indefatigablog

So long, Facebook1

Posted by c in buttwhack, lunacy, surveillance (Sunday July 20, 2008 at 6:57 pm)

Today i say goodbye to social networking. I no longer wish to opt-in to additional consumer surveillance.

If i had an office job that bored me to tears, i would surely feel differently and continue to click my way through mob, zombie and other such mindless *wars*.

Alas, i have no such job and after a discussion about its pros and cons, it is undeniably clear that the cons ruthlessly outweigh the pros.

After using the features that Facebook provides *free* to users for the past couple of years, in all fairness it was fun to occasionally find a long, lost pal.

However, given the amount of information Facebook sells about me and anyone else who uses it, I began to think this way : “They’re making lots of money off of tracking what I spend and where and potentially using my words and images without my knowledge. Is that such a great deal for anyone else?”

To boot, I was friends with a lot of people who I never see or actually have much in common with [towards the end i actually started removing "friends"].

As for the friends i see on a regular basis, i don’t need such a tool to stay in contact with them.

So — so long, social-networking-disguised-as-data-mining-and-profiling sites!

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c

YARTGROYTV0

Posted by c in anthropology, buttwhack, influence, lunacy, sight and sound (Sunday July 13, 2008 at 3:29 pm)

Have you ever wondered why they call it television “programming”?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it INFLUENCES people how to behave would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it TEACHES people to adopt an identity that isn’t their own would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it CONVINCES people that they need to act a certain way to be COOL would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the WORLD would be a better place without it would it?

Fact : programming is programming you.

Yet Another Reason To Get Rid Of Your TV :

Is ANYONE here to make friends?

This “reality” makes me think there’s not much difference between television programming and how these people feel/think at work, at home and in society at large.

Are YOU here to make friends or are you just here to *win*?

You *winners* aren’t able to answer that honestly and that’s ok - you didn’t come here to make friends.

The rest of us didn’t come here to make friends with self-serving bullies.

Sadly, according to this study, the bullies aren’t going away any time soon.

It’s easy to get down about this but, fortunately, there ARE good people around who help balance them out : )

The only catch is, you won’t see or *meet* any of them on TV.

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c

GoDaddy.com shills domain auctions?0

Posted by c in buttwhack, screws, tech (Sunday June 29, 2008 at 9:37 am)

Before you purchase hosting or domains, check out NoDaddy.com, which explains the way GoDaddy.com operates.

Via Slashdot :

When a GoDaddy customer forgets or otherwise fails to renew a domain, GoDaddy sells it off to the highest bidder through their TDNAM subsidiary. Some registrars–even Network Solutions–give the domain owner a percentage of the proceeds of such auctions. But GoDaddy keeps all the spoils to themselves. Anyway, it was recently discovered that the Vice President of TDNAM has been bidding on (and sometimes winning) TDNAM’s own auctions. This drives up the prices for normal customers and also leads to conflict of interest issues since normal bidders need to trust TDNAM to keep various information secret, such as their proxy bids, bidding history, the domains on their watch list. Also, GoDaddy doesn’t tell you when your bid price was inflated due to TDNAM executives bidding against you. They are one of the few auction services which don’t even give you the nicknames of competing bidders.

DomainNameWire contacted other domain auction services, and none allow unrestricted employee bidding on their own auctions like GoDaddy does. Enom (a patner in NameJet) notes that “We definitely do NOT let employees compete in auctions. Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.” Yet GoDaddy seems to think it is fine for executives to inflate their auction prices by bidding against customers. They responded to DomainNameWire that they allow this. There is a big risk that these employees have access to private information of the normal bidders, that they get special discounts, or that they may sometimes shill bid to increase prices without trying to actually win.

Head on over to NoDaddy.com for more information.

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c

Charter should rename itself Cheater0

Posted by c in buttwhack, lunacy, tech (Wednesday May 14, 2008 at 7:19 am)

Charter Communications spies on customers

Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an “enhanced online experience” that involves Charter monitoring its users’ searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser.

Reader Matt copied The Consumerist on a letter he sent to Charter’s VP of Customer Operations and CEO:

Dear Mr. Stackhouse,

I am a high speed internet subscriber in the Fort Worth, TX area. For the last year or so I have had Charter’s 10 Megabit service and I am a satisfied customer. I am writing, however, because I am concerned by your recent letter discussing the “enhancement” that will be coming soon to my Charter web browsing experience (targeted, in-line advertisement manipulation). I appreciate Charter’s respect for my privacy, but the method that Charter has provided to opt-out of this tracking scheme is insecure and woefully inadequate.

The method that you provide to opt-out is as follows. First, a customer must visit www.charter.com/onlineprivacy. Once at the site, the customer must enter his or her complete name and address. Upon submission of this personal information, the customer must accept a cookie from Charter that indicates his or her opt-out status. While this process sounds simple on face, further consideration reveals that this opt-out method is fraught with privacy concerns and places the burden on your paying customer, rather than Charter.

The most pressing privacy issue with this opt-out method is that the opt-out form presented at the aforementioned URL is not encrypted. As I’m sure you realize, this means that a user submitting his or her address to Charter is doing so in the clear, leaving this personal information open to eavesdropping. It is not difficult to create an SSL-encrypted web form. It is troubling that Charter has not done so in this case.

The fact that this opt-out system relies on a cookie to keep users opted out is also a privacy issue. By telling customers who visit the opt-out page that, “if you delete your cookies or cache files… you will have to opt-out again,” you are encouraging users to keep those files that good privacy practices dictate should be frequently purged. Ironically, the best reason to purge one’s cookies often is to prevent internet marketers from tracking one’s behavior online.

In addition to the critical privacy concerns, the steps required to avoid being tracked by this new advertising system place the burden on your customers, rather than on Charter where it belongs. A customer should be able to opt-out of this advertising tracking system in a manner that will rarely, if ever, require the customer to opt-out again. Instead, because the system uses cookies, a customer must insecurely opt-out of being tracked on each PC in his or her home. Further compounding the work that the customer has to do, if he or she deletes cookies in accordance with safe browsing techniques, it will be necessary to insecurely opt-out on each and every PC again.

I suggest that rather than force your customers through unending iterations of opting out of this advertising system, you should allow customers like me to opt-out at the cable modem level via a secure, encrypted form on your website. I’m glad to hear that Charter has an appreciation for my privacy, but please change your opt-out process to demonstrate that you also have an appreciation for my time and security online.

Matt’s letter focuses on the flawed opt-out clause, but the program itself, an implementation of “deep packet inspection,” is more worrying. Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to monitor not only its users’ searches and visited websites, but also the type of activity (e.g., email or peer-to-peer), which could be used for traffic shaping and threatens net neutrality.

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c

buttwhack.com0

Posted by c in buttwhack (Tuesday April 8, 2008 at 1:51 pm)

buttwhack.com is LIVE!

From the site’s about page :

“We, here at buttwhack.com, are interested in our collective struggle as human beings to make good choices.

As much as we’d like to believe we are always superior beings, the truth of it is we are a race of ups and downs, with the downs often regarded as negative and worthy of forgetting.

We disagree! What we post here is all the idiosyncratic nature of being human in all of its unglamorous truth.

As we find stories on the Web that reflect this our goal is to collect some of them here - each its own example of our profound capacity to behave like buttwhacks.

Thanks for stopping by.”

Check out buttwhack.com and if you find any cool stories that would make good home on the site, be sure to email them along!

: )

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