Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Why I left Facebook

I have been worried about Facebook for years. I worry about how personal information on users is their most valuable asset, and the ways in which they may seek to profit from it. More generally, I worry about the unintended consequences of creating massive searchable databases on social interactions.

What actually prompted me to ‘deactivate’ (not ‘delete’ yet) was two things.

Excessive time demands

First, Facebook is too time-demanding. People expect me to keep up to speed on their many postings, despite how there are hundreds or even thousands of status updates that appear every day. If you advertise your event on Facebook and I miss it completely, it is probably because I was trying to get some reading done, or enjoying a walk and a cup of coffee, or dealing with my neverending flood of unanswered email and so I missed the status update message or invitation for a few days.

If you really want me to know about something, you must at least send me a text or an email. Putting notice on Facebook (or Twitter, or your own website) is not a sufficiently attention-grabbing action to ensure that I will see it.

As I am writing this, I am ignoring a sizeable collection of projects that are in need of attention. I should be working on finding an apartment in Toronto, packing up my current apartment, and making plans for how to move. I should be researching possible doctoral programs, working on my research proposal, and corresponding with possible references and supervisors. I should also be reading various books from various stacks of semi-read tomes, refining my low carbon mutual fund idea, improving my chess, getting exercise, exploring some elements of Ottawa that are still unknown to me, planning a trip to Washington D.C., planning a trip to New Orleans, writing articles and letters to editors, processing and uploading photos, going out and taking new photos. I should be taking university courses, learning practical skills, responding to letters, searching for photographic gigs, learning to drive, joining clubs, going camping, and improving my data backup regime.

All of those tasks are better uses of time than Facebook.

Privacy

Second, I am worried about facial recognition. The only barrier to it becoming absolutely ubiquitous seems to be the availability of data on our faces. The cameras are already out there, and the software and the computing power to turn pixels representing faces into names are coming inevitably.

Someone with a lot of determination can dig around the internet and probably find dozens of photos of me to feed into a facial recognition algorithm. While I was on Facebook, however, this process was simplified to the point of easy automation. In thousands of photos, I had been specifically identified and even had the region of the photo containing my face marked.

Still not too isolated

So far, I have been glad to be off that particular grid. Anyone who actually wants to contact me has a wide variety of ways to do so. My email address and cellphone number are both on the ‘contact me’ page of my blog, and my blog comes up immediately when you Google my name. If that is too much work for a person to go through, it seems fair to say that they didn’t really want to contact me in the first place.

I don’t want to delete my Facebook account completely because it does have some value to me as an archive. Nearly all my photos from Oxford are in there, with tags and comments affixed. If Facebook provided a way to download all that as an elegant, accessible archive that can be used offline I would be happy to do so. I doubt, however, that they will ever provide such a tool. All their plans hinge on attracting people to the site and making them visit as often as possible. Helping them untangle themselves and walk away with whatever data they find valuable runs completely counter to that. Facebook actually lets you download your photos easily in quite a good archive format.

I will miss the chance to see what distant friends are up to easily, and to have the occasional fortuitous bit of contact with them. I will try to remember to send an out-of-the-blue email every once in a while.

P.S. I left LinkedIn too, but who cares about LinkedIn?

This American Life on patents

A recent episode of the This American Life podcast centres around technology patents, with emphasis on the so-called ‘patent trolls’ who harass legitimate companies using dubious patent claims, in hopes of getting cash settlements.

Designing an ideal patent system is an interesting question from a utilitarian perspective. It seems beneficial to encourage innovation and protect small companies with novel ideas from giant companies that might steal them. At the same time, patents can be used by big companies to bully small ones, and when obvious ideas are given patents it can prevent useful technologies from becoming widely available.

Automated facial recognition

As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.

London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.

To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.

Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.

OS X Lion available for download

Ars Technica has a detailed 19-part review of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. 

My take: this new version is a big deal and changes some pretty fundamental things both under the hood and in terms of how you actually use your computer. It will break some old software. Don’t upgrade lightly before checking whether the change will break something really important to you.

Also, you may never really have control of your files in the same way again. With the pervasive new autosave system, OS X will have a mysterious new relationship with them.

Recent lessons from the NPR Planet Money podcast

Arguments and ideas featured in recent Planet Money podcasts:

It’s a good podcast.

Macs are also vulnerable

If you think your computer is secure because it is a Mac, you are dead wrong. The latest patch for OS X – 10.6.8 – contains 29 patches for security holes that allow arbitrary code execution. Any of those holes could be used to totally own your computer, circumventing any antivirus or encryption software you may be running. These 29 have been patched, but you can be sure there are others in the OS and in popular software like Flash and Adobe’s PDF reader.

If you want to keep a system safe, keep it physically disconnected from the internet.

Control time is a cost

In real-time strategy games – like the Starcraft, Warcraft, and Homeworld series’ – the player needs to collect resources of some kind, which are then invested in additional resource gathering capabilities as well as combat units. The ‘macro’ game consists of building up an economy that can support the military forces you wish to assemble. In many games, it is necessary to collect resources of different kinds, with different units requiring various combinations for purchase. For instance, Warcraft II required players to collect gold, wood, and oil. Starcraft and Starcraft II feature the collection of minerals and ‘vespene gas’.

Combat units also vary substantially in how much attention they require from the player. Some units can just be ordered to march in the general direction of the enemy, and then allowed to attack automatically. Other units require constant personal attention, for instance because their capabilities are centred around spells or special abilities that the unit will not use automatically. A unit like a Roach in Starcraft II falls into the first category – it doesn’t require much personal attention. By contrast, units like High Templar and Infestors can only be effective if the player’s attention is focused on them quite a bit.

I think it is sensible to think of the time spent controlling a unit as a cost closely equivalent to the resources invested in it. Indeed, the player’s time is probably the most fundamental resource in such games. Every second spend developing an economy is a second that cannot be spent on scouting the enemy, harassing their resource collection operations, or performing tactical strikes with combat units.

Something a bit similar may arise in turn-based games like chess, especially when a timer is involved. When a player is under pressure to make moves quickly and accurately, the time they need to spend working out the implications for each of their pieces is a real cost. For instance, it might put useful pressure on your opponent to have a bishop well ahead of your other forces, supported from behind. But for every move from that point on, you need to think about the implications of your moves and countermoves for that bishop, and the chances of making a mistake increase.

What Google knows

I wrote before about how Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan is really the minimum requirement for such a powerful organization.

Jacob Mchangama, a Danish human rights lawyer, has put this in a nice way: “The dream of all dictators is to know as much about you as Google does”.

Incidentally, that is all the more reason for companies like Google to refuse to comply with illegal search requests from governments.

Photos and asides

Sorry for the thin content here lately. I have been intensely busy with other things.

For instance, last night I took photos at a Young Canadians in Finance sponsored fundraiser for the United Way. The keynote speaker was Wayne Wouters – Clerk of the Privy Council and Canada’s top bureaucrat. The United Way has a press release up about the event, which includes one of my photos.

P.S. If you are planning to mail anything in Canada – or have anything mailed to you – it may be wise to do it soon.

P.P.S. You can solve chess endgames for free online, using the Nalimov Endgame Tablebases. Once you are down to six or fewer pieces (including kings), the number of possible chess positions falls off sharply. In fact, they can all be stored in just over 7 gigabytes of space.

Firefox avoiding duplicate tabs

Firefox 4.0.1 seems to have a new behaviour. If you try to enter an exact URL that you already have open in another tab, it jumps to the first instance rather than opening a new one.

That seems rather sensible, though the jump seems a bit abrupt. Still, it’s better than having piles of redundant and confusing content in your many Firefox windows. It’s especially confusing for me, since I am usually running Chrome and Safari for testing purposes at the same time.