benrobb

The Case Against Net Neutrality

The Lesson Applied » The Case Against Net Neutrality.

I’m going to go ahead and say it.  I’m against Net Neutrality.

I love the concept.  I’d love all content to have equal access to internet pipes, but I don’t want that to be enforced by laws and a governmental morass of regulation and legislation.

If you can achieve the same thing through a gentlemen’s agreement, then it’ll be a thing of beauty, but I think this is one thing the government shouldn’t have their hands in (there are others, but let’s stay on topic).

Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean I should go crying to the government in to solve the problem.  When I was a kid we had a word for people that always appealed to a higher authority when facing a problem.  We called them tattle-tales.

Facebook Is Not Your Friend, Your Friends Are Your Friends

Facebook is not run by philanthropists intent on providing a valuable service to the world by helping them keep in contact with people they know (or don’t know as the case may be).  It is run by businessmen who are making money in various ways that include selling advertising and personalization.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with making money (I like to do that myself), but it does have an impact on how Facebook runs, and you should be aware of the ramifications.  Facebook was initially built on the foundation of privacy and a small group of your friends.  Overtime as the number of users grew, Facebook realized the power of what they’d built (they are now the most visited website on the Internet), they began to leverage their size in ways that required people’s profile information and activity to be more public.  If you haven’t looked at your privacy settings lately, you’re probably sharing with a much larger crowd than you anticipated.  See here for a vivid little demonstration of how Facebook has become more public over time.

Example #1

Every time you update your status, the contents are piped straight to all the major search engines, where search engines do what they do best: they index it and make it findable for anyone who types in related keywords.  In other words, the whole world can see what you write on Facebook, unless you’ve explicitly set your privacy settings to disallow this.  Explicit is the key word here, you can control all these settings, but now you have to set them manually to keep your information private, whereas before it was the default setting.

Example #2

You know all that information you put into your public profile?  Your name, hometown, likes, interests, musical preferences, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, etc?  Yeah, all that information is used to construct a demographic picture of you so that Facebook can target advertisements to you (I’m fine with that), but if you’re signed into Facebook and visit another site while still signed in, that site can also potentially see all the information in your profile.  This allows the site to personalize it’s interface to you which is powerful and actually pretty neat, but it allows a lot of other things to, and you should consciously be making the decision about whether the risk is worth the reward.

What’s Happening?

Keep in mind this is serious enough stuff that members of the US Senate are writing letters to Facebook’s leadership warning that the FTC may get involved if certain concerns aren’t addressed satisfactorily.

So for those who don’t follow tech news, if you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the Open Graph API or Instant Personalization (these are both Facebook “features”), I’ll almost gaurantee that you are sharing much more publicly than you thought you were.  Maybe that’s OK with you, but you should be aware of what you’re doing.  “Knowledge is power” and all that.

So What?

I’m not advocating a Facebook boycott like many in the tech world are doing.  Facebook provides a valuable service that I enjoy.  I am, however, advocating that you know the cost of the service that Facebook provides, even though that cost is not measured in dollars.

If you decide that you don’t want to share your details with the world and the rest of the web, Business Insider put together a handy little guide for putting Facebook on a “Privacy Lockdown”.  The guide will tell you to put everything to “Only Friends”.  You can choose your on level of comfort, I have most of mine set at “Friends of Friends”.

Tags: facebook, privacy

Magic or Technology

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke, 1961.  I invite you to watch the latest photo-editing technology from Adobe.

Tags: adobe, photoshop

The Best Tech Thing Since Sliced Bread

Two programs that have made my Windows-life easier.  One I’ve been using for awhile, one I found yesterday.  Both are programs that add on some (in my opinion) missing functionality in Windows.  Both are also very lightweight on system resources which is important to me.

Launchy: Never use your Start Menu again.  Ever.  A keystroke (mine is Alt+Space) will open a launcher.  Type in the first few letters of the application you want, and it’ll pop up.  Hit Enter to launch the application.

Launchy maintains a catalog of places where it will look for files/applications/anything that matches your keystrokes.  I added My Documents into my catalog along with a few extensions and now I can open a document in its native application just by typing the first few letters of the document name (a la Spotlight).  Beautiful.  It’s not a revolutionary idea, just a lightweight alternative that’s available for Windows Users.  It’s also skinnable, so you can get a few different looks from it.

AutoHotKey:The idea here is simple, the implementation is light-weight, and the end-product is powerful.  Pick any key combination, and execute a script that tells Windows what to do.  There’s a whole scripting language to support this with function calls, if/else logic, etc.  You can tell where your mouse should click, what buttons to type, etc.

A few examples.  Ctrl+Shift+P on my computer will now set my status for my chat client to “On the Phone.”  Ctrl+Shift+A will mark me as “Available” again, and Ctrl+Shift+L will set my status to “Away” and lock my computer.

Now I know that the non-techies in the audience are thinking that I’m wasting my time, but anyone who works on a computer for a living knows that you can use a keyboard about 10 times faster than you can use a mouse.  So the fact that I can perform so many of my common tasks without touching my mouse translates into increased productivity.  That’s cool tech beans.

Tags: software

Gadget Inventory

I’ve been trying to find a local electronics recycler because all my old computer junk is just taking up too much space. When you get new electronics and toys, you’ve got to get rid of some of the old ones.

This process made me realize just how many gadgets I’ve got. Here’s the current inventory that’s not on the recycle list:

• iPod Touch (current favorite)
• Macbook Pro (close second)
• AppleTV
• Mac Mini
• Dell 2407WFP
• 5th Gen Video iPod
• 2nd Gen iPod Nano (the one before the fatties)
• Nintendo Wii
• Dell Optiplex 745
• Dell Optiplex GX150
• Dell Inspiron 600m
• Blackberry Pearl
• Sharp Aquos 32inch 1080p LCD TV

I wanted to get a new video card with this month’s allowance, but I realized that 2 of my 3 pairs of jeans now have holes in them and I better get some new ones before they rotted in tatters from my body. It was a little disappointing to realize that the video card would have to wait, but I made the right choice (I think) =)

Clothes shopping has to be one of the most boring things in the world, but I figured I had to power through it. The trip to Target for jeans wasn’t a total loss though, because I was able to pick up Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Wii while I was there! Falcon Punch!!

Tags: gadget inventory, gadgets