Via XKCD

I’m not at all ashamed to admit that I have a profound fear of flying. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying per sé; in fact, I’ve skydived, gone hang gliding, been in a hot air balloon, and actually love being in any kind of flying vehicle. If I could afford it, I’d love to get a pilot’s license. No, my fear of flying is a very recent development, and is restricted to a fear of flying on a major airline, especially in America. Mostly because I’m afraid of how I’d react to the latest advancements in TSA procedures. And so really I guess my fear is for the well-being of TSA personnel. I really, really do not understand people who accept the newly-instituted TSA pat-down policies. I mean, I can understand why President Obama says they’re frustrating but necessary, and why John Boehner brags he’ll be flying commercial airlines more than his predecessor. Obama gets to go straight from Air Force One to Cadillac One, and Boehner – like other politicians – is exempted from all the ass-grabbing going on. What I don’t understand is why apparently 4 out of 5 Americans support the new scanners. It’s hard to decide which recent incidents are most appalling. The woman who had her breasts exposed while agents laughed? The 4-year-old boy who was strip searched? Or in light of the UCSF scientists’ letter highlighting radiation risks, perhaps the recovering cancer patients like Thomas Sawyer, who had his urostomy bag knocked loose, leaving him covered in urine, or the former flight attendant and breast cancer survivor who was forced to remove her prosthetic breast. Or maybe the absurdity of patriotic soldiers returning from the wars that are supposed to be saving us from the terrorists having their nail clippers confiscated. Keep in mind this was one of 233 people toting assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns. For a much saner and complete roundup by an actual security expert, see this Bruce Schneier post from the other day. More images and video below.

The boy in the video below seems pretty calm compared to the girl in this one.

He must have read a copy of this:

Did You Know Transport Canada Is Now A Division Of Homeland Security?

Is nothing sacred? Muslim TSA Worker Frisks Catholic Nun

This is the nun a few hours later in detention with the TSA robots:

If you’re using Firefox, tracking and blocking basic cookies is super easy with Ghostery. After you download and install it as a plugin, it shows you what services are tracking you, offers a link explaining what they do, and options for blocking or not blocking them. Ghostery is partnered with Better Advertising, which “was founded to ensure that the advertising industry’s voluntary initiatives meet the needs of consumers, government and advertisers”. Ghostery provides fairly unobtrusive little tabs to display and manage tracking activity:

Flash Cookies

These are a little trickier, and insidious enough that they’ve inspired a lawsuit. You can’t actually control these directly on your computer, even though the Adobe software that makes them work is installed on your computer. You have to go to this page on Adobe’s site, and use the rather confusing tool they’ve provided. It’s confusing enough that they provide a note that says “The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager. Click the tabs to see different panels, and click the options in the panels to change your Adobe Flash Player settings“. When I went to the page, I quickly got an alert box like this:

When I told it to keep running, it eventually did this:

When I finally got it working, the choices were a little confusing, like this one.

And after all this talk about companies trying to guess my future actions, this threw me for a second:

We asked recently if Facebook was “over”. Well, the results are in. And the answer is no. I think “dead” would be more accurate. Sure, hundreds of millions of people will continue to use it, but hundreds of millions of people still use Hotmail. And toilet paper. And other things that they don’t necessarily enjoy using, but kind of have to. So why am I suddenly going so harsh on Facebook? Well, partly it’s my own whiny techno-ennui. It just became boring to me some time last year, after doing the one thing I valued it for, which was reconnecting with some valued old friends, and meeting a few new ones. But mainly because of two other things. First of all, the fact that the people behind Facebook have no interest in the user other than as a data mining resource, as evident in their constantly eroding privacy policies and repeated interface changes that do nothing but bury content and confound users about what their privacy settings are doing. Bet you didn’t know Facebook even censors your Inbox messages, did you. The other main reason is that while they do all of these things that are geared toward user data collection to increase their market value, they’ve managed to position themselves as a “utility”, but one that falls short in dozens of ways while distracting many people from more flexible and purposeful forms of communication. Although different users experience the phenomena in different ways, the illusion of being “in touch” with people on Facebook is a compelling one, but in my and many of my friends experience, an illusion that profoundly detracts from real communication, and occasionally actually impedes work when someone is dumb enough to use it as a primary communication channel. But what finally got me in terms of all these interface and privacy changes was the recent rollout of Community Pages. Try some of the paranoia-inducing things listed on this page, and you’ll see what I mean. I’m gearing up to archive my content and contacts, and delete my posts (which FB makes rather difficult), and completely backburner my account as a real tool. How about you? Are you over it? I’m not being melodramatic, by way, just check out Gizmodo’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.

You probably saw a pop-up box like this recently. Mine at first had no “Ask Me Later” option.

I was amused recently when people expressed surprise that Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared privacy a thing of the past, and wondered if the alleged tell-all by a former Facebook employee was for real. Please, people. How can you possibly expect to share vast amounts of personal data online using shopping sites, Facebook, and cloud services like Google Docs and then expect to maintain any semblence of true privacy? This apparently may be a generational issue, and personally, I find myself bridging the generations on this one. This whole issue was driven home hard for me recently, and here’s how: As part of my work over the past ten years, I’ve experimented casually with forms of social networking going all the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities.com. Although I’ve often consulted with clients to implement the various available tools, I’ve done little to use them myself in a purposeful way; although I’m a very social person, I’m also a very private person. As an example, although I’ve logged into Facebook daily for over a year, I don’t use it as a serious business tool, and don’t very often share serious personal thoughts on issues there. I’ve mostly used it to reconnect with old friends, meet a few new ones, and banter humorously with them. I also only have about 150 friends, because I’m not what what in pop lingo has been called a Facebook Friend Whore. In spite of this, and in spite of not being active on LinkedIn, Xing, or other more business-oriented sites, I have a primary network of about 300 valued contacts, and an extended contact list of maybe 1500 people. So while preparing to launch some new projects this year, I was aware that I’d have to update and verify my contact lists, which I try to do annually. The problem? Like me, you may have noticed (depending on your tech lifestyle) that – because of the pervasive adoption of texting, Skype, and Facebook – your e-mail volume and phone time have dropped off significantly over the past year. A lot of casual connecting – which is the very basis of successful networking – happens on sites like Facebook. Historically, I would maintain most of my contacts in Outlook or Thunderbird, and export this info to Excel to “massage” the data. This became profoundly problematic this year, when I was reminded that Facebook and other sites make it nearly impossible to export your contacts. In fact, they may shut down your account if you use certain tools to do so. So after doing a bunch of research, I ended up doing a manual cut-and-paste of a lot of info, and once again, massaging it in Excel. Why? Because although professional contact management tools like Act!and Goldmine are starting to integrate social networking, they’re not quite there. And the alternative? The soon-to-be-booming market for Social Network Aggregation. Mashable.com lists 20 supposed options here; my personal pick for brand of the year is Profilactic. Yeah. Social networking. Put a sock on it. Next they’ll launch “Profilactate.com, a place where you can get together with friends, and breastfeed“. Seriously though, as of this writing, one of the more viable services of this type is Plaxo which entices you with the ominous tagline “Plaxo-Your address book. For life” (my punctuation). There are others in the works like Neodex or Stronico. The problem? Why on Earth would I spend months or years building a network of valued and categorized contacts, and then *upload them to someone else’s server?!? I’m keeping that data to myself, thank you very much. I think we’ll see this become more of a common concern this year, after the new citizens of the Nation of Facebook realize what they’ve really been doing the last few months, giving little thought to where all their status posts and banter ends up, i.e.: in Google’s index, for all the world to see. There are a couple of initiatives to deal with these issues, like OpenID and The DataPortability Project, but the simple fact is that we’re entering an era with a completely new definition of “privacy”, and you may as well get used to it.

On a positive note, you can use all these CCTV cameras to make your band’s video. Manchester band The Get Out Clause did this by performing in front of public cameras and then gathering the footage with “Data Protection Act” requests:

Probably the greatest accomplishment of all these cameras is that they managed to capture an eight foot tall alien on tape:

Posters like this apparently don’t do much more than being creepy…..

…because apparently the cameras on this bus in the 2005 London bombing weren’t even working:

Some images from  NO CCTV and Big Brother Watch: