Mostly Harmless

Article on the BBC about search sites indexing information from social networking sites as well as the usual sources such as websites and newsgroups.

The interesting thing is that these sites don’t really change anything - yes they provide a “picture” of sorts of a person’s dalliances online that is accessible to the ordinary person but they don’t give you much more than a little fiddling with Google could have done.

In my case (and I have a pretty unique name) all you get is a rather fetching picture with a christmas hat from myspace that isn’t currently on this blog. So far so not very revenue generating for the site in question. A few scraped links to technical queries on online forums and mailing lists also aren’t very interesting to anyone, given that the email addresses and topics under discussion will be a few years old now.

What most people already knew to be true hasn’t changed - for piece of mind online just don’t use your real name. Given that I’ve got profiles across several social networking sites, this blog and quite a few domains in my name as well as profiles on numerous forums the level of information scraped by these sites is really pretty piss poor. Yes, these personal info aggregation sites do pose a major risk to those teens currently posting deeply personal stuff publicly over the web, but really that is the fault of the parents who let them have access to something unsupervised that they don’t really understand the implication of themselves.

If you do have a lot of information on a profile (such as facebook) including telephone numbers, address and birthday then that should really be a friends only page anyhow (don’t join a network) - unless you’re the type who writes your details in pub toilet stalls hoping for a “friend request”…

The sites also seem to suffer from the usual “common names” problem - they can tell me that Dan is a councillor in Eastbourne and was a governor at a local school but not one of them managed to link both of these pieces of information to the same name. One of the sites picks up my boss (who has a pretty unique name) but again simply by pulling a myspace entry which links you to one of the sites that she owns.

From the point of view of unique features, if the site is simply trawling other social networks and the web then it’s in danger of dying of irrelevance - myspace, facebook etc could easily partner with a search company if they wanted to trawl information from other sources for users to add to their profiles but most people don’t want that anyway - I have absolutely no interest in auto populating a profile of mine with out of date information or detail of online support requests to the MythTV project. Most people’s profiles are highly tweaked to a specific picture they want to provide at that moment.

I’m not saying that an upstart service couldn’t combine Google style search algorithm power and social networking into something massively wonderful / privacy threatening depending on your perspective but what I am saying is that the level of technical acumen and capital required to achieve such a thing makes it pretty unlikely. Pretty much the only thing these sites seem to do at the moment is provide an ever useful reminder to be careful what you attach your name to.

Rowan :: Aug.08.2007 :: Internet Anonymity, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

I’ve been a reader of Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter for some years now and it always inspires mixed feelings. Schneier writes with authority on security, terrorism and the psychology of both. At the danger of being misrepresentative, here’s a quote

“We worry about airplane crashes and rampaging shooters instead of automobile crashes and domestic violence — both far more common”

Depending on the issue, you might feel safer after reading but generally you come away worrying about people’s ability to be duped over what is and isn’t an actual probable risk to them. You’ll worry about politicians taking advantage of these as easy emotive issues rather than focusing on more likely ones that are harder to “sell” and you’ll worry about the media herding people in the direction of their statistically improbable fears rather than acting as a responsible platform.

“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of “news” is “something that hardly ever happens.” It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that you should start worrying”

On the good side, it’ll help you be more rational about the security threats that are actually likely to effect you. I’ve scared the crap out of my partner on more than one occasion by arguing that if someone really wants to get to you or the contents of your house, the lock on the door and the burglar alarm are really only a formality. They stop people wandering in but they won’t stop someone breaking in (unless they’re inept…which is another story). So what really determines if you should be scared of burglary is the amount of attractive swag you have in your home and how many people know you’ve got it.

It’ll also remind you that security theatre like a burglar alarm is still worth it so you don’t have to get up every time the freezer clunks in the hall, one thing I really like about Schneier’s writing is he doesn’t belittle people for being people (and that must be oh so tempting when you’ve been working in the field as long as he has).

The newsletter is perhaps over long for the “average” reader, but for every single intelligent person I’d advise having a read, it just might help you feel more rational and clear headed about what you ought to be spending your valuable time worrying about

Rowan :: Jun.18.2007 :: Personal Entries, Security :: No Comments »

It has been such a very long time since there was a record that really mattered, a record that can get under your skin. Something that tries to take on the world, chew it up and spit it out, snarling and cool all at the same time.

Continue Reading »

Rowan :: May.30.2007 :: Personal Entries, Reviews :: 2 Comments »

Spent an enjoyable evening yesterday playing the Viking Game with Jen and family (yes yours truly really knows how to live it up of an evening). It’s a Tafl game or basically one where the teams are not equal. The King (who has a small guard of pieces) has to escape and the attacking team have to prevent the king escaping and ideally surround him with four pieces in order to run him through.

Thinking ahead is actually harder than something like draughts, because the pieces are not constrained to only move once square at a time, they can move any distance as long as their path is not blocked.

I haven’t found a computer equivalent that reproduces the board game we played exactly - only one that runs in a DOS box where the king can win by reaching the edge of the board, which makes it fairly easy for him compared to the version we had where he has to escape to one of the four corners (which are more easily blocked). I suspect this is balancing on the part of the producers of the boxed version because it does seem a bit easier to be the king at least going from the first couple of plays. Also that old DOS game seems a wee bit hard…

If anyone knows of a more recent Linux variant of this game, do please let me know.

Rowan :: May.29.2007 :: Games, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Anyone who hasn’t yet go check out Nine Inch Nail’s new release Year Zero (go on you can listen to the whole thing online I’ll wait). You also NEED to swing by NINWiki and read at least some of the back story.

Most importantly it’s the first album I’ve heard to actually mean something since 1994’s The Holy Bible Rather than harp on about it I’ll let you discover for yourself.

lefsetz get much more excited much more effectively that I ever could, go have a read - however the one thing I’ll really disagree with about their entry is the stuff about Mac owners. Creativity or even participating in cool online goings on is not determined by the brand of your hardware!

I’ve considered Macs multiple times but at the end of the day having to pay a premium for the fact that it’s a Mac is as bad as having to pay a “Microsoft tax” on a new PC. Yes Garageband is great but Audacity is a good first stop for anyone who wants to play on a Windows or Linux machine and LMMS is also worth checking out. Or if we’re talking about Reznor’s source files and you have another fave editor / sequencer just convert the files to WAV and away you go if it won’t open GarageBand files.

The money I saved by buying a non Mac Laptop (even with a three year onsite warranty) will let me go to about six NIN gigs and with a decent Linux distro installed it can more or less do everything the cool people on Macs can do.

As for the tracks being available to listen via steaming on the band’s website it’s clearly the way of the future. It didn’t stop me buying the CD, it made me pre-order it. It helps that the Year Zero digipack feels worth having (lyrics book, cool artwork, colour changing CD).

RIAA dinosaurs take note, change or die.

Rowan :: Apr.26.2007 :: Music, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

la redoute appear to require a lesson in basic manners. Sending letters out to your customers which state “you haven’t bought from us since 2004, so if you don’t buy something soon we won’t send you a catalogue” is somewhat unlikely to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when they’ve had recent orders from the same household, but due to the oddness of their database system we have about 12 customer numbers between us.

Receiving your catalogue is not a privilege, we may wish to use it to exchange money for goods…

Stick to sending out vouchers and special offers please.

Rowan :: Apr.20.2007 :: Marketing, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Breakfast TV today was talking about another sterling piece of research on the working habits of men and women. On the findings that men actually work harder than was thought the pundits made the interesting points that “most of the men were probably lying” and “if these new men exist I’ve never met any”.

Good to have a balanced discussion on morning TV to really get you thinking isn’t it? These are the same comments on this sort of survey / research I’ve been hearing what…oh yeah, all my life! (Yes I ought to stop watching breakfast TV). As a child it was bemusing, now as an adult it’s just got really really old.

I can just imagine the research interviews now… (if you close your eyes you’ll almost hear the carpet crackle).

The researcher begins to question me about how hard I actually work. I break into a cold sweat because I work from home, sit in the garden with the laptop in warm weather and only hoover when things off the carpet obviously start to stick to my feet as I walk on it.

The research assistant is young, pretty and most importantly looks a bit gullible. I glance around… good no other men within earshot.

Making sure I maintain eye contact throughout so that the interviewer doesn’t think I’m lying, I report that I work a sixty hour week, do all of the housework and am home teaching the two children I don’t actually have. She records it diligently and YES I think she’s bought it. She’s looking at me in a new light, if I were only ten years younger, single and could actually be bothered.

Male pride restored I then go home, shout at the other half to “clear this f**king mess up now” and sit down to watch the football whilst throwing empty crisp packets and cans onto the floor, because I work hard enough lying to researchers about how hard I work to use the bin.

Oh please.

How about spending research money on something worthwhile, there are plenty of actual issues in the world to solve. Go fix ‘em…

Rant over.

Note: I’ve had a browse round the BBC site and I can’t find the actual research, which I wanted to have a glance at in case the whole thing was simply misreported I often seem to have that problem with the BBC site as there is just so much there.

Edit - here is the link if you want to try and get the BBC to accept your snippet of wisdom :p

Rowan :: Apr.19.2007 :: Personal Entries :: No Comments »

It has to be said, buying a house in the South of England scares the living daylights out of me. Prices are so ridiculously inflated that you could probably factor in the cost of chartering a helicopter to bring you back and forth to visit family and friends and still wind up with it being cheaper to live elsewhere. Worse, property websites like Right Move and Estate Agents themselves just aren’t giving what I’d expect.

Continue Reading »

Rowan :: Mar.19.2007 :: Personal Entries, Property :: No Comments »

I honestly couldn’t help but laugh when I came across this. The basic gist of the article appears to be that rather than continue to play Video Games and buy “childish” material we should all be getting loans for suits we can’t afford and praying for promotion. Apparently not doing so also means you won’t be able to relate to your children…

Sigh.

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Rowan :: Mar.15.2007 :: Blog Responses, Games, Personal Entries :: 1 Comment »

Funny the way things work out, you have a day when you find out some stuff you’d really rather not have known and the weather doesn’t seem to care a jot - and the cynic in me has to be amused by the bit of me that thinks that there should be some correlation

Still, if the picture proves something it’s that taking a break from the computer to stretch your legs is good and that the quality of my camera is bad…

It seems to make the point that whatever it is, it really isn’t worth thinking about so hard.

and such is life.

Rowan :: Mar.14.2007 :: Personal Entries :: No Comments »