Alex's Journal

I, like most people I know of my generation, have an extremely strong web presence. Facebook, MySpace, StudiVZ, Last.fm, Wordpress.com, BlogCatalog and DeviantArt are just a few of the social networking sites that I have an account for. Of course that does not even include the other sites I have accounts for that are not technically social networking sites — websites such as Google and Amazon.com.

You have probably read it somewhere else before, but with the conveniences that these services provide comes the high price of anonymity and privacy. While some sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, are obviously much more attuned to the destruction of one’s privacy than businesses such as Amazon.com who use your personal information for business purposes (such as sending a package to your home address when you place an order), each time you sign up for a new account on a different website, a little bit more of your privacy disappears.

Unfortunately for someone of my age (a college student), having accounts on sites such as Facebook and MySpace are practically imperative for your social life. Let’s say you meet someone at a party who you would like to hang out with later or stay in contact with. The first thing they ask you isn’t for your phone number or your e-mail address, it’s whether you have a Facebook account. It’s gotten to the point that the only people you give your phone number to are your closest circle of friends. Receiving a text message is a far more private matter than receiving a message on Facebook. Why? I can’t really explain that.

Again, the biggest problem with this is the matter of privacy. While Facebook does allow you to change your privacy settings and you yourself can control what information about yourself you post to the social networking site, you can’t control what other people put on there. For example, I have always taken the precaution of not posting pictures of myself on the site; however, I am still somehow connected to over 100 different pictures of me that have been posted by other people. Facebook even furnishes a convenient link to these pictures right on my profile page. It is virtually impossible to control this.

On a side note, some may argue that keeping a blog destroys one’s privacy. That is not true unless the blogger wishes it to be so. While with blogging people have the ability to write about their personal lives or post private pictures (and no, I’m not talking about just naughty pictures), the beauty of it is that the writer has the ability to post whatever he or she wants and therefore the freedom to disclose or conceal whatever information about themselves to the world they want to.

The biggest concern I have with these privacy matters is largely two fold. First of all, I don’t think any government agent should be able to access my private information without probable cause, which is absolutely something he or she could do if it was generically posted online. The second concern I have is that future employers will ‘research’ me on the internet. I find it absolutely absurd that potential employers could justify not hiring me just because they found out about a party I went to or what my political or religious opinions are. That to me is an enormous violation of privacy and therefore I want to reduce the risk because the sad truth is that it actually happens.

In order to combat this potential problem, I have decided to attempt to reduce my web presence. This is by no means an easy task. Unfortunately in most instances, what you post on the web, stays on the web. Fortunately I have never posted anything too terribly private. I have begun by deleting my MySpace account. MySpace does not make it easy at all to cancel an account. They first make you confirm that you really want to three separate times, then they send you an e-mail with further instructions you have to follow in order to delete your account. In the e-mail you have to click a link where you are asked yet again if you really want to cancel your account. Then finally, they say your account has been ’scheduled for cancellation’ and that it will take ‘up to 48 hours’ for the changes to take effect.

I would love to delete the other social networking accounts as well, but unfortunately it is the only way I have to contact a lot of people — especially a lot of international contacts I have. That is the hook. Once you start using the service, you’re essentially stuck if you want to keep in contact with most people.

As time goes on, I plan to systematically remove as many accounts as I possibly can. This task might sound easy, but in reality is quite difficult. Most services provide you with a way to remove your account and others just allow you to hide your account from public view, but most of these companies and websites keep your information despite requesting a deletion. We will see how many I end up actually deleting and how many I will deem necessary to keep.

I read an interesting article online that talks about the latest studies finding Firefox to be the safest browser available.

“Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox’s single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said.

The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users — 47.6 percent — were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.”

As I said in my last post, Wide Open Art is finally open. I am using the domain for a personal online portfolio to show off my photography, digital art, writing, web and graphic design, etc. The design process has been long and quite tedious, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed it.

I started with the idea of kind of a wooden background with Polaroid-style photos adorning the sides of the page, but when trying to find a decent wood texture for the background, I ran into the old paper textures and decided to use those for the background of the main part of the page. From there I decided maybe I would do kind of a book on a wooden background kind of style. I really like the way it turned out.

My biggest concerns about the design, however, are the loading speed and its compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. Because the site uses large images as the background, it loads dreadfully slow in my opinion. I’m not exactly sure how I can speed that up and keep the same design. Although I suppose it might not be that big of a deal because I don’t expect the site to really be a high traffic site. The issue with compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 is transparent PNGs. According to Microsoft, in Internet Explorer 7, they fixed the issue with the Alpha channel in PNGs allowing PNG images to have transparency. The problem is that not a lot of Internet Explorer users have upgraded to version 7 and the design uses a lot of transparent PNGs.

I know there are workarounds for the problem in Internet Explorer 6, but I decided not to implement them because first of all, I can’t test them since I don’t have access to Windows, and secondly because it’s time for Internet Explorer uses to update to version 7 anyway.

I am the proud owner of 4 domain names: www.alexseifert.com, www.wideopenart.com, www.eswirdkalt.com and www.undesregnet.com. As such, I have been trying to figure out what to do with the latter 3. I use alexseifert.com as my general internet-base for things such as this blog and my other blogs as well as for my music. Wideopenart.com used to be a website that I kept that displayed online galleries of art done by myself and several other friends. Eswirdkalt.com used to be a fansite for the German band, Eisbrecher and undesregnet.com used to be a fansite for another German band, Der Bote. The sites went down quite some time ago when the Windows 2000-based server I owned and co-hosted at my ISP became too infected with viruses and other malware to work properly.

Since then I have decided I have no interest in having and maintaining my own server and therefore have signed up for a hosting service. While I have gotten alexseifert.com back up and running, the other domains I am no longer sure what to do with. I am thinking I am going to use wideopenart.com as kind of an online portfolio for my photography, webdesigns, digital artwork, stories, etc, but as far as the other 2 domains go, I am not sure what to do with them. I no longer have the time (or desire) to keep fansites.

I am considering maybe using one of them (possibly eswirdkalt.com) as a blog that I will keep in German, however I am not sure what I would blog about nor am I sure if I would have the time. I barely have enough time to blog here and at History Rhymes (in fact, I’m really far behind at History Rhymes).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I’ve been living in Germany for almost a year now and with the exception of the internet at the university library, not once have I encountered fast internet here. The speed of the internet in the place where I live is dreadfully slow. It is supposed to be broadband, but behaves as though it was trying to be dial-up. And that’s when it works!

The way they’ve got their system setup is such that everyone is routed through a proxy server. While this may be common and isn’t that big of a deal, the fact that the proxy server is constantly refusing connections is a big deal. During this time I can access secure sites that bypass the proxy server, but the rest of the internet is unaccessible. That means that not only is the internet slow, but half the time browsing the internet is impossible which is extremely annoying.

I suppose it’s not really fair to say that every connection in Germany is this horrible, but as of yet I have to see a connection that isn’t horrible — broadband or otherwise.

Today I downloaded Firefox 3 for the first time since the first beta. So far I am extremely impressed at its speed. It’s unimaginably faster at rendering images and pages and also at running JavaScript than its predecessor, Firefox 2; especially on my slow old PowerBook G4.

I had a brief stint where I used Safari again for a while because it was so much faster than Firefox 2, but that came to a quick end as Safari just doesn’t offer the features of Firefox. I would have to say that Firefox 3 is even faster than Safari which is quite impressive.

The new version also looks a lot better than the previous version, especially for Mac OS X. The new theme blends in more than the old one.

I recommend downloading it. You can find it for free for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X here:

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/ISPs_Injecting_Websites_with_Ads]This kind of infuriates me:

“Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site.” (Source: Slashdot)

ISPs should not have any right to alter webpage content whatsoever, much less inject ads into websites that normally don’t contain any ads. That’s especially if you’re paying for their service in the first place.

It seems to me that that should be considered spamming or even vandalizing. As a web developer, the kinds of websites I work on generally don’t have any sort of ads on theem. I don’t want my visitors to have to see ads if I haven’t originally intended the website to have ads.

You can read the full and longer article at PC World.

“On the 28th of February, 2008 while everyone was paying attention to the WIKILEAKS.ORG censorship case, another Wikileaks domain, WIKILEAKS.INFO, was unlawfully locked and seized. The censoring company was domain name registrar eNom, Inc of Bellevue, Washington. eNom is the second largest registrar of domain names with 8.6 million internet domains names under its “control”.

eNom was also cited in the March 4, 2008 edition of New York Times this week for censoring a Spanish travel company with flights to Cuba.

[...]

In addition Wikileaks has discovered a previously unreported eNom proposal from last year to bulk-release customer records to government agencies. The plan is to convert the entire internet domain system to into “Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement”, a big-brother scheme redolent of the NSA CLIPPER chip fiasco.Not content to roll over eNom customer records when asked, eNom has apparently realized it can decrease subpoena processing costs by giving away domain holders confidential information to government agencies en-mass. eNom’s idea is to encrypt registrant’s confidential information and attach it to every public “whois” record. This would allow law enforcement, or anyone else with a decryption key, to obtain all confidential records automatically. Not content to undermine the 1st amendment, eNom apparently has plans to do away with the 4th as well.

What follows is the Wikileaks case against and call for a global boycott of eNom and its parent company Demand Media, Inc. of Santa Monia, California, and all associated holdings and resellers. “

More information, including evidence, about it: http://wikileaks.org

This is an interesting game I found:

http://eiskalt.myminicity.com

[digg=http://digg.com/software/Google_is_Slow_and_Frustrating]Edit: I finally now have IMAP for my Gmail account.

Google is simply slow and frustrating when it comes to updates. I’m sure everyone who pays any sort of attention to technology news already knows that Google has introduced IMAP support for Gmail. When I first saw that, I was ecstatic. I’ve been using POP access to check my Gmail mail for quite a while. Unfortunately, because of the way Gmail is setup that means balancing my online Gmail account and my local mail application. It just bugs me if they’re out of sync with one another.

I use a local mail application (Apple’s Mail) because I have several e-mail accounts (some POP, most IMAP) that I check on a regular basis and found that to be the best and easiest solution for me. Gmail is the only POP account that I consistently check on the web, so keeping it in sync with what I have on my computer is important to me. As soon as I read about Gmail supporting IMAP, the first thing I did was get on Gmail to set it up. The problem is that the option for activating IMAP simply isn’t there. I checked Gmail’s help documents and found nothing useful. I only found instructions that I couldn’t follow because I didn’t have the appropriate options in my Gmail settings.

I checked the help documents again later and found out that they haven’t implemented the IMAP feature to all accounts yet. That’s the part I don’t understand. Google certainly should have the resources and the ability to implement features into all Gmail accounts at once. Admittedly, I don’t know exactly how it all works, but it seems to me that it shouldn’t be so difficult to flip a switch (or a lot of switches) to turn it on; or at very least make it an automated process. Give the users the option to enable IMAP. If the user enables it, but they’re account isn’t setup for it, make the setup an automated process that will setup it up on the fly. Certainly they could do that.

Google has done this with other new feature in Gmail as well. I won’t go into detail about them, but I just find it kind of frustrating. Or maybe disappointing would be a better word for this particular instance.

Edit: I finally now have IMAP for my Gmail account.