the Cloud
On the Media is an excellent resource always, but the second segment of the Apr. 23, 2010 goes over the lack of protection afforded data in the cloud due to the Stored Communications Act, an increasingly important topic.
Current law allows a very low standard for access to “Stored Communication” such as Gmail or Google Docs or any other “cloud service.” It turns out that Google gets about 20 requests for data a day and if an investigator asks for your email they do not need a warrant to get it.
If you don’t own the hardware, you don’t own the data.
Even if the Stored Communications Act is overturned, any data you store on a remote server such as Google’s, is Google’s and not yours. You have no right to get it back, no rights controlling Google’s dissemination of your data or resale thereof. In many cases there is a click through agreement with the service provider which may, for example, state that certain information will be kept private or not sold, but such clauses are typically superseded by statements claiming the right to rewrite the agreement without notification.
For example, FaceBook might change default privacy settings such that information you stored on their server with the understanding that it would be kept private is later exposed to search engines and indexed and thus made public, thereby increasing search traffic to their site, and thus to their advertisers.
FaceBook did not give, and was not required to give any particular notice. The data you put on their servers is theirs, not yours.
Don’t put data in the “cloud” you don’t want to be public. Google Docs is not a replacement for Open Office on your own hardware. Companies don’t make any money offering you free, private compute resources and storage; these services are profitable by exploiting the value of your information. In the long run it is probably cheaper to buy your own hardware.
Side note: in this excellent episode of OTM, they also cover the GAO’s pooping all over the MPAA/RIAA linkage between guerrilla antitrust (unauthorized copying) and economic problems. OTM also points out the linkage between the asinine ruling against the FCC and Net Neutrality, which is a free speech disaster, and worse still the MPAA/RIAA efforts to create a world-wide three-strikes rule to extort money to replace the money they used to be able to generate with their obsolete business model.
Facebook Open Graph Fun
More detailed instructions about how to access facebook’s new Open Graph (below). Open Graph is an interesting OAuth based mechanism by which facebook is opening their database to “select” third parties and allowing those parties to read FB cookies and automatically connect to FB and read “engagement enhancing” information about the user such as their social graph, their profile, their news feed, the groups they belong to, their pictures (including all that they’ve been tagged in): just about everything FB knows about them. The details are at this URL.
It is not 100% clear to me yet whether giving the third party access to the facebook cookies, but if the techcrunch article is correct, then third parties can read FB cookies, which are all under the domain .facebook.com and all “send for: Any type of connection” including the “lxe” cookie which is the user’s sign-in email address.
To experiment with Open Graph, first log in to facebook… Read more…
Facebook Open Graph
AWESOME! Facebook open graph lets you grab data from facebook with an oauth connection. They hand back some amazing data for your exploitation pleasure. You get automatic login with a default privacy set to allow. I’m sure they will carefully vet every site they give permit, just like they say they will, and so you can be sure they’ve visited the companies, performed background checks and submitted everyone at the applying company to a lie detector test.
;-)
Until then try the sample code so you can see what sorts of things you get back, like this query:
Then vary the object ID. (..com/objectid?acc…) Poking around to 4 I get:
{ “id”: “4”, “name”: “Mark Zuckerberg”, “first_name”: “Mark”, “last_name”: “Zuckerberg”, “link”: “http://www.facebook.com/zuck”, “birthday”: “05/14/1984”, “work”: [ { “employer”: { “id”: 20531316728, “name”: “Facebook” }, “start_date”: “2004-02” } ], “education”: [ { “school”: { “id”: 105930651606, “name”: “Harvard University” }, “concentration”: [ { “id”: 111394625549982, “name”: “Computer Science” } ] }, { “school”: { “id”: 108366532520435, “name”: “Phillips Exeter Academy” }, “year”: { “id”: 115476681798224, “name”: “2002” } } ], “timezone”: -7, “updated_time”: “2010-02-14T09:05:15+0000” }
Substitute any username for the query object and get that user’s profile (friend or not). Increment through all possible object IDs and collect the entire FB data set.
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Twitter Tools is pretty cool
If you have a wordpress blog and the thought of bidirectional integration with twitter is interesting, twittertools is pretty cool. For a long time, used KBB RSS widgets to display the RSS feed of my facebook status on my personal, unedited, why would anyone else possibly care web site (aka “blog”) and never really noticed how slow it was to retrieve the RSS feed (and maybe the facebook fave icon) but it seriously hung the page load times. Plus FaceBook is so last month. I mean seriously, who uses it any more?
Twitter is only so last week and while it may already be uncool, the cool phase is so short that even with rapid software development tools it is hard to build an ecosystem around the hot new technology in the two weeks between when it has enough traction to be “hot” and when it is so mainstream as to be “burned out.”
Sometime in that brief arc, twitter tools appeared and it does a couple of simple things really well:
- You can display a selectable number of your most recent tweets in your sidebar,
- You can make tweets into blog posts (why? 140 characters is a short post!),
- You can “digest” a day’s worth or a week’s worth of tweets into a post,
- You can tweet your blog entries (like this) in some format we are about to discover,
- It prefixes your tweeted blog entries with a fixed text to prevent a masturbatory circle tweet.
I messed around with twitterfeed, and that too seems cool, doing a similar thing, but it requires a third party site and I generally prefer to have my code local.