Unsocial Media: The Uselessness Of Facebook And Google+

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18 October 2012
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Google+ is apparently a success, according to many tech reporters. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people are using G+ to post inside Circles. Some 11,000 people have added me to G+ circles — but, apparently, none of the ones they post to. Of the 150+ people I had in circles, precisely three of them posted content I could see. When I posted content, only a thin fraction of those 11000 people could see it, because at some point I got tuned out by the system. G+ is therefore useless to me, and I just nuked my circles.

Facebook Pages allow some 16% of the people who clicked Like on a Page to see the posts from that Page. Regardless of whether or not those people specifically requested those posts in their News Feed. If a Page owner wants to access the eyeballs of more of the people who clicked Like on a Page because they wanted to see that Page’s posts, that Page owner has to pay to Promote those posts. I would currently have to pay USD $10 to ensure that all the people who Liked the official Warren Ellis Page on Facebook actually saw one single post. Facebook Pages are therefore useless to me.

(Of the 150+ people I had as Friends on my personal page, maybe five people were aware I was actually there, so I’ve nuked my friends list there, too.)

None of this is important, you understand. But I’ve not been paying a huge amount of attention to social media this year. Until it became time to start thinking about raising awareness of GUN MACHINE. So I’ve had to dig into this a bit — I’ve been talking about this in the newsletter, too — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google releases Disavow links tool to fix SEO spam

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17 October 2012
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Google has used the PubCon conference in Las Vegas to release a Disavow Links tool, allowing webmasters dump links into their site that are hurting search rankings.

Most people should not need to use this, saidMatt Cutts, head of webspam at Google. We build our algorithms such that in most cases we handle things just fine. It’s also an advanced tool, so be careful.

The new tool is designed for websites that have already been warned by Google that they have unnatural links pointing to their site, typically content farms for SEO gamers. These have most likely come from people either deliberately or accidentally hiring bad SEO firms that try and game the Chocolate Factory’s search ranking systems — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Swiss clock licensee surprised that Apple can use clock design

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17 October 2012
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Earlier this week, Apple secured a license from the Swiss Railway to use its iconic Swiss Clock on the iPad. This agreement was lauded by the SBB, but it wasn’t so favorably received by Swiss watch maker Mondaine, according to a report in MacWorld UK. The watchmaker has held an exclusive license to use the design since 1986 and said it was surprised by the SBB’s agreement with Apple.

Mondaine holds a long-term exclusive licensee according to a contract with SBB to produce, distribute and market watches and clocks based on the SBB design since 1986 and got surprised to hear about a license agreement between SBB and Apple. — via redwolf.newsvine.com

HP prosecuted by Australian consumer regulator

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17 October 2012
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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the nation’s guardian of consumer rights and regulator of competition and consumer law, has commenced legal action against HP over its warranty and repair practices.

The ACCC is upset with HP for five reasons, namely:

  • The remedies available for a faulty HP product were limited to remedies available from HP at its sole discretion;
  • Consumers must have had a faulty HP product repaired multiple times by HP before they were entitled to receive a replacement;
  • The warranty period for HP products was limited to a specified express warranty period;
  • Following the expiration of an express warranty period, HP would repair faulty HP products on the condition that consumers pay for such repairs;
  • Consumers could not return or exchange HP products purchased from the HP Online Store, unless otherwise agreed by HP at its sole discretion.

— via redwolf.newsvine.com

Gary McKinnon extradition to US blocked by Theresa May

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17 October 2012
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British computer hacker Gary McKinnon will not be extradited to the US, Home Secretary Theresa May has announced.

Mr McKinnon, 46, who admits accessing US government computers but claims he was looking for evidence of UFOs, has been fighting extradition since 2002.

The home secretary told MPs there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was seriously ill and the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn.

Mrs May said the sole issue she had to consider was his human rights.

She said it was now for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, to decide whether he should face trial in the UK — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Notorious creepy uncle troll unmasked

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15 October 2012
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One of the world’s most notorious internet trolls, who created an online forum to share sexualised images of underage girls, has been exposed as a middle-aged Texan grandfather who loves cats.

When confronted about his secret double life, Michael Brutsch pleaded with the New York-based blog Gawker not to expose his identity, saying he had a disabled wife and could lose his job.

I just like riling people up in my spare time, he said.

But the 49-year-old, who used the Reddit name Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres) to post vile messages across the internet, said he did not regret any of his online activities, which include creating or moderating Reddit forums called Chokeabitch, Niggerjailbait, Rapebait, Hitler, Jewmerica, Misogyny, Incest.
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He also led Jailbait, where Reddit users submitted images of scantily-clad tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis or skirts. The images were taken from social media sites, and photos of girls older than 16 were usually deleted — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Why using your real name will not mean better behaviour online

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15 October 2012
1 min read
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In Rights, Technology
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It is fallacy that anonymity breeds terrible behaviour — poor community management and poorly designed reputation systems do that.

Being made to use your real name online does not hold most accountable. If that were the case hundreds of facebook/social media managers around the world would be out of work while people behaved politely online and with civility towards fellow humankind.

Persistent identity — because real can’t be regulated (yet anyway) — does not stop people from behaving badly, if anything it stifles their ability to say what they really think. Which as a society, is something we should all hold in high regard. And defend.

Most people I meet who are anti-anonymity have never inhabited an online forum because almost everyone who ever has, has a completely different understanding of the issue. (Quite possibly Randy Zuckerberg also falls into this category, and no doubt her anti-anonymity views of indicative of what gets said in the halls of facebook) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Snooper’s Charter: 19,000 Emails Against, 0 In Favour

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14 October 2012
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Back in August, I urged people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft Communications Bill, aka Snooper’s Charter. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38 Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been considering the Bill – and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.

Out of 19,000 emails received by the Committee on the subject of the proposed Draft Communications Bill, not a single one was in favour of it, or even agreed with its premise. Has there ever been a bill so universally rejected by the public in a consultation? Clearly, it must be thrown out completely — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Governments Seek Control Of Internet

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10 October 2012
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It is the most important meeting you’ve never heard of — a behind-closed-doors battle for control of the internet that one of the web’s founders fears may put government handcuffs on the net.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, is reviewing international agreements governing telecommunications with a view to expanding its regulatory authority over the internet.

The ITU will hold a summit in Dubai in December where member countries will negotiate a treaty (last updated 24 years ago in Melbourne) that sets out regulations on how international voice, data and video traffic is handled — via redwolf.newsvine.com

How The Hard Drive Crisis Led To One Company Buying Up 5.5PB Of Costco Storage

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10 October 2012
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Flooding in Thailand made getting a hard drive a lot more expensive late last year. It wasn’t a huge deal to most of us, but for a small cloud storage company, it was almost death. Staying alive took creativity. And Costco.

About a year ago, the 3TB internal drives that Blackblaze — which sells unlimited cloud storage for $US5 a month — had been using shot up from about $US130 to $US360. And while the human cost of the floods was enormous, the company also needed to do something to keep itself afloat.

It turned to cheaper external drives. Basically, the answer was to buy the drives, rip them open and stick their guts into the 135TB pods that the company uses — like shucking an oyster. Costco had the best deals, and employees went there to buy 50 or so 3TB external drives at a time. Then things really started to get complicated:

The Two Drive Limit signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November. At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise. Sometimes, we talked our way into more, but we heard 2 is the limit a lot. We started doing drive math: 2 drives a day per store, times 3 stores per day, times 5 farmers, times 7 days a week is 210 drives. That would be sufficient, but in reality it didn’t work out that way. Stores were stocking out of drives on a regular basis and we really couldn’t farm everyday, but we kept at it. One Wednesday afternoon, after working all day at Backblaze, Yev circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores — 10 stores, 46 drives, 212 miles on his Nissan

— via redwolf.newsvine.com

British Library tracks rise and fall of file formats

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10 October 2012
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File formats and the software capable of reading them are living longer than previously thought, according to a British Library and UK Web Archive study.

Formats over Time: Exploring UK Web History (PDF, slides as PDF) considers 2.5 billion files author Andrew N Jackson retrieved with the help of the Internet Archive and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). All the files come from the UK web domain and come from the period between 1996 and 2010.

Jackson used Apache Tika and PRONOM’s DROID tool to inspect the files and determine the format they use. Central to the research was Jeff Rothenberg’s 1997 prediction that Digital Information Lasts Forever — Or Five Years, Whichever Comes First. Jackson is also keen on a rebuttal from David Rosenthal, who he quotes as saying “when challenged, proponents of [format migration strategies] have failed to identify even one format in wide use when Rothenberg [made that assertion] that has gone obsolete in the intervening decade and a half.”

Jackson’s take is that file formats seem to last rather longer than five years even if they don’t survive forever — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter outage caused by human error, domain briefly yanked

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9 October 2012
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An outage that broke hyperlinks on Twitter yesterday evening originated with a simple human error at a Melbourne, Australia-based hosting firm that was responding to an abuse complaint, CNET has learned.

Twitter last year began to abbreviate all hyperlinks using its t.co domain name — which had the side effect of introducing a central point of failure where none existed before. That failure happened last night around 11.30pm PT when t.co went offline, meaning millions of Twitter users received non-existent domain errors when trying to follow links.

A spokesman for Melbourne IT, a domain name registrar which Twitter uses for t.co, told CNET this afternoon that: Yesterday in the process of actioning a phishing complaint, our policy team inadvertently placed the t.co domain on hold. The error was realised and rectified in approximately 40 minutes and t.co links again began working — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Bing is the most heavily poisoned search engine, study says

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9 October 2012
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Bing search results are more affected by poisoning than those of other search engines, according to a study by SophosLabs.

Search engine poisoning attacks are designed to skew results so that dodgy sites — anything from malware infected websites to payday loan sites — appear prominently in the index of sites related to popular search terms. In many cases the tactic is so successful that malware sites appear in the first page of results for popular search terms, in sometimes much higher than legitimate websites. More recently, miscreants have began trying to manipulate image search results — via redwolf.newsvine.com

eBay frets as right to resell comes under scrutiny

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8 October 2012
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eBay has launched a grass roots campaign to defend America’s first sale doctrine, as a Supreme Court hearing approaches that could subject second-hand and resale trades to the approval of rights-holders.

The online auctioneer is lobbying in defense of the first sale doctrine, and has launched eBay Main Street to mobilise its merchants.

The first sale doctrine — in essence, your right to sell your property — will be put under the spotlight in a case sparked by a student reselling textbooks bought outside the USA.

At issue is a decision by a lower court that as far as books are concerned, the doctrine only applies to copies made in America — a decision that forbids what Australians would recognise as parallel imports.

Rather than being confined to books, however, the Appeals Court ruling in the case of Kirtsaeng v John Wiley & Sons soon to be examined by the Supreme Court covers all copyright works — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Start An Online Store For Less Than $200

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7 October 2012
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So many people I speak with have that great idea for an online store spinning around inside their head, but it never gets realised because of the perceived roadblocks to getting up and running. The tools for aspiring entrepreneurs that have evolved over the past few years have made it possible for anyone to start an online business with just a few hundred dollars in initial investment. The information below is based on my experience over the last four months taking the online store for men Details by Sven from an idea in my head to a profitable online business — via Lifehacker Australia

Japan introduces piracy penalties for illegal downloads

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3 October 2012
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Japan-based internet users who download copyright infringing files face up to two years in prison or fines of up to two million yen ($25,700; £15,900) after a change to the law.

Such activity has been illegal since 2010, but until now had not invoked the penalties.

It follows a lobbying campaign by country’s music industry.

But critics said that efforts should have remained focused on stopping users making such material available.

In Japan illegal uploads of copyright infringing music and videos carry a maximum 10 year prison sentence and a 10 million yen fine.

Sales figures suggest the country is the world’s second-largest music market after the US — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Spam text senders face fines of up to £500,000

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2 October 2012
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Two people responsible for sending out millions of spam texts offering accident compensation and payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling services face fines totalling about half a million pounds, following a crackdown by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Another eight companies could face similar fines as the data enforcement office concentrates on unsolicited texts, which its research has shown is one of the most annoying examples of unwanted marketing people receive.

The case is the first of its kind in which the ICO has used its new powers to levy fines of up to £500,000 for misuse of personal data — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Former Copyright Boss: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until Congress Says Otherwise

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30 September 2012
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One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we’ve (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society — one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. his is a hugely valuable thing, and it’s why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don’t upset the apple cart of copyright, before they’re allowed to exist. I’m not joking. Mr Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today’s copyright law — something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman’s amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Purpose of RFID finally discovered: It’s for pairing up socks!

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28 September 2012
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The dream of 21st-century man, socks that pair themselves, is almost upon us with special hosiery which can find its mate using only an iPhone, an embedded tag and an RFID reader.

The socks come from Blacksocks, and feature a heat-tolerant RFID tag identifying the pair to which the garment belongs. Sadly the iPhone has no RFID reader, so a separate reader is waved over the laundry pile to track down the errant match, the details being reported to the iPhone application as RFID Journal explains — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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