yup, this is a UIC project. This is the grad student who won the Image of Research prize: http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/~mayank/

They also got the widely used wxWidgets toolkit to change their name from wxWindows. It was apparently amicable, but I MS requests are generally like the godfather's "offers".

I should also add: why not just have a service to delete the image automatically from facebook after N days? Encryption is absolutely not needed here and achieves nothing.

This can be debunked quite easily: once an image is decrypted, it is forever decrypted. Alternatively, all I have to do is comment on your post of the image with the key I just downloaded for it while it was still valid. Even more alternatively, I could set up a counter-service to this that stores retrieved keys permanently and hands them out publicly. Unless the service is refreshing the image data every single day with a new key, in which case: (a) they will run out of bandwidth and CPU in a week, (b) they will hit facebook's limits very very soon, and (c) I still have copies of yesterday's encrypted data and yesterday's key.

Oh yes, and your friends will not be able to see your pictures unless they download a plugin ("huh...what's that??"), and possibly use a specific browser ("huh? why?").

So yeah, pretty stupid overall. This is another sad attempt at a form of DRM.

So using an MS or MS-compatible (thanks to years of aggressive marketing by MS) stack is less expensive in terms of training time than inserting a piece of open-source software into that stack and trying to make everything work? Interesting...next up, replacing my car's wheels with motorcycle wheels makes it take longer for me to get to places. Perhaps I should just get the entire motorcycle instead?

In America, you put in Linux.

In Soviet Russia, Putin Linux you.

Sure, why not? However, Thiel better be right about selecting people correctly for the program. Otherwise, you've "stopped out" for a couple of years, got a failed .com startup to your credit, and might have trouble getting back into or adjusting to university.

I dislike the analogy between "large social networking sites walling off your data" and net neutrality infringement/censorship/monitoring. Walled gardens are a perfectly acceptable consequence of a FREE web; net neutrality infringement is the opposite. Would you complain if your

Hopefully, this won't turn out to be true. Brag in the short term, you bourgeois pig, but I'm still among the idealistic holdouts, with thousands of dollars in my hand waiting in line to sign up, who believe in Virgin Galactic and economies of scale.

I don't know about you, but I can't stop trying to figure out what word they're trying to represent with the symbols. For example, I know the second word in your subject means viagra, but what is "H3rb41"? Oh..."herbal". It's naturally (perhaps unknowingly) targeted towards geeks and puzzle-solvers, which perhaps isn't the worst market to target available-without-human-contact penis drugs towards.

Why? If I really wanted to post something anonymously, I would set up a network of proxy SSH severs paid for with prepaid debit cards (purchased using cash), change the wireless MAC on a throwaway secondhand laptop (purchased using cash off Craigslist), walk down to the local Starbucks, access my proxy setup through Tor, and then be reasonably confident that I would be able to do anything anonymously. Of course, I would only post plain text files.

So I don't really understand why you would be an idiot for expecting anonymity if you went to the pains of taking care of it.

It's not ironic because there is an expectation of privacy in a courtroom. Hypothetical: I accuse you of being a pedophile, procure tons of evidence against you, which I display in court. Sure, the case gets thrown out (maybe I face charges myself, but I'm reckless that way), but someone videotapes the proceedings, edits out the juicy bits and puts it up on youtube without context. Pretty sure your life's ruined.

If my fate's being determined, that's between me, the lawyers, the defendant/plaintiff, and the judge/jury.

It's programming.

...allow me to plug my own banal "checkin" service, based on things "most people do"...

FourGoHookupPlaces: for telling your friends when and who you procreate with! BONUS: use your iphone's built-in accelerometer to compute your "performance", and try to best your friends! Become the virtual "mayor" of PEOPLE! Make lovemaking an ONLINE social game!