The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned this week that US government agencies are actively using social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace to spy on people. Agencies named include the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The EFF raised concerns that the breadth of the surveilance program was concerning, altough it did acknowledge that the DHS monitoring of social networks was appropriate, and that they were attempting to apply “Fair Information Practice Principles”. USCIS officers had apparently been instructed to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud, including evidence that their relationships might not live up to the USCIS’ standard of a legitimate marriage.

I have no objection to the general concept of law enforcement monitoring my activities in a public space – this is really no different from having police officiers walking down your street, but the ease with which the govementment can automatically monitor every public conversation on social networks is more than a little scary. I can’t wait for the day when Diaspora is mature enough to use, and I can take control back of my data.

Well, yet again, Randall Munroe hit the nail on the head with this one. Time to go change all my passwords.

Must have been a great sabbatical – just finished this paper for Supercomputing 2010, and it was the least painful paper I’ve ever written.

It has been a crazy couple of months at work, but we finally got to launch the Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) and the press reaction (BBC, CNet News, The Register) has made it all worth while. Now that the launch is out of the way, I can get to do some research on this beast and hopefully get back to a more normal life

It is nice to see them respond to the public concern, but personally I feel safer now that I have just opted out of all such potential use. ]]> http://www.neotextus.org/2009/07/24/facebook-reponds-to-photograph-abuse-claims/feed/ 0 http://www.neotextus.org/2009/07/24/facebook-using-or-abusing-your-photographs/ http://www.neotextus.org/2009/07/24/facebook-using-or-abusing-your-photographs/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:42:26 +0000 paul http://www.neotextus.org/?p=594 It’s a little scary to discover that Facebook has stated providing user photographs to advertisers to include in their advertisements. From an advertisers point of view, this is a great way to capture eyeballs, but personally I don’t want to see my face on an advert for Hillsboro singles!

Thankfully, there is a way to turn it off – go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Privacy Settings’ -> ‘Newsfeed and Wall’, select the ‘Facebook Ads’ tab and choose ‘No one’ from the ‘Appearance in Facebook Ads’ pull down.

Thanks to Brigett for the warning ]]> http://www.neotextus.org/2009/07/24/facebook-using-or-abusing-your-photographs/feed/ 0 http://www.neotextus.org/2009/03/14/cool-augmented-reality-demo-on-cnn/ http://www.neotextus.org/2009/03/14/cool-augmented-reality-demo-on-cnn/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:29:01 +0000 paul http://www.neotextus.org/?p=550 CNN are running a segment today publicizing a GE advertizing campain for their Smart Grid which has got to be seen to be believed. If you have a camera on your PC, follow the instructions to print out the sample page and hold it anywhere in view of the camera. The flash application downloaded will create a three dimensional animation which bursts out of the page you are holding. This is really fun, and all done in Flash – wow! The model not only reacts to movements of the paper, you can even blow over the wind turbines (well actually into the microphone on your laptop) to make them spin.

It’s all done with the open source FlarToolkit – kudos to GE for not only getting the best out of open source, but also publicizing the fact. There is a demo on the website for those who want to play around with the ideas, although most of the documentation is in Japanese ]]> http://www.neotextus.org/2009/03/14/cool-augmented-reality-demo-on-cnn/feed/ 0 http://www.neotextus.org/2009/02/22/another-smbclient-timeout-fix/ http://www.neotextus.org/2009/02/22/another-smbclient-timeout-fix/#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:29:24 +0000 paul http://www.neotextus.org/?p=543 There are new Fedora samba packages (3.2.8) upstream, so here is another update to my samba packages to address the smbclient timeout issues which were causing BackupPC to fail.