click away (presumably using Google Checkout). From there you can say, buy Plants & Zombies, the very popular game in Apple’s App Store. But this runs all on the web in Chrome, thanks to Flash. You can run the game full-screen as well.

Another game is Lego Star Wars. This game is run through Chrome’s use of native client (so developers can use native code to develop for the web). This is a full 3D game, built using rich HTML5 APIs.

There will also be apps in this store based around content. This means that magazines and periodicals will be coming to the store — and they’ll be able to charge for them. Sports Illustrated showed off its web app on stage.

I'm excited to see that HTML5 is being implemented and used in this, especially for video games, being a gamer myself. While the app store looks nice, I do fear that price tag. Will it be on games? Will it spread to things nobody should have to pay for such as themes, or extensions? I hope price is not used on most things, because I don't know about my peers but I'm sick of paying for things there should be an open source / free version of, but just so happens there isn't.

Sure, video game makers need money. But the inevitable maker of "ChromeCalculator" surely does not. This is my main worry concerning this "app store". Hopefully Google will realize that since Google Chrome is not proprietary it does not have the same monopoly the original "App Store" does. Trying to charge for every little app would hopefully result in an open source backlash. Otherwise, some of us would be denied the ability to experience the store.

More on the Facebook scene

It's been a rough few weeks for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ever since he unveiled his company's plan to personalize the Web. After a string of Facebook security breaches and outcry from US Senators over Facebook's new privacy policies, the New York Times revealed the complexities of Facebook's new privacy policy (now longer than the Constitution). Now, it seems users are stepping back and taking a hard look at their relationship to America's most popular social network--some dissatisfied users even planning a "mass exodus" from the site.

Aaaah... Facebook users. You know somehow I saw this coming a mile away. It's as if it was completely obvious to me that Facebook was NOT a place to have a private life. It was as if I was immediately tipped off that they wanted the truth and nothing but the truth and would go to any means to get the truth to the questions they asked so that they could have your info. I must have a sixth sense that allows me to see these magical things.

Satire aside, Facebook is carving it's own little niche in the world as the 'real life' social network. The problem with it is that Facebook itself is not a part of 'real life'. In short, the two should not mix so dangerously. Those of us who are experienced with the internet know exactly what happens when offline and online worlds clash. Bad things happen, generally to individuals.

On the note of the article at hand, not being directly about Facebook's screwups, but rather about Facebook's CEO being depicted as a sex maniac. I find this giant gaping flaw that makes the article seem mis-leading to me.

Hot on the heels of this controversy comes news out of Hollywood that probably won't help Zuckerberg's image. A leaked version of the script for The Social Network (aka the "Facebook Movie"), which dramatizes the fledgling company's rise, paints the young entrepreneur as a "ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac," writes the Times of London.
The film, slated for an October release, is set to star Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake. Written by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires. The film unfolds during flashbacks that occur while Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) faces former business associates in court in 2008.

 Reading the above quote, one should come across the answer to the fill in the blank that someone forgot to add to the title of the article. "The Social Network Depicts Facebook CEO As 'Sex Maniac' IN A MOVIE.

 My immediate response after seeing that part of the article was "Wait hold on my care meter just about twenty yards.". I mean, really?! It's a big deal that a guy starring in a movie is portrayed as a pervert? I don't know about my readers but I definitely don't think of the actor when I see a character in a movie.

Firefox 4, and what to expect in upcoming releases of Firefox 3

Don't get your hopes up. Firefox 4 isn't coming out around the corner. Mike Beltzner simply announced his vision for the next upcoming major release of Firefox. What does he have in mind, you may be eager to know? Well, nothing very specific. Good intentions are a great start though, right?

Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast

Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 andbeyond!).

Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Upcoming versions of Firefox 3 are more out in the open. You can expect some of the following major updates in future firefox. In Firefox 3.6.4, you can expect Firefox to finally take a step into the security spotlight by stealing a security feature Chrome has been using for a long time.

"Uninterrupted Browsing" is the term, and if Flash, Quicktime, or Silverlight are crashing your browser, they will simply crash instead, leaving you free to continue browsing or reload to try again.

Quote from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.4/releasenotes/

"Firefox 3.6.4 provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.

If a plugin crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. You will be able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again."

In addition. I have done some beta testing of the Firefox beta. The specific version is 3.7a5pre-release. Some of the notable things I see in this release are a change to the interface, and a brand new way to handle your addons. In the future, according to this pre-release anyway, you will use about:addons as your browser URL to manage your addons. What we're looking at is the death of the traditional addons.mozilla.org web-page and it's reincarnation in a more sophisticated, user friendly form.

I took the liberty of taking a screen-shot of both of these obvious changes to the new version. The operating used at the time was Windows XP, as I was in a work environment. I do however support the use of less obsolete operating systems.

http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/4061/95008296.jpg

Why you SHOULDN'T board the Facebook bandwagon

I would highly recommend reading the original article on Gizmodo before reading mine, as there is plenty that needs reading and I do not want most of my post to be in quotes. (This is a good thing. It means their article is not full of fluff you don't need to read.)

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

 It should be a well known fact by now that Facebook is about as private as high school. That is to say, it's not very private. There is no predictability like in any normal respectable business. The use of gray areas where it's up to Facebook's complete discretion how problems are handled proves this. Basically, their terms of service allow them to screw you over at any time for any reason.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

 I honestly don't find this a very solid reason. As far as my limited research concludes, this is simply a rumor supported only by Facebook's willingness pay people off rather than fight to prove them wrong. But don't let one out of many reasons discourage you from staying out of this lame-fest.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy

 Building on my previous discussion about privacy. Facebook wants it less private. Yeah, that's right. They're against the average user.

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch

Yeah, their practices aren't always the most trustworthy. Meaning, one day you might wake up to find they have screwed you over. We shouldn't need a lawyer to feel safe using a website, Facebook.

6. Facebook is a bully

 Y'know there was once a guy that tried to raise awareness of the bait-and-switch practices? Yeah... he got sued. Internet censorship being enforced. I'm sure everyone wants to deal with that. The proceeding sentence was blunt, obvious sarcasm.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications

 Yeah... Apps essentially have the ability to take any data they want, and the only way to protect yourself is not to install them.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

 I honestly think the original article leaves me without anything to say, so I'll just quote it here.

Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account

 Yeah... This is hilariously horrible. This has got to be the most painful, ridiculously time consuming and painfully prone to error way to delete a social networking account I have ever heard of. This would make me rage, even if I did it exactly right. If anything this is incentive not to 'quit' Facebook, but to just get up and LEAVE!  Let the profile rot, rather than go through that.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web

See: Facebook is not private, Facebook is not safe, Facebook only cares about itself.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks

 Judging by the fact some people actually need to be told, I'm assuming telling them this isn't going to sway them much. If you were to ask me, Omegle is more of a "Social Network" than Facebook. Who uses Facebook to be social?! If you're one of those people who doesn't add someone they don't know, you are one of the stereotypes of the anti-social network, Facebook.

SSL coming to Hotmail

Following in the footsteps of Google's Gmail, Hotmail Wave 4 will offer full-session SSL. Presently, logging in to Hotmail uses HTTPS to protect user credentials from attack, but e-mail itself is delivered over unsecured HTTP. Gmail switched to using HTTPS for the entire session—both logging in and reading/sending mail—by default in January (previously, it was an opt-in feature).
In Wave 4, Hotmail is following suit, offering HTTPS encryption for mail access as well as authentication. With the most valuable part of a mailbox often being the mail itself, not the credentials used to access it, this is a welcome change.
The other big news is Hotmail will offer ActiveSync support. ActiveSync is used by Exchange to provide push mail and other facilities to smartphones. By adding ActiveSync to Hotmail, Microsoft is extending these features to 300 million smartphones, giving Hotmail-using consumers the full seamless sync experience on their phones.

I personally love Hotmail. Gmail's nice and all but Hotmail is on a superior level in my view. There is one, simple reason for this. Hotmail can be configured to use any email address as your Microsoft Passport, which is what you use to sign into microsoft sites and MSN messenger. Want to be different? Get your own 'special' email address suffix at a different provider and submit it to be your Microsoft Passport. My one and only recommendation for cool suffixs (See, Name@suffix.x) is http://www.mail.com.

What we're looking at are nice new features for hotmail, and more security. If you're an active user of hotmail these new features will probably seamlessly integrate into your daily tasks and use of the service. I'm pretty sure this upgrade is one sided in terms of who will like it. It's pretty straightforward that this is a good thing.

(Woah. I'm not ranting. Spooky.)

Android 2.2 to support flash

In an interview with The New York Times, Google’s Andy Rubin revealed that the upcoming version of the Android mobile operating system will fully support Flash technology. Code named Froyo, Adobe showed us Android 2.2 with Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One last month.

In a world where every company seems to find excuses not support flash, I find it incredibly exciting to hear that this is no longer a stereotype of the mobile world. The Wii had a very outdated version of Flash, the DSi had none at all, your average phone has none, and even high tech, and I use the term high tech loosely, pieces of media equipment such as the iTouch or iPhone don't support it. It was beginning to seem as if companies have a gripe with flash, and were deliberately trying to kill it's success at the expense of their own products. Perhaps, on the other hand, one company that happens to be a leader in the smartphone race has a bone to pick with, like, everyone.

Needless to say, I am officially wishing I could have an Android phone, specifically one running version 2.2 which will support flash 10. I think Apple has dug themselves one heck of a hole at this point. Microsoft, Google, and Adobe are now on their grudge list and considering two of these companies are very powerful web forces (Google, Adobe) and the other is coming out with what is supposed to be a revolutionary new smartphone (Microsoft) they have plenty of competition with a nice huge advantage over them now.

I can't speak for him, but if I were in charge of decisions at Apple, I'd be scared right about now. Android 2.2 officially has a major advantage over it's main competitor, the iPhone.

Google censored in 1/4 of countries

"This morning, on their main blog,  Google posted a little reminder to everyone about its view on censorship on the web. Specifically, they don't like it. And while we all know their take on China's demand for censorship by now, the search giant also offered up a new interesting little factoid: of the 100 countries around the world in which Google offers their services, some 25 at least partially block them."

 Countries taking action by censoring the internet is increasing, and frankly I don't agree with it. In my personal opinion it isn't the governments place to censor anything for any reason. Censorship should be done on a far lower level, such as a company blocking access to specific websites. This is simply more efficient and provides far less potential for inconvenience. You would think when there are so many people and groups supporting this that the government as a single entity would be a lot less willing to step on people's toes by going ahead and censoring as they please. I believe perhaps it is time debate against internet censorship was taken a bit more seriously and we put some pressure on it.

Windows XP will not support Internet Explorer 9

It's official. Windows XP will not support Internet Explorer 9. A lot of people are outraged that this is so, but I have one question? Why? Unless you're pretty young, you should know that this trend has existed forever. Back in the day, people treated Windows 2000 like they did XP now. The facts are however, that Windows XP is an obsolete operating system. Windows XP was released in the year 2001. It has been 9 years approximately since it's release, and it has been succeeded not by just one, but two newer and better operating systems. What people are doing now with Windows XP would've been like clinging to Windows 98 when Windows 2000 came along. Believe it or not Windows XP doesn't really have a chance anymore. It's in it's coffin, and it's just waiting for us to shut the doors, so to speak.

It's not a matter of choice anymore. Tons of new operating system features have been released that boast important security fixes, performance increases, and new features entirely, and frankly I believe it's time XP died, or perhaps was killed. It's too obsolete to continue supporting new software. This is fact, not opinion.

In conclusion, one should not be outraged as support is dropped for XP. It is getting more than any operating system has yet, and frankly, consumers should keep that in mind and stop being such dinosaurs with their computers. See, personal computers are not designed to be legacy computers. They are meant to be replaced. If consumers intend to fight this, they should expect for flexibility to eventually snap, resulting in loss of compatibility. It's pretty simple really.

The Apple iPad

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/03/apple-ipad-review/

"The Apple iPad. The name is a killing word -- more than a product -- it's a statement, an idea, and potentially a prime mover in the world of consumer electronics. Before iPad it was called the Apple Tablet, the Slate, Canvas, and a handful of other guesses -- but what was little more than rumor and speculation for nearly ten years is now very much a reality. Announced on January 27th to a middling response, Apple has been readying itself for what could be the most significant product launch in its history; the making (or breaking) of an entirely new class of computer for the company. The iPad is something in between its monumental iPhone and wildly successful MacBook line -- a usurper to the netbook throne, and possibly a sign of things to come for the entire personal computer market... if Apple delivers on its promises. And those are some big promises; the company has been tossing around words like "magical" and "revolutionary" to describe what many have dismissed as nothing more than a larger version of its iPod touch. But is that all there is to this device? Is the hope that Apple promises for this new computing experience nothing more than marketing fluff and strategic hyperbole? Or is this a different beast altogether -- a true sign that change has come to the world of the PC? We have the definitive answers to those questions (and many more) right here, so read on for our full review of the Apple iPad!"

 The Apple iPad, pride of Apple. This is my favorite part of the above excerpt.

"The iPad is something in between its monumental iPhone and wildly successful MacBook line"

 They have it exactly right. Take out all the hype, all the shameless plugs, and all the typical Mac reasoning, and you have just that. The iPad could be described as a MacBook trying to be an iPhone. I've heard lots of things about the iPad. Here's a few things I'd like to bring up.

1. It's supposed to be functional.
2. It's supposed to be a breakthrough in technology.
3. It's supposed to take the "throne" from Apple's other products. (I wasn't aware there was a "throne" for shenanigans or propaganda.)

These all share something in common. They are logically wrong. Allow me to explain.

1. It's supposed to be functional.

No, you see, a mouse is functional. A touch pad is very much less functional in many situations, being far slower for typing and less accurate than a mouse. This is okay for a small phone, but for something competing with laptops? The iPad's keyboard will lack the physical click of a real keyboard, something we could have removed long ago if we had ever wanted it gone. And with the reduced size of an iPad, it should come as no surprise to people that it is not a high-end computer. This being said, how exactly is it functional? It isn't, it's pretty.

  2.  It's supposed to be a breakthrough in technology.

I'm calling Shenanigans. I mean really, not only has the exact same technology been used on the iPad's freaking predecessor, the iPhone... But it has been used on other things way before it was ever even announced. How about the incredibly famous Nintendo DS? How about the iTouch? New? Breakthrough? Not even close. Your high horse is built off of stolen ideas Apple. At least admit it.

  3.  It's supposed to take the "throne" from Apple's other products.

First, it's too big to take anything from the phone / mp3 player line, and too weak and non-functional to take anything from the laptop line. Second, the iPhone and even the new DSi does this stuff better in my opinion. Why? They're smaller, a stylus is more accurate than a finger, and most importantly. They don't try to be a computer. They're mobile devices. And that justifies their flaws. Oh, and they don't cost an arm and a leg.


In conclusion, don't be fooled by the hype around the iPad. There's nothing worth exchanging your laptop or smartphone for.

Facebookers outraged over undercover FBI agents posing as "friends"

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/city-news/fbi-undercover-facebook/
"The AP mentions the Los Angeles case in which federal prosecutors unsuccessfully moved against a woman, Lori Drew, for posing as a teen boy on MySpace and then allegedly harassing a 13-year-old neighborhood girl who later hanged herself. She was nabbed for allegedly violating MySpace's terms of service -- posing as someone she isn't -- and convicted in L.A. before a higher-court judge overturned the ruling.
Aren't federal poseurs on Facebook doing the same thing Drew did? Facebook has a similar rule against giving false information when opening an account on the site."

Aaah... Facebook drama. On a list of websites I hate most, Facebook is right at the top. But that's a story for another article.

The internet is often considered a place of anonymity, where people can do what they please without fear of offline consequences. However, I don't sympathize with these people.

Facebook is a strict place with strict rules. If they expected anonymity there they thought wrong, very, very wrong. I've seen this since the first time I researched Facebook, that it was not a place to be anonymous.

Secondly, people seem to be forgetting that these are the authorities, not civilians, and certainly not bound to the same laws as civilians. The law for civilians does not automatically apply to the authorities, and it's their job to decide what is appropriate.

There is a huge difference between an undercover cop on facebook that adds suspected criminals and things like that in hopes of obtaining useful information and a lady who pretends to be someone else for the sake of harassing people and causing harm.

I support the FBIs ability to do this. Furthermore, unless you're a criminal, they probably are not going to randomly add you and start leeching info from you. This is logic. So if you're not a criminal, in the same boat as myself, then you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of this affecting your privacy.

As for criminals that abuse their privacy to break the law, what right do they have to that privacy anyway? It's their criminal choices, their consequences, and their life they screwed up. They tried to abuse the safety of their rights to privacy to screw other people over, and it's people like them that are the reason we have to deal with officials wanting to reduce privacy in the first place. I for one love the idea of one of these people being behind bars.

Firefox shamed on first day of CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacker challenge

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=5865
"VANCOUVER, BC — The first day of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacker challenge wrapped up here today with a familiar face going after a familiar target.
And, for the second year in a row, a German hacker known simply as “Nils” exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox to take complete control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine."

I have personally been the victim of Firefox flaws. I've had it crash, become unstable, and memory leak up a storm. This being said, despite the fact that it was my default browser for several years, and I still use it regularly...

I'm rather tired of Firefox.

I look at Chrome, which now has add-on support and has never given me problems over anything, and on top of this, has been credited with being very secure, fast, and lightweight, and I'm starting to question why I go back to using Firefox.

Is anyone else starting to get the impression that Firefox is a bit bloated, slow to start, and now that it's essentially #1 in terms of fame and personal use, insecure?

Browsers are very lightweight. I encourage people to try several different Browsers, mainly Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8 all on the same system. Use them, test them, See if perhaps your initial browser choice wasn't optimum.

Windows 7 Phone details

In my last blog post I talked about Windows 7 Phone not having Copy&Paste or Multi-tasking.

Conveniently I found another post that clarifies one of these two issues.

Link

In this article the issue where Microsoft does not plan to include Multi-tasking in the Windows 7 Phone is clarified. The good news is that that it was a false rumor, and that multi-tasking is planned for the Windows 7 Phone. What things will be able to be multi-tasked may be limited, however, multi-tasking will infact be available.

For instance, you will be able to listen to music and use other apps at the same time.

For more info, please read the original article, or this quote:


"Microsoft itself makes use of multitasking in the operating system. For users and developers, an application pauses when the user switches to another program, and the first one could be shut down by the operating system to reclaim CPU or memory resources.
"This was not a quick decision," says Charlie Kindel, partner group program manager for the Windows Phone 7 Developer Experience. Microsoft looked at what it could take to create and use background processing on the phone for developers and users, and the potential impact on the all-important user experience. The conclusion: A lot of infrastructure would have to be built and a lot of added complexity would result.
At the same time, Microsoft executives say the Windows Phone 7 platform provides a range of integrations and services for applications that provide the kind of multitasking users want. For example, if you start a music track on the WP7 device, it will continue playing if you switch from the music application to another one. The "live tiles" in the UI -- the intelligent rectangles and squares that can be linked to phone or cloud-based services and applications -- coupled with Microsoft's free push notification service for Windows Phone provide a way for developers, their apps and services to continually notify and update phone-based programs, for example, with the latest scores from the NCAA tournament.
The goal, Kindel says, is to ensure "We control the quality of the overall user experience.""

The lack of Copy&Paste was unfortunately not discussed in this article. I did however find an article that discussed the lack of Copy and Paste.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191825/windows_phone_7_copy_and_paste_mia.html

"Microsoft revealed this week at its Mix 10 conference for Microsoft-oriented Web developers that its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile OS will not include a clipboard capability for copy-and-paste operations -- at least not in the first version.
"Windows Phone 7 Series will not initially offer copy-and-paste; instead, we try to solve the most common uses for copy-and-paste via single-tap action," says Casey McGee, a senior marketing manager in Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business group. "For example, people often want to take an address and view it on a map, highlight a term in the browser, and do a search or copy a phone number to make a call. Instead of the user manually doing a copy and paste in these scenarios, we recognize those situations automatically and make them happen with just one touch. In our early testing, people have been pleased with this approach, but we're always listening to feedback and will continue to improve our feature set over time based on what we hear.""



What I see here is Microsoft trying to immitate something Apple did... The problem with this is that nobody liked tihs "feature" on the Iphone either. On the bright side, if you read the above quote there is a ray of sunshine. Number one is that Microsoft implied in their statement that they may add copy and paste in a later version

Number 2 didn't appear in the above quote, because it is said later in the article. Developers will be able to add copy&paste functionality to their apps. This to me sais that if Microsoft doesn't wise up, a developer inevitably will and implement copy&paste in say a web browser, where it's most important to people.

"Casey also notes that developers are free to implement copy-and-paste in their own applications"

In conclusion, the future of the Windows Seven Phone looks fairly bright.

One thing of note, however, is that the Windows Seven Phone will not support flash. From what I understand, flash can severely reduce battery life. To this I say to Microsoft, here's a better option. Include Flash compatibility, simply add an option to disable or enable it, so that people can choose.

The option is better than not having a choice.

Here's a quote from the the article at http://gizmodo.com/5495005/hey-microsoft-dont-fck-up-windows-phone-7

"Dear Microsoft, you did a good job at out-Appling Apple with the Windows Phone 7. At least on paper. But instead of trying to beat them completely, it seems that you want to screw it all with two stupid decisions.

The first one: Eliminate application multitasking. After making fun of Apple's iPhone for not supporting multitasking, you are exactly following Apple's task model... just when it seems that they are bringing multitasking with iPhone OS 4.0."

"And then... then there is copy and paste."

This will suffice for the article at hand. As you may know Windows is releasing a mobile OS platform to compete with the Iphone. My question to Microsoft is... You wouldn't really pull something like this, right? It should be common knowledge by now that everyone likes copy&paste, and everyone hates the lack of ability to multitask.

After all, there are several websites for popular mobile devices that offer a hack for tabbed browsing on normally tab-less browsers. A good example of one of these tabless browsers is the Opera browser for the Nintendo DSi, or Nintendo Wii. Neither have tabs built in, but in both cases there are websites that attempt to hack makeshift tabs for you. In some cases they work very well, such as one site called http://dsitabs.co.cc/

If that doesn't convince you that people love their multi-tasking I don't know what will.

As for copy paste, I don't see why it's a matter of "having it" instead of a matter of "not having it"

After all, shouldn't such a simple, basic functionality of Windows be standard? I dread the idea of typing everything out, on a phone no less, everything I could've copy&pasted in far less time. Don't remove things for no good reason.

This isn't the computer market, this is the phone/mp3 market. And to be honest Apple dominates that market right now. Microsoft needs to take this area of their business seriously, because to be honest it seems obvious to me they couldn't care less about Apple in the computer market.

All in all I think Microsoft has the advantage of better technology here and should make good use of it.

I don't know about the readers, but if the new Windows Phone turns out to be as good it sounds, I'll make an effort to get it.

Microsoft creates a browser choice screen for Europeans

Microsoft put a "Browser Choice Screen" in European versions of Windows. Now, I'm not going to sugar coat this at all. Microsoft chickened out from a fight they had in the bag. See there was, and is, a major controversial problem with the browser choice screen that has already started to cause complaints.

Quote from Link

The ballot screen is also giving more obscure browsers a chance for recognition. In addition to displaying icons for the five major browsers, the screen offers up some real estate to Avant Browser, K-Meleon, Flock, Maxthon, Sleipnir, GreenBrowser, and FlashPeak. However, a few of these lesser-known rivals are unhappy over their placement on the screen and have complained to the EC.

Due to the width of the screen, just IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are visible at first glance. Only after scrolling to the right can people view the other six browsers in the list. If these more obscure companies have a case, Microsoft may need to tweak its ballot a bit further.

 What you're seeing here is Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari cashing in on their own popularity in order to get an unfair advantage over other browsers. It seems rather hypocritical to me that the same people that complained about Internet Explorer having an unfair advantage are perfectly fine with snuffing out the smaller less popular browsers when they can get away with it.

Incase you weren't aware, there is a scroll bar on the browser choice menu that can show you these smaller less popular browsers. They cannot be seen like the "Popular" browsers by default however.

I'm personally lucky enough to live in the USA where we don't have to deal with this political nonsense

Furthermore, am I the only one noticing that once again Apple is strutting around in their good guy outfit? If you ask me, Microsoft should refuse to put Safari on the list until Apple gives a similar browser choice screen with Internet Explorer on the list. After all, shouldn't they, as big company #2, be following the same fairness rules as everyone else? Or will such questions simply be put off until Apple starts to resemble Microsoft?

Somehow I doubt Apple will be questioned about their own practices for a good long time.

I don't know about the readers, but here in the USA quite easy to install your favorite browser and remove Internet Explorer.