Windows 7

Reading today's news headlines, you'll be sure to hit an article or two saying the Linux ommunity loves Windows 7. And yes, this is a fact. Even Linus Torvalds himself has been caught promoting Win7 (picture above).

From tuxradar.com: "It's official: we love Windows 7"

And according to them, their pagehits and search requests seem to indicate that people are actually validating operating systems before shelling off their precious $$$'s without as much as a question. Since the release of Win7, tuxradar has been receiving page requests for two specific articles on their site: Linux vs Windows 7 and Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Windows 7.

I find this really pleasing, foremost because if these visitors are non tech-savvy people, it shows that the efforts of the open source communities are finally showing some kind of influence on how people determine their computing needs.

This also shows the effect social networking has had on people's Internet habits, most of the hits on these pages are probably linking from blogs, social networks, IRC, twitter and the like. The electron-generations are finally getting recognition from 'the pinkies' (squares, conservatives, whatever you like to call them).

I've been testing Win7 RC myself in a virtual machine @ work, and I must admit, Microsoft has really pulled it off this time.

It's fast, secure, intuitive, goodlooking and it just works!

And as a result of all that linking, people are getting more aware about Linux and it's surrounding communities!

WIN - WIN

Facebook legal twists

Today's article on cnet news tells about the outcome of a year-old class lawsuit filed against Facebook by 20 discontented users in the U.S. (filed August 2008).

Basically, the lawsuit centers around FB's advertising engine: "Beacon". Which --before it was shut down-- collected information from user-profiles, user surfing habits, user shopping habits and generally monitored FB-users' surfing-activities while logged-in to FB.

( I used keyword-blockers and/or router URL filtering to block this collector engine )

Not that it was difficult to block this monitor-service with simple browser plugins, but then again, if you don't know WHAT is monitoring you, or HOW it is monitoring you, how can you stop it?

The plaintiffs argued that Beacon was gathering information illegally and hidden from users. But the thing is, it was announced and described in Facebook's Statement of Rights and Policies when launched a couple of years ago. I can even remember it being mentioned in the early Privacy Policy.

Anyway, the lawsuit got settled, and Beacon is history. However, Beacon has evolved over the last two years, into what is now known as Facebook Connect. Which is FB's centralized authorization system, developed in collaboration with other major service-providers online, to provide a SSO (Single Sign-On) solution. Thus providing Facebook, and it's partners the web-habits of users using the SSO-system by collecting pagehit statistics collectively through all sites joined in the collaboration effort on Facebook Connect.

I just don't think people read statements, policies or user-agreements anymore. Everybody just expects everyone (including web-companies and the like) to abide to 'normal' society standards and rules with regards to privacy.

But the Internet is a completely open and public community network, you cannot expect to post personal information out there, and NOT expect anyone or anything to misuse this information to the fullest extent. And Facebook is by no means an exception, it is a PUBLIC social-port! Then again, it IS set-up to prevent people from seeing information you don't want certain people to see. But there are ways of obtaining this information without even visiting facebook.

You'd be surprised at how easy it actually is to get a decent amount of personal data via a search engine like Google...

In my opinion, if you're dumb enough to upload photography, personal information, and other sensitive data and/or information online, and *NOT* limit access policies on the content, you're garantueed a world of hurt and/or annoyances.

Good Luck Dumbasses...

Link:

http://news.cnet.com/

Facebook for Android™

Hei hvor det går! ;D Da var native Facebook applikasjon på plass for Google Android også :P testing viser at denne offisielle appen er MYE mer stabil enn både "Babbler Lite" (som jeg har brukt) og andre tredjeparts applikasjoner.

Funksjoner inkluderer:

• opplasting av bilder
• posting på vegg
• sending av melding
• "Live Facebook Folder" *
• status widget

* Live Facebook Folder - er en dynamisk mappe som du kan legge på skrivebordet i Android og bruke til å hente epost-adressene og tlf-numrene til dine Facebook-kontaker.

Alt-i-alt en veldig intuitiv pakke :) men alt kan forbedres, og de har opprettet en egen gruppe på FB hvor en kan sende inn "Feature Requests" til utviklerne.