Category: Technology

Facebook Privacy Settings

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about Face­book’s pri­vacy issues, and the import­ance of mak­ing sure the pri­vacy set­tings in your Face­book pro­file match what you want to have hap­pen to your per­son­al data. Bri­an pos­ted on this same top­ic and has some good points and detailed instruc­tions; the com­ments are also worth reading.

I went and checked my set­tings and found they looked a little dif­fer­ent to what I remembered, so it’s prob­ably a good idea to check your set­tings on a reg­u­lar basis; as Face­book changes what they do they may change which options exist. And think about what you want, about that bal­ance between let­ting out enough inform­a­tion so old friends can find you again (as lots of people want) and mak­ing sure that not too much inform­a­tion gets out. I changed most of mine to “friends only” from the default “my net­works and friends”; maybe at some stage I’ll change some of them back again but for the time being I feel more com­fort­able this way. 

Hibernating Ubuntu

I’ve had Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, and it nev­er hibern­ated. I’d do what looked like the right things, but it just did­n’t work. So a couple of days ago I decided I should try to track down the prob­lem. I was par­tially suc­cess­ful; hibern­at­ing a laptop prop­erly seems to be dif­fi­cult. Here’s what I did to track down (some of) the problem.

When it comes back after fail­ing to hibern­ate, the sys­tem politely tells you to check the help file for com­mon prob­lems. So you bring up the help file and it con­tains a defin­i­tion of hibern­ate, with no hints as to what might be going wrong, but a point­er to the Ubuntu sup­port for­ums as well as to laptop test­ing pages which sup­posedly con­tain ideas of what to try. The laptop test­ing page claims that hibern­ate works for the Toshiba Tecra M2 that I have, so that did­n’t help much.

Watch­ing closely the next time I tried hibern­at­ing revealed an error mes­sage flash­ing by about not enough swap space. Search­ing for this reveals that the swap space the installer gives you by default may not be enough to man­age hiberna­tion. You need the same size swap as RAM, which I did­n’t have. OK, out with the gpar­ted livecd to recon­fig­ure my par­ti­tions. For­tu­nately I had some spare unused room next to the swap par­ti­tion to grow it into. The next error mes­sage I saw flash­ing by on hibern­at­ing (read­ing it involved hibern­at­ing mul­tiple times, star­ing fix­edly at the right point in the screen, hop­ing that the last mes­sage I saw might be of some use; why can­’t these error mes­sages by default be put in a nice error dia­log box so I can actu­ally read them?) was that the sys­tem could­n’t find the swap space. Pok­ing around the Ubuntu sup­port for­um reveals that each time the machine is rebooted, the swap par­ti­tion gets a new UUID, thereby killing the con­fig files for any scripts that were set up to use the old one. More details here; fol­low­ing the steps in that post­ing finally made hibern­ate mostly work, albeit with a ton of error mes­sages about the USB device (the mouse, I pre­sume, since that’s the only USB device I have con­nec­ted) which I’m ignor­ing. The mostly refers to the fact that the sys­tem often won’t actu­ally come back to life after being in hiberna­tion until I hit the power but­ton and restart from scratch. I have yet to fig­ure out what’s going on there; any hints are welcome.

Bad Behavio(u)r

If you use the Bad Behavior/Bad Beha­viour plu­gin for Word­Press, you will need to update it imme­di­ately if you don’t want to be blocked from access­ing your own site (which is rather dis­con­cert­ing). More details at Bad Beha­vi­or 2.0.11. Simply over­writ­ing the old files with the new should work; anoth­er option is to rename the bad-behavior-wordpress.php file to some­thing else, which will dis­able it, so you can then log in to the admin pages as usual.

Kudos to the plu­gin author (Michael Hamp­ton) for find­ing and fix­ing the prob­lem quickly!

Recycling Computers

I just got back from drop­ping off three mon­it­ors (two big and bulky, the third does­n’t work), two PC boxes (one works: a friend was upgrad­ing so I offered to get rid of the old one, the oth­er does­n’t even turn on any more), two key­boards, a 9600 baud modem, an old router, and assor­ted asso­ci­ated cables, at Free Geek Van­couver, a lovely organ­isa­tion that cheer­fully takes com­puter hard­ware, work­ing or not, obsol­ete or not. They reuse what can be reused (installing Ubuntu + soft­ware and donat­ing to a good home), and recycle what can­’t be reused. 

Reusing or recyc­ling old com­puters does­n’t solve all the envir­on­ment­al prob­lems caused by the com­put­ing industry but it’s at least a start. 

Web 2.0: Issues

There are some issues with Web 2.0, mostly in the areas of pri­vacy, secur­ity, copy­right — all those things you’d rather you did­n’t need to worry about. Take pri­vacy for example. On many social net­work­ing sites people sign up and then put in all their per­son­al inform­a­tion simply because there’s a field there for it. Often those pro­files are pub­lic by default, rather than private, and often they’re open to search engines as well. So people think their inform­a­tion is private and then dis­cov­er it isn’t, and have to go search­ing through menus to find out how to turn on those pri­vacy fil­ters that are turned off by default. In many cases what’s good for the site own­ers isn’t neces­sar­ily good for the users. One big factor in Flick­r’s early suc­cess was the fact that uploaded pho­tos could be seen by the world unless spe­cific­ally made private, and lots of users did (and still do) get con­fused by copy­right issues (cre­at­ive com­mons licenses don’t solve the issue of what “pub­lic domain” etc actu­ally mean).

Then there’s the per­sona issue. I might have a leg­al but slightly embar­rass­ing hobby that I don’t want work know­ing about. So I need to set up a sep­ar­ate online iden­tity for that — people need to think about the implic­a­tions of this in advance if they don’t want cor­rel­a­tions of that hobby per­sona with their “real” one on the basis of an address or phone num­ber or email.

Oth­er prob­lems with the pleth­ora of new Web 2.0 social net­work­ing sites: they often don’t under­stand what pri­vacy and user con­sent mean. You sign up for some­thing, they ask you to upload your address book to see wheth­er oth­er friends are already there, the next thing you know they’ve done spam-a-friend and emailed every­one in your address book without your know­ledge, let alone your con­sent. Or they ask you to give them your user­name and pass­word to some oth­er social net­work­ing site under the “trust us, we will do no evil” motto (whatever happened to “trust but verify”?).

There are some solu­tions to this: users have to be care­ful about the inform­a­tion they hand out (fake birth­d­ates, any­one?) and start demand­ing that sites take care of their inform­a­tion. If I want to hand out inform­a­tion to the world, that’s my decision, but it should­n’t be up to some web site to make that decision for me.

The last of a series on Web 2.0, taken from my talk at the CSW Sum­mer School in July 2007. Here’s the series introduction.