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How To Restore Your Privacy on Facebook
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Hide your photos.
Most people don't seem to realize their profile photos and other albums are available to strangers. The profile photos are usually shared more widely, e.g. to "Everyone," while the photo albums are often only slightly more restricted, e.g. "Friends of Friends."
From your Facebook home page, go to the Settings menu in the upper right corner, and select "Privacy Settings." Then select "Profile Information." Then scroll down to Photo Albums and click "Edit Settings"...
...and adjust to the level of privacy you are comfortable with ("Only Friends" was probably your setup before):
Hide other people's photos of youIf someone "tags" one of their Facebook photos with your profile, it can show up on your profile. If you don't want strangers (including "Friends of friends") to see these often candid shots, go to Settings/Privacy Settings, then "Profile Information" and adjust "Photos and Videos of me." We'd recommend "Only friends:"
Hide your birthdayIt's insane that Facebook recommended that many people share their birthday with "Friends of friends" in its defaults for the new "privacy" scheme. This personal information can be used by financial fraudsters to help impersonate you to your bank, credit card company, email provider and others. We'd recommend showing it to as few people as possible. Or, even better, set it to a false date.
Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:
Hide your postsFacebook is defaulting people to share their posts with "friends of friends," i.e. strangers. You may want to revert this to share only with your friends. Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:
Remove your friends list from your profile pageFacebook has updated its privacy policy to say that you can never permanently hide your friends list, and last week it was impossible to hide the list from friends of friends (see Felix Salmon's second update here). This might be changing; on Monday, we couldn't find a way to view the friends list of certain "friends of friends."
In any case, it's definitely possible to make your friends list harder for strangers to view, by removing it from your profile. Go to your Facebook home page, then click on "Profile" in the top right corner to view your profile.
Then scroll down to the section of the profile that shows your friends (titled "Friends"), and click the pencil symbol in the upper left corner. This will reveal a checkbox to hide your friend list from some strangers, at least on your profile page:
Hide your profile from search enginesFacebook is touchy about this one, because it's always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That's why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, Facebook now pops up this ultra-defensive dialog:
What Facebook doesn't tell you is that it now offers a link to "View Such and Such's Friends" from the public, search-engine-indexable profile page. At least, that's what ours does. At the very least, you should look at your search engine page using the preview link under "Public Search Results" and see if you want to continue to make it available:
From the Desk of David Pogue - The Culture of the Internet - NYTimes.com
What, exactly, is the syllabus for Internet culture? What are the videos and memes do you have to know to qualify as a Web-savvy person?
The "Star Wars" kid, of course. The Exploding Whale. The Mentos and Coke video, probably. "Where the Hell is Matt," for sure. Dancing Baby.
So I asked my Twitter followers to supply a list. Their suggestions poured forth for hours, numbering in the hundreds.
To save you a lot of scrolling, I'll just pass along a couple of links that they suggested. First, at least one person has carefully compiled a list of the 99 videos he thinks you need for a basic education (as he puts it, "unless you're a loser or old or something"): www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com.
State of the Art - With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like - NYTimes.com
But imagine if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?
Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.
In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)
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But imagine if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?
Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.
In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)
Creativity: Twyla Tharp on Creativity, Failure, and Money
Choreographer (and author of The Creative Habit) Twyla Tharp briefly discusses the roles of failure and money in creativity in a short video interview below. There are several good tidbits here, but in the instant-publishing internet age where everyone seems to be competing for the most YouTube views or highest web site traffic, I especially love the bits about how being creative for the sake of admiration and recognition is different than being creative simply because you want to make something. Here's the three-minute, 22-second clip.
Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates
In South Korea and Japan, 100Mbps fiber links to the home are common, rubbishing the idea that US ISPs just can't give Americans the insane speeds they seem to want. They certainly could; it's just that no one but Verizon has been willing to bite the bullet and pay for fiber to the home. Such $20 billion projects aren't good for short-term profits (though FiOS has made Verizon the only real forward-looking telco).
ISPs in favor of throttling and other controls generally argue that they are in danger of being "overwhelmed," which again isn't a necessary condition but the result of business decisions (offering 400 homes one 12Mbps upload pipe, for instance, was never going to deliver really spectacular service). While they can't truly be "overwhelmed" (cable modems and DSLAMs cap upload and download speeds based on how much a user pays per month, so the maximum data rate is well known), ISPs don't want to pay for huge amounts of peak capacity that will sit unused much of the time. ISPs oversold service on the premise that they operate like roads and most cars wouldn't be on the highway at once.
As unattended apps like P2P and network backup utilities tie up a portion of bandwidth for ever longer periods of time, the old solutions aren't working as well and congestion is one result. Cerf's idea would take us back to the old "circuit-switched" days in the sense that each Internet user would instead get a guaranteed line with a minimum guaranteed rate at all times. This would answer consumer complaints about "not getting what I paid for," but would cost ISPs more cash.
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In South Korea and Japan, 100Mbps fiber links to the home are common, rubbishing the idea that US ISPs just can't give Americans the insane speeds they seem to want. They certainly could; it's just that no one but Verizon has been willing to bite the bullet and pay for fiber to the home. Such $20 billion projects aren't good for short-term profits (though FiOS has made Verizon the only real forward-looking telco).
WGA Strike Primer: The Big Secret - Robert J. Elisberg - Entertainment on The Huffington Post
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Irving Thalberg knew both the craft and business of movie-making together as well as anyone ever in Hollywood. Here's what Irving Thalberg said about writers:
"The most important part in filmmaking is played by the writers. We must do everything in our power to keep them from finding out."
The writers have found out.
And the AMPTP corporations have only themselves to blame. They opened the hidden door, turned on the overhead light, and let writers inside to read the magic book.
Here's what the Book of Secrets says. There's only one chapter.
"In order to make anything, we need a script.
"Audiences pay or tune in to see actors, but actors need something to say. Directors bring everything together, but directors can't direct a blank page.
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Writers do like having the studios and networks. They have benefited from them. (And been screwed by them, but who hasn't?) But writers don't need them.
Because there's the Internet. And major New Media corporations are aching to make movies and series - have their own "great content" - that can be shown on the Internet, in the void left by studios and networks. And there's oceans of money and companies to do just that. Already. And it's being done online. Already. And writers have actually figured it out. Already. Setting up personal deals with venture capitalists. Labor discussions between the WGA and Internet behemoths. Already. And the AMPTP corporations did it to themselves. All because they walked away from the table and wouldn't just talk. Giving writers time to think, talk and figure it out. This is arguably the worst blunder in movie history, topping "Battlefield Earth."
It's a blunder of epic proportions, because the door the AMPTP opened also leads to copyright ownership for writers. And this has been their Holy Grail for decades. And the AMPTP corporations brought this all on themselves.
Boing Boing: NPR Goes Public With Effort to Protect Internet Radio
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Folks like me who rely on Internet streaming to listen to great public radio stations like KEXP in Seattle or KCRW in Los Angeles - may be disheartened by the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) requiring public broadcasters to pay the same (outrageous) royalties as commercial broadcasters, and charging them back-pay.
Luckily, an updated a public broadcasting advocacy site will now allow the public an opportunity to tell congress how they feel about the CRB ruling.
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