Amit Schreiber's Blog | הבלוג של עמית שרייבר
Facebook announced they’ll be sharing phone numbers and addresses of users with platform application developers. I recommend removing personal information from your Facebook profile (I’ve done it a long time ago.)
Also, if you haven’t already turned off Facebook applications in the applications privacy section, maybe it’s time. If you don’t use Facebook applications – why not turn them off? Legacy apps, which you installed in the past, still have a so-called “legacy access” to your information.
Not too long ago I wrote in a post (How can we take back our privacy?) about the option of expiring our online data, and now some Germans decided to provide software called “X-pire!”, which expires images after a period of time. Still not solving the problem of saving the image and re-posting it, but “a journey of a thousand miles” and so on and so forth :)
Sometimes you have to experience something to really learn a lesson. I heard before about the Hershey’s Kiss experiment and the vast difference between dirt cheap and free, but I had to see it with my own eyes.
Before Dindy was free it cost 0.80 USD and I had around one download per day for a little over a year. Now, after making it free, Dindy gets downloaded 50 times every day. So in one month it went up from 366 to 1924 downloads with 784 active installs (40%.) Dindy’s rating remains around the same (4.25 out of 5), which is good.
Users are offering good enhancements and I’m trying to keep them happy. In the past I refused to do reply-to-SMS in Dindy because Google removed SMS capturing and reading from the API in the first Android release and, for some strange reason, never brought it back. So while it’s still possible to read SMS messages programmatically there’s no official support and applications using it may break at any time. Now that Dindy is free I don’t mind adding it and the next update will probably have reply-to-SMS (the texter will get a message telling him/her to call in order to make the phone wake up from silent.)
I put up a donation button on Dindy’s website but so far I got no donations. I’m still considering a donation button inside the app.
Following the latest xkcd strip I went on to read the list of common misconceptions on Wikipedia. Just pick a subject and enjoy waving your beliefs goodbye.
And because it’s on Wikipedia it must be true, right?
The December release. Wonderful.
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Privacy has become a huge issue. We get free (or cheap) and useful services in return for information about us and the potential uses of this information are becoming more frightening over time. If you don’t have anything to hide you might think this is OK, but what if someday someone will make use of the information you shared to do something you don’t approve of? The problem is that you can’t take it back. You can’t have your information withdrawn to get your privacy again, not even if you give up on the services that you got in return.
So I’ve been wondering if there’s a way, without legal assistance, to create a software mechanism that would allow us to take back our privacy. For example, let’s say I decide to close my Google account. I would like then all the data Google has on me to become undecipherable to them or to anyone else.
Unfortunately my thoughts on this led me to realize that this is a lot like DRM, which has failed miserably so far as people find the keys required to decipher the information eventually. But I’m still wondering whether this could work somehow.
This is an old school web 1.0 idea I had over the weekend. It’s very simple: let’s say you want to leave a message for someone, anonymously or not. You go into the website, put in the person’s email address and the message. The person doesn’t receive any notification about this, and can only see his/her messages if they go to the website and enter their email address. That’s it.
What is it good for? With all the connectivity among people and now that every website has “social” features, there’s no way for a simple “message in a bottle” kind of a gesture in today’s Internet.
Like I said… old school.
Just sharing an idea from one of my favorite authors. Move along. Nothing to see :)
…. it takes you a second to realize you have to physically press down a resistive touchscreen to get a response.
(either that or I’m just getting old)
I’ve been a fan of The Mars Volta for quite some time now. While waiting for their upcoming (6th studio) album, I listen to one of Omar Rodriguez Lopez (The Mars Volta’s dictator) albums. Rodriguez Lopez has been releasing many (free to listen) albums lately, that are very different in style and sound. The latest one, which I really like, is a live recording called どういたしまして (“You’re Welcome” in Japanese).
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