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[via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life] - Facebook just sucks!

Facebook Beacon is Unfixable

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post which pointed out that the two major privacy and user experience problems with Facebook Beacon where that it (i) linked a user’s Facebook account with an account on another site without the users permission and (ii) there was no way for a user to completely opt out of being tracked by the system. Since then Facebook has announced some changes which TechCrunch named Facebook Beacon 2.0. The changes are excerpted below

Notification

Facebook users will see a notification in the lower right corner of the screen after transacting with a Beacon Affiliate. Options include “No Thanks” that will immediately stop the transaction from being published. Alternatively closing or ignoring the warning won’t immediately publish the story, but it will be put in a queue

Second Warning

Presuming you’ve ignored or closed the first notification, Facebook warns users again the next time they visit their home page. A new box reminds you that an activity has been sent to Facebook. Like the first notification you can choose to not publish the activity by hitting remove, or you can choose to publish it by hitting ok.

…

Opt Out
Found via the “External Websites” section of the Facebook Privacy page, this allows users to permanently opt in or out of Beacon notifications, or if you’re not sure be notified. The downside is that there is no global option to opt out of every Beacon affiliated program; it has to be set per program. Better this than nothing I suppose.

The interesting thing to note is that neither of the significant problems with Beacon have been fixed. After the changes were announced there was a post on the CA Security Advisory blog titled Facebook’s Misrepresentation of Beacon’s Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in which pointed out that the complaining about purchase history getting into the news feed of your friends is a red herring, the real problem is that once a site signs up as a Facebook affiliate they begin to share every significant action you take on the site with Facebook without your permission.

Which is worse, your friends knowing that you rented Prison Girls or Facebook finding that out without your permission and sharing that with their business partners, without your permission? Aren’t there laws against this kind of invasion of privacy? I guess there are (see 18 U.S.C. § 2710)

I wonder who’ll be first to sue Facebook and Blockbuster?

Anyway, back to the title of this blog post. The problem with Facebook Beacon is that it is designed in a way that makes it easy for Facebook Beacon affiliates to integrate into their sites at the cost of user’s privacy. From Jay Goldman’s excellent post where he Deconstructed the Facebook Beacon Javascript we learn

Beacon from 10,000 Feet

That basically wraps up our tour of how Beacon does what it does. It’s a fairly long explanation, so here’s a quick summary:

1. The partner site page includes the beacon.js file, sets a <meta> tag with a name, and then calls Facebook.publish_action.
2. Facebook.publish_action builds a query_params object and then passes it to Facebook._send_request.
3. Facebook._send_request dynamically generates an <iframe>which loads the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php and passes the query_params. At this point, Facebook now knows about the news feed item whether you choose to publish it or not.

When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. Fuck.

The icing on the cake is the following excerpt from the Facebook Beacon page

Stories of a user’s engagement with your site may be displayed in his or her profile and in News Feed. These stories will act as a word-of-mouth promotion for your business and may be seen by friends who are also likely to be interested in your product. You can increase the number of friends who see these stories with Facebook Social Ads.

So after giving Facebook millions of dollars in customer intelligence for free in exchange for spamming their users, Facebook doesn’t even guarantee their affiliates that the spam will even get sent. Instead these sites have to pay Facebook to “increase the chances” that they get some return for the free customer intelligence they just gave Facebook.

This reminds me of the story of Tom Sawyer tricking people into paying him to paint a fence he was supposed to paint as part of his chores.

At the end of the day, Facebook can’t fix the privacy problems I mentioned in my previous post in a way that completely preserves their users privacy without completely changing the design and implementation of Facebook Beacon. Until then, we’ll likely see more misdirection, more red herrings and more violations of user privacy to make a quick buck.

Based on an article by Russell Gold and Ann Davis in The Wall Street Journal via Dow Jones Newswires, Nov 19, 2007

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains such as Christophe de Margerie, the chief executive of French oil company Total SA, James Mulva, the chief executive of ConocoPhillips, and Sadad Ibrahim Al Husseini, a former head of exploration and production at Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day. Some predict that, despite the world’s fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit — which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day — is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

The world certainly won’t run out of oil anytime soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.

The current debate represents a significant twist on an older, often-derided notion known as the peak-oil theory. Traditional peak-oil theorists, many of whom are industry outsiders or retired geologists, have argued that global oil production will soon peak and enter an irreversible decline because nearly half the available oil in the world has been pumped. They’ve been proved wrong so often that their theory has become debased.

The new adherents, who range from senior Western oil-company executives to current and former officials of the major world exporting countries, don’t believe the global oil tank is at the half-empty point. But they share the belief that a global production ceiling is coming for other reasons: restricted access to oil fields, spiraling costs and increasingly complex oil-field geology. This will create a global production plateau, not a peak, they contend, with oil output remaining relatively constant rather than rising or falling. And these are the arguments to support their view:

• production forecasts by the International Energy Agency of 102.3 million and 120 million barrels a day by 2030 are seen as unrealistic; to even achieve 100 million barrels a day by that date is viewed as “difficult”
• many existing oil fields are being depleted at rates that will damage their geologic structures, which will limit future output more than most people allow
• some nations endowed with large untapped pools of oil are generating so much revenue from their current production that they feel they don’t need to further develop their fields, thus putting another cap on output
• the industry does not have enough engineers to ramp up production fast enough to keep up with the thirsty global economy; during the years of low or moderate oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s, companies didn’t develop enough geologists and other skilled workers to supply today’s needs, which has led to a limited and aging pool of skilled workers
• one of the largest obstacles is the booming commodity markets themselves: prices of raw materials used in oil-field platforms and equipment has escalated
• high oil prices too led to steep cost inflation for drilling rigs and other equipment, seeing the industry falling behind in the investment needed to sate expected future demand (to meet demand forecasts of 90 million barrels of oil a day in 2010, the industry needed to have spent $350 billion on drilling and producing in 2005, but the International Energy Agency estimates that spending on oil-field production in 2005 came to only about $225 billion)
• many people think most of the world’s giant fields already have been discovered; by 1970, oil-industry explorers had discovered 10 giants that could each produce more than 600,000 barrels a day; exploration in the next 20 years, to 1990, yielded only two; since 1990, despite billions in new spending, the industry has found only one field with the potential to top 500,000 barrels a day, Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea, and it is proving expensive and difficult to extract
• most of the world’s biggest fields are aging, and production at them is declining rapidly; just to keep global production at current levels, the optimistic view is that the industry needs to add new production of at least four million daily barrels, every year, roughly five times the daily production of Alaska, with its big Prudhoe Bay field, without assuming any demand growth at all; a more realistic rate of decline seems to be 8% to 10% a year, especially because modern technology actually succeeds in depleting fields faster (meaning the industry needs to add new daily production of at least eight million barrels to stay even, 10 times current Alaskan production)
• new discoveries are tending to be smaller and more complex to develop
• above-ground risks like resource nationalism (tightening state control of oil fields to achieve political aims), limited access and infrastructure constraints may make it feel like peak oil just the same; some of the most promising geological formations are in locations that are inhospitable, for reasons of geography or clouded by geopolitical and local instability (e.g.Iraq, Iran and Nigeria)

Many leaders of the industry such as BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward and Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson still dismiss the idea that there is reason to worry; they believe for example that the industry would be able to raise fuel production to meet demand in 2030 of 116 million barrels a day. U.S. government experts too are optimistic — to a point. The Energy Information Administration, the data arm of the Energy Department, forecasts world oil production will hit 118 million barrels a day by 2030. But the agency warns that its prediction might not pan out if resource-rich nations such as Venezuela and Iraq don’t invest enough in their operations.

The oil industry has long been beset by doom-and-gloom scenarios, which so far haven’t panned out. “The entire oil industry in the late 1970s was convinced the price [of oil] would be $100 by 1990 and we would need huge oil shale mines” to exploit oil locked away tightly in rock, says Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc. Of course, that didn’t happen, as discoveries ushered in new eras of low-priced oil in the mid-1980s through the late 1990s.

Two or three years ago, it was far more common for oil analysts and officials to trumpet the potential of new technology to harvest more oil. In a report last year, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a prominent adviser to energy companies, made the comforting prediction that oil production could reach 110 million barrels a day by 2015, and “more than meet any reasonable high growth rate demand scenario we can envisage” up to that date. Because of progress being made in extracting oil through new methods, CERA said it found “no evidence” there would be a peak in oil flows “any time soon.” In a later report, CERA said world oil production won’t peak before 2030 and that even when it does, production will resemble an “undulating plateau” for one or more decades before declining gradually.

Oil executives who believe a production ceiling is coming are making plans to stay relevant in a world where oil production is constrained. Mr. de Margerie said at Total’s annual meeting this spring that the company was “looking into” nuclear-industry investments and had hired nuclear experts to help make strategic decisions. ConocoPhillips recently said it was considering building a commercial-scale plant to turn plentiful U.S. coal into natural gas.

Soaring energy prices have also breathed new life into projects targeting “non-conventional” oil, such as that trapped in sand or shale. But these sources can’t be tapped nearly as quickly or inexpensively as the big oil finds of the past. Canada’s massive oil-sands deposits, which hold the largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia’s, offer a vivid example. They contain an estimated 180 billion barrels of oil. But after years of intensive development and tens of billions of dollars of investments, the sands are producing only a little more than 1.1 million barrels of crude a day. That’s projected to reach three million a day by 2015. The oil deposits are so heavy that companies must either mine them or slowly steam them underground to get the oil to flow out of the sand. Randy Udall, co-founder of the U.S. chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, has written that these unconventional oil supplies are like having $100 million in the bank, but “being forbidden to withdraw more than $100,000 per year. You are rich, sort of.”

As these uncertainties mount, there is growing hope that Saudi Arabia, which has about 20% of the world’s oil reserves, would ride to the rescue if needed. Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, has embarked on an ambitious plan to increase its daily production by 30%, or three million barrels, early next decade, and thus reclaim the title of top producer from Russia. But Mr. Al Husseini, the former Saudi oil executive, now an independent consultant, said others aren’t doing as much, leaving the world entirely dependent on Saudi Arabia to provide extra capacity. “Everyone thinks that Saudi Arabia will pull us out of this mess. Saudi Arabia is doing all it can,” he says in an interview. “But what it is doing, in the long run, won’t be enough.”

Empty shelves at the Alameda County Community Food Bank
in Oakland signal a hard winter ahead for those in need.

Another sign for an economic model in deep trouble: US food banks are struggling to supply the poor. The New York Times reports that critical shortages have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close. The situation is the worst some organisations have seen for 26 years.

Experts attributed the shortages to an unusual combination of factors, including

• rising demand, partly driven by rising prices of oil, gas, rents and the results of foreclosures
• a sharp drop in federal supplies of excess farm products because farmers are doing well, which leaves the federal Agriculture Department’s Bonus Commodity Program with too little surplus crops to buy (supplies from the surplus program dropped to $67 million worth last year, from $154.3 million in 2005 and $233 million in 2004)
• tighter inventory controls that are leaving supermarkets and other retailers with less food to donate
• retailers selling to discount stores items they can’t sell or that are part of seasonal inventory that is no longer needed because people are shopping in those places
• a farm bill currently stalled in the Senate that would raise emergency aid for food banks to $250 million a year, from $140 million, a figure has remained steady since 2002

The Vermont Food Bank said its supply of food was down 50 percent from last year, and for two weeks this month, the New Hampshire Food Bank distributed supplies reserved for emergency relief. Demand for food here is up 40 percent over last year and supply is down 30 percent, which is striking in the state with the lowest reliance on food banks. Household budget squeezes have led to a drop in donations and greater demand, leaving not only the homeless hungry but also working people. Household incomes are kind of stuck. There’s very little way to increase income, and most people have a very heavy debt load. Any event that increases your costs is really, really troublesome, because they already are stretched thin.

The problem though is not just a result of social injustice (e.g. some struggling food bank are in the heart of one of the most productive agriculture areas in the world) or corporate greed - it is a systemic one, and it is no surprise that American food banks are hit hard. The US is the champion of a totally unsustainable, ruthless capitalism that deifies the market, exalts those who successfully profit from it and worships consumerism over anything else in life. This has resulted in a nation living totally beyond its means through racking up staggering amounts of debt (that it can’t repay) for the acquisition of goods (it didn’t really need), resulting in an economy that slowly but surely is sliding into recession. And given the US being the biggest consumer society in the world, the global repercussions will be enormous, with the only unpredictable aspect right now being the scale of the negative effects. Foreclosures, food bank shortages, the falling US dollar, peak oil, falling consumer confidence and the various effects of global warming are all signs for an economic model at breaking point and maybe even at the beginning of collapse. The free market economy, certainly in its excessive neo-conservative manifestation is dieing, with the pain accompanying its demise just beginning for all of us.

Given what M$ has become, it’s rather interesting to watch this ancient Steve Ballmer pitch for Windows 1.0. Apart from how pathetic Ballmer’s hawker performance is, I also wonder how much M$ marketing has changed in essence …

[via Geekend]

An interesting little reflection on why, yet another time, Apple most likely cares more about its profits that about serving the needs of its customers.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column declaring that it was the wrong time to buy an iPod–particularly for those of us who already own iPods–and it managed to provoke a few hostile responses from readers. One reader wrote, “How can you sit there and write such a pathetic article? If you call this ‘reporting’ then so help us all. You are clearly not a fan of Apple products seeing as you try to slant them as much as possible. This is an absolute disgrace, for a company such as CNET, I expected a better article and unbiased review.”First, thanks to the readers who eloquently replied to the irate reader(s) and said they found the article informative–or at least somewhat so–and that if you read it closely, you’d realize I’m not an Apple hater; rather, I’m just somewhat fickle with my affections for the company’s products. Second, to be clear, this is a column (read: opinion); I’m not reviewing products per se, as the only official CNET review is one that has a rating on it. And I’m not trying to win a Pulitzer (last I checked, they usually give those out for covering real wars, not gadget wars). But I am in the muck. Up to my head in it. And that gives me license to take potshots at the big shots now and then.

Which brings us to the subject of this column. Rarely do I write about a single feature on single product, but after re-reading that previous column, I realized what really bothered me about the new iPods: they don’t have any support for wirelessly streaming audio. Now, a lot of people were expecting–or at least hoping–that the latest batch of iPods would support wireless stereo streaming via Bluetooth. But it never materialized, even after several blogs “reported” (so help us all) that the iPod Touch might have a Bluetooth feature.

Because the iPod Touch, new Nano, and iPhone are such sleek, sexy products, a lot of people have forgiven Apple for leaving stereo Bluetooth off them. (The iPhone doesn’t count, either: its Bluetooth option is currently limited to the monaural flavor that’s good only for headset calls, not the A2DP “Advanced Audio Distribution Profile” that enables high-quality stereo. Apple can probably add A2DP with a firmware update–if it so chooses.) Both the Touch and iPhone have built-in Wi-Fi, but that’s not for streaming audio to wireless headphones or a wireless speaker system like I’m doing now with the Samsung YP-P2 MP3 player that I have sitting on my desk. Similar to the Touch, the YP-P2 also has a touch screen. The P2’s touch screen isn’t as responsive as the Touch’s–and overall the Samsung unit isn’t quite as good as the Touch. But it’s less expensive and has some features the Touch doesn’t have (A2DP Bluetooth, a built-in mic for recording voice notes, and an FM radio). There’s no Wi-Fi, but that doesn’t bother me since I have a 3G phone that has a Web browser.Right about now some of you are probably shaking your head and saying, “Gee Mr. Fully Equipped, what’s so [insert expletive] great about streaming audio wirelessly? Who cares?” To which I respond, stealing a line from Chinatown: “It’s the future, Mr. Gittes.”

It is. I swear. The fact is once you go wireless, it’s hard to go back. The biggest drawback to most of these iPod speaker systems is that when you dock your iPod, you have limited control over it with the credit-card-size remotes that typically ship with the systems. Also, you can’t see what’s on your iPod’s screen unless you’re standing a few feet from it.

But with built-in stereo Bluetooth, you can use your iPod (or Samsung YP-P2) as your normally would and it becomes a fully functional color-screen remote (the range is about 30 feet). I have the YP-P2 linked up to a Bluetooth speaker, the Parrot Boombox, and it’s a pretty sweet little setup. If you’re willing to pop a Bluetooth dongle on the bottom of your iPod and attach a small external Bluetooth receiver to your audio system, Logitech, Belkin, and others, have options. But trimming out the accessories and going direct feels a lot cleaner and liberating. It’s the way it should be.

So, why didn’t Apple include wireless stereo streaming in its latest batch of iPods and the iPhone? Obviously, it could have; it has the technological wherewithal to pull it off. Easily. So, why not?

Well, the Apple faithful will tell you that Apple didn’t do it because Bluetooth just doesn’t cut it yet as an audio wireless streaming platform. And there’s certainly some truth to that. Bluetooth isn’t incredibly reliable, you get some dropouts, and your already compressed music gets compressed even further when you start streaming. But Bluetooth has come a long way in a year. Bluetooth 2.0 coupled with EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) offers better bandwidth, and I’ve found the connection between the Samsung YP-P2 and the Parrot Boombox has been steady over the last couple of hours. It sounds pretty good, too.

Part of me is willing to accept that Apple doesn’t think Bluetooth is ready for prime time. But a more cynical side of me gets the feeling that the reason why Apple didn’t include support for stereo Bluetooth streaming is that it didn’t want to shave any revenue off its licensing fees for the multitude of iPod audio accessories that are out there. Many of you are probably aware that any manufacturer that incorporates an iPod dock into its product has to pay Apple a licensing fee for the “Made for iPod” certification. However, that wouldn’t be the case for Bluetooth. Parrot, for example, doesn’t have to pay Apple to make a Bluetooth speaker. (Instead, the company probably has to pay a licensing fee to the Bluetooth folks.)

Of course, you could argue that this is a smart move by Apple and good business practice. And you’d be right. But it’s not necessarily the best thing for consumers–a somewhat notorious path that Apple’s followed as of late. The question, of course, is whether Apple will come up with its own proprietary form of wireless audio streaming. There are some other, allegedly superior solutions out there, including Kleer Audio LP, which RCA is using in some of its MP3 players. But I’m afraid the proprietary route may be the more likely scenario for Apple.

Or maybe not. People seem endlessly forgiving of the feature deficit in Apple’s products, with the oh-so-slick design trumping such basics as replaceable batteries, FM radios, and expandable storage that are becoming standard features in competing players. Maybe Apple’s betting that wireless audio streaming is the latest feature that it can do without. But I hope not. An iPod Touch or an iPhone with a 32GB of memory and Bluetooth stereo would definitely be something worth waiting for.

[David Carnoy, Fully Equipped, CNet Reviews]

PS: maybe David Carnoy forgot a little detail, the one my good mate Harry mailed to me:

“I wasn’t going to comment on it, but given that I just have … this guy doesn’t have a clue.

Sure, bluetooth is fine for making and receiving calls, but thats only because in that case phones are using low-bandwidth protocols to talk to the headset and most of the time, it’s idle, consuming relatively little power.

On the other hand, streaming at A2DP bandwidth rates for an extended period would drain the battery pretty quickly.

That’s fine, if you can live with it, of course. However, having the battery die within a couple of hours isn’t the kind of user experience that Apple likes to give their customer, which I think explains why they’ve not included it, even on the iPhone, which actually has a bluetooth chip (none of the iPods do, I don’t believe).”