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Digital Culture Links: October 18th 2010

Links for October 13th 2010 through October 18th 2010:

  • Facebook in Online Privacy Breach; Applications Transmitting Identifying Information [WSJ.com] – *sigh* “Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure. […] The Journal found that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users’ IDs to outside companies. […] include Zynga Game Network Inc.’s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user’s friends to outside companies”
  • Apple stores teeming with germs [WA Today] – Finally, viruses come to Apple! 😛 “A leading Australian expert in infectious diseases says people who use display iPads and iPhones at Apple stores are risking serious infections and the company should do more to maintain hygiene. The call by Professor Peter Collignon, the director of infectious diseases and microbiology at the Australian National University, follows research that found a higher risk of transmitting pathogens from glass surfaces like iPads to human skin. “You wouldn’t have hundreds of people using the same glass or cup, but theoretically if hundreds of people share the same keyboard or touch pad, then effectively that’s what you’re doing,” Collignon said in a phone interview.”
  • Facebook and Microsoft Team Up on Social Search [NYTimes.com] – Searching your social graph? “Bing just got a little more help from its friend, Facebook. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Facebook users would be able to see recommendations and relevant links from their friends in search results on Bing. “It isn’t just about the common connections between data and the offline world, it’s about the connections between people,” said Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president of online business at Microsoft, during an event held at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. Mr. Mehdi gave the example of a Bing user trying to decide whether or not to see the science fiction film “Inception.” When a user searches for the film on Bing, information about how many of their friends “liked” the movie on Facebook and relevant links they have shared will appear alongside reviews, ticketing information and movie show times, he said. […] Facebook and Microsoft are increasingly deepening ties, perhaps in an effort to better fend off a common adversary, Google”
  • Unlogo – Nifty! “Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on. In short, Unlogo gives people the opportunity to opt out of having corporate messages permanently imprinted into the photographic record of their lives.” [Video: http://vimeo.com/14566198]
  • Facebook keeps ‘deleted’ user photos for years [WA Today] – “Even if you delete incriminating photos on your Facebook profile, the company is keeping them accessible to anyone online for up to 30 months. The social networking site admitted it had been keeping deleted photos for a “limited” amount of time. But users who have kept the direct link to photos that were originally uploaded to the social networking site have been able to still gain access to them months, even years after deletion. In one report, a Facebook user said they had deleted an image from the site 2.5 years ago (30 months), and that it was still available to see on the site. Another said a photo from April 2009 was still accessible after it was deleted.”
  • Baby Born From 20-Year-Old Frozen Embryo [io9] – “Cryopreservation was once the domain of sci-fi novels and B-rate movies. (Think Encino Man.) But it’s increasingly real, as the recent birth of a healthy boy from a frozen embryo created 20 years earlier shows. The birth, which is reported in a study in the online edition of the journal Fertility and Sterility, sets a record. Until now, no embryo frozen for this long has resulted in a live birth. The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF. That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 …”
  • Half of second-hand mobile phones contain personal data [SMH] – “Consumers are unwittingly passing much of their most private personal data to strangers when they discard mobile phones, with intimate photos and credit card numbers and pins frequently left on handsets, according to new research. An analysis of 50 handsets bought from second-hand resellers on eBay found that more than half contained personal messages or photos, according to exclusive research from the mobile and forensics experts Disklabs. More than 60 per cent still contained phone numbers left on a call log. A number were sold with pornographic material still on the phone. […] Personal security information, including home address, credit card numbers and pin numbers, was on 26 of the handsets.”

Digital Culture Links: August 30th 2010

Links for August 27th 2010 through August 30th 2010:

  • iPod sales drop to lowest quarterly number since 2006 [Business | The Guardian] – Sales of the traditional iPod are slowing in the face of the dramatic growth of iPhones, iPads and other competitor products. Apparently the music industry is concerned because they were betting on (presumably old-style) iPods to be the great saviour of the music industry, ensuring the next generation was downloading music legally, replacing slowing CD sales. The article also mentions the shift some canny bands have made to band-specific apps, meshing music and other experiences together via in bespoke applications, which better suit an iPhone/iPad environment. To be honest, nothing in this article should come as a shock, but it does point out that with 5 billion app downloads from the Apple store in just 2 years, this is definitely the peak growth area.
  • The Trouble with the Fourth Estate [Snurblog] – A sobering but insightful analysis by Axel Bruns regarding the failings of political journalism and the limits of political blogging in Australia today. Axel argues that the ‘fourth estate’ is probably the wrong metaphor for political bloggers today, although they struggle perhaps to be a fourth branch at times, doing some work once in realm of good journalism. The short version, though: “we’re stuck in a muddle, where journalists won’t and bloggers can’t exercise the informative function with as much energy and commitment as it actually requires – and that’s a very problematic state of affairs, especially in a political situation that is as confusing as the one we now find ourselves in.”
  • The Ballad of Cat Bin Lady: The Internet’s Latest Viral Villain [Mashable] – Coventry, England resident Mary Bale made a stupid decision when she pushed a local cat into a wheelie bin and shut the lid. By virtue of CCTV footage posted online, she was identified, named and shamed, and so forth. She’s become a meme, and a hated meme at that. But is the response too much? A ‘Death to Mary Bale’ Facebook group has just been shut down, suggested that in ‘citizen justice’ the penalties often vastly outweigh the crime.
  • Facebook Trademark Lawsuit Aims to Limit Use of “Book” by Others [Mashable] – “Facebook has filed suit against Teachbook.com, an online community for teachers. The lawsuit accuses Teachbook of “misappropriating the distinctive BOOK portion of Facebook’s trademark.” The lawsuit argues that Teachbook’s use of “book” dilutes the Facebook (Facebook) brand name, impairs Facebook’s ability to remain unique and creates the facade of a false relationship between the two social networking entities. While Facebook does not own the rights to the word “book” in all its forms, the company believes its name trademark applies to the word “book” when used in connection with a website of similar purpose. Facebook also takes issue with the fact that Teachbook has attempted to trademark its name and makes claims about being “Facebook for teachers” on the Teachbook website.” (Oh noes: I’ve been using this trademark infringing NOTEBOOK all this time …)

I Can Stalk U

I Can Stalk U is another one of those very simple websites which highlights how information already being shared by people everyday may be used in ways we’ve not necessarily thought through. In a similar vein to Please Rob Me, which highlighted tweets where people indicated they were leaving their home, I Can Stalk U illustrates how much information many people are inadvertently sharing via the geographic photo tagging in many smartphones (including iPhones). On the I Can Stalk U website, each tweet that includes geotagged photos is translated (ie the metadata is read, and presented), showing the approximate address, this address on a Google Map, the picture it was attached to, and a link to the original tweet.  All of this information is publicly accessible, the website is simply putting the geotag information up front, rather than the original tweet.  Here’s an screenshot from the website:

icanstalku

Often these sort of websites can be a bit confronting for people who’ve not thought about their privacy in relation to geotagged photos. The whole concept of metadata – literally, ‘data about data’ – which can so easily be embedded in photos, is a bit disconcerting for many people who may not have realised it was there. Thankfully, despite the initially confronting website, I Can Stalk U is set up as an educational tool, showing what data is unknowingly being shared, and telling you how to fix that if you don’t want this information out there on the web. On their ‘How’ page, the I Can Stalk U folks provide details on how to disable geotagging for iPhones, Blackberries and some other popular smartphones.  If you’ve got one and it’s not on the list, it’s worth disabling the geotagging unless you’re 100% comfortable with every photo you take (and share) embedding the where, when and on what that photo was taken.

Digital Culture Links: August 10th 2010

Links for August 4th 2010 through August 10th 2010:

  • Women Set the Pace as Online Gamers [NYTimes.com] – “Although women are still slightly in the minority among global Web users, they are closing ground with men and, once connected, spend about two more hours online a month on average. […] Women also outpace men in photo sharing and shopping, and in what may come as a surprise, gaming, favoring casual puzzle, card and board games. Female gamers over 55 spend the most time online gaming of any demographic by far and are nearly as common as the most represented group, males 15 to 24.”
  • Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars [Information is Beautiful] – Fantastic infographic showing a timeline of some of Wikipedia’s silliest editing wars.
  • Omo GPS stunt opens doors for marketers [News.com.au] – Unilever Brazil has embedded 60 GPS trackers in OMO washing liquid bottles and then their teams have followed the pruchasers of these bottles home and given them prizes. Understandably, many privacy issues have been raised!
  • Does Facebook unite us or divide us? [CNN.com] – Brilliant, and a little confronting, TED talk from Ethan Zuckerman (senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society) looking at how globalisation might be a technical achievement, but not a social or mediated one (“cosmopolitan globalisation”). We look to our own social networks, and they increasingly narrow our perspective rather than broadening it.
  • Update on Google Wave [Official Google Blog] – Google Wove: Wave development ceases, after users find it’s all too complicated.
  • CommBank app lets people snoop on your house [SMH] – House-pricing information is apparently available to the public generally, but there is a real sense of privacy invasion at work here: “There’s a brand new property app on the block that gives iPhone users detailed information on the value of any house they care to point their handset towards, but privacy experts warn it may not sit well with the neighbourhood watch. Detailing sales prices of 95 per cent of Australian homes, the free app has been launched by the Commonwealth Bank in a bid to deliver more immediate buying and selling information to the public as they are actually viewing properties, helping them to ward off rogue sellers who attempt to talk up property prices. Just by pointing an iPhone at a particular property, they will be able to see the last sale price of the property, and if the home is actually for sale, the app will bring up a listing from realestate.com.au with details such as home layout and pictures.”
  • Thunderous Bolt sensitive to parody [ABC The Drum Unleashed] – Jason Wilson weighs in on fake Twitter profiles in the wake of Andrew Bolt’s angry denouncement of (fake) himself: “Online fakery is something that draws on different strands in online and offline cultural history. Apart from drawing on early online examples like Fake Steve Jobs, Twitter faking has links with political impersonation, writing techniques like pastiche, and it also has some relationship to genres like fan fiction. After all, the best fakes don’t just go after their targets with blunt instruments, they create a narrative world for the fake persona to inhabit …”

Digital Culture Links: August 4th 2010

Links for August 4th 2010 (definitely not endorsed by any version of Andrew Bolt):

  • Andrew Bolt discovers Twitter fake. Is cross. [mUmBRELLA] – News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt has, it would appear, had something of a sense of humour failure over his fake Twitter persona. This morning, Bolt wrote in his Herald Sun blog: “It shouldn’t need saying, but I do not have a Twitter account and the fake one seems to be the work of people whose employer will be very embarrassed to find its staff once more engaging in deceitful slurs. A little warning there. A tearful sorry afterwards will be both too late and insincere, especially from people with their record of sliming.” The fake Andrew Bolt, who has about 5000 followers, does give certain subtle clues on Twitter that he ain’t the real deal. Such as his bio: “Journalist. Blogger. Broadcaster. Climate scientist. Great in bed. This is the Twitter of Andrew Bolt. Follow me you barbarians.” Or messages such as: “Julia Gillard should put together a comittee of common folk to see if they can change the laws of physics. I suspect they can.””
  • Andrew Bolt is not happy about @andrewbolt [Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ] – Peter Black looks at the legal side of (fake) Andrew Bolt on Twitter: “…it seems to me that Bolt would at least have an arguable case, that one or more of the tweets constituted a defamatory imputation. Moreoever, they were referrable to Bolt and published. It is also worth noting that cartoons, caricatures, jokes or satire may be defamatory depending upon the context of the publication (see Entienne v Festival City Broadcasters (2001) 79 SASR 19). How a jury would construe these statements, given they take place in the context of a fake Twitter account, is hard to predict. Nonetheless, I do believe that a judge would find that the material is capable of defaming Bolt and that it would then be up to a jury to decide whether the material actually defamed Bolt. So while I think it is highly unlikely Bolt would actually sue for defamation, it is worth remembering that even fake Twitter accounts, while intended for the purpose of satire and humour, may well have legal consequences.”
  • Twitter List @andrew__bolt/AndrewBolt – A list of more than 30 ‘Andrew Bolt’ (fake) accounts on Twitter, the majority of which have appeared in the last 24hrs since Andrew Bolt (the man) complained about @andrewbolt (the most popular fake, on twitter).
  • SRSLY? SMS Celebrates Its 25th Birthday [The Next Web] – “According to a press release from Sherri Wells, ‘one of the leading SMS messaging experts in the world’, SMS is celebrating 25 years of existence today, making its way from a R&D lab at Vodafone to become a technology that is now present on every single mobile phone currently in existence. Although SMS was developed twenty-five years ago in a collaboration between France and Germany, the first text message was actually sent seven years later on December 3rd, 1992, reading “Happy Christmas”. Since then SMS evolved through various stages, starting as a free service where teens helped popularise the service, before carriers then charged for the service, causing a decline of up to 40% in the process. Back in 2000, the average monthly texts sent per user was a paltry 35, today it’s as high as 357 with 1.5 trillion messages sent annually in the US.”
  • Bill Cosby dead rumours dismissed on Twitter [WA Today] – Tweets of my death have been greatly exaggerated! “Television star Bill Cosby has been forced to reassure fans he’s still alive and well after news of his ‘death’ became a top trending topic on Twitter. ‘Bill Cosby died’ remains the fifth highest trending topic on the micro-blogging site this morning. “Emotional friends have called about this misinformation,” the Cosby Show star tweeted in response to the announcement. “To the people behind the foolishness, I’m not sure you see how upsetting this is. “Again, I’m rebuttaling rumours about my demise (sic).” This is the second time this year that Cosby has been pronounced dead by social media.”
  • Old Spice Voicemail Generator – Make your own voicemail or answering machine message made up of audio samples from the Old Spice guy’s recent replies. This voicemail is now diamonds! (By Chriswastaken, Area, and Nelson Abalos Jr | Thanks to Reddit)
  • YouTube Star to Put His Life in Your Hands for a Year [Mashable] – “Heyo all you megalomaniacs out there — may we introduce yet another way to get your jollies this year: Dan 3.0. Starting today, 20-year-old YouTube sensation Dan Brown is launching a new web show/social experiment in which he will turn control of his life over to you, the viewers, for an entire year. Brown […] is one of those rare dudes whose only gig is video blogging. […] When asked how he thinks this project will affect his day-to-day life, Brown told us: “Basically I’m going to be living my life, doing what my viewers tell me and documenting it. That’s going to be it. Daily life is going to be affected – I don’t know exactly what it means for relationships with friends and relationships with people I know in real life. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.” So as to prevent any catastrophes, Brown has a few ground rules. Viewers can’t ask him to do things like, say, dump his girlfriend, or to do anything illegal or harmful to others. He has also veto power …”
  • Google Android phone shipments increase by 886% [BBC News] – There’s a lot more smartphones out there: “Google Android phone shipments increase by 886% Shipments of Google’s Android mobile operating system have rocketed in the last year, figures suggest. Statistics from research firm Canalys suggest that shipments have increased 886% year-on-year from the second quarter of 2009. Apple showed the second largest growth in the smartphone sector with 61% growth in the same period. Overall, the smartphone sector grew by 64% from the second quarter 2009 to the second quarter 2010, the research says.”

Digital Culture Links: July 14th 2010

Links for July 11th 2010 through July 14th 2010:

  • Recycle, Remix and Re-use with Creative Commons on Vimeo Staff Blog [Vimeo Staff Blog] – Video-sharing website Vimeo adds support for Creative Commons licenses. Yay!
  • Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Tool [NYTimes.com] – Nifty: “Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (appinventor.googlelabs.com/about), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves. “
  • Facebook ClickCeop app to offer optional ‘panic button’ [Technology | The Guardian] – “After months of pressure to improve its online safety features, Facebook has reached an agreement to provide an application not dissimilar to the “panic button” critics have called for, which users can add to their homepage and links to the UK’s online child protection watchdog. […] Now Facebook UK is to launch a new initiative with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, one of its harshest critics, to give all users the potential to access the organisation’s advice and reporting centre. The service, accessible via a ClickCeop button, includes a dedicated facility for reporting instances of suspected grooming or inappropriate sexual behaviour. Facebook said that it marks the first time in the UK that all users, and especially the target demographic of 13-to-18-year-olds, will be able to have direct access to CEOP’s services. However, the new system is opt-in, meaning that Facebook users will have to actively choose to download, add, or bookmark the new button …”
  • Facebook relents on doll nipples ban [The Age] – Not so prudebook (just bad management): “A Sydney jeweller has castigated Facebook for its “opaque” and “arbitrary” moderation system after the site apologised for censoring her images of a nude porcelain doll posing with her works. The social networking site admitted this morning that it made a “mistake” in removing Victoria Buckley’s photos, after last week sending her several warning notices for publishing “inappropriate content” and erasing both censored and uncensored versions of the image from Facebook. “We’ve investigated this further and determined that we made a mistake in removing these photos,” Facebook said in a statement.”
  • iChatr: Chatroulette For the iPhone [TechCrunch] – “Oh, Internet, is there anything you can’t do? iChatr, a new app for the iPhone, is essentially Chatroulette for the iPhone. It’s pretty barren right now – I saw the same people once or twice – but the quality is pretty good …”

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