On Goggles.

It's late.

I'm home from my book club, happy, and slightly under the influence, having drunk several glasses of excellent red wine.

Google just know that am in no fit state to be allowed to send anyone an email.
Google Goggles will take control.


Before I can Gmail anyone on and Friday or a Saturday night I will be required to answer a few simple maths questions. 

Get them wrong, the email doesn't get sent!
Maths was never my strongest subject.

So in future if you don't get an email from me, don't blame me, blame the Goggles.

Do you suppose the Goggles should be applied to my blog too?

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All at Sea with Google.

The ever interesting Fimocuculous asks "Is Google Starting it's Own Country?" and points to an article on Radar, which in turn points to an article credited to the Independent but actually in The Times.

"The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate
its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km)
offshore. The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their
computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean
the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres,
which are sited across the world, including in Britain."



How clever is that?

Imagine all our data, our google docs, this blog, our search history all at sea.

Afterthoughts.

"Offshore status" would also I guess place all our data far far away from any prying governments.
I wonder where these barges would be registered ie. what flags would they fly?

Presumably the data would have to be backed up on land which would still result in energy costs.

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Google in Space ?

This story has been reported all over the internet, but it's still worth noting.


Remember the phrase "eye in the sky" ?

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On Google Chrome.

I've not looked at Google Chrome yet (I just love my Mac), but it's arrival on Tuesday has resulted in a torrent of speculation, observation and hysteria.

Yes we might be seeing the next chapter in the Browser Wars, but right now Google chrome is a new untested product. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera have the browser market covered. The new Google product will have to be good to make its presence felt.

Even now with Firefox seeming to be the browser of choice for many of my colleagues, it is still only used by less than twenty percent of internet users.

Somehow I can't see Chrome cutting up that market. Despite that I've signed up with Google to be informed when Chrome for the Mac appears, just in case.


As is so often the case with Google the user agreement paper work for Chrome wasn't quite correct.

More food for thought.

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Apparently "LLoyds Is Pants"

Reading the news today I came across this story.

As someone who often struggles with creating and remembering passwords, how I wish I had Mr Jetley's imagination.

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Two Google stories! Street View and YouTube

Yesterday while looking out of the bedroom window I saw a car drive past with what appeared to be a tripod on it's roof with camera's (?) pointing in all directions. In my head I thought ah a Google camera car. It has to be said that the car was travelling at speed, quite fast for the narrow quiet road on which I live, it's speed made me think that it couldn't have been a google surveyor but then today I read this.

"Google Street View" matches photographs to maps, providing a real 3D view of a location. If passers by or residents are in the street as the image is taken, they appear on the "Street View" display. In the States some individuals have complained about their presence and had their images removed or blurred, Google "has said it has begun to trial face blurring technology,
using an algorithm that detects human faces in photographs."

Here in the UK "Privacy International, a UK rights group, believes the technology breaks data protection laws."In our view they need a person's consent if they make use of a
person's face for commercial ends," said Simon Davis of the group.""

I wonder did they catch my face peering through the window?

The story makes my sighting of the strange camera car all the more interesting because the same news story includes this sentence. "Photographing of areas in the UK, including London, is believed to have started this week."


Coincidentally Google was in the news yesterday. A judge in the States has ruled that Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched a video on YouTube to Viacom. That's 12 terabytes of data! Apparently the viewing log will contain the log in ID of users, the computer IP address and details of the video clps watched.

Scarey stuff. Once Viacom have the data what will they do with it.

This court case raises once again all sorts of questions about the vast amounts of personal data held by social networking sites, ISPs, Google, etc.etc.

Big Brother has not gone away!

On Baby's Bums, Asda and a Birthday Cake

It has been reported here and here (nsfw), that a mother who attempted to purchase a birthday cake from Asda for her twenty one year old son, featuring a nude photograph of him taken when he was five months old; was told tht the photograph would have to be censored as it showed him nude.

Asda deny thinking that the photograph was pornographic, it's just that their "policy across the board" is that they "don't do nudity of any sort at any age".

In the end staff solved the problem by covering baby David's bum with a star!

Is this the sign of a healthy society?



I wonder do they have a policy about selling cigarettes, or cheap alcohol?

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On Plagiarism

Here is a curiously interesting story that requires a little thought and action.

BBC education reporter Sean Couglan notes that the Higher Education Authority and JISC have established the Academy JISC Academic Integrity Service "to help promote a culture of academic integrity in UK Higher Education"

It would appear that they face a monumental task.

"A study found only 143 students caught cheating were expelled out of
9,200 cases - despite almost all universities threatening expulsion as
a sanction."

I guess that tells us that the sanction isn't working.

"despite the repeated warnings to students not to cheat by using
someone else's work, those caught are unlikely to face particularly
severe penalties.

More than 98% of students caught cheating were allowed to stay
at their university - even though some of these students had been
caught before."

Perhaps more disturbing is the observation that

"the recorded level of plagiarism among postgraduate students was so
much higher than the recorded level among undergraduate student,"

It seems that the colleges face a problem.

Plagiarism can and is being detected.

The question is what should be done with the plagiarists?

Facebook and Privacy

Like toothache some doubts just never go away.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Group based at the University of Ottawa has filed a complaint against Facebook citing 22 separate breaches of privacy law in Canada.

As is ever the case Facebook refutes the charges suggesting that

"We pride ourselves on the industry leading controls we offer users
over their private information. We believe that this is an important
reason that nearly 40% of Canadians on the internet use our service.

"We've reviewed the complaint and found it has serious factual
errors, most notably its neglect of the fact that almost all Facebook
data is willingly shared by users."

Notice the phrase "almost all Facebook data is willingly shared by users".

I think that is just not the case.
Many , many Facebook users have no idea how their personal data is used, manipulated and exploited for Facebook's commercial advantage.

The concept of social networking and privacy seem incompatable.

Perhaps it's time for us all to become hermits.

On Deleting Facebook (2)

Mashable reports that Facebook has responded to an article in the New York Times.

The instructions on how to deactivate / delete your Facebook account have been changed. Facebook has responded to disquiet about their deactivated yet not deleted accounts policy.

There's a new paragraph which quite clearly explains that Facebook has now made it possible to have your account deleted for you. No more deleting all of your posts, messages, interests one by one.

"If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box."

So now we have a choice, deactivate or delete.

Why did it take them so long to offer this facility?
Will users rush to delete their accounts?

Somehow I doubt it.

(Another question.
Why do online newspapers insist on having articles that are spread over several pages?)

On Democracy in Action

At a time when it is almost impossible to open a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the television without coming across coverage of the American elections.
It was refreshing to come across this story about voting in the Chicago Sun Times.
(via Boing Boing)

Can it be true?

On Watching the Internet.

Two separate and yet related stories.

Lewis Page writing in The Register observes that Sir David Pepper, Director of GCHQ has noted how difficult it is to monitor conversations on the Internet. It would appear that GCHQ's

"ability to intercept conversations and messages is seriously undermined by internet-protocol (IP) communications."

In his report to the Intelligence and Security Committee the Director reported that the Internet is not quite like the telephone network!

"The Internet uses a very different approach to communications in that, rather than having any sense of fixed lines like that, there is a big network with a number of nodes, but for any individual communicating, their communications are broken up into shorter packets. So whether you are sending an email or any other form ofInternet communication, anything you send is broken up into packets. These packets are then routed around the network and may go in any one of a number of different routes because the network is designed to be resilient…
This [represents] the biggest change in telecoms technology since the invention ofthe telephone. It is a complete revolution…"

Readers in Wales will be interested no doubt to note that the ISC is chaired by The Rt. Hon Paul Murphy, MP (Torfaen) recently appointed Secretary of State for Wales.

In a similar story Nicholas Carr points us to the Washington Post, which notes that

"U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage."

It would seem that Linden's Labs virtual world could pose a threat. While we in the UK are wondering whether Second Life could be of educational use, the CIA has moved in and

"created a few virtual islands for internal use, such as training and unclassified meetings, government officials said."

Second Life doesn't need this kind of publicity, so

"Officials from Linden Lab have initiated meetings with people in the intelligence community about virtual worlds. They try to stress that systems to monitor avatar activity and identify risky behavior are built into the technology, according to Ken Dreifach, Linden's deputy general counsel.

Dreifach said that all financial transactions are reviewed electronically, and some are reviewed by people. For investigators, there also are also plenty of trails that avatars and users leave behind.

"There are a real range and depth of electronic footprints," Dreifach said. "We don't disclose those fraud tools.""

Even Big Brother has a Second Life.

On Facebook Privacy (again)

Now it appears that the Information Commisioners Office (who?) are interested in Facebook's data protection policies.

Someone has complained that they couldn't delete their profile after terminating their account.
We knew that here On a Hill didn't we?

In the world of Facebook the word terminate does not exist, the word according to Facebook is "deactivate" and when you realise that life without Facebook is impossible, all your data is there ready for you to reactivate.

As we noted here if you wish to delete your information from the Facebook servers you must delete every entry by hand, item by item, message by message, wall entry by wall entry, group membership by group membership; which must be such a pain for real Facebook addicts.

I'm not sure you can see a "delete all" button anywhere in Facebook.

Of course one of the issues might just be that the data on Facebook pages is held .....

Tell me, where are the Facebook servers?

Blogged with Flock

On Facebook Beacon, Zuckerberg and the Panopticon

It won't be long before anyone interested in Facebook reads or hears of this post from Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog.

He has come to see the damage sustained by Facebook through the introduction of Beacon and reflects on the uneasiness felt by current and prospective Facebook users.

And bites the bullet,

"About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."

I know little about the workings of business, but I do know that when something goes wrong it needs to be fixed quickly. When Zuckerberg and Facebook realised that Beacon was flawed they found themselves unable to react. In the panoptic glare of the world's social and media networks they responded far too slowly to the ever increasing criticism.
He knows that now.

"Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better."

As a result Beacon has changed, last week it became an opt-in system; this week users can turn it off completely.

"If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook"

Hmmm.

In Bentham's Panopticon, the warders looked outwards, at inmates who never knew whether or not they were observed. Control came from the centre.

In Zuckerberg's Facebook, the users have realised they are being observed and have started looking inwards.

Who has control now?

Facebook, it's users or it's partners?

On Facebook Fridays

Through reading Tony Karrer's blog eLearning Technology, I've come across this article about the use of Facebook within a company.

It describes how a company called Serena Software has "Facebook Fridays"

The paragraphs highlighted by Tony are worth noting.

"Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends."

“Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers-on demand. A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done. Companies that do not embrace social networking are making a huge mistake.”

Despite my enthusiasm for Web 2.0 I'm really not sure about this use of social networking.

It's Friday, so you will network, you will use Facebook, you will connect with one another and our customers.

• What happens for the rest of the week?
• What if I don't want to mix home and work?
• What if I don't want to update my Facebook profile?
• What if I don't want a Facebook profile?
• What if I want a private life?

This initiative just doesn't seem right.
You will be "friends" because the CEO says so seems doomed to failure.
It's not team building, it's not creating a sense of community, it's not embracing social networking it's imposing it.

That's not how the world works

On Facebook, Advertising and Digital Clutter

If you believe the hype (and I don't) the world changed on November 6th.
Mark Zucherberg founder of Facebook made the announcement that had been expected for a long long time.

Facebook is moving into advertising.
He said

“Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections."

and I still don't get it.

Facebook Ads will have three components.

Social Ads ie personalised ads informed by member profile data,
(I guess its time to play with my profile)

Beacon (Ads) which will allow members of Facebook to announce to their friends that they are fans of a particular brand via their feeds.
(Now we shall discover who our real friends are!)

Insight which will provide advertisers with marketing data from within Facebook, ie social demographic information.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch was there, live blogging the event.
Here are his immediate thoughts

"This could be huge if done right, but it could also backfire badly for Facebook. If I start to think that my friends are advertising to me, I may no longer trust them (and, in fact, try to avoid them . .. by not logging into Facebook anymore). So the the trick is to make these appear to be genuine recommendations, and not ads. I am not sure how many people will be fooled by this, though. It risks turning something useful—the feed of my friends’ activities—into something spammy."

How true is that?

Much as I like my Facebook friends, I'm honestly not sure that they would consider their feeds useful. I don't.
I certainly don't want to start receiving advertising recommendations from them. I have enough digital clutter already. It's bad enough that I know when my friends are cooking, thinking or breathing.

Everyone, yes everyone should visit Nicholas Carr and read his thoughts on the "Social Graft"

I guess that anyone who still believed that Facebook had a future as a PLE, a VLE or as the next platform might be having second thoughts.

I hope so.

:-)

On the End of the Week

It's been a busy week. I'm a little ashamed to say that I've neglected the blog. it's good to be back.

My trip to Dundee for the HEA Web 2.0 Day took three perhaps four days out of my work schedule; which has not been helped by it being half term. I had a good time North of the border and met several researchers working in my field who were interested in our work. It was good to be able to compare notes and experiences. My talk was surprisingly well received which leads me to think that I should work harder.

During the last month the hit counter has shown some interesting trends. I'm getting more and more visitors in search of information about deleting Facebook, a surprising number of hits in search of Facebook porn while the endless search for "gradatim ferociter" continues. Additionally the number of visitors visiting more than one page On a Hill has increased significantly. It's also worth noting that one visitor arrived On the Hill from Afganistan, via a microwave link; it seems that even in Kabul worries about Facebook led one Googler to The Hill!

The high spot of the week just has to be the arrival of my Macbook Pro.
I've spent far too much of the day loading Leopard, Microsoft Office:Mac and Firefox. Transferring information and data between two machines has led to me to consider the problems created by reading blog feeds on two computers. Much as I love sage (for Firefox) it may be that Google Reader will become my feed reader of necessity.

The problem now is what's to be done with my Macbook ............
Decisions, decisions!

We are in Your Games

It's been reported here and here, that

"A British intelligence agency has targeted a new generation of recruits by advertising in computer games."

Adverts featuring the GCHQ website are to be found in a number of XBox 360 games, in the hope of capturing "the imagination of people with a particular interest in IT"
I knew all those hours spent playing Quake (in my youth) would come in handy.
It's an excellent idea though I'm not sure that all gamers are "tech savy".
But then what do I know?
It could well be that an ability to take on the Strogg could be an assett at GCHQ.

The news generated by the story took me to the GCHQ website (via the BBC), where you can find out what they do, look at job vacancies, crack some codes and explore their press releases. I liked the site. It's good looking with obvious navigation, loads of information and a few recruitment videos. There are jobs for technologists, mathematicians, linguists etc.

It was interesting to read the press release about their successful Universities Day part of their educational outreach programme. University language and careers departments were invited to GCHQ to learn about employment opportunities.
A good example of links between "business" and academia.

The home page carries a quote from a former prime minister.
"Secret intelligence gives the Government a vital edge."

Let's hope they use it carefully.

Problems with Facebook

Harriet Swain has a long and interesting article in today's Independent about social networking sites and their position in Higher Education.

There's very little I might want to add to the article, except to say "I told you"

This paragraph in particular caught my eye.

"Facebook owns the material on the site, including teaching notes and, potentially, research, says Lawrie Phipps, manager of the users and innovation programme at JISC. He has already advised a couple of research groups to take research notes off a site. While there are plenty of new technologies that lecturers can use in teaching, such as discussion groups, wikis, or Second Life, social networking is not one of them, he says, unless it's restricted to an institution's virtual-learning environment. "I'm on Facebook and I have a laugh with friends," he says. "But, if it comes to academic work on Facebook, it's totally inappropriate.""

Read that final sentence again,

"But, if it comes to academic work on Facebook, it's totally inappropriate."

What if?

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame has written a wonderful story for RADAR simply titled Scroogled.

"Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches ...... What if it controlled your life?"

It's an excellent read.


Later I came across this and laughed, and began to wonder.
What gender is Google?

Read the proofs, read the commandments and pray!