HN user
not really no. Compare to how many humans use the web or are simply connect to the internet, now that's impressive.
But knowing that many humans use the internet as a transport to a walled garden aware of their IRL identity and holding captive a heap of their personal data, this is frightening.
They're only doing the right thing for them, this move seems to incidentally benefits users too but not really. it prevent outcomes such as users 1) closing their account / switching to another website 2) creating an additional fake profile only for work.
This article [1] is imho quite right, this is mostly a non-issue turned into PR.
1:http://rexriepe.com/2012/clever-pr-facebook-bends-a-non-stor...
An interesting view of slavery in Mauritania, it's important to raise awareness about slavery which has a natural tendency to fly under the radar.
But the sensationalist title is misleading, old style slavery is much more prevalent than this article let the reader believe, obvious cases are dubai and sex slaves, but there are more all across the world.
And there is the new style of slavery,the kind where people are free to get minimum wage to barely pay for food and shelter or maintaining themselves in debt, the kind where freedom is about choosing between brands or channels, choosing between a limited panel of wanna be leaders all funded by the same pocket.
So according to your post, having more money = freedom ? Does it not look like what a slave to money would say to deny slavery ? Or as stated in the article: Various religions in many countries have been used to justify the continuation of slavery. "They make people believe that going to paradise depends on their submission,"
That's said, what you stated is false,it's a known fact that the abolition of old style slavery was to replace it with a new from of slavery, namely minimum wage slavery, according to a then emerging economic context. Something along these lines: freed slaves have to find money to buy food and shelter and are offered minimum wage for jobs doing what they used to do when they were slave.
Does anyone know how the japanese judge story [2] and the german trickster Till Eulenspiegel [2] are related ? I knew the story as an adventure of Till Eulenspiegel.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Coka_Tadasuke#Famous_cases
Google web search's secret: it's not searching what you tell it to search.
- suggest spelling corrections and alternative spellings - personalize your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before - include synonyms of your search terms to find related results - find results that match similar terms to those in your query - search for words with the same stem, like "running" when you search for [ run ]
Paradoxically this is also the reason why the biggest advertiser's search engine sucks more and more. This fuzzy search where he looks for all kind of synonyms instead of what he's asked means it often returns no useful results and misses the target by a solar system or two.
Looking for a film on the web = imdb no babies are born = no procreation
So let's search for "imdb no procreation": http://lmgtfy.com/?q=imdb+no+procreation and http://www.bing.com/search?q=imdb+no+procreation
Now let's turn off this fuzzy synonymous search, go on the results page for "the film where no more babies are born", click on "more search tools" in the sidebar and click "verbatim". Not only the actual results doesn't show up anymore but we now see this very story referenced several times further skewing the results towards confirmation bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
I switched from metacrawler to google for my web searching in 1998, I can testify that it's getting worse and worse at providing relevant results for a while now and at the same time it gets better at tracking users and raising privacy concerns, censoring results, adding clutter, spam and ads, silently removing useful features. I've switched to duckduckgo in 2010 and rarely go back to google anymore.
You're only looking at one side of the coin. If you look at it from a FB stand point, FB connect is effective whatever the market.
See you can make money in a casino, some games offer better chances than other but in the end it's always the casino who makes the real money.
It seems like a more or less reasonable solution but it defeats the whole point which is to use and abuse users' data and circle of facebook friends.
If you remember several years back when it was discovered that ads had become inefficient because people learned to filter them out after being exposed too much for too long but that if the ad came from a member of the social circle it bypassed this filter and has the potential go viral, which pretty much gave birth to so-called viral marketing.
Well it seems facebook is the realm of a combination of viral marketing (trying to pretend not to be an ad in disguise) and spammer strategy (a large enough number of potential marks insure some will fall for it). IINM this is what facebook currently pushes for in a renewed attempt to monetize their userbase.
This seems like a reasonable solution I said, because the real problem with facebook connect is that it links real world identities (or rather facebook profiles which is close enough to real world identities) to online activities that users don't necessarily want the world to know about. And while facebook uses this to collect even more data about its users, the users have no control over it
tl;dr: the real underlying problem of facebook connect is the same old "if you're not paying for it, then you're the product being sold".
Having to deal with registration and account management is a choice, not a necessity. From bugmenot to mytrashmail, examples of websites not having to solve account management are numerous.
The registration is often a barrier preventing people from using your service, and it's not even mandatory to have user management [1].
[1] https://jobpoacher.com/blog/blog/2012/02/13/what-craigslist-...
Chances are it is connected to the other personas and facebook has a more complete than you think profile, heck they don't even need you to be registered to have a profile on you, from being in registered people's addressbook to going to web page featuring a facebook button they can piece together a profile.
Same here and sometimes I wonder if those who provide facebook only login would consider answering the phone 1 out of 10 times by saying "fuck off" and hanging up a good business practice, because that's basically what they are doing.
"hey we have this fantastic service offering this and that, but we don't want you to use it (unless you register to a third party whose sole purpose is to collect as much personal data on you as possible and has a long history of privacy issues)". Best sales pitch ever.
>2. I think the Facebook hate is miss-placed. Do you really hate Facebook (provider of a tool) or those who spam you via Facebook (users of the tool)? If you're so worried about Facebook tracking you offsite, why have an account at all?
I think it is right on. Both because the tool shapes the usage (if your only tool is hammer, all problems look like nails). I don't have one.
The funny part is that for a long time they just did it without informing you and no one complained. cough zynga cough
John Gabriel's greater internet fuckwad theory is a joke about people playing video games online, it's not really relevant to the general internet. While chatroulette arguably offers anonymity but the very instant a website requires registration it's not anonymity anymore, it's pseudonymity, a totally different thing. Not using your real world identity but an online identity which according to context holds a certain value to users preventing them to behave as total fuckwad.
If you look at the famous example of the month of eternal september [1], the problem at hand showed a totally different picture, an artificially high number of newcomers overcharging the capacity of the community to properly teach them how to behave [2]. In short when your user base grows organically you have minimal bad behaviour.
Then again if you look at facebook itself you'll find more than the regular share of inane bs and bad behaviour.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September [2]: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.html
Two different shows, one is about showcasing techniques in extreme situation and feature an ex british special forces with a heavy background in adventuring while the other is about putting one guy alone in a survival situation for a few days featuring a regular guy who has personal interest in survival.
Though they're not with him, Les stroud also has a support crew and a way to contact them in case of life-threatening emergency.
1) you're missing a few figures and the whole picture, by the conservative estimation Zuckerberg will make 16 billions with the ipo so he personally made ~20 bucks per registered user. Selling ads is pocket money, at the end of the day the wealth is in the mega database of the user data. See, paying users can choose to take their dollars elsewhere so you have to give them what they want, if it's gratis people flock on the service and lack the incentive to go away if the service is somewhat unsatisfying so you can impose whatever you want to them.
2) they can't offer such an option, facebook is a machine designed to collect, store, hold and aggregate user data and they built a business model out of it. Putting the user in control of its data is the opposite of what facebook wants. You can't really compare the subscription of news aggregator websites and an hypothetical subscription on facebook. Facebook is unique in the fact that it holds user personal data and has a strong grasp on it through heavy vendor lock-in, you can easily leave slashdot or reddit and get your news elsewhere from an alternative but you can't leave facebook easily because they have your data, data you need in your daily use and there's nowhere to go to to find an equivalent.
I trust facebook for doing every wrong thing and the other that I can imagine. It's their business model and whole reason of existence.
I don't appreciate the repeated attacks against personal freedom (they like to call it privacy) and against the internet and open web. I dislike the methods and techniques of manipulation they used.
For someone who had some experience of the internet it was quite obvious what was going to happen, history repeats itself, except that when microsoft tried to bypass the internet and build a microsoft network a.k.a. msn, included in windows, they failed hard.
Now with the critical mass and sheer momentum, everyone and their friends are asking to have the closed and proprietary facebooknet preloaded in their mobile device. But I won't be part of the effort to destroy the open internet, so I quit google and its free services and block everything facebook.
What's so special about beacon ? It's no more business as usual at facebook, with the additional twist that it caused public uproar.
I never register a facebook account and there's no way I will regsiter to facebook just to use an app even if its the killer app.
I trust facebook for snooping in on the data provided by 3rd party apps, they've been doing all the dirty tricks of the book since they started.
why no facebook account for me ? because it was obvious from the beginning where facebook was heading with a business rooted in linking real world identities and online activities. They are basically building a closed facebooknet to compete with the open web and internet. There's no way I would be part or support a closed and proprietary internet.
it doesn't really help the point the author is trying to make that this post is flawed, biased and laced with logical fallacies and FUD.
Let me point out a few things:
- google says it analyzes gmail contents algorithmically, but do we really know what they actually do ? - email being made out of secure or insecure protocols is irrelevant to gmail respecting privacy - it is not about email security, it's about privacy. - secure email is not a myth, see gpg - one individual who could gain access to a mailbox is not the same order of magnitude than a transnational corporation systematically going through inboxes of milions of people. - "Google becomes evil and steals all your email to do X "is not on your list of plausible threats because it's worded wrong, try "Google goes through all your email and adds it to the info they have on you to build a very detailed profile of you and your life" which goes on the confirmed list along with "people have been locked out of the gmail accounts without a valid reason" - Google is obviously about selling ads [1] and has to maintain trust from their users for this to work, it does not mean they have to respect people privacy, actually it even means the opposite, they have to breach on people's privacy and make it look so it won't hurt their users' trust. - gmail has default https, sure, but only after a high profile case of hacked gmail accounts made it to the medias. [2]
Lastly, about the advice to never use @gmail.com addresses, I wonder if using our own domain would protect us from google having the abilty to lock us out of our inbox.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-wh... [2] http://www.physorg.com/news182629293.html
Here's your rebuttal: shine another light on your situation and suddenly instead of having half the messages ending up on google servers anyways, you have half of your email freed from google servers which is better than having all on it there, privacywise.
AFAIK google has broken its own privacy policy, gmail's databases have been compromised and they did change default settings to be more public at least once.
This makes a strong contender of gmail for privacy issues.