facebook: profit from it
Another update: Why does stuff keep happening on facebook always! I had to join back to be in the loop! GAH!
Update:
See what I did there?
‘facebook blue’ might not actually be a colour, but I feel it is the colour of investigatability after having read this article my friend Rahul sent me. My spell checker tells me “Dude, sounds like something you made up to the strains of a Who song!” (I stole that bit from House).
What happened?
According to the story a woman lost her medical-leave benefits because her apparently secure facebook profile was used as part of an investigation by her insurance provider. And this happened even when her profile view was limited to only those she approved.
I am an active Facebook user.
I have been an active user of facebook for a while now (since last year). After discovering the service I was lost in wonder and in awe of the service. I even went to the point of evangelizing it as much linux. But I didn’t know about the dark side to it back then. After all my friends moved over I started realizing that it wasn’t as cracked up as I thought it to be and I strove to break free. And then I found that while deactivating my account merely removed it from public view, facebook still held all my data in the backroom storage archive. Even their deactivation process is a joke. Logging back into the account reactivates it. There’s barely any difference. Except that as per their ToS, content from deactivated accounts is not shared as per the license that was granted to them when you posted that same content to facebook in the first place. So the only way to gain some measure of control was to quit the service and be an outsider. So, I did that a couple of times. And then I got tired of people saying, “Did you see what
And after having listened to the doubts expressed by a lot of people online, I actually took the time to go through their Terms of Service once and found that whatever users posted to facebook gave facebook the right to share the information with trusted third parties. This in essence meant that facebook could take anything that I gave them - status updates, photographs, notes and all other personal information (I haven’t read their privacy policy but I get an inkling that it’ll be a minefield of contradictions) - and possibly profit from it.
“We don’t just advertise.”
So, if you think about it, their only source of revenue needn’t be just advertising. It could also be allowing these ‘trusted’ third parties untrammelled access to the information that they need to do a background check or anything else they like.
I don’t feel secure on Facebook.
The answer to the security question has always swung like a pendulum weight for me. I alternate between extreme paranoia and extreme boredom and extreme recklessness when it comes to using the service. I have deleted my account numerous times and gone back only because one of my friends decided it was easier to post his photos to facebook rather than open an account with a service like picasa or flickr to post an album with 200 photos because all his friends could then see it.
Dear friends, have any of you ever heard of using a photo-sharing service like flickr and then posting links via twitter or even email!? Apparently not. I dislike having to do this each time, so I keep my account on facebook open. Sometimes, I think even of doing what Rahul does: to screw it all and not care.
Another possibility is that security on facebook is easier to circumvent than most people think. What with all these applications on there that a lot of people use - quizzes, games - could it be possible that third parties can create malicious applications designed to trick users into giving them their access credentials?
Or is it just possible that almost anybody who depends on facebook for their ‘social experience’ has a higher chance of having chosen an easy password that can be brute-forced quite easily?
Either way, there are problems with their security that need to be fixed as soon as possible. There have been too many stories of hacks appearing all over the place.
Should I pull the plug on social awareness?
Maybe it’s time I stopped chasing behind what my friends send me, and let people send me the content instead. Only email from now on and not HTML email. (Plaintext is the best.)
I wish there was some to get people back to using email and coding their web presences in HTML. Coincidentally I started learning HTML yesterday so that I could write my own website from scratch one day. More on that later. For now back to facebook.
It might not seem like it, being the nice, blue and friendly place to be with photos of your friends smiling back at you from all over the place. Any doubts that form are instantly quashed as you find yourself clicking and typing your way to the place where the foundation of all friendships are built.
fakebook. bah!
it’s ok
The problem with Facebook is that it’s too distracting. I find people playing there half the time while they pile up one unread IM after another. From multiple contacts.
A friend of mine showed up as a green dot on Google Talk. After saying hello and asking a few trivial questions. I went wandering around the Internet in search of somebody I could talk to.
When I checked back 15 minutes later, she’d replied with trivial answers.
And no information on why she’d taken so long to reply.
I replied with apologies and an explanation on why I’d taken so long to reply to her messages. And wandered off…
And 15 minutes later, I chanced across an “It’s okay, I’m on Farmville.”
15 minutes later I replied back: “I just deleted deactivated my facebook account.”
What Am I Doing In Chennai
I spent the past many days in Chennai just working on all kinds of stuff. I don’t know whether the term working really applies here, but it makes anything I did sound all the more important, so, to hell with being correct, I’ll use it!
Trying to find a job (where people PAY me to use Facebook)
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I spent about two days working on the old resume, which didn’t exist up till that point, and also on a over letter that would somehow explain all the shortcomings in my portfolio of academic achievements: “It’s not there because I was doing something really super cool!” I registered my profile on naukri.com and have found about 30-40 jobs that match my profile, but somehow I’m not quite sure where I can say yes. Mind you, everybody is mostly looking for people who can write basic Java code, and/or people who can be trained to write .NET code. I can’t do either that well. If somebody was looking for a person who could mess around with UNIX boxes and do all kinds of neat stuff with them, then I’m only a pen away from signing on the dotted line. Seriously, I like messing around. I like it even more than commenting all over Facebook - a thought that I expressed out loud. People agreed with me, as you can see. The only thing that’s missing right now, is the pay!
firstnaukri.com: first impressions - How Stupid Do They Think I Am?
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I also came across firstnaukri.com in my search. As the name implies - it’s a naukri.com (group website) for freshers. Odd thing about this site, it takes advantage of how clueless freshers are when it comes the concepts of confidential information and personal stuff. They ask you to upload copies of your marks cards, certificates, (finger prints, DNA samples and medical records coming soon!) and anything else you like. Even though I haven’t been through their ToS, (and I doubt any fresher actually has been) I don’t think the idea of uploading all my academic records - not-at-all impressive as they are - is going to help me in any way. They may protect my confidentiality through use of words like “confidential” and “secure storage”, I’m still not sure.
I liked the fact that they’re promoting the use of video resumes. They even have a sample video CV up on the site - its one of an computer animation whizkid who doesn’t sound excited to be doing what he does at all (and come on! those look like rip-off tutorial videos from Compositing 101!) - but I can’t deny it, it does look pretty impressive, and who knows, maybe he even landed a job from that. He does mention a blog which I (and only I appear to have) checked out.
Blogwalling/Pounding The Wall ——> Setting Up A Laconica Instance
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I spent about two days setting up a laconi.ca instance for my friend Siddharth who had trouble understanding the different between a blog, and a wall.
“Blogs are for losers!” according to him. “Feelings, and all that emotional bullshit.”
“But they’re a great place to rant, you see. And that’s what you keep doing all over everybody’s wall!”
“But here I get immediate feedback and that’s where I find blogs lacking. Not much spontaneity.”
“How about micro-blogs? Those are pretty good, right?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. I saw that laconica thingy at your place. Looked stupid.”
“But that’s exactly the kind of stuff you need. It provides you with the ability to make short, instant rapid fire posts, and get immediate feedback from people while maintaining context, and control over where the conversation is going. You can’t even do that on Facebook. All you have is a bunch of people commenting one-below-the-other on a single story that HAS NOTHING to do with your ranting.”
“Blogging is stupid. You’re a jackass!”
Which brought us back to where we’d left off. So, I said, I setup a laconica for him, and he could do with it as he pleased. He didn’t seem to care, but I thought it’d be a fun thing to try out anyway. And I had the experience to gain of setting up something on a server which I didn’t know anything about - where it was, what it was running or who was running it?
So, I proceeded to find a free hosting service that would give me enough flexibility and power to setup a laconica instance. I went through free hosting services - awardspace, black apple hosting, and came back full circle to trying out something I had to pay somebody for, which I couldn’t do.
So I asked my good friend Vikram, for permission to use the server we deployed r.emynd.us on. And he said go ahead, since it’s only going to be up for a few months anyway. Well, that would serve as an excellent temporary solution.
So, I went ahead and set it up. While I’m yet to understand how most of the pieces in laconica fit together, I’m pretty impressed at it’s ability to fit into such a small package. It can be downloaded as a 5 MB tarball, and it takes up a few more MB when untarred. While setting it up never seems to have worked for me, I still can’t figure out why the install.php file never works for me. I tried setting it up on my own machine, and also deploying it on a remote server elsewhere. Nowhere does it seem to work as promised - for me - but I did see a few people on identi.ca thanking @evan for it’s utility, so maybe it does work. But I found the included .sql query files easy to use, and I used that to setup the database schema, and everything was easy from then on - directory perms, paths, and domain configuration.
I went ahead and followed the instructions on setting it up for Facebook Connect, and also creating a Facebook application for the instance. Now it’s Connected (!) to Facebook and working just fine.
I’m even thinking along the lines of developing for Facebook. It’s quite a neat platform, and while I may not fully imderstand the impack of some of the resitrcition sthe platform imposes on developers, I’m beginning to gain a sense of appreciation for what they’ve been able to accomplish, and also why it remains the more popular platform despite OpenSocial’s presence on the map. I wonder what happened to those guys who put their weight behind that. They don’t seem to be anywhere I can. Maybe I ought to think about developing there as well! Maybe I’m the only one. :D
So, let’s see how Sid takes to this new thing. I checked 5 minutes ago and nothing seems to have changed since yesterday. And he hasn’t made any posts just yet. Oddly the instance doesn’t seem to be working with twhirl. Maybe I forgot to do something. I’ll have to check on that.
Grandad’s Blog
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Besides this, I’ve been helping grandad get his blog up online and out of Microsoft Word files. I tried out a couple of blog hosting services - Blogger which I’m quickly getting tired of - I’ve used them since 2005, my first blog (deleted now) was there. Wordpress which I’m beginning to like. I went from self-hosted-are-you-freaking-crazy to wordpress.com is just fine (for now). So, you can check out grandad’s rants at http://masadanand.wordpress.com/
There are about 40 years of writing more where the stuff there came from. And it’s all in one big fat scrapbook. I doubt Wordpress’
3 GB limit is going to be enough to hold all of it.
Besides all this
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I’ve been spending time reading and re-reading Patrick Naughton’s excellent book (a little out-of-date now, but still good) on Java. I’m getting the hang of multi-threading and hope to be past all this and onto imaging and the really really neat bits of Java soon.
I’ve also got to think of booking a ticket back home. Going to McD’s in Chennai and seeing if the increased humidity here makes the fries here taste any different.
I’ve also been taking a lot of photographs. Not having brought my camera along, I’ve been forced to fall back on various cameraphones, as diverse in terms of megapixels as in terms of quality of content. My cousin’s cameraphone is a 3.2 MP (it claims to be, you never really know with these things) Sony Ericsson K790i. I’m trying to get the images off the phone, and I’ll post it here.
That’s about it for now, back to the real world.
