Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
Also, since I moved into an apartment earlier this month, I leave you with this comic from www.xkcd.com
1 Commentroflmao
This amuses me. Apparently it’s ok to use internet abbreviations (lol, rofl, etc) on standardized tests in New Zealand now. lol.
A take on the recent Facebook debacle, written by Matt “The Man” Topolski
Hello everyone,
Because of the recent Facebook controversy which has made it all the way to CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the CBS evening News. I’ve decided to do a little research. It seems as if there are a few things people on this little networking site may be unaware of, so allow me to further educate all of you.
We have a serious problem here, and its more than just the new BIG BROTHER News Feed. Apparently, Facebook is in bed with a few people we may not have thought of before, allow me to elaborate if I may.
Facebook is selling the personal information of its members. In fact, it recently was given in the sum of 13 million dollars by a major marketing corporation in order to use the information of all the college and regrettably high school students using this service.
Therefore, the first thing I am going to do is tell you what you can start doing. Besides the obvious, deleting your account (which many have), you can follow these directions to stop the authorization of your info being sold to 3rd parties;
Instructions:
1. on the left hand side of the screen go to “My Privacy”.
2. Go to the “Everyone” subcategory under Networks. Click on “edit settings”.
3. scroll to the bottom where it says “Facebook Development Platform.
4. Uncheck the box which states “My information may be used according to the ‘Restricted Terms of Service’.”
5. click on save.
Now that you have done that I’m going to explain to everyone what a little bit of internet research has done! It appears that we may have gotten more than we bargained for when college students around the globe decided to join this service.
The first venture capital money (start up cash) to come into facebook.com was in the amount of 500 thousand dollars. This cash came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal also a Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book “The Diversity Myth”. Which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC. Do more research on your own if you want to know about this group. Let’s just say they have no problem intruding in people’s private affairs.
And in fact creating a site that looks like a networking opportunity for college kids, would be a tremendous profit when you could take all of their information that they in fact place upon the site willfully for other reasons other than to be spied upon by marketing firms, corporate entities, and companies that are trying to find new products to market to our demographic!
Next further funding came to facebook in the form of 12.7 million dollars from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager James Breyer was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association . Jimmy served on NVAC’s board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 (CIA!!!!!). This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including most notably “nurturing data mining technologies.”
Let me say that again, DATA MINING TECHNOLOGIES! If you don’t know what I am getting at yet. Look up data mining people.
Now here is the scary part. This is again based on fact not theory and is supported by their own words:
“While the nearly $13 million that came from Accel to fund The Facebook certainly looks suspicious and unfortunately disturbing after reviewing all of this information, the only problem on the surface seems to be the appearance of some incestuous relationships between the Pentagon, the CIA, and these venture capital firms. But this goes further than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fame in 2002 when John Markoff of the New York Times announced the existence of the “Information Awareness Office” (IAO). According to Wikipedia, “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.” Protests came from civil libertarians on both the right and the left who saw the IAO as a new Orwellian arm of the United States government. After Congress investigated DARPA’s project, funding was cut off and IAO was essentially dead in the water.
The Information Awareness Office seems to have survived some of its original purposes in a mutated form, found in today’s Facebook. In fact, one of IAO’s original example technologies included “human network analysis and behavior model building engines,” a surprising echo of the social networking mapping that Facebook does using SVG visualizations. Add that to the information that Facebook collects and compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students.”
And those college students continue to log on to TheFacebook, completely unaware of the massive affronts to their privacy. The so-called “Privacy Policy” of Facebook includes a statement saying that they “may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” It goes on to say that, “We may be required to disclose customer information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”
Some of the aspects of the privacy policy are downright creepy and confusing. This particular gem is especially disturbing: Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.” And there’s no telling when the privacy policy may change. As of when this was written (July 1, 2005), the policy was effective as of June 28, 2005.
Who knows where the information they collect about these three million college students, alumni, and professors is going, or what they intend to do with it. The fact that these companies and agencies are all so closely related, and that The Facebook has almost no organizational transparency are all cause for concern. Hopefully we can soon uncover the truth.
Now there’s a few quick notes I want to point out and just gift wrap this in a way people can understand what I’ve been saying. If you join myspace, there is no requirement for you to submit any TRUE information about yourself at all, and the only information linking the profile on myspace to you is your email address, however any one person could have HUNDREDS of those.
The requirements of facebook.com, regardless of what name you put in your profile or data you enter. In order to join you must submit your COLLEGE email. Your college email whether from a state institution or private is still directly linked to you. Only you and you alone own that address, and at anytime the powers that be can make the correlation between you and your address.
My suggestion to everyone is to get informed, and stay alert. At this point its pretty much a joke as to whether or not you leave the site, simply because for most of us, we’ve already spent quite a number of months as a member of this community, so any information we thought was private is probably already in the hands of someone we would find questionable. I do believe however, that these recent events are cause for more concern than meets the eye. And an online petition has already generated close to 800,000 students who disapprove of the recent changed to facebook and the current privacy policies in place.
CONTINUE TO VOICE YOUR OPINION!
Best Regards,
Matthew P. Topolski
Happy 4th of July!
I like fireworks.
2 More Videos
Here are 2 more videos for your viewing pleasure. I can’t take credit for making them, but I did go ahead and put them up on Google Video for your viewing pleasure. Those who went to college with me will get the most enjoyment out of these videos:
Another Year
Today is a very special day. It is my 22nd birthday, and also Deucenet’s 1st birthday! That’s right people, Deucenet began exactly one year ago today, and I began exactly 22 years ago today!
Windows Dancer
About a week ago, I got a new computer that has Windows XP Media Center on it. Today I noticed a little program that came preinstalled called “Windows Dancer”. I was intrigued, as most probably would be, as to what this program did. I fired it up, started some music, and suddenly a little person appeared on my desktop, dancing along to my music, and impressively it was mostly on the beat too. I fooled around with it a bit and discovered that I could download more dancers. I proceded to download the dancer named Ben who is a fat guy that does some pretty funny dancing, such as the shopping cart and the sprinkler, along with many other moves. Here are some screen shots I took of Ben:
Here’s Ben doing the sprinkler on my iTunes window.
Here he is dancing on Deucenet!
By the way, this is actually a product created by Microsoft, not just some weird 3rd party people. Bill Gates, you have officially lost it! However, I am highly amused.
From that Electronic Music class…. a video.
The final project for my class was to make a soundtrack to go along with a short video clip. We didn’t have to make the video ourselves, but I decided that it would be fun to do so. Here’s the movie that I made: …of the Carrot (in a nicely deucenet formatted page)
or …of the Carrot (in all of its google video splendor)
By the way, I got an A on this project.
15,000!
It has just come to my attention that DeuceNet has recently reached 15,000 hits! Yay!
