Friday 20th January:

Friday is the last day of the conference, and everybody is starting to look tired; it’s a full-on week. But, before we all go home, there are just a few more excellent talks to attend. The first of these was Friday’s keynote, given by Jacob Appelbaum, and what an amazing keynote it was. Jacob talked about the state of surveillance states. He explained what they are doing to keep track of all of their citizens, and the special measures that have been put in place in the last few years (mostly since September 11) that significantly curtail our freedoms in the name of privacy and safety. A few choice quotes from the talk:

Free software is for freedom, open source is for business solutions.

Be the trouble you want to see in the world. [It's in my notes, but I'm pretty sure it was actually just written on his shirt]

90s Nihilism: I have nothing to hide.

The data kept about you in [server] logs around the world tells a story that is not necessarily true, but is made up of facts.

This talk flowed on nicely from Senator Ludlam’s talk at the Penguin dinner.

After morning tea, I watched the talk by Rusty Russell and Matt Evans about why UNIX has been getting bigger over time (in terms of binary bloat). It’s mostly due to new features, but also because of the infrastructure that modern systems have and the libraries that are statically linked in these days (glibc is basically just bloatware). Also in this session I attended the talk by Simon Horman on Open vSwitch. It’s really interesting content, but the presentation was a bit dry. It’s definitely something I want to check out when I get home though, as it could be quite useful for me when I have VMs set up in Linux. The support for VLANs makes it a much better choice than standard Linux network bridges.

During lunchtime there was a meeting between a group of Tasmanian delegates, and it was decided that the Hobart Linux User’s Group should be started up again. So if you’re reading this, like Linux and live in Hobart, get in touch!

After lunch was the best-of sessions. These were talks voted for by the delegates that they wanted to see again, or missed the first time around. I watched two fabulous talks. The first was on Codec2 (presented by David Rowe), an audio speech codec that uses 1400 bits/sec for transmission, which is a 500x improvement on raw 16bit 44.1kHz audio. Very impressive. The second was on the freedom box project (presented by Bdale Garbee, which is a platform for developing easy-to-use home servers oriented towards federated social networking services (such as Status.net or Diaspora). This followed on nicely from Appelbaum’s talk that morning, giving a solution to some of the problems that were outlined.

The final session of the conference was the lightning talks. The real highlight was watching Paul Fenwick jump up on stage between the lightning talks and try to give a several minute long presentation in thirty seconds. He failed, but it was funny to watch. After the lightning talks was the closing ceremony. The main reason for this is to hand out a few awards and thank some people, but also to find out where the next linux.conf.au is going to be held. Next year, it’s in Canberra!

Front Cover

As you might be aware, I’m not a huge fan of Google, or indeed, cloud-based apps in general. When I saw The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) in my local campus bookstore, I decided that it would be a good read on the spot. It was a good read, and here’s why.

I will admit upfront that I’m probably not the most unbiased person in the world when it comes to what is really a review of a review of Google. If you dislike bias, go watch the Pakistani cricket team instead.

I’d always been a bit hesistant to use Google products (or any cloud product) because of lax privacy. How do I know that Google won’t be using my information against me? This book (partially) confirmed my suspicions. They are using my information, both for and against me. Every time somebody performs a Google search, Google stores the query and information about me (my IP, my location, browser, etc) and uses that to tune search results for me. This appears on the surface to be fine. I like it when I search “cat” on Google and Google knows that what I really want is the first result to be whatismyip.com (I use the “cat” Google search as a quick method to test Internet browser connectivity, I don’t know why). But Vaidhyanatham (the author) raises other points about this. Firstly, how long is our data kept? And who else is it being shared with? But perhaps most disturbingly, Google might prevent me from seeing new information because it’s too busy telling me about what I think I want. For instance, if a new species of cat was discovered in the jungles of Peru, I might miss it because Google is too busy customising my results with Internet connectivity tests. While that not matter much, on other (more important) subjects the splitting up of information based on what we think we want to see is disturbing.

Vaidhyanatham raises many other points in his book too. The Google Books project is designed to give everybody in the world access to out-of-print books, instead of having them sit on dusty shelves in university libraries. It’s a nice goal. However, the program is structured in such a way that nobody else could possibly compete with it, due to arcane copyright law and out-of-court settlements. Do we want Google to be the sole provider of this service? Shouldn’t this be done by a public or community organisation instead? They’re difficult questions, and the fact that we haven’t even started considering them should warn us.

Another similar situation exists for Google Scholar. Google has obtained agreements with universities to provide academic articles for inclusion in Google’s archives. The idea, similarly to Google Books, is to allow more people to see things they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. A noble goal. Again, however, there are several problems with the project’s implementation. Again, arcane agreements and laws prevent universities from easily collaborating with an alternative archive agent. Even more worrying is the fact that to most users (those without access to the paywalled sites that the articles actually reside on) only the abstract of an article is available. This results in a broadening but a shallowing of the information available to most people. This is another of those projects that might be better taken on by the people, for the people. I know of one user on an IRC channel I frequent who is collecting datasheets and manuals from PC components from the 1980s, before these datasheets become extinct. While not legal, and while he hasn’t made this public, it’s the right direction to go in.

Then there’s the shallowing of our knowledge due to Google. This is a huge topic, and so many authors have covered it in so many various degrees of rigour that I won’t even begin to scratch the surface. However, here’s the gist of the idea: Because we have access to the largest library in human history (the web) at our fingertips at any point we’re in front of a computer (which for those of us with a smartphone, is constantly), we don’t remember information like previous generations did. I’m still not confident that this is a bad thing; I am a lot more knowledgeable than I would be if the only learning resource I had was a paper encyclopædia. I don’t know a lot of facts, but I know where to find them. In today’s world, that’s what counts. Still, it’s something we should look into further.

A good portion of the arguments put forward in this book are more general than Google and apply to the Internet at large (such as the shallowing of our knowledge). Most of the other arguments could be taken directly to Google’s legal department in a court showdown (which would almost certainly be the court case of the century). Whichever way you stand on the issues, more information is never a bad thing.

Over the last few years I’ve been in a similar process, getting rid of my Google account and hosting my own email. I’ve attempted to get rid of Facebook, and learned a lot about myself, my friends, and Facebook in the process. I now no longer have twitter (again) and I’m just generally being a lot more careful with my data.

I think everybody will benefit from thinking just a little more about where their information goes, so I highly recommend you read this article.

Facebook, along with its partner in crime MySpace, were touted as the all-singing, all-dancing duo of social networking in the Web 2.0 age. For a long time I didn’t catch on, until about March/April in 2008. It was at that point in time that I decided to open an account on Facebook, to see what friends of mine were up to. And that’s when the trouble started.

When I opened the account, it was quite interesting to see what some of my school mates had been up to since leaving school nine months previously. Some were at University, others were busy making themselves a pocketful working, yet others were having overseas adventures, lounging around on beaches in southern Spain. Altogether, quite interesting. I’m sure everybody who still has Facebook knows this all too well.

I started off by using Facebook once a week, just checking my wall for messages (usually there were none) and reading the current home page looking to see what friends were up to. Of course, to see what friends are up to, you need to tell Facebook who your friends are. You do this by inviting people (via Facebook) to be your friends, and then they accept. So I went around looking for people I knew to be friends with. All good and happy so far.

After a while, I started spending more and more time on Facebook. I also started adding (and got added as) ‘friends’ who I had never met. I can remember becoming friends with a French girl I’d never met, never seen, and only ever spoken ten words to. Our whole relationship was based on mutual membership of a fan club of an Internet hosting company. I mean, come on. If that isn’t tenuous, I don’t know what is.

By the time I quit Facebook ten months later (in January this year), I had 100 and something friends, only about 70 of which I’d ever met in real life (though I do have a number of really good friends I know through the Internet, my girlfriend included), and about 60 of whom I’d actually like to keep in contact with. That’s 40 or more people I added (or got added by) who we had no emotional connection with, other than passing each other in a corridor at school one day.

There were a number of reasons why I decided to quite Facebook. The spark behind each of the ideas can be attributed to an acquaintance of mine, Thomas Karpiniec (who closed his own Facebook account). I asked him about this on MSN, and he agreed to let me publish this:

Jack: If I may ask, what were your reasons for closing your Facebook account?

Tom: There’s a few reasons, some of which stand better than others on their own.

• Having an account makes it easy for people to tag me in photos and unfortunately some friends have no mercy.
• I like to be able to keep my social groups and family reasonably separated, particularly for work.
• The whole ad and annoying app economy of the site is frustrating to navigate around. [Tom says that in his opinion this has since been fixed].
• Web 2.0 is still new. Most people are content to throw all their personal information into the cloud but we haven’t really seen what the consequences of that are (data processing and rationalising is still catching up). I’m happy to put certain information about me online, such as what I write, and my name, and whereabouts I live, but who all the people I know are and their pictures of me is more than I’d want average people to be able to see at will.

As of writing this, Tom has since re-opened his Facebook account. From a more recent MSN conversation, he says that he was a “pain in the butt” for other people using Facebook who wanted to organize events. He mentioned one instance of a friend organizing a party via Facebook, and then sending a special email invitation to a single person: guess who.

You can view this from a couple of different angles, and there are a number of different questions to be asked. Firstly, is Facebook the best way to organize events? Probably. Only a few pieces of software spring to mind as substitutes, and neither of those are perfect. Not a whole heap of people outside the business world have Outlook (mostly because of it’s price, and despite it being the best email application ever) and Google Calendar still has some flaws in this area (it’s good, but not as good as Facebook). In addition, not everybody uses Google Calendar.

The second question raised is whether it’s Tom’s fault that he’s not on Facebook. Over-analyzing slightly, I don’t feel that it’s Tom’s fault that he doesn’t use Facebook. If we go back to the days when things were simple and invitations were done on paper, people used to print out some invitations, either hand them around or mail them out (and if you didn’t either exist or have a mailing address, you probably weren’t worth inviting to the party), and then give multiple options for RSVPing. From my childhood, I could remember being asked to either reply by SMS, send an email, phone up the host, contact them in person, or for more formal occasions, write them a letter back. Now if that doesn’t give enough options, what does? Squishing all our existences into Facebook for the purposes of making event management easy isn’t a good enough reason by itself to use Facebook, nor is it a reason to exclude.

Taking this further, we might suggest that Facebook makes us lazy. I have another example: Back in January my sister (who lives interstate) rang me up to wish me luck on my overseas holiday. My sister doesn’t ring me very often, so I was interested in what made her call now. According to her, she was just going to leave a message on my wall on Facebook, something along the lines of “good luck in Berlin”. However, my Facebook account had been closed by that stage, so she called me instead. Although it was only a quick call, I appreciated it much more than I would have getting a Facebook message. An email even would have meant more than a Facebook message. A bit of effort goes a long way in these things.

There are definitely upsides to using Facebook though. Let’s say you have an album of photos (say, of your birthday party), and you want to share them with your friends. You could email them (which would use a crapload of bandwidth), or you could mail a CD (which is a pain in the neck). You could post them on Flickr, but the average person doesn’t have a Flickr account, nor could be bothered with one. But almost everybody has Facebook (apart from the people who don’t). And of course, this argument is a logical fallacy, but most people couldn’t care less about that either.

The biggest issue with the Internet today (and especially the Web 2.0 part) is privacy. A lot of the time we give out more information that we either realise or would desire. A fairly standard Facebook page would have my name, full address, phone numbers, age, etc. Basically anything required to steal my identity. And I don’t have a lot of control over how that information is used. Once it’s on a Facebook page, any of your friends can see it, and depending how your security settings are set, everybody else as well. Compare that to say, this website, where I have full control over the information I give out (in my case, quite a lot, but others are more private).

We haven’t had Web 2.0 around long enough for the privacy thing to play out in full. This is the opinion of Tom, who I quoted earlier. He says that it’ll take some time for the consequences (if there are any) to show themselves and play out, and until that time he is going to err on the side of caution. Which I say is fair enough. Me personally, I give away a lot of information anyway, so it’s less of a concern, but I do like knowing exactly what information is out there. Facebook gives a false sense of security in that the ‘private’ information may not actually be private. I know my information is public.

Facebook is also, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. I have a lot of things to do, like go to Uni, do homework, cook, work, sleep, browse forums, write blog posts, etc. I find that Facebook takes up a lot of time to do properly, and worse yet is that the more time you spend on Facebook, the more time it begs you to consume. It’s a lot like smoking in this regard. People who don’t smoke (such as me) never feel like smoking a cigarette. Likewise, my father (who, as a policeman, sees the ‘un-private’ nature of Facebook every day) has no desire to even open an account. But once you’ve taken that first puff, you want more. So you have more, and the cigarettes keep calling to you. I’m sure cigarettes are addictive and crazy and bad, but you can see the parallels to Facebook.

One thing that a lot of Web 2.0 sites do (such as Flickr) is allow you to separate who sees what. On Flickr, you can set some images as only visible to friends, others only to family, and others to public, so that everybody in the whole wide world can see them. While on Facebook you can (in theory) set some things private and some public, you can’t separate family and friends, not in a meaningful way at least. You can set them as relations when friending the other person, but this does nothing meaningful in terms of information sharing.

A lot of people would remember a chain email sent around a few months back (during the Australian summer, traditionally a time of copious drinking). For those who haven’t, a brief history: An employee emails her boss, saying she is sick and can’t come to work (the ‘sickie’). Boss emails back with the contents of her Facebook page, where her status is something along the lines of ‘X is not going to work today… bit hard on the drink last night’. Although it was actually a fake, it does illustrate a point. You don’t want your boss knowing that you were drinking last night. Nor your clients, or probably your mother either (though, mothers being mothers, she probably already knew).

I find the biggest problem with Facebook is that you can’t actually delete your account. If you decide that Facebook is bad, like I have, then you want to close your account. Well you can… sort of. What happens is that after filling out 10 minutes of forms and “why are you closing your Facebook account?”, they ‘suspend’ your account so you can come back to it later, but you can’t actually delete your information off their servers. Which, in my honest opinion, is a big flaw. A VERY big flaw.

As for ‘… and why you probably haven’t noticed’, consider this: there are millions of people using Facebook. If one of them disappears, even if it’s one of your 150 friends, you’re unlikely to notice.  It’s just hard to keep track of that many people.

I’ve reached the end of my spiel now. I think I’ve said everything I need to say. In conclusion then, I hope you’ve found these points useful. Let me know if you do close your account because of this, or whether you think I’m talking crap, or whether you think I’m crazy (although I already know that). If you don’t have a Facebook account, I urge you not to open one without thinking long and hard about the issues of privacy on Facebook.

Update: Tom has published his side of the story, here.