Category Archives: New Paradigms

better ways of looking at and doing things

Grumbles, New Paradigms, Security & Privacy

Facebook breaches Canadian privacy law

Ok, so you didn’t need the Portable Consultant to tell you that Facebook has privacy issues, but this CBC news story covers the particulars of how the site breaches PIPEDA, the Canadian privacy legislation.

My own use of the online games is minimal because I was always concerned about the permission statements that you get when you sign up for them.

That’s not how I personally use Facebook anyway, but the recent ‘conversion’ of a cute aquarium game (send pretty fishes to your friends’ aquariums) to a dating service with constant emails (“Honestly, Dear… all those speed date emails are spam. All I ever did was send her a fish!”)… well, that was downright naughty. Bad Facebook, bad, bad!

I was struck by one item in the news report that would be funny if it weren’t true:

“- Facebook keeps the profiles of deceased users for “memorial purposes” but does not make this clear. Recommendation: Information about use for memorial purposes should be in Facebook’s privacy policy.”

…Thank you, Facebook, but when the time comes The Portable Consultant would rather have family and friends handle any and all memorials. All social networking sites should delete accounts after an agreed period without any logins, at the very least. (This is a much larger issue, of course.)

Facebook needs to get its act together, but users/consumers also need to understand how important personal info is …and take care not to sign it away without due diligence.

Cheers,
-pmh

New Paradigms, Ramblings, Security & Privacy

Who’s still got your content?

A while back, your Portable Consultant was intrigued to read a BBC story about “Websites ‘keeping deleted photos'” for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it showed a surprising degree of technical knowledge that used to be absent from Internet stories. The method that the researchers used to retrieve photos from social network sites after they had supposedly been deleted is trivial, but used to be beyond the abilities of news organizations to understand. There’s obviously a new generation of reporters and researchers who understand this beat.

Secondly, the heart of the issue as clearly stated by Joseph Bonneau “It’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on”, should be framed and hung on the walls of web designers and managers, not only at social networking sites but also those in the public service, in the private sector, and even corporate intranets.

Cheers,
-pmh

Copyfight, Grumbles, New Paradigms, Open Source

Adobe DRM and Carl Malamud’s Yes We Scan Campaign

Yes We Scan - Carl Malamud
Yes We Scan - Carl Malamud

The other day The Portable Consultant caught this interview with Carl Malamud on an IT Conversations podcast. Having enjoyed his 1992 book Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, I was interested to hear that he is still pursuing his attempts to free public information from the reluctant hands of bureaucrats. In Exploring the Internet, he discussed his attempts to get the International Standards Organization to distribute international standards over the nascent Internet. Now he’s running for the position of Public Printer of the United States, a public office for which only one other person has bothered to run since it’s inception under President Lincoln.

Yesterday I attempted to print some Canadian tax changes, from a recent budget, that might affect my taxes next year. They are found on an ordinary web page almost entirely made up of text.

Adobe’s Acrobat 9 Pro Extended failed to print the page in my Firefox browser and issued the following error:

%%[Page: 14]%%%%[ Error: LucidaSans,Bold cannot be embedded because of licensing restrictions. ]%%
%%[ Font vendor (B&H) does not permit this font to be embedded in PDF. ]%%
...
[Warning] The font LucidaSans-Demi could not be embedded because of licensing restrictions.
Text may display incorrectly on platforms that do not have this font installed.
...
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Now, I like to keep such documents in PDF rather than cutting and pasting into text files so I turned next to the freeware printing utility CutePDF and found it had no problem. It printed the web page as a PDF file just as I had asked Adobe to do… only CutePDF had no compunctions about embedded fonts being licensed to my machine. CutePDF uses the open source Ghostscript PostScript to PDF converter.

This is why open systems will win out every time against the forces of DRM. When DRM tries to stop us from legally accessing and ‘owing’ a copy of public documents it fails to meet the criteria of a reasonable and fair constraint on the use of intellectual property, in this case a font.

Carl Malamud understands the necessity for free and unrestricted access to public information – documents and databases. He understands the underlying technologies. This is why Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Tim Bray and others who share these views are supporting his candidacy for the position of Public Printer of the United States via the Yes We Scan campaign.

For what its worth, I do too.

In fact, there are some governments on this side of the border who should also be paying attention to his candidacy and his platform for the fair dissemination of public documents and data.

Adobe… shame on you!

Cheers,
-pmh