blog.marcwiesner.com

Oh I was sure purprised when I logged onto Facebook and had my privacy software (ZoneAlarm) tell me that my name was being sent to circuitcity.com. What’s the connection between Facebook and Circuit City? No Circuit City ads were even being loaded (not that loading a CC ad means that my name should be sent). It’s as if Facebook just sent a little "oh by the way, Marc just logged on" to whomever they please.

Worse yet, to whomever would pony out the dough.

Facebook End-of-Year Privacy Sale!

Everything Must Go!

I’m sure many have now heard about the heat Facebook is taking for their "information sharing" across websites. Apperently, purchases from certain merchants get fed into your Facebook feed unless you opt-out. That’s right, users are automatically opted in for this privacy invasion. Nice. Very friendly. Funny how this comes on the heels of that ridiculous Microsoft buy-in, isn’t it?

I heard on NPR that Facebook, responding to criticism of privacy invasion, said that users can set their privacy options to not display information aggrigated from other websites in case they didn’t want everyone to know what book or blender they just purchased. Deciding to tackle this before everyone I know discovers how many copies of The Rights of Man I’ll be purchasing, I open up Facebook and go to their privacy section. Here is the full content of that page (minus headers and ads):

Show your friends what you like and what you’re up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile.Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.No sites have tried sending stories to your profile

That’s it. Here are the two things that jump out at me. 1) There are no sites listed below so I don’t even know what sites to be wary of (read, unmarked minefield). 2) There’s no settings to control. There’s no way I can tell Facebook that I don’t want this information gathered, traded, used for marketing, or displayed on my own or EVERYONE’s mini-feed.

Boiler-plated this seems a passive way of saying that they aren’t sharing WHERE this information will be collected from, WHAT they’re wispering about in dark corners, WHEN they will be publishing the information they gather, or WHO I can tell I want my privacy respected. My question is WHY does Facebook think it’s necessary to do this in such a shady way? There are enough programs and apps for Facebook that people can add if they want this information shown.

They can opt-in.

Why can’t I opt out?

I think I’ve figured out what bothers me about most Europeans I meet traveling; they tend to put a fair amount of effort in trying to find or recreate the Europe they left behind. Despite being in a very foreign country they expect the same standards of clean, language, privacy, public behavior and what not that’s found in Europe. The shock of not finding this familiarity seems to be more than most Europeans can handle. Thus, the communities of people who have nothing more in common other than their place of birth arise out of a smoke of disappointment and dissatisfaction.

In the west we usually criticize such insular communities. Indian, Korean, Chinese communities, it’s thought, create a buffer which impedes integration. We think it bad when people live in these communities and become so insulated they can’t speak a national language but what contributions to Europeans bring to their communities? Are western restaurants as popular in Asia as Asian restaurants are in the west? Do we have many scientists and scholars who decide to move into China to help with academic research or philosophical inquiry?

People from English speaking countries traveling here in China seem to be particularly off. Not as a rule, just as a general observation, people from Australia, England, Canada, and the USA react remarkably poorly to such a foreign place where English ability are by no means an expected norm. I suspect the problem can be considered as stemming from a Continentinal Island mentality due to the fact that we aren’t really pushed to learn a foreign language since we don’t really have any neighbors who make it necessary. While the USA’s southern neighbor Mexico would seem to give us a good reason to learn Spanish it’s clear that this motivation is lost on most US citizens; a point which itself should speak to Mexico’s general status within America.

They’ve done it! My years of suffering with less than five blades are over! Finally there’s a five blade face razor for men. That’s right…men only. Because, clearly, it takes a man to handle "the comfort of five blades." Umm…I mean…a real man needs "the comfort of five blades." Because….ummm…oh right! Because after centuries of shaving with single-blade razors men need comfort….umm..cause real men use so much lotion and their skin is so sensitive.

Fortunately, any man who considers himself more manly for buying face creams and blade laden razers because it’s the manly thing to do won’t be offended by the following: the men who so casually let themselves be led around by the balls by the marketeers deserve the economic castration they’ve undergone!

As a Jewish person living in California the question of tattooing has popped up on my mind occasionally. Not that there’s any indigenous or deep cultural tie with tattooing in California but let’s face it, if there were a body-modification capital I think you’s have to give it to the state with LA, Hollywood, and San Francisco, no? Yeah.

Anyway…permanent and purposeful scarring of the body is prohibited in Judaism as I understand it. Not that it’s explicitly stated in the scriptures, but having a tattoo will pretty much guarantee you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery because of the taboo that’s grown around it as a breaking of the convenient that’s formed with G-d by virtue of having a corporeal body.

This afternoon I think I’ve cracked the nut (in my own rationale at least).

Read the rest of this entry »

Another week gone by. Friday….feel like I should be doing something to celebrate the end of the week. Mike’s off napping, Frank’s out, my other peeps seem to be incommunicado at the moment. I’d love to go out for a ripping bike ride but with the two hours I put in yesterday and the chance that I’ll be biking into Mountain View tomorrow to meet up with Preston discourages me from pushing myself tonight.

So I’ll blog until I can find better trouble to get in.

Something that I’ve been frustrated about for a while is the geographical division of the globe within Santa Clara’s History Department. The five area that one can study are Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia. The problem I have with this? Well…as it effects me, the Middle East is part of Asia. So I can take a class on the history of the middle east and it won’t count as part of Asia, but part of “Africa and the Middle East.” This smacks of thinly veiled religious gerrymandering to me; it would be far more accurate to call the five areas: the Protestant World, the Catholic World, the Southern Catholic World, the Islamic World, and the Buddhist World (I know..India is predominantly Hindu, but has got strong Buddhist influence and was its launching pad to the rest of Asia). This system of labeling would also solve the problem of Russia which, despite being mostly in Asia, is traditionally a Catholic country. And then…students like myself who see a class on Middle Eastern history nested between “Asian” history classes won’t naively think it will actually count as an Asian history course.

Ugh…I’m short on my thesis…I filled out the outline last night and only had a touch over five pages. Gotta give them at least seven, I figure, and I can expand it later (just a rough draft of the 2nd half, ya know). But I needed a bit of distraction….and low and behold, Yanni’s in the news!

Arrested for domestic violence. Not like I don’t know there are screwed up relationships in the worlds, and attacking physically is rarely as bad, in my opinion, as attacking emotionally/physiologically. It’s just the idea of a new age pianist lashing out like that that I find singularly humorous. ‘Cause it’s Yanni. And his defense? He claimed to only have grabbed her arms to keep her from kicking him (yeah…cause the leg bone’s connected to the arm bone like that) yet the cops find no bruises on him when she’s got a busted lip and other marks.

Oh, Yanni, you should know better…

A can’t believe they’re actually making another Beverly Hills Cop movie. Doesn’t that seem wrong and so very sad? I’m sorry, but how shitty must Murphy’s reputation (or agent, at least) be that he can’t get anything decent or original? Wouldn’t it be better start doing stand-up again than to go back to the a movie series that played itself out by the first sequel? When is the line drawn? When do you say “that’s enough?”

And how what a sad state for Hollywood that they can’t come out with anything good and original? Doesn’t it seem like just about every movie that comes out is either a sequel, an adulteration of some historical event or other piece (*cough*Troy), or a remake of a Foreign (usually Japanese) movie?

But why do we pay to see this shit? Are our expectations so fucking low that we we’ll watch any piece of drivel that comes out in Theaters?

Hollywood, you wonder why people are renting or downloading movies? I’ll tell you why. THEY’RE NOT WORTH PAYING FOR.

hehe…Frank just read me the grand list of upcoming sequels (two with our wonderful Gov. Schwarzenegger, glad he’s got his priorities straight) and I got a little riled up for a minute

How reliant we have become on the internet to transport information. With the media blocks in China, what will historians deduce thirty years from now when they look back on this period? Because there were no bulletin board posts challenging gov’t position on Taiwan no body within China objected to the policies?

I suppose it’s the same problem we have now when we look at the past. Those who have had the skill to write have usually been the wealthy and educated. Those who would want to support the government of their nation. Now, though, the skill to write has been spread to dissenters so the opportunity to write is being removed. Is the spread of ideas, even dissenting ones, a right to be protected or a privilege that can be suspended?

If we say we respect the right for a government to act in what it sees as the best interests of its citizens by censoring an ‘outspoken minority,’ what about when this censorship becomes part of the classroom curriculum HERE? I was in a Chinese history class where the instructor (American, Caucasian, b/c it matters on cultural context) said that you CANNOT meet a Chinese person who doesn’t have a strong opinion Taiwan. Usually, she said, that opinion is that if China has to lose so many millions of lives to take that island, it would be justified. I know this isn’t true. On a common sense level it’s ridiculous to say that EVERYONE has a strong position on this subject. Second, I’ve spoke to people who’ve lived their entire lives in China who say that Taiwan isn’t an issue to them or their friends. LOTS of people care far more about the Chinese economy than relations with Taiwan. It seems to me that this instructor came to this view because the people she spoke with in China were either coached or selected by people with government interests (or she was horribly exaggerating).

If we accept foreign censorship, we end up censoring our selves and our youth.

What can I say? I was wrong. On Sept. 17, 2005, I anticipated a swelling of fraudulent charities to use Hurricane Katrina as a banner for ‘donations’ into personal bank accounts. What I was wrong about was expecting the donations made to legitimate charities would go to the people who need it (or, at the very least, to the massive overhead that these organizations feel they need to function).

Nope, wrong.

More than $200,000 of intended aid money was diverted by 19 Red Cross workers to friends and family. 49 people have had charges brought against them by California Prosecutors and the FBI’s even gotten involved. The temp agency who supplied the Red Cross with these workers, Spherion, said that they didn’t have time to perform background checks on these members of their job pool.

Firstly, if this company can’t perform the background checks on workers going through, who needs them? Isn’t the whole point of a temp agency to provide temporary work that doesn’t have a history that would make the client uneasy? Sounds like those weaselly freaks at Spherion only did half the job. I say they should be charged with defrauding a charitable organization. They billed Red Cross from A and B, yet only did half the job.

Second, what does this say about the management style and coordination within a Red Cross call center? If these 19 workers didn’t have background checks done, it seems safe to assume that they hadn’t worked with Red Cross before. Yet, in the midst of this tragedy, they were able to figure out the Red Cross’s check dispersal process well enough to almost get away with $200,00? And the only reason someone noticed was because the number was so high. They just got greedy, is all. If they stole only $150,000 they might have gotten away scott free. Isn’t one of the first rules of a business that moves money around (like a casino or bank) to “watch the money”??

How many others have gotten away with a few grand here or there? If 19 temp workers got caught for a couple hundred grand, doesn’t’ it stand to reason that there are other leaks in the boat?