Facebook doesn't care about your privacy

Today I pulled up a web page in my browser to read its article on Google Buzz links, which turned out to not be the info for which I was looking (why does Obi-Wan's Jedi mastery not imply mastery of English grammar?), and what did I see?

This:
What the hell? How does it know that none of my friends already clicked the thumbs-up icon button to indicate that they liked that web page? If my friends had liked the web page that I was viewing, how does it know who my friends are?

Facebook's new "Personalization" web feature. The Personalization feature is a little bit of code that web authors and bloggers can put on their web pages.

This code "phones home" to Facebook every time you access that page. This is not very new. Trackers and web hit counters do this all the time and generate marketing information and ad success rates. But the key here is that Facebook knows exactly who you are and what precisely you are viewing on the web.

Sites accessing the Personalization feature have access to all your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and friend and fan page connections.

Considering that Facebook's Personalization code can be placed on any web page on the Net, it seems that this has some pretty broad privacy implications. I have turned off the feature in the privacy settings of my Facebook account. It was on by default, and the introduction page that was splashed on my profile announcing it's arrival did not explain how to turn it off.

Protect your privacy -- turn off Facebook's Personalization feature that tracks your activity on the web by following these steps:

1. Go to your profile, and bring up the "Account" menu, and choose "Privacy Settings" from the drop-down.
2. Click on the "Application and Websites" link.
3. In the section "Instant Personalization" for "Control[ing] how select partners can personalize their features with my public information when [you] first arrive on their websites", click the "Edit Setting" button.
4. Make sure that the check-box for on this page is unchecked. Apparently, once you have removed the check from this box, your setting will be saved.

There is still no guarantee that Facebook isn't keeping track of every partnered website that you visit.

The cookie used by the Personalization widget is your Facebook cookie. That cookie is stored in your web browser. So every time the Personalization code phones home it sends your user name to Facebook, along with the URL of the website making the request to access your information.

Do you see how easy it is for Facebook (and other sites) to keep a log of every single website that you visit? So long as their code is used often enough by people who write the websites that you visit, eventually Facebook can collect a pretty good profile of your web usage.

It's one thing for Facebook to know who all your friends are simply because they help you keep in touch with them. But now Facebook can know things about you that are well beyond information about your social connections. As of this post, this is the default setting -- their new feature defaults to spying on you.

Are you comfortable with that?

Google Reader feed URL for future reference

Feed:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F02879164155444581511%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Stream:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F02879164155444581511%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Gravity might be entropy

And entropy is a loss of quantum information in matter.

Tonight I read an article about some ideas on entropy and gravity that seemed to suggest that gravity is somehow an outcome of the complex relationship of the quantum information, or states, of the subatomic particles that make up matter.

Trying to understand this, I'm imagining that a chunk of space dust: not much matter, not many subatomic particles in various states of interaction. Big planet with lots of matter: lots of subatomic particles, all in various quantum states, all interacting in complex ways.

Jae-Weon Lee at Jungwon University in South Korea seems to have some pretty advanced ideas about gravity and quantum information. His theory seems to arise from Landauer's principle which suggests that data erasure or merging of computational paths results in more entropy. Entropy is basically just the loss of structure or information.

The article doesn't really get into the details of how changes to subatomic particles' quantum states actually causes gravity. I guess I'll have to do some more reading on the subject to get a better handle on the ideas.

But the article did remind me of some ideas I was playing with a few weeks ago now.

The Earth is a pretty bizarre place sometimes. Life on this planet seems to organize itself in ways that seem so, well, disorganized. Nature is almost always portrayed in stories and films as a wild, uncontrollable, random place where nothing makes sense, and everything is in constant flux. This idea seems to be deeply entrenched in Western thought -- the idea that the natural world of life on this planet is chaotic. Even deeper thinkers tend to imply that its patterns are spontaneous and simply the inevitable result of mathematical coincidence.

What if life itself is the result, or embodiment of entropy? The most chaotic environment I can imagine is when the universe was theoretically just a hot plasma soup. All that energy began to condense into matter and collect in gravity pools and spin around singularities. Eventually matter seems to have somehow organized itself into reproductive patterns -- life. But why?

What if the mathematically chaotic patterns that we observe in nature are a sort of response to gravity and the loss of information?

It almost seems as if this planet's life is itself intent on escaping Earth's gravity. Single-celled organisms writhe and wiggle about in fluid. Fish propel themselves through the oceans. Amphibians drag themselves ashore and lurk about. Insects burrow and crawl and dart and fly. Mammals run and swim. Birds soar. Anything, any movement, it seems. To ever stop is just to die.

As if gravity somehow represents death, while at the same time being the womb of life. As though the vastness of space were the ultimate destination of life, and the one true outcome of order from chaos. Every creature, toiling forwards, gazing upwards, arms outstretched, wings unfurled, desperate to escape the clutches of their origin.

As if life was intent only on filling up the voids of the universe with the energy represented and embodied by its patterns. The proportions of energy represented by an individual life form are astronomical when observed at the sub-atomic level, but spread throughout an organism, mechanically organized energy propels life into patterns of events that play out through time in what seems like nothing more than chaos.


Almost certainly, I don't know what I'm talking about, but ideas are fun to play with.

Stuart McMillen's cartoons

Stuart McMillen consistently produces delightful cartoons that capture the heart of the inquisitive and independent life. Some of them are very inspiring, and others convicting.

At the Recombinant Records website, you can find a selection of Stuart McMillen's works.

The pressure mounts on defrauder Blodget to explain why he is such a moron

Any failure of NBC to adequately cover the Olympic Winter Games is not a big deal for me.

What is a concern to me, is language like this: "Pressure builds on NBC to explain why it's ruining the Olympics"

The so-called pressure to which the author of this weird article refers, is the article that he wrote the day before in which he "asked" the very questions of NBC that he is claiming NBC is being pressured to answer.

This kind of illogical self-referential editorial "journalism" feedback is typical of the sort of dancing-with-smurfs nonsense talk for which certain entertainment-news channels are known.

On a blog that also hosts articles supposed to have been written by Sarah Palin, I suppose I can't be very surprised to find such stupidity.

Unable to watch the State of the Union address tonight

Because my AT&T High Speed Internet (DSL) connection is so utterly useless and incapable, I was unable to watch the President's State of the Union address tonight. I could not find a single solitary website that had an unbroken video stream of the broadcast of the President's speech.

I just deleted a profanity-filled rage letter to AT&T, but let me just say that I feel nothing but animus and resentment for this and every other telecommunications company with whom I have ever done business.

It makes me angry that AT&T collected US $6.4 billion in data service revenues this past year, and yet somehow, they are unable or unwilling to replace the copper wires in my neighborhood with fiber optic cables.

Snap software judgment of the day

As far as remote desktop connection software for Mac OS X goes, CoRD is the best.

CoRD > TSclientX
TSclientX > RDC

Why?

CoRD - http://cord.sourceforge.net/

-	Download size:	1.12 MB
-	Install size:	3 MB
-	Open Source?	Yes
-	Ease of use:	Incredibly easy
-	Installation:	Drag CoRD.app to Applications folder

TSclientX - http://desktopecho.com/tsclientx/
Pros: Not Microsoft, Open Source
Cons: 40 Megabyte download

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 -
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx
Pros: ?
Cons: By Microsoft (not Open Source), comes as an mpkg (no uninstaller), 10 Megabyte download

FSM in the heavens

It's the flying spaghetti monster in the clouds! PROOF!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060822.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia