Month: November 2007

Facebook Beacon

As follow-up to Ben’s look at Facebook’s Beacon system, I began investigating the extent of its privacy implications. What I found is extremely disconcerting. Facebook is collecting information about user actions on affiliate sites regardless of whether or not the user chose to opt out, and regardless of whether or not the user is logged into Facebook at that time. The evidence I present below directly contradicts both public statements made by Facebook, and direct email correspondence from their privacy department, demonstrating that Beacon is a serious threat to user privacy.

more greed. if they continue like that they are toast.

HyperTIES

HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES Browser (right) and UniPress Emacs Multi Window Text Editor Authoring Tool (left), tab windows and pie menus, running under the NeWS Window System.

what could have been. another awesome OS that died because it was proprietary

Undetectability Conjecture

In the recent article `Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observation’ Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe, arrives at the puzzling conclusion that `we should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size) where most observers should be, while in fact we do not’. In this note we discuss the intriguing possibility whether we could be in fact immersed in a large civilization without being aware of it. Our conclusion is that this possibility cannot be ruled out provided 2 conditions are met, that we call the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture.

this is one of the more interesting papers on the fermi paradox: we are basically too dumb to be of interest to older civilizations.

Ajatus

Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.

Ajatus-Note-Related

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we’re taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

  • Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
  • Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
  • Simple base data types (note, event, contact, …) that users can customize and extend
  • Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb’s restful JSON interface)
  • Speed

using couchdb. for some reason, henri’s feed just updated today on reader.

Zuckerberg Privacy

The independent magazine, which is aimed at Harvard alumni, put up a series of court documents in a downloadable format here it obtained from a court in Massachusetts related to a hard-hitting story it recently published about the origins of Facebook at Harvard, and had inadvertently not redacted that sensitive personal information in all places at first.

hehehe

Laissez-Faire Marriage

I think it’s time to restore freedom of contract to marriage. Why should 2 men, for example, be denied the same rights to contract as are allowed to a man and a woman? Far from ending civilization the extension of the bourgeoisie concept of contract ever further is the epitome of civilization. Our modern concept of marriage, for example, is simply one instantiation of the idea of contract. People will claim that this means a chaos of contracts for every form of marriage. This is wrong factually and also conceptually misguided. Factually, we already allow men and women to adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials. Moreover, different states offer different marriage contracts with some offering more than one type. Partnerships of other kinds have access to all manner of contractual arrangements without insufferable problems. More importantly, the chaos of contracts argument is fundamentally misguided. The purpose of contract law is to give individual’s greater control over their lives. To make contract law a restraint on how people may govern themselves is a perversion of the social contract. To restrict people from accessing the tools of civilization on the basis of their sexual preference is baseless discrimination.

as usual, there are deeper, economic reasons behind some of the crap bible-thumpers are rallying behind.