I don’t frankly give a crap what else happened in Tech in February of 2008. i don’t care bit the MS >> Yahoo merger. I don’t care about new MacBooks, or The iPhone SDK, I don’t give a flying about any of that.

This is what matters and I’m absolutely chewing at the bit to get my hands on it:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/224

It’s Microsoft Worldwide Telescope. I think it is, from what I’ve seen at least, truly wonderful. It made Scoble cry, apparently. Frankly I don’t blame him, I can’t wait to show my niece this.

If you hold any international domains (.com, .net, .org etc.) beware of this:

I received a letter in the post today from the ‘Domain Registry of America’ asking me to switch my domain over to them from my existing registrar. I was not interested from the get go as the prices were loopy (25 GBP a year!!??) and I like my existing registrar (also the host of this site) thank you very much. I decided I’d confirm my existing registrar still held the domain admin for me, which they do, and they were also good enough to point out to me that DRoA are basically in the business of charging rather ‘ambitious’ fees for registrations, renewals and transfers of domains. I kind of already guessed from the prices on the letter, but this only confirmed what I already thought.

So if you get a letter from these guys then open it, have a good laugh, then burn it

This App (thumbs up to F-Secure for the post), would appear to have less than in-tact morals. While not a security risk per se, it is a nasty piece of work and as fake as a Hollywood breast implant. Avoid at all costs.

This pisses me off. I mean yes I know CES is a healm of capitalism and crap consumer goods that no-one wants, but really guys, there are limits. Once would probably have been funny, no, wait, no it wouldn’t.

Think about it like this. You’re a poor hack from a TV company who’s probably getting paid far too little to stand there trying to put a presentation across about your newest product and some retard decides it’d be funny to turn off all the TVs. You look an ass, your company looks an ass and people walk away because of it. Just imagine how pissed off you would be, for a second. Not only are you making these people’s lives even more of a misery than they undoubtedly already are. I mean who is gonna enjoy giving the same presentation full of corporate pap 5-10 times a day anyway? Have you not morals?!

Well I hope you’re happy. You play a stupid prank, not once but multiple times. You then post it on the net and sit around laughing like a bunch of stupid high school drop outs who just pushed an old lady over. Now it’s all over the web that bloggers are pulling stupid pranks at CES. Great. So when CES refuse to invite bloggers because you can’t be trusted to conduct yourself like proper journalists then I hope you’ll be even happier, having set the clock back 5 years and returned CES to the journo hacks, who go and butter every company up and write resultantly biased drivel.

Congratulations, idiots. Just because CES is barely worth attending these days is not an excuse to try and get your asses banned.
via Gizmodo

Speaking of Scoble’s Facebook debacle…

This article is very interesting, it highlights something that *immediately* sprung to my mind when I found Scoble was banned for scripted ’scraping’ of details from the site. As Paul points out in this article, Facebook themselves use scripts to scan your GMail, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts for users that might be on Facebook. That is, apparently, as detailed inthe artcile linked below, against the terms of service of all these sites.

Double standards? Yet more evidence of Facebook/Zukerberg becoming Microsoft/Bill Gates 2.0 I think…

via Paul Buchheit

It’s going to be a tough start to 2008 for Facebook, it seems. First the whole debacle over Scoble and his information skimming script (now resolved, but leaving a few questions about users rights to access their own data), and now this. We all know that dodgy websites are capable of installing spyware onto your computer, but this is the first example I have seen of a Facebook application doing it. Of course it[s perfectly feasible as Facebook apps are just web code like any other page, and are hosted for the most part by 3rd parties. I have to say I got sick of them because most of them were crappy, and I also didn’t trust most of them with my data or the integrity of my computer (and I use a Mac, for the record). Seems every major reason I had for leaving Facebook is coming up in turn in the blogosphere as a matter for discussion… and they thought I was paranoid?

UPDATE: I read into it and it actively requests users to download and click a download button. In my book it’s just another one to file under the ‘don’t download stuff you don’t trust, dumbass’ file, but it’s still serious and it is pushing out Zango, which is a notorious spyware/adware package that I myself have spent many a frustrating hour trying to remove (unsuccessfully) from a Windows machine. I’m pretty certain it’ll catch plenty of gullible/uninformed folks out pretty easily all the same, and I still stand by my posiition. I’d like to see if Facebook take any action against the app and it’s authors.
via FortiNET

Every major blog I read has offered their support and positive vibes to giga-blogger Om Malik, and I’d like to add mine too.

Om suffered a heart attack on December 28th and has been recovering ever since. Makes my cold I was complaining about look a bit lame really doesn’t it?

My dad has had some relatively light brushes with heart trouble, and it’s pretty scary stuff. I’m just glad Om is on the road to recovery, and we all wish him well.

His insight on the web is as entertaining and insightful as it is individual and gritty, but hey I’m willing to wait until he’s fully back to blogging speed to read his next article!

via GigaOm

Technorati Tags:
om, malik, heart, illness

via Scobleizer

It seems Facebook didn’t like some kind of script Robert ran over his Facebook profile. So they kicked him out. They cut the line, THEN asked for consultation on the issue. They haven’t got back to him either (from what I see anyway, he’s not updated the story at the time of me blogging this). Now I left Facebook after the whole ‘Beacon’ thing blew up and I was surprised more high profile folks who spoke out against it and Zukerberg didn’t quit also (I guess it means more to them than to me). I can’t see Scoble going back even if they let him now…
I get it now. Zukerberg is the new Bill Gates. A geek who wrote some slightly-less-than-crummy software at college that took off, made it big, developed into something leviathan in scale and is used by many people the world over, and now he is milking it for every penny, using bad terms of service (on the assumption no-one ever reads that crap anyway) and suspect deals and user data monitoring. Moreover you have to start completely from scratch if you change from his platform because their applications only run on their platform and you can’t port your data or apps elsewhere.

Sound like an piece of software we know and love at all? I thought so too…

– EDITED –
I’m sure people at Google were smirking rather vivaciously over Facebook’s embarrassing faux-par surrounding Facebook Beacon. Well they can damn well wipe the smirks off now, because they too have committed information technocide erm, made a mistake (don’t ask what that means, because i don’t know).

This, posted on Google’s own Blogger service, gives some details of the spectacular screw-up that has been Google’s attempt to add a ‘Social’ element to the Google Reader RSS aggregation service. Again there is no opt-out and very little warning of the roll-out of the feature and the feature itself makes blinding assumptions regarding who you want to share your public feeds with.

When will these people learn. What the hell do we have to do to make these people do this stuff properly. I mean yes it’s a cool idea, and certainly Scoble seems to like it, but for chrisakes ask people, interact, get feedback on *how* people want this to work. Learning from other’s mistakes is a way of avoiding the same thing, and in the past Google have been pretty smart at not going down the wrong avenues where competitors like MSN and Yahoo! have, making them the leader they are today. They missed the mark this time.

However… Scoble has a point. “Public” means public, so people should have reacted accordingly.
–

My stand is still the same however. Ask, or warn, or interact with your users before you make major changes like this, especially something that is ’social’ as ’social’ is a weird and touchy subject area, especially these days. Offer it, allow opt-in, even if it’s only to start with, and you don’t get a blog shaped brick through your front window. Over time early adopters will work out the glitches and then you can announce (beforehand, like well before) you plan on rolling it out later fully, with a pre-definable opt out, or something like that. It’s hard and I’m baking my brain just thinking about it, but a company like Google, or even Facebook, has the people and the nouse to get stuff like this right. Why don’t they?

Technorati Tags:
facebook, google, privacy, reader