Streetview Finland – Where were you when Finland was Googled?
A blog collecting snaphots from Google Street View, which recently released summery scenery from Finland. Lots of sign language and such.
[via:usvi]
10 February 2010
20 January 2010
12 January 2010
“If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.”
They’re also redoing the site in a compiled version of PHP to reduce web frontend CPU load by 80%.
[via:Gina Trapani]
13 December 2009
Swedish law draft: police and domestic intelligence to gain rights for automatic ‘net wiretapping
Did any silly sod believe even for a minute that the wiretapping rights actually wouldn’t be expanded from the Swedish military intelligence to domestic agencies? Because, you know, it is the Russian internet traffic that was so crucially important to capture?
Also, an article in Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish).
[via:Mummila]
22 November 2009
Depressed woman on sick leave loses insurance over cheerful Facebook photos
She was partying on doctor’s orders.
[via:Slashdot]
18 November 2009
Weird Google Street View Scenery
Related to an article with the usual panicking about Google Street View.
Protip for complainers: build a fucking fence if you don’t want your genital warts photographed when you walk naked in your suburban garden.
Yes, Google and the likes are really privacy issues in the scale of spanish galeons on monster truck wheels.
High resolution, freely available street maps with metadata are, however, some of the most useful types of services ever, and someone building this doesn’t even enter into the “ethically dubious” category.
Shut up and start looking at the real issues, such as real time video surveillance and online data mining.
[via:Joonas]
3 October 2009
Stalking Facebook users with strict privacy settings
This is important, so I’ll try to explain the linked article: The API is what applications and developers use. Applications on Facebook run with their users’ privileges: applications can see anything their users can.
To put it simply: Facebook allows anyone capable of writing, say, a simple but alluring questionnaire access to stuff most users probably think of as visible to friends and site admins only.
All Internet users who think of sharing information on Facebook and the Internet in general as being “kind of private”, should familiarize themselves with data mining. Except for when you forget to log off a service or leave your computer unlocked, the real privacy issues are rarely about what someone is able to see while browsing your inbox for a few minutes. It’s all about what profiling information can be collected over time and which patterns are identifiable in heaps of data.
[via:Waxy]
5 September 2009
This method involves creating lots of links to well visited web sites and asking the browser for links marked as visited (no Javascript or cookies required). Ossi M explains this in Finnish, Boing Boing has a summary in English.
[via:BobaMa]
26 August 2009
Porn bookmark collections put people off upgrading to Firefox 3
“In May, [Mozilla made] one last attempt at persuading [Firefox 2 users] to move up to Firefox 3 [...] Those who declined were invited to fill out a questionnaire. [...] The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed.”
[via:Slashdot]
23 August 2009
What Do Facebook Quizzes, Apps Know About You?
Slashdot’s summary says it all:
“A Facebook app[/quiz/whatever] can get its grubby little hands on [lots of stuff] by recursively sweeping through your friends list, pulling all their info and posts, and showing it to you. What’s more, apps can get at your information even if you never run the app yourself. Facebook apps run with the access privileges of the user running it, so anything your friend can see, the app they’re running can see, too.”
See also: Facebook Quiz about Facebook Privacy, or the lack thereof.
[via:Slashdot]
12 August 2009
18 July 2009
Facebook using user faces for ads
Failing contextual advertising is always hilarious. You might want to opt out, though.
[via:Mashable]
16 July 2009
UAE mobile network pushes spyware on Blackberry users
“…text messages and phone calls are usually more easily intercepted [...] the BlackBerry architecture doesn’t lend itself to that kind of legally-authorised interception, which has caused problems in several other countries.”
[via:Slashdot]
17 January 2009
Demonstration against wiretapping law in Helsinki on Feb 5, 2009
Briefly in English: Meeting near the Central Railway Station at 14:30, demonstration to begin outside the Parliament at 15:00.
“Lex Nokia” is a loophole plagued law proposal which, if passed, would allow network owners to spy on header information (from/to fields) in electronic communications in order to stop very loosely defined “misuse”. Eavesdropping on “parts” of unencrypted electronic communication protocols is as much of a bad joke as pretending to be reading only the address part of a non-enveloped postcard.
The bill derives its informal name from Nokia, one of its corporate backers.
I’ve previously used this site as a vehicle for my views on the cancer of middle aged clueless-on-Internet-issues voters and politicians that’s destroying existing preconditions for civil liberties in my country.
Also: Google translation of the original post, the event on Facebook.