facebook « Tikkunista!

5. Pages Torn from the Facebook

Nov-12-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Sure, I spend way too much time on Facebook. Isn’t that essential, these days? But you know, the communication is shallow, the tentacles are clingy, and the privacy just isn’t. Here are a three interesting approaches, starting with Zadie Smith, who is always gloriously entertaining even if you disagree with her, on why she doesn’t like Facebook (though she’s on it too.) Then the page Google puts up if you try to import your G-mail addresses to Facebook, (it’s pretty amazing), and finally a useful anti-Facebook plugin.

* Generation Why? Zadie Smith The New York Review of Books

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

… At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed…. I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete asLiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore

* Google’s Message When You Import Contacts To Facebook

* Facebook Blocker Extension for Safari and Chrome and Firefox

We’re beginning to feel overwhelmed by the frequency with which Facebook links are starting to appear on many of the sites we visit in our daily routines, so we decided to do something about it. This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.

6. The Social Network

Oct-22-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The Social network is the hit film about the creation of Facebook. The top critics on Rotten Tomatoes were 100% fresh about it (“Impeccably scripted, beautifully directed, and filled with fine performances, The Social Network is a riveting, ambitious example of modern filmmaking at its finest.”). But what’s the real story, as opposed to the film plot? The New Yorker tells about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, while Vanity Fair has a fascinating piece on Sean Parker, the Napster man who came into Facebook with a vision. Both are worth reading to answer questions the film raises, and we follow with two pieces about privacy issues FB is currently facing, or not.

* Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg opens up : The New Yorker

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East.

* With a Little Help From His Friends Vanity Fair

Sean Parker was sitting in World Civilization class at his Virginia high school when someone brought him a note. His father, it read, was waiting to take him to an orthodontist appointment. A chill ran down Parker’s spine. He didn’t have an orthodontist. When he got outside, his father angrily whisked him into the family minivan. When they arrived at their modest suburban house, a team of F.B.I. agents was toting papers and a desktop computer out of Sean’s room.

Within a few short years, Parker went from apprehended 16-year-old hacker—he had managed to break into the computer networks of numerous multi-national corporations and even military databases—to world-class Internet entrepreneur. In 1999 he became rather notorious, at 19, for helping an even younger teenager named Shawn Fanning create Napster. That free song-sharing service upended the music industry. More recently, Parker played an indispensable role as the founding president of Facebook, the mammoth social-networking site where 500 million people now spend 700 billion minutes a month. Had he not joined founder Mark Zuckerberg in Palo Alto in the summer of 2004, when the fledgling Facebook was just five months old, the service almost certainly would not be the colossus it is today.

* Has Facebook lost control of the Platform? | The Social – CNET News

The problem, according to the Journal, is that some of these third-party companies, including extremely popular ones like FarmVille manufacturer Zynga, were selling that data to advertisers and tracking companies in violation of Facebook’s terms of use. Some of those tracking companies, too, were matching up Facebook user data to other personally identifying information that they had on hand, in effect putting together puzzle pieces into clear pictures of unsuspecting users’ identities.

*Facebook – CIA Profile Database Youtube

Facebook is associated with the CIA for the purpose of profiling all members.

5. Computers are Your Friends. Isn’t that Right, Hal?

Sep-24-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Like many things we couldn’t live without, computers may not be good for us, as a chorus of people are pointing out. The Guardian has an amusing piece that sounds the core themes, Gizmodo has a vicious anti-Facebook rant, and Google stays one step ahead of your mind. But as William Gibson quotes this week on his blog, (and it’s exactly what makes Tikkunista! possible): “Fuck the exposition,” he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. “Just *be*. The exposition can come later.” He describes a theory of television narrative. “If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or ‘second-line’ musicians–you can look it up.” The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to over-explain, allowing history to light the characters from within.

* Google Instant Is Trying To Kill Me Charlie Brooker The Guardian

Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.

I entered the room at 10.30 am. Because I was interested in the phone-hacking story, I’d set up an automatic Twitter search for the term “Coulson” (eavesdropping, essentially: he’d hate it). Whenever someone mentioned his name, a window would pop up in the corner of my screen to alert me. Often their messages included a link to a webpage, which I’d end up skim-reading. This was on top of the other usual web distractions: emails, messageboards, self-deluding “research” on Wikipedia, and so on.

By 1pm I’d written precisely three lines of script. Yet my fingers had scarcely left the keyboard. My brain felt like a loose, whirring wheel that span with an audible buzz yet never quite touched the ground….

* Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook Gizmodo

After some reflection, I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I’m not missing anything. In any event, here’s my “Top Ten” reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

See also: The Twenty-Seven People You’ll Meet on Facebook (cartoon: Joy of Tech)

* Google Wants to Own the Future…by Predicting It! Datamation

…Even more tellingly, Schmidt said. “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Schmidt conjured up a world where, knowing your location, Google will remind you of things it believes you want to be reminded of.

That’s actually where Google is going. The present instant, the current moment, the right now isn’t fast enough for Google. They want the next instant they can’t wait for you to think. They want to tell you what you’re going to think before you think it.

8. Media Protection

Apr-30-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: Everyone wants protection, but from what? The EFF wants protection from Facebook Intrusion, while the Music Industry wants protection from pirating, (and has some remarkable bedfellows in mind). Meanwhile a rogue Muslim website (or is it a false flag operation by right-wing Israelis?) wants protection from South Park, while the Times wants protection from the powers of the rogue website. You can’t tell the players without a guideline, and that’s where we come in.

* Facebook’s Evil Interfaces Electronic Frontier Foundation

OK, perhaps the word “evil” is a little strong. There’s no doubt that bad user-interfaces can come from good intentions. Design is difficult, and accidents do happen. But when an accident coincidentally bolsters a company’s business model at the expense of its users’ rights, it begins to look suspicious. And when similar accidents happen over and over again in the same company, around the same issues, it’s more than just coincidence. It’s a sign something’s seriously wrong.

* Music Industry Spokesman Loves Child Porn Cory Doctorow boingboing

A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you’ve got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:

“Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. “It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.

* South Park New York Times

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.

In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

RSS Feed

8. Media Protection

Categories

Blog Roll

Tags