Beret

Facebook's new privacy settings.

They’re a bait & switch.

Users gain the ability to set privacy per post, but lots of control & privacy is lost. You can no longer opt-out of the app platform or beacon. It’s also impossible to set restrictions for your friend list, name, profile photo, gender, networks, pages, or current city. It’s all forced to being publicly available now.

This “public info” and anything set as viewable by everyone is available to any Facebook enabled website or app used by either you or friends. You and your friends will be leaking everyone’s information everywhere they go.

There is no setting to prevent this.

The new public profile also has a permanently public wall displaying most of your recent activity (added friends, liked statuses, etc.) Details on added friends was previously available to non-friends, but only in the timeline after an (unignored) friend request was sent. All this broad access is new.

Your whole profile photo album defauts to ‘everyone’ if you have more than one photo in that album. (or you have just one picture which you haven’t set as your profile image) You can revert this behavior here.

Facebook has a terrible dearth of privacy already; and it just keeps getting worse.
Oh well, welcome to the internet.

Say hello to your newer, more detailed and ~~intrusive~~ social, internet nametag.

ps: Even if a minor selects “Everyone,” the information they share will be restricted to their “Friends”, “Friends of Friends” and school or work networks.

edit 12/10: The public wall has been removed.
Note behavior of profile photo albums.

Played 7 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Hummingbird - The Best Of B.B. King

The first track of the album. My only complaint is that it’s a tiny bit too stereo when you listen to it with headphones. But that’s not an issue if you use speakers. It sounds great, and is mastered well. The rest of the album isn’t consistently as good, but it’s still nice, albeit a bit short. (I will ignore the avant-garde portion of the last track)

ps: It’s available on amazon for really cheap; ignore all the reviews, they were written in the 90’s by old people.

edit: Turn it up, seriously. It won’t sound good at furtively-internetting-without-letting-anyone-know volume.

Progression of Halloween costume ideas

For Halloween I don’t want to be a generic pirate or ghoul, I want to be a bit more meaningful.

I considered being a societal villain. Maybe a CEO with an actual parachute painted gold. But alas, my favorite parachute supplier didn’t have any.

A biking freak in the requisite spandex? A hipster or other pretentious person? Nah, both took too much work; and I really didn’t feel like shaving my legs.

Then my thoughts became obtuse; a dull suit or entirely blank white wardrobe symbolizing America’s lack of creativity. (a crude reflection of how uncreative I was feeling then)

The horrors continued as thoughts of an experimental or concept costume were entertained. Would I create a powerful costume while using only X elements of disguise?

No.

All my lofty ideas were either awful or unattainable. So I regressed.

I might be Cyrano de Bergerac with a 2 foot piece of ornamental grass as a feather; or a wizard whose staff carries a microwaved Beatles CD I found in the street this week.

Or I could just be a ghost; ironically.

Bin-laden didn't even encrypt his phone calls.

Pretend for a moment that you’re running a international group of crazy people from your cave in Afghanistan, and you want to talk to your super secret switchboard in the capital of your fathers birth country.

So you just take out your satellite phone and call direct to HQ. To provide some level of security you speak in using code words like you’re an 8 year old with a secret clubhouse. Your sinister bearded operatives in foreign countries also call direct to your communications hub to receive your orders.

As you somewhat openly plot your moves, the agency motoring your calls (NSA) refuses to share intelligence with other agencies due to interagency rivalries. Similar issues of non-communication occur to a lesser extent with the CIA & FBI.

While they’re bickering you bomb 2 US embassies, the USS Cole and hijack 4 planes which you crash into various buildings of significance.

Congratulations, your operations are now at international mastermind level; and your enemies have hamstrung themselves.

ps: watch the whole nova program on this, it’s very interesting.

“Mr. Obama did not have much time for congratulations; hours after accepting the peace prize he was huddled in the white house situation room plotting war strategy for Afghanistan. An accident of timing he nodded to in his remarks.”

NPR: Obama Surprised At Winning Nobel Peace Prize

He was awarded the peace prize on the second day of the ninth year of the Afghanistan war. He’ll probably be adding another 35,000+ troops to our commitment of 68,000.

Note: some have been inaccurately claiming that he received the award for only 10 days of work as president since nominations ended on Feb. 1st. Though nominations may have been based on that, the prize committee can made their final decision based on actions done after the deadline as well.

I was stuck without transportation or motivation last week so I decided to chart my online identity. Each node is an account or online presence with a list of what information can be gleaned from it. (eg: gender, location, sexual attraction to pink toilet seats)

Nodes are linked with others that have information in common (eg: shared alias or link pointing to other presence) Sites which are private or ambiguously linked (site linked to, but no specific user specified) are noted with a clouded outline.

Some interesting things can be considered with this data. Though my main/real email address is publicly available ~~(and associated with my name thanks to google cache)~~ it’s very hard to link it to any other facet of my online identities.

In other news, I am not paranoid; just realistic.

I’ve noticed that guys with Alienware gear appear more likely to have girls that are out of their league. This confused me for a while, but then enlightenment struck me. Alienware stuff is just a symptom of being very rich (and having bad taste in tech) The women can be explained away in a similar fashion.

</bitter observations>

“I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood. How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.”

How Jewish is Hollywood? (via azspot)

The problem is that we’ve been trained that (entirely reasonable) observations about such matters are distasteful & anti-semitic.† If I were to say that jews hold a disproportionate share of wealth, power and control, I would be just repeating a stereotype; it’s accuracy outside of that context wouldn’t matter.

ps: I once had a long serious post about Jane Harman and AIPAC, but I lost it due to government scheming (codename: browser crash)

† It’s worth noting that the Palestinians are Semites too. Its formerly broad meaning has been dropped in favor of a more politically expedient (Israeli/Zionist lobby friendly) term.

I used to worry about being biased in essays discussing democrats & republicans.

Now I’m so jaded that I view them both with equal disgust.

Digital Arts and Technology Academy (DATA)
and a discussion of NM’s dishonestly calculated dropout rate.

Here’s an interesting fact about this charter school which has been heavily advertised using direct/junk mail, billboards, etc.

It has an 18.3% dropout rate. Of their 360 cumulative students in the 2007-08 school year, 66 dropped out. That’s not counting transfers, students becoming homeschoolers or those that received a GED.

Something else I noticed in my perusal of the charts:

To make New Mexico’s dropout rates appear less appalling the Public Education Department (PED) now (as of their 07-08 report) divides the # of dropouts by cumulative (grade 7-12) enrollment over the course of a year. The standard national formula they were using previously counts enrollment on the 40th day in a school year. [pg. 9]

The beauty of this ~~tweak~~ underhanded trick is that cumulative enrollment will almost always be higher and never be lower than amount of students at day 40. The cumulative enrollment number for 07-08(153,964) is 5,425 students greater compared to same year enrollment at day 40(148,536). This makes the student body appear larger and helps dilute the dropout rate.

Additionally, enrollment at day 40 in the measured grades (7-12) dropped by 2,315 in the 2007-08 school year versus the previous year. Even though the student body effectively shrank, they still managed to fabricate an increase.

When calculated using the standard formula the dropout rate for 07-08 is actually 3.76% not the stated 3.63%. It’s still a good improvement over 4.38%; but good improvements still don’t fix a 54% graduation rate.

So when the PED says:

OVERALL DROPOUT RATE IMPROVED FOR 2008 SCHOOL YEAR
New Mexico’s overall 2008 number of dropouts decreased from the previous school year by 1,022 students. The statewide dropout rate was 3.6% for grades 7-12 in 2008, compared to 4.4% in 2007.

They may not be outright lying, but they’re being rather dishonest.

07-08 Dropout Report[PDF]
07-08 Enrollment #’s at day 40[PDF]
More datasheets are here.

Today's dubious idea: temporarily loosen regulation

squashed:

While I think extending unemployment and reforming healthcare will do a lot to soften the pinch of the recession, private industry will probably have to pull us out of it. And, since the large businesses have no interest in expanding until we’re through this, a lot of that expansion will likely come from innovative small business. A lot of people are getting to the point where they need income anyway they can get it. Perhaps that means making things to sell online or at a farmer’s market. Perhaps that means creating a service people didn’t know they wanted.

Unfortunately, the knowledge barriers to setting up your own business without running afoul of a variety of laws are relatively high. What are the rules about payroll? Should you incorporate? How do you do it? How long do you need to retain records? Where and how can you advertise? How can you dispose of waste? How much do you have to pay your employees? How do you have to document them? What licenses do you need to have?

Most of these rules are, in general, fairly good rules. But we may be at a point where we wouldn’t mind if somebody inadvertently broke a few of them if they created a few jobs and expanded the economy. Could we, for two to four years or so, create a general policy of not enforcing certain laws and regulations against businesses under a certain size that make goodfaith errors in complying with some of these laws? At the end of the period, enforcement would go back to normal. Is this a terrible idea?

[emphasis added]

Yes, that is a terrible idea.

We have this thing called deregulation, it made our utilities absolutely awful. Temporary deregulation for business won’t be good for the rest of us either; and I have little faith that regulation would actually be reinstated.

A much better solution that would create a positive business and labor climate would be to provide resources to people wanting to start their own business. Classes, counseling and legal guidance on how to plan and start a business would foster more sustainable and lasting growth.

Loosening regulation may cause a temporary flood of activity, but an enormous proportion of businesses would fail due to poor management.

As for the detrimental effect on workers it would cause, andrewfmorrison said it best.

The working class has gotten screwed enough already without a loosening of labor laws.

ps: Is figuring out minimum wage so complex that it’s a barrier to innovation? No it isn’t. There’s no excuse not to pay your workers a living wage, much less minimum wage.

TED talks are so diverse.

@18:15

ps: She makes good points and I agree with her emphasis on integrating fields. Knowledge is much more valuable and intriguing when it has relevance beyond an isolated area.

Michael Brooks, David Aslanian - BitTorrent Hacks (Black Hat '09) [pdf]

They discuss design flaws of private tracker announces (passkeys and client side trust) and extensively detail the weaknesses the of BitTorrent’s encryption scheme. (RC4, improper use of static strings, unnecessary hashing, etc.)

In the end it fails to even provide the simple obfuscation against throttling it was designed to do.

So what is the solution to all of these problems? MSE [BT encryption] should never have been built! Let me be very clear, MSE was built by people who don’t fully understand the cryptographic systems they are using. MSE is wasteful of resources and does not provide the type of protection that the authors desired. In fact, the solution to traffic shaping and keeping your data a secret existed long before BitTorrent. The answer is SSL, which is now called TLS. TLS is both efficient and effective, two things that MSE is not.

ps: I’ve only read one Black hat paper yet and skimmed 2. But I already feel less secure. (BH09 media archives)

Google

Isn’t it kinda’ fucked that our largest information portal is run by an advertising company?

staff:

We just updated the Followers and Following pages. Let me know what you think!

The one page layout was much easier to use though the addition of smaller icons and zebra striping is nice. The removal of last updated from the following page makes it much harder to weed out dead blogs. Also, with so few tumblelogs per page, management is painful even with < 40 followed.

Edit: the last updated section was added :)
pagination is still painful though