It’s worth taking a moment to reflect… Are things getting better or worse?

(I don’t claim there’s any easy answer, it’s complex and multifaceted, which may be why it’s worth thinking about.)

This week was an interesting one in terms of privacy, and there are some great writeups for 2 of them:

• Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds – Gordon and I came up with most of the headline for this (ours was a slightly more gripping “Sex Baiting on Craigslist Destroys Lives” – now, if I can get a nickel for each time someone uses sex baiting). The mechanics of this is pretty simple and doesn’t differ much from phishing or 419 scamming (using fraud to engage victims) except that instead of financial gain, the main goal seems to be hurting other people. I believe of all the commentary the best description is that of sociopath (one interested only in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the effects of their behavior on others). Like Andy, I think that some of the immediate effects will be a profound change in how communities treat the way they interact with strangers over email (a good thing), but I fear that in the long-term this will only contribute to continued degradation of the norms of our expectations of confidence when interacting with individuals (ie JigSaw, which a few years ago would have been a parody-dotcom not a real site)
• Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama – danah writes up her thoughts on the Facebook changes and subsequent backlash with her regular keen insight and spot-on metaphors. Cam’s write-up earlier this week mentions that Upcoming.org (that’s us!) introduced a similar feature at the beginning of the year to much less fuss. That point wasn’t lost on me when I first saw Facebook’s announcement, the differences in implementation help illuminate what’s at the crux of the backlash. The primary differences with our Activity Log is that 1) this information isn’t displayed globally on profiles, but serves as a personal tool only on the dashboard, which I believe has an effect on comfort levels and more importantly (and to Cameron’s point) 2) the information we display is either point-to-point (notifications of a message, etc.) or information that is not only expected to be public, but central to the point of the site (comments/attendance of an event you’re watching, etc.). It’s not a technical issue to show changes to profiles, group membership changes, etc., but it’d be “icky”, largely irrelevant, and a disservice to the community.

One other privacy story that hasn’t gotten as much play is the HP boardroom scandal (“pretexting aka social engineering aka lying; more ongoing) which actually ties very closely to the sex baiting in terms of MO, but because of its more traditional context perhaps isn’t as controversial. We’re not talking about any changes in actual/perceived social architecture, just business as usual.

Looks like there was a publishing hiccup, so this is a dupe. Since I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say at the moment, we’ll leave it at that.

Interrupting this silence for pimpage. We released a huge update today on Upcoming.org. This is without a doubt the biggest frontend update we’ve made since our acquisition, and starts to take advantage of a lot of the big behind-the-scene changes we’ve been toiling away on.

Be sure to check out the landing page and it’s geotargetting. It’s way cool.

Currently the bane of my existence until we switch layout grids…

• On having layout — the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win – the explanation of the bane of my existence this morning, but not a fix
• Fixing the PC IE “float drop” bug – a fix that didn’t quite work for me. I ended up just absolutely positioning based on an expression and then using a height clearing hack
• Clearance – height clearance was much easier for me; I didn’t go this really long route, I just set an expression to set the height to the absolutely postitioned element, then set the height to 100%. Seems to work fine.
• Making IE 5.5+ use position: fixed; – I didn’t need this, but it looks vaguely useful

I got my iRex iLiad ebook reader yesterday. Its screen is pretty fantastic. Tonight I’ve enabled the networking and am poking around (the firmware I’m running conveniently has dropbear running).

root@ereader:/# df   
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/tffsa2               3038      2365       519  82% /old-root
/dev/tffsa2              73045     62332      7001  90% /
/dev/tffsa5              28973       225     27252   1% /mnt/protected
/dev/tffsa6             131180      7372    123808   6% /mnt/free
/dev/tffsa7                888       145       698  17% /mnt/settings

root@ereader:/# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor       : XScale-PXA255 rev 6 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 397.31
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp 
CPU implementor : 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0x2d0
CPU revision    : 6
Cache type      : undefined 5
Cache clean     : undefined 5
Cache lockdown  : undefined 5
Cache unified   : harvard
I size          : 32768
I assoc         : 32
I line length   : 32
I sets          : 32
D size          : 32768
D assoc         : 32
D line length   : 32
D sets          : 32

Hardware        : iRex Technologies ER0100 eReader
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000

The most useful non-communication app on my phone is most certainly Google Mobile Maps. I suppose there’s some chagrin in saying this considering that Upcoming.org is part of Yahoo! Local now, but honestly, there’s no shame in recognizing quality, and GMM is the best third-party mobile app I’ve ever used, bar none.

Yes, the features are great (the polyline animated step-by-step direction routing is both gee-whiz *and* useful), but what really makes GMM stand out is the amazingly well thought out UI – you know the designers have not just thought things out, but have tweaked it after using it in their daily life. It’s the little things that just work like they should.

For example, tonight I was in San Jose for an event, and was looking for a drug store by the venue. Easy enough to do a business search and get some results back – but where is it in relation to the venue? (which had disappeared with the new search) There was a second of trepadation, as I clicked into “directions there,” but again, GMM didn’t disappoint – there was the location listed at the top “recent searches” listing the venue in the directions tab.

That’s just awesome. And inspirational.

One of the things that’s surprised me is how successful the “objective” media has once again been led to cover the controversey and rhetoric rather than expose how ridiculous the argument against government funding for embryonic stem-cell research in HR 810, which specifically funds only research from in-vitro fertilization embryos that would OTHERWISE BE DISCARDED.

So we get these absurdly fake histrionics about the “destruction of human life” that are completely deceitful. And the sad thing is that it works. Time and time again, almost without fail, even when the contradiction presents itself directly.