« Archives in May, 2010

Review: Facebook’s Privacy Issues

May 18, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain, Reviews / 2 Comments

Many have said that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.

Facebook‘s privacy policy and use of your information is worse than lemons. It’s shit.

Good luck selling shit-ade on your local street corner this summer.

Everyone is aware that Facebook’s privacy policy isn’t that great. Most people have no idea just how bad it is, though.

Some of us have read the things. It’s a fucking cesspool, and they’re still dumping crap in there all the time.

The full current privacy policy is available here.

It’s 5830 words long. That’s longer than the United States constitution. While I was counting bullshit, I took the time before beginning this article to count the settings required to lock down your Facebook profile as best as it can be.

You have to change over 50 settings. FIFTY. And not all of them are even all that easy to find.

The New York Times made an infographic showing what you have to change to set things how you like to protect your information.

Look at all those settings. If each of those was a tentacle, and your personal information were a nubile young anime girl, that would be a scene from Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend.

To see what information you’re currently leaking all over the internet, click here. Hopefully it’s not too much, and you don’t care about what it is. Stopping this horrible leakage would normally take entirely too much effort to fix. Thankfully, a nice group took the time to take care of things for you. Click here for their help.

Some of you may not understand why this is such a big issue? After all, you just post some stuff on Facebook from time to time. It’s no big deal. If a few people see it, that’s fine…right?

Anyone can see it, more than likely. Forever. Your kids will be able to look up whatever you posted on Facebook yesterday 30 years from now. Your boss can see it. Your future wife. Your mom. The government.

ANYONE.

It’s only getting worse.

Here’s a neat flash animation showing how Facebook’s privacy issues have evolved over the years.

Facebook changes their privacy policy often, so they can use your information to make money off you. They sell it to advertisers. They’ll probably sell it to anyone.

Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor1 and CEO of Facebook, has said that he has no real regard for people’s privacy.

Below is an IM conversation reported by SAI between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend, from back when he first started Facebook:

“Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.“

Trustworthy, right? I’d totally give that guy my credit card number. Or tell him who all my friends are.

Everyone got so upset when Google Buzz exposed their contact lists. Google fixed it within a few days of the issue being brought to their attention. Facebook does that with very little issue, even for people who have attempted to turn that “feature” off.

So, we’re using a service run by a conniving asshole who wants to sell every scrap of info you give him so that we can stay in easy contact with each other. There’s no serious alternative available, and we’ll all keep using it while the service continually updates its “privacy settings” to opt us in to whatever scam it likes.

I use it to stay in contact with my family, who I had a falling out with in the past. It keeps them at a comfortable distance, but we still know what’s going on in the lives of each other. Until the value of that outweighs the burden of dealing with Facebook’s privacy issues, you’ll find me there, being bent over Zuckerberg’s fucking barrel.

But I won’t be surprised when we all get Zuckerpunched.

  1. although some still dispute this, he did win the legal case brought against him by the two early partners he had who claim he stole the entire idea from them [↩]

110 Wonderful Years

May 17, 2010 / posted in Fiction / 1 Comment

Via Wikipedia

May 17th 2010 marks the 110th anniversary of the publishing L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Yes, this epic story, commonly associated with the great depression, was published in 1900.

The intrepid tale of Dorothy’s journey through Oz has been told many time in different media. The most popular being MGM’s 1939 movie version The Wizard of Oz.  There has also been a resurgence of popularity with Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and it’s Broadway adaptation, Wicked. None of these would have been possible without the original story.

In the introduction of the book, Baum says:

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.1 »Read More

  1. Public domain via Project Gutenberg [↩]

bkI Twitter Round-up 2010-05-14

May 14, 2010 / posted in Tweets / No Comments

TNP Status Update: 5/14/10

May 14, 2010 / posted in Texas Noir News / No Comments

Yeah, I got nothing.

Seriously, I have nothing to report.

Why? Well, once again real life got in the way.

No, really. Chris is still wrapping up the school year and, on top of other commitments, I’ve had some kind of cold that has traveled into my chest to form some ancient Lovecraftian cabal of mucus powered shoggoths intent on changing reality into a non-euclidian hell worthy of the Great Old Ones.

No, really, every time I blew my nose I had to roll a saving throw to keep from losing sanity points.

So, yeah, nothing to report, butI did manage to get my writing space pseudo-organized, so it’s not a total loss.

Quick Review: Brick

May 13, 2010 / posted in Film, Reviews / No Comments

I’m gonna say this right off the bat: Unless you really like arty, indie films or are a scholar of old pulp noir, you will NOT like Brick.

Brick is an exercise in genre and genre bending. The story is pure pulp crime, complete with lingo so dense that, even when they stopped to define a few things, it was still confusing. The plot itself is simple, a girl ask’s a guy for help then disappears and his personal sense of honor won’t let him walk away. There is drugs, violence, gangs, snitches, all the shit that fills your hard boiled detective story.

Catch is, it’s set partially in a high school with teenagers, giving the whole film this weird Romeo and Juliet (the diCaprio one) vibe that makes it hard for even me to follow.

That being said, it’s acted and directed really well, and had all the makings for a great cult film and an excellent example of pulp crime/noir storytelling.

Provided it had subtitles.

Quick Review: Iron Man 2

May 11, 2010 / posted in Film, Reviews / No Comments

I’m not sure why people are having problems with Iron Man 2.  The only thing I can think of is that they wanted more action and less character, but that’s what I liked about it. I mean, take someone with the GIANT ego of Tony Stark and give him super powers and it’s naturally going to go to his head.

In fact, I’m willing to name the ego as the antagonist of the film. The whole story is Tony interacting with his friends, the people that really know him, and the challenge of being the friend of an insufferable prick. Iron Man 2 is really a character study.

Unfortunately the movie going public isn’t much for “character” and would probably only have been happy if it was two hours of fight scenes.  It’s sad really that comics, traditionally frowned upon as “low” art, are too smart for the American consumer.

Quick Review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

May 9, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain, Reviews / No Comments

This book came out quite some time ago, I know. I just read it again, and I had to say this to someone. It’s just that damned good.

Neal Stephenson is an anthr0pologist of the future. I swear, his books study humanity not as it is, but as it will be. He does this by having an incredibly wide view and form grasp upon our past. He definitely showed this with his writings in The Baroque Cycle.

I loved those books. To many, they were fucking unreadable, though. Horrible chunks of thick slimy brain matter started sliding down the front of your face whenever you cracked those books open.

Anathem does not suffer from that. In the way that The Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon entertained, so does Anathem.

It is the story of Erasmas, a young scholar who lives in seclusion amongst a group of monk-like people who have secluded themselves to keep society from infecting their thinking.

Then stuff happens.

I don’t want to go into a lot of detail as to what occurs, as one of the greatest things Stepehenson does in this book is draw out the tension and provide the release of the “AH HA!” moment whenever things come together.

Stephenson also does a remarkable job of taking major concepts and making them understandable, as well as contextual to the story. Much as his explanations of basic cryptography were well done (and relevant) to Cryptonomicon, the same is true for theories of thought and physics throughout Anathem. This makes the book a true joy to read.

Stephenson also has a marvelous fun time with language in this book. Using Latin and Greek (and a few Germanic) word roots, he bends words to his will, making up a number of words that sound like they’ve been around for forever. You read one of the words he’s made up for this book, and based on context and word root, you know what it means. No glossary is needed. It’s fabulously done. I wish I had half his skill at that alone, much less the rest of his writing ability.

In my opinion, Anathem is one of the best sc-fi books I’ve read in the last decade. Not giving it a go would be a disservice. Pick it up.

The Amory Wars: An Epic Tale by Coheed and Cambria

May 9, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

I first stumbled into this story just after In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: III was released.

What a bunch of craziness. New prog-rock with an overarching story of sci-fi awesomeness, with a singer who looks like an angry mexican factory worker got attacked by a mophead and lost and sounds like Geddy Lee taught him all he knows.

Following the story was nearly impossible at that point. Some points in the lyrics definitely told you what was going on, but getting the overarching story was fucking impossible. Entire websites (which I pored over) were dedicated to dissecting the lyrics bit by bit and attempting to make a coherent whole of the thing.

Even better, comments and speculation show that the band may have changed the story based on ideas that the fans came up with as to what happened. If they liked the fans idea better than what they had in mind when they wrote it, they went with the fan idea instead.

Fucking brilliant. Crowdsourcing the plot of the story.

I went and purchased The Second Stage Turbine Blade shortly thereafter, and listened to all of it. A lot. I can sing all the songs along with both albums. Hell, I can pretty much do so with all their albums, now.

As the later albums appeared, I became even more impressed with their musicanship. Not only were they telling the story of Claudio, a young genetically made nanobot enhanced person (called an Irobot) and his fight against the corrupt government that killed his parents (as far as we could tell, anyway), but they were doing it with some damned finely crafted songs.

Then, the comic books came. The first set of comics started with Second Stage Turbine Blade, and showed even more of the story.

Strangely, later comics jumped ahead to Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV: Volume I From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. As a trade paperback. And how the fuck did they ever talk any record executive into allowing that to be the album title? Heavy psychedelics had to have been involved.

Then, the Second Stage comics died. We’re not entirely sure why.

Then, they restarted the comics as The Amory Wars. Starting with Second Stage Turbine Blade. Again.

The last album, Good Apollo I’m Burning Start IV: Volume II No World for Tomorrow, came out.

Then, the first album, Year of the Black Rainbow, was released.

It came with a big hardcover book that tells the tale of Coheed and Cambria, and their creator, and the start of the whole story.

It’s really rather good. Peter A David, one of the Babylon 5 writers, wrote it with the lead singer.

So, if you want a big-ass convoluted sci-fi tale of battles, love, and creepy enhanced people, this is the deal for you.

I just hope to hell that the rest of the story gets told in book form as well, or we’ll never make any damned sense of it all. However, it’ll still be fun to listen to.

Unboxing and Review: HTC Droid Incredible Smartphone Let’s Add Even More Words LongAssName

May 7, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

Last week, I received this:

It's a Box!

It's a Box!

As I was expecting it, I did not release the cyborg enhanced warhounds when the FedEx man pulled up outside the compound.

What could be in it?

Could the phone I was expecting be in such a nondescript box? It’s called the Incredible, is it not? Also, Droid is in the name. Should’t it be delivered by a team of robotic valkyries in a flaming chariot?

No Fanfare

Upon opening the box, I noticed a distinct lack of trumpets. No fanfare at all was to be heard, nor did a choir of angels begin to sing.

The box was, however, full of stuff. Which is good. If nothing but shitty packing material had been in there, that would have been a major fucking disappointment. If I receive a box, it best have something cool in it. Alternately, liquor is acceptable. At a bare minimum, if only packing material is discovered, a fuckton of bubble wrap had better be in evidence.

There was, in fact, some pretty good stuff in there. My phone. A car charger.

Gaze Upon It!

Also, a bunch of fucking paperwork. Like anyone reads this crap. The real info about any cellphone plan you sign up for is only available on the website anyway, and took a team of demented lawyer apes to write.

Look! The phone! It was…a phone. Why the fuck do people do these unboxing things, anyway? It’s like the kids who open their presents on Christmas and spend all day playing with the box the shit came in. If they’re three years old, that’s kinda cute. When you’re 42, not so much.

Hot shit! It came with a battery! Who expected that one!

Remove before use. I’d hate to be the Asian citizen paid 2 balls of rice and a nickel a day to put those stickers on. What kind of retards do you think he or she thinks we are? How do they think we make enough money to buy the phone if we’re that dumb?

It’s totally a phone.

So, after that meticulous “unboxing” I threw all that cardboard shit in a corner and took my precious upstairs, plugged it in to charge, and flipped through the manual to make sure there was no self destruct button.

Then I turned it on, despite it saying I needed to fully charge the battery first. Yeah, whatever.

This phone is beautiful. I’ve played with iPhones before, and this thing beats the tar out of them, then uses the tar to waterproof its roof.

Snappy response, gorgeous screen, awesome sound. Android 2.1 is wicked good, the apps are awesome, the speech to text function is phenomenally better than I imagined.

The camera is incredimazing. The pics above were taken with my old feature phone, an LG enV2. It was serviceable.

Pics taken by this thing can be seen here:   House On The Rock Trip

I haven’t played much with the video camera, but I’ve been impressed with the little I’ve done so far.

If I could plug this thing directly into my head with a less than 50/50 chance of lobotomizing myself, I’d have done so already.

Here’s my app list: Click Me!

The apps work fantastically. The only app I’ve looked for on the Android app store and not found so far is some form of Bookworm. It could be I simply haven’t looked hard enough.

Turn by turn GPS navigation is easily as good as any GPS I’ve used. Plus, Google Street View on arrival!

The only downside I’ve seen so far is battery life. This thing sucks down battery power like ecstasy users suck down fruit juice. Still, with the car charger, I’m golden.

It made it through all 5 hours of use at House on the Rock, with about 200 pictures taken. It had to be plugeed in as soon as I got home, but it made it. On an average use day, if I’m not streaming music to it, and checking a zillion things every other minute, it makes it 8 hours without issue.

So, basically, if you need an extra brain in your pocket, and would prefer that it be shiny and cool, get one of these.

Counting Eggs Before They’re Hatched

May 7, 2010 / posted in Texas Noir News / No Comments

One of the reasons I setup TexasNoir.com was as a kind of public shaming accountability.  I mean, by leveraging the Facebook fans, the Twitter followers, and the random direct web-hit folks,  I theoretically have people other than just Chris keeping me on task.

Therefore I pledge a weekly (at a minimum) Texas Noir update, be it some long diatribe about how me and Chris plan on working together or just a cop out word count. Course, it would also help if said co-author, over the summer, dropped me some essays, stories,  or rants for that other site I ride herd on.

This leads me to the State of the Project. »Read More

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