Who thought this was a good idea?

WASHINGTON — Representative Darrell Issa calls it a way to promote transparency: a request for the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years.

In short, he wants to get a list of everyone who requests anything under the Freedom Of Information Act. Who they are, what they requested, and of what department the request was made. He’s sent out these meta-requests to 180 agencies. Isn’t this just a little Big Brother?

Considering how much grief I give Facebook about their treatment of user data, I do have to commend them for this:

A Continued Commitment to Security.

Facebook is giving their users the option to have all traffic between the user’s computer and Facebook’s servers encrypted, all the time. Part of me wishes they didn’t make this an option – that they just turned it on for everyone, regardless.

The reason? FireSheep.

…another remotely exploitable Flash bug.

In the not-so-distant past, the size of a computer monitor determined the number of horizontal and vertical pixels it would display. Usually, a 15″ screen was about 800×600 pixels, a 17″ screen was 1024×768 pixels, and a 21″ screen was 1600×1200. These aren’t exact numbers – sometimes a manufacturer would make a denser screen by putting 1600×1200 pixels into a 19″ screen. Wikipedia has a nice table showing common screen sizes and their respective pixel densities.

The problem I have now is that it has become incredibly expensive to get a resolution higher than 1920×1080 pixels. This is because of the proliferation of HDTVs’ – 1920×1080 is the resolution that a 1080p HDTV runs at. Which means that when you shop for LCD computer monitors, once you hit about 21″, the resolution stops increasing. Going to a 25″ monitor doesn’t give you more real estate on the screen – the resolution is static. This is true until you get to a 27″ WQHD monitor which sports a 2560×1440 screen, and a price tag of over $999.

What’s worse is that a 26″, 1080P computer monitor costs $350, while a 26″ 1080P HDTV costs $230. It’s signifigantly more cost effective to buy a cheap HDTV than it is to buy a mid-range computer monitor. The color won’t be nearly as accurate, but the picture will be just as sharp, and the built in speakers will probably be worth enough to stop worrying about crummy desktop computer speakers. This whole effect is pushing out innovation and cost efficiencies for monitors, as anyone who realizes this will just buy the TV for ~$250. And it means the higher resolution, color-accurate monitors are $999+, and there’s nothing in between. I can’t really justify buying a 27″ Apple Cinema Display for $999 or the new Dell UltraSharp U2711 for $1049, but I also can’t stand the idea of trying to do photography work on a 1080p HDTV.

It’s getting to be that the phone you carry with you is the most important thing you have. It has the names, phone numbers and now addresses of most of the people and places you frequent; it often has your personal email accounts and social network logins stored on it; it may have apps installed to let you bank from anywhere, any time or have apps installed that know where you and your friends are in real time.

Considering how much information is on the phone, it’s remarkable how relaxed people are about them. They hand them over to friends all the time to let them “play” with them. I’ve see people ask strangers to take pictures of them and their friends. They almost never have any kind of passcode set to access the device, they almost never use the encryption settings on the phone, and they almost always set every application to save their passwords. Once someone gains physical access to the phone, its short work to totally compromise their identity. It doesn’t matter if you use an iPhone or an Android-based device, the same applies equally.

The theft of a smartphone is a one-stop-shop for wholesale identity theft, and most people don’t seem to understand or care.

Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Oh, gee, let’s let Facebook application developers and advertisers access our user’s personal contact information, like their home address and phone number. Nothing could ever go wrong!

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Remember, don’t put anything on the internet, anywhere, that you don’t want people to know. There’s a reason that most of the profile fields of my Facebook account look like this:

Sophos article here.

There has been a lot of news lately about the fight between Google and Apple. Video codecs, patents, the definition of openness, what have you. The sad thing is that this seems to be a fight Google started, and they are picking on the wrong person. Not that they won’t win against Apple (I have no idea who can win, really), but because they are going after a company that doesn’t care at all about advertisements, search, or really, web applications.

Google is, and has always been, an advertising company. They make money selling ads along side their amazing search software. You use their software, from any device, and Google makes money from the links they show you. You use Gmail? Great! Google makes even more money – now they can show you ads about things that are relevant to you, and they can charge more for each ad. Targeted advertising is lucrative. Something like %96 of Google’s revenue comes from selling ads.

Which is why it’s stupid for them to target Apple. Apple is, and has always been, a hardware company. They make amazing, expensive, profitable hardware. The software that runs on it is part of what makes it amazing, but Apple doesn’t get rich selling software licenses to anyone. They get rich when people buy their top-shelf hardware that carries a %30+ profit margin. I mean really – a cell phone that costs as much as a mid-range laptop? Considering where Apple’s market cap is now, they are doing that very, very well.

Google should be going after Facebook. Facebook has 500+ million users. More and more every day. Facebook is, and has always been, an advertising company. They sell ads to show to users. They have an incredible lock on their users. They know not only what computers their users use, they know what cell phone, what laptop, what digital camera (from EXIF data on photos). They know where you are, they know who your friends are, they know what you like.

This is why the incredible valuations on Facebook make sense. No, they don’t bring in a lot of money right now, but they have won the social media wars. They are on the cusp of making as much money as they want, all day long. By doing so, they are going to eat Google’s lunch. Once the advertisers realize there is another place to sell ads – one where you know exactly what the demographic is – you can charge anything you like.

Google’s attempts at social media have been… mediocre. I don’t know anyone who uses Buzz. I know one person who uses Orkut. Google Wave died on the vine. Google Reader never took off as a social media function. Picasa is used as a toy – almost everyone I know uses Flickr or SmugMug. On top of this, there have been anecdotal reports recently of Google’s search becoming inadequate. This is troubling. If Google loses it’s reputation for being the best search engine out there, a significant percentage of their profit starts to fall away, and right into Facebook’s hands.

So what does Google do? Makes the news over video codecs, apparently to spite Apple. Zuckerberg must be laughing his ass off.