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Comment Re:What's the complaint? (Score 1) 446

In Facebook, go to:

Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites

You will find the following:

What your friends can share about you through applications and websites
When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card.

If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone.

Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
Status updates
Online presence
Website
Family and relationship
Education and work
My videos
My links
My notes
My photos
Photos and videos of me
About me
My birthday
My hometown
My religious and political views

So you CAN control what information your friends know about you that is "shared" with applications.

Comment How about actually TRYING to secure your privacy? (Score 1) 446

The anonymous reader who reported on TFA is not correct that you can no longer control the distribution of your most personal data on Facebook.

To test my theory, I searched Facebook for "mark smith" and found dozens of Mark Smiths whose privacy settings don't share any personal information (such as their city/hometown) with strangers. All I learn about these various Mark Smiths is that:

Mark only shares some of his information with everyone.
If you know Mark, send him a message or add him as a friend.

Then I created a test account on Facebook, and locked it down. See if you can find any info on facebook about the account I just created in the name of: Catherine Fiver.

I'd like to see someone in this thread give a concrete example of a setting they can't actually lock down to an acceptable privacy level, because I've gone over all the privacy settings and it looks like you can lock your account down to a level of uselessness (such as the Catherine Fiver account) where no one else on Facebook will know anything about you unless you connect to them as a friend, and even then they will know almost nothing about you. You can lock down how visible your account is - choosing if you want to allow indexing by search engines - and if your account is found by facebook user searches by non-friends. If you lock your account down to the limit (as I did with my test account), non-friends won't ever find or see you on facebook.

The default choices for each data field are "everybody", "friends of friends", "only friends" and "customize". Within the customize menu you can choose "just me", or allow or block specific people.

Comment Re:paper in your wallet (Score 1) 1007

Guard that sheet like you would your credit cards. If your wallet is lost, immediately set all your passwords to something temporary then build a new password list all over again.

I don't think you thought this one thru very carefully. Once the wallet is lost, how would he login to all his accounts to reset the passwords?

Most websites have a function to email you your password, or to reset and email you your new password. But that doesn't work if you don't remember your email password and you lost that slip of paper...

Comment Exercise calorie calculator? (Score 1) 978

Speaking of exercise and weight loss, does anyone know of an online calorie calculators that figure calories burned based on:

Weight
Distance
Effort (type of exercise)

All of the online calculators I've been able to find use time instead of distance, which makes no sense. If I move a given weight (my body) a given distance (e.g. 5 miles) using a standard type of effort (walking/running, or bicycling which takes less effort), then the calories burned are the same no matter the speed. This is basic physics. But all of the online calculators say that the faster you go the fewer calories you burn. If it takes 25 minutes to run 5 miles or 100 minutes to walk 5 miles, it still takes the same amount of "work" to move a mass that distance, and the calories burned should be approximately the same. If I ride my bike 20 miles and it takes 1 hour my effort per minute will be *about* twice the rate as if it takes 2 hours and both rides should require (burn) about the same amount of calories. But the calorie calculators say that the slower ride burns twice as many calories because I rode for a "longer" period.

Comment Re:Corporate America (Score 1) 146

That's interesting. Where I work, inserting a personally-owned pen drive to a computer on the network that gets caught in a scan results in a suspension. Inserting a personally-owned pen drive that pushes malware out onto the network gets you fired. Inadverdently attaching a spreadsheet with customer data to an email and sending it outside the organization gets you fired, everyone in your area subjected to additional training, and an executive or two dragged before a congressional subcommittee to fall on their swords. Deliberately accessing customer data to which you have no right gets you all of the above, plus you go to jail.

Other places don't take security as seriously?

I'm saving this as a great counter-example when someone claims that government agencies can't ever do things as efficiently or as well as private industry.

Comment Re:The Article is poor.... (Score 1) 247

The article repeats the same Myths of password security that we have been repeating for the last thirty years. Let me review them for you:

  - Password Length is important

  - Password Complexity is key (e.g. A-Z with at least one special, one number)

  - Password Expiration is important

Like all good myths these have elements of truth in them but fail to really hit the nail on what the problems actually are, or namely:

  - Strong login auditing is important (failed attempts, unusual patterns, etc)

  - Login speed should be throttled (e.g. No 60/guesses per minute)

  - Failed logins should be capped (e.g. Login wrong five times? Consult technical support)

Now we are talking about password security. You can also throw on a five length minimum. Now even if your password was "password" they would still find it extremely difficult to compromise the system since it would be slow and would break after the first five. If you tried to spread out the attempts over several weeks (making it slower still) the audit logs should be alerting the administrator to 14/failed attempts per week from China.

This is an excellent summary of the problem. I love how you addressed the small elements of truth in the 3 big myths, then explained what is more important. I hope you don't mind if I copy your list the next time I try to explain to my bank why their password policy (composed entirely of the 3 myths and missing all of the 3 items that are more important) is needlessly interfereing with ease of use and actually contributes to a lack of safety (because people ARE going to write down their login passwords when they are forced to change them every 60 days).

Comment because there's competition? (Score 1) 345

Can you imagine that someone probably once claimed Google will never crack 50% market share because there's competition, because Yahoo and Altavista (does anyone remember Altavista) and all those other search sites were there first?

Firefox will crack IE just like Google cracked Yahoo - because Firefox is better, and a non-Microsoft business policy will save businesses money in the long run. As each business looks at the cost of upgrading their software, and someone proposes a lower cost alternative, and the bean counters see that it saves them money, this is a crack in Microsoft's dam. Even when Microsoft offers schools and governments M$ software for free, many realize it's still to costly to be locked into the M$ platform and they go with open source software instead.

Comment Info about Copyright as it applies to personal use (Score 1) 273

Get it into your thick skull already; copyright cannot stop you from using what you bought the way you want it. It only stops you from copying what you bought and giving it to others.

You are mistaken, and the above is incorrect.

When you "buy" a song, a photo, or software, what you are really doing is purchasing a license to use a copy of the item. The license almost always has restrictions. You can NOT do "anything you want" with your copy. For instance:

1) When you buy a song, you can't then play that song at your restaurant. This is a commercial airing of the song, and you have to pay royalties for this use. This is outside of the license you were granted for your personal use of the song. It doesn't matter how you purchased your copy - bought a CD or downloaded it from iTunes. Ditto for buying a DVD of a movie then showing the movie at your business.

2) When someone takes a photo of you at an event (e.g. sporting event, graduation, office xmas party) and you buy a print or a jpeg, you can't give your copy (no "copying" taking place) to someone else to use for commercial purposes. The photographer still owns the copyright on the image, and your copy is for your personal enjoyment only and is not licensed for commercial use. (Such commercial use usually involves making additional copies and the "copying" becomes the issue, but even if no additional copies are made, the commercial use is outside the license granted with the personal purchase of the photo.)

3) When you buy software, you can use it on one computer, and a backup computer. You can't install it on every computer in your home or office *unless* the seller explicitly gives you this right.

You do have the "right of first purchase" to use your copy for personal use or to sell it to someone else (as is the case with a music CD or video DVD). But your rights are limited, even for your own personal use.

Now, it is fair to argue that copyright laws have been extended (many times) in the past 100 years in ways that amount to a "taking" from the public domain, and that they are overdue for changes. As someone who benefits from copyright laws (I'm a photographer), I'm not in favor of their extended reach today, and back proposals to rein-in copyright. But until the laws are changed, this is the state of copyright law in the US today.

You may also find these cites helpful:

Copyright Myths

Brief Intro to Copyright

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