Shifting Away from Social Media Platforms

This post is the first in a series of three posts about some changes I have been making in my personal life with respect to how I interact with online social media platforms, and how that affects this blog. The points most relevant to this blog are as follows. This blog used to have associated Facebook & Twitter accounts, and I used to share each new post on my own personal Facebook timeline to encourage others to read it. While I'm aware that a few contacts on Facebook did read my & share recent blog posts, there weren't many. Meanwhile, looking back at the Facebook & Twitter accounts associated with this blog, almost no new readership came from those, so I didn't feel too badly about deleting those accounts (after deleting each individual post), especially because the synchronization of new posts from this blog being automatically shared to its associated Facebook page didn't work for the first few months that I tried it (over 10 years ago), and then I stopped caring about that Facebook page afterwards. Furthermore, I added a lot of tools to connect this blog to social media sites over 10 years ago, when I, being in high school and then in the first & second years of college, had more time on my hands & had high hopes for this blog becoming popular online (especially in the domain of Linux distribution reviews); for the last several years, I have had neither the time nor the interest to continue pursuing such popularity contests, and I'm almost certain that I won't feel inclined toward such things again, so I have no problem with removing those connectivity features. I know there are still some widgets built into each post or page on this blog which are connected to different social media sites for easier sharing of posts, and I should remove those eventually, but simply as a practical matter (with respect to my own time), I'm less concerned about removing those right away. In the meantime, I think it is still possible to get updates about this blog via email, RSS, or Atom. Follow the jump to see why I have taken these steps for my blog and am currently undertaking similar steps with my personal presence on social media platforms owned by Facebook or Twitter.

Book Review: "Radical Markets" by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl

I've recently read the book "Radical Markets" by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl. I should disclose that I came to know of this book upon attending a talk and Q&A session on campus by the latter author about this book, and that I was able to ask a question during that time (though as I point out later, I didn't find the answer to be so satisfactory). In any case, the topic intrigued me. This book is essentially a vision for a radical reformation of society, starting in the West but ultimately spreading through the world, such that concentrations of power are systematically broken and a level playing field is quickly approached. The two key novel contributions of this work are the notion of a common ownership self-assessed tax (COST), which aims to revolutionize notions of ownership by abolishing property rights extending to perpetuity and replacing them with auctions for goods & capital, and quadratic voting (QV), which aims to replace the principle of one-person-one-vote with voting credits such that individuals can vote on issues or candidates (for or against) in proportion to their perceived importance while being prevented from unduly swinging elections. There are also other issues discussed, such as immigration, institutional investment, and the value of digital data, all in the context of concentrations of power. It is worth pointing out that though there are many arguments that extend to Canada, the UK, other European countries, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, most of the arguments are made in the context of the US.

I will leave a detailed critique after the jump, and summarize my thoughts here. I found the ideas presented in the book rather intriguing and certainly novel. However, the main flaw of the book in my view is that the authors too often like to present their ideas at a very broad conceptual (macroscopic) level while simultaneously presenting examples justifying these concepts at a very granular (microscopic) level. The missing elements are the granular implementations of their broad concepts as well as the implications of the granular examples interacting on a larger scale; as a result, particularly for the introduction of the COST ideas, the claims must be taken essentially on faith, as the authors are quite glib about the importance of implementation details to the overall path of society if their ideas were to be followed. Given this, there are many reasons to remain skeptical about these ideas. This is also evident in the writing style too, in that my need to reread parts of certain chapters multiple times, while in part because these ideas are certainly not trivial, was mostly because of these sorts of logical leaps to conclusions that were not obvious, and many times, these conclusions remained non-obvious even after multiple reads through; the writing is otherwise engaging and fun to read, but I could tell that the authors were at many points getting swept up in their own ideas at the expense of clarity for readers. Overall, I recommend this book because the ideas are intriguing and I do want to see these ideas fleshed out better, but I would not recommend this book in the sense of wanting to preach these ideas myself. Follow the jump to see more detailed discussion about this book.

Book Review: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

I generally don't read works of fiction, as I don't have as much interest in them as I do in well-crafted nonfiction works, but Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of the classics of dystopic science fiction; in particular, many comparisons have been made to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, with the latter surging in popularity in the last few months in the context of the current political climate in the US, so I figured I might give this one a read instead. This book is set in a time where society is explicitly stratified into castes and everyone is conditioned, through physical, chemical, and psychological means from [artificial] fertilization through death at age 60, to behave in ways that would never lead them to question their roles in society; this is further helped by the omnipresence of a pleasurable drug called soma and by the omnipresence of this very conditioning, such that social ostracism is feared perhaps above all else. With that in mind, the main story primarily involves two characters, one named Bernard Marx who is born and raised in this society but finds himself dissatisfied with the society and his role in it, the other named John the savage who is born to a woman (named Linda) outside of this society and becomes repulsed after understanding the superficiality of the existence of members of that society.

The initial parts of the story seem to drag a little bit as it isn't initially clear to which character the reader's attention should primarily be drawn, but after the introduction of Bernard Marx, it becomes much clearer that the initial parts paint the setting of this world to make it clear why Bernard Marx is out of place. Additionally, in terms of movement of the narrative, the extended dialogue between John the savage and the controller Mustapha Mond drags a little, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the author's true view of such a futuristic world. What I found most interesting is that both Bernard Marx and John the savage keep trying but failing to escape the oppressive social confines of their world, though the issues at play are different. Bernard Marx feels socially isolated due to his short height relative to his upper caste and due to his (perhaps related) desires to have time from himself, away from the rest of society. However, his psychosocial conditioning is fairly thorough, such that even when he visits the tribe of savages and has a chance to live a simple and isolated life among them, he chooses instead to bring John the savage as well as Linda back to the main society in London so that he can gain credibility in that society that he finds hard to come by; when John the savage rejects further gawking visitors (which reflects poorly on Bernard Marx, being the custodian of John the savage), rather than joining John the savage in solitude, Bernard Marx becomes despondent about his renewed feelings of alienation and ostracism from society at large. This deepens near the end of the book, when he is exiled to Iceland; his thoroughly conditioned worry about social alienation overcomes any excitement he may have felt at realizing that he would be among high-caste misfits like himself instead of in the superficial society for which he ostensibly does not care so much. Likewise, John the savage is initially delighted by what he sees after traveling from his tribe to London, but having been raised and conditioned outside of that society, he is disgusted by the superficiality, free love (though that may have more to do with his early childhood trauma of seeing his mother, who was brought up in the society, attempt to practice free love with the men of the tribe, consequently leading to his and his mother's ostracism from the tribe by the women and children of the tribe, respectively), and inability to find solitude in the main society. Yet at the end of the book, when he attempts to escape and live an ascetic penitent life outside of the city, the other members of society relentlessly hound him as an exhibition for their amusement; even at the very end, when he takes his own life, his limp hanging body is seen as another cheap spectacle, so even in death, his earthly remains cannot escape the superficiality of that society. Overall, I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in this sort of thing. Follow the jump to see more discussion of my thoughts about how this relates to today's society in the US (disclaimer: this is coming from a lay observer of American politics and society, so don't take anything too seriously; moreover, I'm sure that many of these observations have been made in the past by various people at different times).

Google+: Initial Thoughts

A couple days ago, my Google+ invite finally started working again, so I immediately signed up for the service.
If you want to know what it looks like and what functions/features it has in depth, I would suggest that you read somewhere else, because these are just my initial thoughts about it.
For the couple days that I have used it, I really like it on the whole. It's very similar to Facebook in terms of its interface, which has certainly made the transition easier. Plus, it has a much simpler privacy policy that's not likely to change much over time, along with privacy tools and options that are much easier to find and modify.
There are only two big issues that I have right now. The first is that not all my contacts on Facebook are using Google+ yet, but that'll probably happen in time once Google+ becomes available to the public, so that's not a really huge issue. The second is that when I decided to enable video chatting on Google+, I had to download a new Google Talk browser plugin and install that. This also overwrote the existing installed plugin; the unfortunate side effect has been that although my webcam and mic capture my video and audio fine, my speakers have suddenly started rendering sounds from the conversation as if both myself and the other person had inhaled helium. I haven't tried this with headphones yet, so I can't say for sure if this is truly a problem with the plugin, and I haven't tried this on other Linux distributions yet (aside from Linux Mint 9 LTS "Isadora"), so again I can't say if this is truly a problem with the plugin, but in any case, it's a problem, and it's also present in GChat.
Otherwise, I have high hopes for Google+, and I hope to use it just as much as Facebook once it becomes available to the public.

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 June 26

There was one post that got a few comments, so I'll try to repost most of those.

Facebook, Google+, and Centralized Proprietary Monocultures

Reader tracyanne said, "quote:: No matter who you are, if you plan on uploading pictures to these "cloud" sites, don't delete them from physical storage at home. Always keep backups on hard drives, etc. Because if you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket falls into a black hole, you're sunk. ::quote That advice pretty much applies to anything "in the cloud". You leave yourself vulnerable to pretty much anything "they" want to do, and anything that can go wrong, and run the risk of losing YOUR data when you rely on such "services". The only way you can ensure that your data (photographs, images, writing etc) is safe is to keep a copy on your own computers and keep backups of that."
Commenter Sandeep said, "Even with diaspora, there are not many people who are actually going to buy and maintain their own server. They will outsource to someone else who has a pod- which leads to the same issues of information gathering, privacy, backups, etc. I am not a diaspora user, so please say if these concerns are nonexistent."
An anonymous reader countered, "Google is not Facebook. Every company has its own motivations and its own people leading them. Google will screw up in completely different ways than Facebook and in different ways than open source projects. None are perfect."
But then commenter Scio gave another vote of confidence to "Diaspora. You can host your own node while keeping your connections with friends over the internet, without giving up your data. It's all encrypted using PGP keys. I think there's a false dichotomy between utilizing the web for data while losing your privacy and keeping everything on a stale hard drive with no flexibility while keeping your privacy. I think it's essential that we reflect on solutions like Amahi, ownCloud, SparkleShare, etc. to make sure that private data owned on the person's own hardware has a place among the services of companies."

Thanks to all those who commented on that post from this past week. I don't have anything planned for this coming week, but I'm sure I'll be able to write about something. Remember, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing, commenting, and sharing!

Facebook, Google+, and Centralized Proprietary Monocultures

This week, Google released Google+, which is basically a social network that's a lot like Facebook, but run by Google instead of Facebook. The big deal here is that it's a lot easier to modify privacy settings and configure what information to post to which group(s) ("Circle(s)" in Google+-speak) of contacts. This shows that Google, at least on the surface, takes privacy a lot more seriously than Facebook. I say this because whenever a controversial privacy settings change occurs on Facebook, it's usually in the direction of less privacy, and only when the users get outraged does Facebook do anything at all (and it's usually insignificant), because the truth is that Facebook's business is built upon selling users' data to companies for marketing, advertising, etc. I've also gotten annoyed with Facebook's chat and constant UI changes that occur for no good reason, so I'm a little more drawn in that sense to Google+ because it integrates Google Chat (which I know works), and all of Google's applications have kept pretty much constant, simple UIs over the years. Please note that I haven't actually used Google+, though I have an invitation (it seems like Google can't process that invitation right now); any statements that make it seem like I've used it are actually just my hopes and expectations.

But at the same time, I'm a bit wary of joining yet another centralized, proprietary social network. Why? Because they could screw me over at any time, and that's pretty much what happened to many Facebook users on Linux. You see, this week, Facebook not only blocked KDE applications from uploading pictures to the site (which was among the selling points for KDE 4.6), but it also deleted all pictures that had previously been uploaded that way. That's outrageous! And worse yet, when prominent free software reporters and proponents complained to Facebook, they got a rather cold response, which indicated both that Facebook didn't really care about the KDE users and more third-party uploaders could be blocked soon. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case, as about a day later, all the KDE applications were allowed to upload to Facebook again, and all the deleted photos were reinstated. It all turned out to be a big mistake/misunderstanding. Whatever.

So the issue is that whether I join Google+ or just stick with Facebook, in either case I'm at the mercy of the company managing that service. No matter who you are, if you plan on uploading pictures to these "cloud" sites, don't delete them from physical storage at home. Always keep backups on hard drives, etc. Because if you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket falls into a black hole, you're sunk. And until Diaspora actually gets going and starts draining users from Facebook (which unfortunately doesn't look likely at all, considering that I haven't heard anything new about the project for a year or so), although I will certainly use Google+ with an open mind, I will continue to remain wary and vigilant.

Movie Review: The Social Network

Yesterday night I watched the movie The Social Network with my family. It's basically a dramatized documentary about the history of the founding of Facebook. Although the main people in real life were OK with this movie, as far as I know, this was not an officially-endorsed documentary, so there was a lot of dramatization especially where details were few and fuzzy. (On the other hand, things like the instant messages and emails, which have been published by Facebook, are real.) Plus, I think it's fairly well-established that Mark Zuckerberg in real life, while certainly blunt and introverted, is much more approachable and definitely not as much of an [expletive] as he was portrayed in the movie; similar things can be said about the other characters. Finally, based on Wikipedia's article about Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, the movie's snippet of text at the end about him retaining 7% of the company seems wrong; at least according to the Wikipedia article, Sean Parker was kicked out of the company immediately following his arrest for possession of cocaine and he lost all his shares.
Other than that, it's a fairly good movie. The plot never gets boring and it always stays engaging. I would recommend it to anyone who's looking for a good docudrama, although I will ask those who watch it to not rely on it for actual historical information.
On another note, I was pleased to see the presence of KDE 3 on Mark Zuckerberg's computer; the window decorations and the bottom panel with a virtual desktop switcher all scream "KDE 3". Yay! This was shown in the trailer, but many writers online suspected this computer would be replaced with an Apple Mac computer. Thankfully, that didn't happen (although there were a plethora of Macs used by other people throughout the film).

Featured Comments: Week of 2010 October 10

There were two posts from this past week that garnered comments.

GNOME 3, Activities, and KDE 4

The most common complaint about this post was that I should have read Aaron Seigo's post on the matter before writing this; unfortunately, it didn't happen that way. I'll get back to this point later. Let's continue with the comments themselves.
An anonymous reader points out, "You shouldn't worry about Compiz. Mutter will provide the desktop effects. If you really, really want Compiz integration with GNOME 3 you are out of luck. Don't ask me why but GNOME developers designed GNOME Shell to be a Mutter plug-in, so as you can see the former depends heavily on the latter, thus making impossible for Compiz developers to support GNOME Shell."
Another anonymous reader adds to this, "If I recall correctly I believe I once heard Compiz was never supposed to be permanent. It was an example of what the Windows managers (aka GNOME an KDE) could and perhaps should/should not do."
Reader twitter adds, "A lightweight desktop with modern features is E16. It has transparency and excellent 2D desktop management. E16's clear distintion between virtual screens and virtual desktops implemented the concept of "activities" more than a decade ago."
Commenter Eric Mesa adds to the previous anonymous reader's comment, "I was surprised to find out that Compiz still exists. Kwin, Fluxbox, and Metacity have all, to some degree, incorporated this. I know they aren't as flashy as compiz, but I think it's just a matter of time. Compiz was the fire under the butts of developers, showing them what X could do and daring them to match it. [...] I have to say that, in my experience, everyone who saw Compiz thought it was neat, but no one was converted because of compiz. They wanted to know if they could still do the work they did on their windows computers."
Finally, a certain anonymous reader (because I'm fairly sure it's the same reader who wrote all 3 of those comments)  complained about my analysis in 3 comments too long to repost here verbatim. I'll try to analyze it point by point.
First of all, my comparison wasn't especially apt only because I'm comparing my experiences with KDE 4.5 with other reviewers' experiences with both KDE 4.5 and GNOME 3. But let's continue from there.
I specifically state that KDE 4 Activities were unusable until KDE 4.5. Hence, KDE 4.5 Activities are quite usable and stable.
From the reviews I've read, GNOME 3 doesn't crash and is about as stable as GNOME 2.X. When KDE 4.0 was first brought into the pipeline, people were comparing its beta releases to KDE 3.5 and GNOME 2.X; why is it not fair to do the reverse now? Furthermore, GNOME Shell can be used in GNOME 2.X, so I would say that if it's made it into the repositories of distributions that use GNOME 2.X, it's certainly not a "future technology", even though it will see its first official implementation in GNOME 3.
What you (the anonymous commenter who wrote these comments) say about GNOME 3 already knowing what pitfalls to avoid is known as the second-mover advantage. It's the reason why in the battles of the jetliners in the 1940s and 1950s, the Boeing 707, which came after the De Havilland Comet, prevailed: the De Havilland Comet, while very sleek, had flaws that caused a number of fatal and spectacular accidents mostly due to the same issue, so Boeing was able to analyze this and build an airplane that did not suffer these issues. Is that really so bad? (Of course, unlike KDE with its Activities, De Havilland was loath to even admit there was a problem until after the occurrence of about 5 major accidents, after which point it was told to stop manufacturing altogether, without being given a chance to reassess its design and engineering and fix its mistakes.) Really, do you want to fly in the De Havilland Comet? No? So aren't you glad that GNOME 3 learned from KDE 4's mistakes?
Finally, with regard to Aaron Seigo's blog post, I think in his analysis, he's missing a key point: although GNOME 3 and KDE 4's Activities are implemented very differently, in that GNOME 3's Activities are a more formalized and structured implementation of virtual desktops, while KDE 4's Activities are collections of different applications, it's important to remember that if you think about it, both come from essentially the same core idea, and that is a way to group sets of applications in some manner. GNOME 3 requires the user to do it each time, while KDE 4 allows the user to do it once and then select from whatever Activities have been made. Part of the difference also comes from KDE 4's Plasmoids, for which there really isn't any GNOME 3 analogue; also, my comparison stems from the fact that although this certainly isn't the default behavior, many online writers recommend after installing KDE 4 that the user tie each virtual desktop to a different activity. Yes, KDE 4's Activities are a good bit different and a bit more advanced than Activities as implemented in GNOME 3, but it's hard to deny that they both come from the same basic idea.
I hope all this clears up my position on this debate.

Facebook's Worrying Privacy Changes

An anonymous reader writes, "Now you can use Facebook but still keep your messages private. And you don't have to depend on Facebook privacy settings. Just ‘CLOAK’ your messages with your own private keyword using the free CloakGuard browser plugin. This garbles your message and only the people you've shared your keyword with (and not Facebook) can read your messages."

Well, that wraps up the comments for this past week. Again, I hope I've made my position a little more clear. In addition, I will say once again that if you enjoy what I write, please do take a moment to subscribe via RSS or email!

Facebook's Worrying Privacy Changes

Over the last few months, there have been myriad changes to Facebook's privacy policy, many of them for the worse (in terms of being able to maintain privacy). This one (Robert McMillan, PCWorld via Yahoo! News), however, seems really bad, not least because Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was himself a victim of this change in the privacy policy. Basically, this new "feature" allows people to unilaterally make their friends members of groups. However, if the friend leaves that group, the original person can no longer make the friend part of any more groups. The problem with this, of course, is that unless there's some sort of notification about being made a member of a group, people won't know in what groups they are members; even if there are notifications, they will likely be ignored anyway (as they already often are). Groups and pages can often extract information from people's profiles even if those people have chosen to make certain information private, which is why this is so problematic. Considering Mark Zuckerberg was made to be a member of the NAMBLA Facebook group, I'm a little scared, honestly. People who know me on Facebook, can you please do me a favor and not be a jerk (by unilaterally making me a member of a group or a fan of a page)? I'm trying to stay away from all groups and pages that don't have to do with my high school and/or college, because I don't want other random groups and/or pages to have access to my personal information.

Review: Blogilo 1.0.1

This is not a typical review for this blog, as it is a review of a specific application (rather than of a desktop environment or operating system). However, I figured I should publish this anyway, as Blogilo is a desktop blogging application for KDE (though it works in GNOME as well, provided the Qt libraries are present).
I was going to write and publish this entire review from Blogilo. It seems nice enough, and it has many rich text features present in Blogger's online client. However, it doesn't yet have support for Blogger labels. Most importantly, however, it refused to publish this post to this blog (or, more accurately, it crashed when trying to do so). Hence, while Blogilo looks like a very promising project, I cannot as yet recommend it for actual publishing.

On a slightly related note, this blog now has a Facebook fan page! The Facebook box is on the sidebar (and a few things have been rearranged). If you enjoy the content of this blog, I would greatly appreciate it if you "Liked" this page on Facebook or subscribed to the RSS feed (or subscribed by email). Thank you!
(UPDATE: I have submitted this blog to a few indexing sites like Technorati. I am simply republishing this post to complete the indexing process. The Technorati code for this blog post is ZRH2VH7EDPKM.)

Another Look at this Blog

Some of you may be wondering what all of the various objects on this blog are. I will try to explain this to the best of my ability.
On top, of course, is the title of this blog. Clicking on the title takes you to the main blog page (or refreshes the page if you are already there).
Each post has a date, title, and content. Clicking on the title brings up the full post (with comments).
At the bottom of each post is a link to share the post to various social networking sites. These consist of Facebook, Google, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Delicious, Digg, Blogger, Wordpress, Google Buzz, and Yahoo! Buzz. If you would like to see additional sites included, please list them in the comments section. I would greatly appreciate it.
Follow the jump to read more.

The Failures of Facebook

I was reading a few articles about Facebook's latest privacy scandal recently.
Apparently, the Facebook developers were trying to "improve" the privacy features - on Facebook, one can preview how someone else would see one's own profile. However, in doing so, they managed to allow (by accident, of course) anyone to see what any of their friends are doing on Facebook at that moment (including the ability to essentially spy on other people's chats).
This is not the first time Facebook has messed up privacy-wise (Facebook is constantly revising privacy options in the hopes of making them better, while in reality, every change creates a progressively larger backlash). However, this one really takes the cake in terms of how big a goof-up it was.
Seriously, Facebook?
Can they get any change to the interface right?
I am really starting to doubt the Facebook developers' abilities right now (though that's not to say that I didn't before either).