11 April 2018
Zeynep Tufekci with some strong medicine, for Wired: In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. “I hope you understand, […]
19 March 2018
Zeynep Tufekc, for the New York Times: Mr. Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance. The […]
19 March 2018
Thousands of third party apps were designed solely to obtain and sell your data. It’s no surprise that the data ended up being used again on Facebook, one of the biggest advertising platforms on Earth.
14 March 2018
Sam Biddle for The Intercept: When Mark Zuckerberg was asked if Facebook had influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, the founder and CEO dismissed the notion that the site even had such power as “crazy.” It was a disingenuous remark. Facebook’s website had an entire section devoted to touting the “success stories” of […]
09 November 2017
Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook: “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with […]
09 October 2013
Facebook lies to your friends and says you “liked” pages that you haven’t if their advertisers pay them enough.
28 August 2012
Today I made a series of seemingly innocuous, though slightly filthy, joke tweets based on a vaginal rejuvenation cream being sold in India. The Facebook thread (I have Twitter set to auto-post to Facebook) for the third tweet now has over 118,000 comments and 5,500 likes, and the comment threat is INSANE. This appears to […]
14 August 2012
Garrett Murray on a troubling trend in Kickstarter projects: At least once a week I receive an unsolicited request to fund a project. These messages are rarely offensive in and of themselves–they’re usually just information about the project and a paragraph or two of generic “please help us out” text–but they’re still spam. They’re usually […]
17 May 2012
Another big privacy / security win for Twitter. They’re using a new feature in Firefox called, appropriately, “Do Not Track“: Do Not Track is a step toward putting you in control of the way your information is collected and used online. Do Not Track is a feature in Firefox that allows you to let a […]
27 January 2011
Dan Wineman shoves a hot poker up the ass of Facebook’s “social authentication”: Captchas don’t verify identity. “Social authentication” challenges based on public information — especially information that the service itself provides, for free, to anyone who asks — don’t do that either. The problem with “social authentication” is that second word, there. Facebook’s calling […]
11 January 2011
The why is important, but more important is that they did it at all. I’m certain that Facebook, MySpace, etc, got similar requests and complied with them without even thinking.
27 October 2010
Visually, the “Share” and “Tweet” buttons are very similar, and are structured identically. On the code-side, however, they are very much the product of two different companies with, I would argue, different outlooks on the web as a whole and HTML specifically. Facebook’s “Share” Button <a name=”fb_share” type=”button_count” share_url=”someurl” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php”>Share</a><script src=”http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share” type=”text/javascript”></script> There is no […]
03 June 2010
Cory Watilo: So what’s happening here? Well, Facebook’s “Opt out of emails from Facebook” page is getting indexed by Google. That means that the email address that Facebook shows you on the page is also indexed. Meaning it is spam-harvester heaven. The hits just keep on coming.
13 May 2010
What is longer than the US Constitution and is comprised of over 50 settings and 170 options? Facebook’s privacy settings.
07 May 2010
Their deactivation page is emotional blackmail at its most absurd: The National Lampoon was way ahead of Facebook in this department, as evidenced by this January 1973 issue of the magazine: The Lampoon was joking, of course. Facebook not so much.
21 March 2010
Soren Johnson’s summary of Social Gaming / Facebook’s presence at SXSW, what it’s doing to the industry, and what it might do to the future of games. Potentially very bad for everyone. My favorite quote is this, which I think sums up my real problem with [those fucks] Zynga: So many of the methods for […]
24 February 2010
Oh, the points you will earn in the future. I think saying the growth of Mafia Wars was driven by authenticity is a very silly, if not outright insulting. Authenticity is not something you can acquire.
11 February 2010
Meaning you can add it to your dedicated chat client of choice. The official site has instructions for Pidgin, Adium, iChat, and the ever-popular “Other.” I think my friend Shawn Medero has the right attitude, “we’ll see how much I hate this.”
02 February 2010
What appears to be a PHP/C++ cross-compiler. This could be some serious mojo for PHP. That name is awful, though.
10 August 2009
Financial terms not disclosed, as usual. The acquisition makes sense as Facebook has basically spent the last 6 months trying to emulate FriendFeed and Twitter.
My name is Phil Nelson and I make beautiful things for a troubled world. I'm a designer / developer / writer / director / editor / narrator at Occipital.
Hey. What're you doing all the way down here? You get lost? Just looking around? Cool. I like you.