A Few Headlines: Facebook & Other Big Bros., & the Nasher v. Museum Tower

More at the links.

1. What Facebook Knows. "[O]n 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group . . . . the company is not above using its platform to tweak users' behavior. . . . By learning more about how small changes on Facebook can alter users' behavior outside the site, the company eventually 'could allow others to make use of Facebook in the same way' says Marlow."

(Rough translation of image at left: "I give the secrets of big companies to you, and I am a terrorist – Assange; I give your secrets to big companies, and I am Man of the Year – Zuckerberg.")

2. Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Re- Gov't's Massive Spying on US Civilians. "Three . . . former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) . . . have come forward to . . . confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the 'secret room' at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006." (Link added.)

3. US Nat'l Reconnaissance Office's Castoff 'Scopes Beat NASA's Hubbell. "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes . . . . [d]esigned for surveillance [and] no longer needed for spy missions . . . . These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble . . . . NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security: 'With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.'"

4. A Modest Proposal. In case you missed it, Dallas's latest addition to housing for the 1%, Museum Tower, is frying everything within its line of sight on the Nasher Museum premises. "So [writes Christina Rees in Glasstire], one of Dallas’s more admirable enfant terribles, Erik Schuessler . . . came up with an early solution, and so far I haven’t seen one to beat it." (Link added; click on the images for larger versions.)

Ideas for Facebook Apps

(1) "Who Are My Sycophants?"; and

(2) "Of Whom Am I on the Brink of Becoming Categorized as a Sycophant?"

Inside FB

Fascinating interview with an anonymous employee, here (thanks, Ben!) As you know, they track everything you do and save it forever, regardless of any deletions you may think you've made.

I also note that, taking this employee's lowest estimate of the number of active users and her highest estimate of the number of servers, there are 27,500 users per server. She also says an in-progress re-coding of the site is expected to "reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%."

I realize FB has expenses other than the servers themselves, but I'm still not clear why a FB-like facility owned by users and accessed for a relatively small subscription fee should be expected to remain economically infeasible forever.

Facebook's New Privacy Options

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a helpful article analyzing the changes, which FB is promoting as giving users more control over who has access to their data. While it's true that the new privacy settings interface is more convenient with respect to some kinds of information, FB is in fact eliminating many privacy options that used to be available. B.t.w., EFF recs that you NOT accept the privacy settings that FB recs.

More here.

(Pretty much all I post on FB is warnings about FB.)

UPDATE: Great NYT article here walks you through the settings to do what little you can to try to protect your privacy under the new FB regime.

FBI Investigates Coder for Downloading Public Records

Per Wired, 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz has been investigated by the FBI because the Government Printing Office experimented with offering free access to its database of public court records, and Swartz made the mistake of accepting their offer.

Swartz downloaded 19,856,160 pages, uploaded them to amazon.com's EC2 "cloud" service, and donated them to public.resource.org, "an open government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader project to make public as many government databases as Malamud can find. It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its EDGAR filings online in the ’90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he promptly put on the internet for anyone to download in bulk."

Prior to the GPO's experimental offer, the records had been available only for a fee of 8¢ per page, or more if purchased through a privately-owned, commercial intermediary. When the gummint figured out what was happening, they abruptly terminated the experiment and notified the FBI that the database was "compromised."

A partially-redacted FBI report shows they ran Swartz through a full range of gummint databases, among other things checking his work history, his Facebook data [see, e.g., here and here], whether his cell number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen register, and checking him against a private data broker’s database; they also obtained his driver's license photo and considered a stake-out of his home (which they concluded would be too conspicuous, since few cars parked on Swartz's dead-end, suburban street).

"The feds evidently identified Swartz in the first place by approaching Amazon, which provided his name, phone number and address. . . . Amazon’s user agreement for its cloud computing solutions gives it the right to turn over customer information to the government on request."

More at Wired. (And for more on Amazon's role, see Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC.)

(Thanks, Ben!)

Re- Facebook

Great article at ReadWriteWeb, "What Facebook Quizzes Know About You":

"[M]illions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. . . . whether or not your profile is set to 'private.' Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is? Just take the ACLU's Facebook Quiz and prepare to be shocked."

(Emphasis supplied.) "Application developers" means, of course, anyone who develops quiz or other application for use on FB, including various Big Bros. and, potentially, crooks.

"[U]sers can limit how much information applications (including friends' applications) can see by tweaking their privacy settings. . . . To do this yourself, go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications [-> Settings]. From there, you can uncheck the boxes next to the items which you don't want apps to have access to."

Note: if you've ever taken any FB quizzes or used any other apps, you'll need first to go to the Applications page and uncheck all the applications with x's across from them (which are still authorized to share all your info).

Kate Miller-Heidke (V. Good)

Stick it out 'til at least 1:06 min.



(Thanks, Paula!)