The eighth rule of Facebook is, verbatim: if you don’t need to use Facebook for work then walk away soldier, and don’t look back, even for a second. For everyone else, here are some tips for protecting your privacy and information security on The Social Network.

First up is some background information in the form of a rant, with more movie references. If you just want the “how to” details, then skip to Global Privacy Settings.

Facebook wants you to over-share

Over the past five years Facebook has gradually changed it’s default privacy settings for both new users and new features. If you join in 2010 and do not change your default privacy settings then your activity can be observed by a lot more people than if you had done the same thing in 2005. Here is a nice set of pie charts that illustrates the story.

Similarly, if you joined in 2005 and have never changed your privacy settings then your activity has gradually become available to a larger number of people because Facebook has added new features that don’t respect or relate to your existing privacy settings. Places, discussed below, is a good example of this.

Two levels of concern

Given the creeping exposure of all manner of personal data over time, there are two levels of concern with Facebook. The first is that your activity may be observed by undesirables (employers, children, parents, stalkers, etc.): the privacy problem. You want to be sure that you configure and use your Facebook account in such a way that your disclosed data can only be observed by the people you choose. The easiest way to deal with this is to treat everything you do on Facebook as potentially a public statement. Another way is to use friend lists.

The second level of concern is that even with good privacy controls that protect you from other individuals on Facebook, your activity over time may generate a behavioural profile that can be used to identify you even if your name never appears in the data comprising that profile. This is exacerbated by factoring in your activity on other social networks. Facebook, its advertising partners or, potentially, law enforcement or hackers have access to aggregate data that could be used to de-anonymise you: the information security problem.

Evil fireball

Just like the evil space fireball in The Fifth Element, that only grows bigger when General Staedert orders his crew to fire at it, Facebook gobbles data and the more active you are, the more it knows about you. Example: deleting a photo you don’t like equals more data about you (she didn’t want that photo to be seen by her friends). Deletions, by the way, are recorded. The data that is deleted remains recorded, etc. Everything is saved. Evil fireball.

Of course, jerks who see the world in black and white because it suits their agenda will tell you that if you have done nothing wrong ever in your entire life, and know that you never will, then you have absolutely nothing to hide from the fireball. They do not care about your privacy and liberty, they just want you to get out of their way. Nevertheless: the best way to deal with these problems is not to join Facebook. The second best way is to treat everything as public even if you have taken measures to control who sees it.

Global privacy settings

On May 26 Facebook replaced it’s convoluted privacy controls with a unified and simplified global settings panel. Nick O’Neill, who has written many useful articles on Facebook privacy, provides and overview in his post “Ten things about today’s privacy changes.” This is easiest way to start protecting your privacy.

Go to Account → Privacy Settings and choose something other than “Everyone” or “Recommended”. Facebook’s “Recommended” settings are, naturally, not very private. If you want my advice, choose “Friends Only” and lock that in first, then customise it further to restrict some of the settings to either a list, a specific group of names, or “Only Me.”

Note that at the top of the settings page there is a section called “Basic Directory Information”. Click on the unassuming little link that says “View settings” to both view and change your default directory settings. This is basically the information that people can find out about you through Facebook’s various search features.

At the bottom of the settings page there is also a section called “Applications and Websites”. Click on “Edit your settings” to set limits to the kinds of data that Facebook applications can access about you by default should you choose to install them (something that I recommend you avoid as much as possible).

Settings for ‘Places’

Following the popularity of location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook in August launched a location “check in” feature called Places that allows you to send your geographic coordinates to the system to let people know where you are. With all of their usual charm and tact they set up this feature to allow, by default, other people to check you in to places. (Bruce Schneier, whom I linked to a couple of times above, calls this type of information about you incidental data.)

Nick O’Neill again provides a good overview and some advice in “Places privacy settings.” The most important thing is probably to prevent other people from being able to check you in to places so be sure to set “Friends can check me in to Places” to “Disabled.”

Customising your settings

If you plan to use Facebook to say things that really do need to be restricted to a smaller group of people then you should customise your privacy settings. O’Neill’s post “Five privacy tips,” written before the privacy simplification changes in May, is still very useful in this regard, especially for the details it provides on using fine-grained Custom permissions, which is what you need to use if you want to restrict a data type to yourself or a short list of specific indiviuals.

Related to this is a change to the Publisher that went into effect this week, and relates to your everyday use of Facebook. The Publisher is the open text box at the top of your Wall and News Feed screens that invited you to start typing something (“What’s on your mind?”) has now been replaced with a Share bar that presents the following options: Status, Question, Photo, Link and Video.

When you one of these you get either a text box for typing, or a set of upload options, as well as a Permissions drop-down that allows you to limit who can see what you type or upload. Use the permissions feature to restrict your status updates to trusted friends if you are planning on sharing sensitive information.

Or, better yet, don’t share sensitive information on Facebook.

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A Pew study views news as inherently difficult to sell:

All these findings speak to the natural disadvantage of news content: Most news is covered by more than one organization and people do not place enough value on the difference between the various reports. In other words, if a user had to pay for a New York Times article on Haiti, evidence suggests that he or she would just look for another source that could provide the basic information. The nuances of depth or breadth in the pay story may not be valued enough to induce payment over a free alternative.

Maybe so. This is a car crash model of consumption: people want immediate, “basic information” about catastrophic events and would be equally satisfied by driving by it as by reading about it online. Obviously, sometimes true. But there are other problems. Most news is just not reported well, or in equal measure, or with any sense of conviction, which gets to matters of competence, selection and trust. Baldur Bjarnason:

If there’s one thing I learnt over the last three years and the tremendous news coverage that Iceland has been getting it’s that mainstream media is incapable of writing even one news item without getting something substantially wrong… Mainstream news isn’t worth £2 a week or a year because it doesn’t have enough facts to qualify as news and is too boring to qualify as fiction.

Here the biggest problem stems from the commodification of news, but manifests in frustrated consumption: news supplied by the mainstream media companies lacks “voice”—that embodied synthesis of:

1. authority,
2. reliability,
3. validity, and
4. perspective

that comprise the necessary conditions of believing what is told to you and wanting to hear it.

The frame of reference is the blind spot. If you understand news as an elementary information product then its consumers will appear to be acting instrumentally, snacking it quickly, grabbing it at the lowest possible price, or walking away from it at the slightest barrier. News appears to be nothing more of less than fast food.

But if, instead, you view news consumption as the search for moments of assurance—as willful participation in acts of telling, delivered by a “subject supposed to know”—then any kind of voicelessness amounts to failure. Not taking a position is abandoning the process that gives the product its value.

The best news sources are the ones that succeed at being “supposed to know.” Having the basic facts is not enough. You have to convey that you know them, so that we are not just receiving facts from you, but we are, first and foremost, being assured by your knowledge of the things you tell us. Audio, video, text, paper, screen—doesn’t matter—as long as we sense the guiding hand.

We want to consult the oracle.

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My awesome sister and her excellent fiancé visited for Christmas and we took them to the mall on, as we Australians like to say, “Boxing Day.” Let this be understood by my dear readers as a sign of our deep and abiding love for those two. Going to the mall the day before, or the day after Christmas is not our usual caper, but for those used to buying clothes on £, the American $ emits an irresistible siren call.

No. 2 (photo versions and details)

Elena was not completely enamoured of my photographic advances when I took these shots, and was fighting the urge to eat in the mall on account of being hungry and repulsed at the same time. But when the carousel started spinning behind her I couldn’t resist crouching in front of the passing throng to snap off a few more shots of my lady as she contemplated her predicament with mounting dread.

No. 3 (photo versions and details)

I’ve made more than my typical number of trips to consumer paradise recently, realising amongst other Important Things that Hollister and Aéropostale have completely taken over a certain chunk of the U.S. teen pre-frontal cortex.

But what surprised me most of all this time was the smell. It was horrific: a sordid amalgam of acrid Cinnabon cloud hanging over the carousel, gagging übermale cologne wafting out of Abercrombie in outrageous quantities, the sharp candy scent of various “autonomous mid-mall snacking units,” tendrils of Chanel No. 5 from JCPenney (least worst) and the unwelcome funk of occasional members of the General Public who somehow manage to represent Axe Body Spray Boy’s diametric opposite on the great wheel of masculine reek.

I’m marking it down: December 26, 2009—the day I finally understood, once and for all, Agent Smith’s aversion to the way we smell. It is completely out of control.

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Nothing to worry about here Tony. Climate change freak out dupes, kindly return to your porch rockers and resume whittling. I mean, it’s obviously a conspiracy, and I wouldn’t expect any different from the Greenies. But I just can’t believe that so many scientists have been taken in by it. I used to think scientists were smart and sensible people. I suppose they will come to their senses eventually. Purple skies—yeah right. Good one NASA. Kidders. Bunch of Photoshop junkies. Go launch a rocket!

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Seen on Main Street earlier in the week. It’s the Mini Cooper S with John Cooper Works GP tuning kit (supercharger, wheels, brakes, suspension, bits of red). They have a Flickr group all of their own. Naturally, the front brake calipers are rouge. I mean, how could you not? Would be a dereliction of duty.

Post thumb by Paul Mullett.

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One is now keeping another weblog for the recording of Various.

This is Jenny, wearing her stuff

Agent Cooper: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just… let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Or an amazing scarf from Jenny Fields Fiber on Etsy.”

Update: see also…

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Whosoever first thought of making the calipers red surely got a big bonus that year. It’s a great example of “Drapering.” That is, making a distinguishing feature of a common one: every car with disc brakes has calipers, but colour them red and your car has some serious stoppers. (Disclaimer one: I just saw A Serious Man (2009)^† whence I stole this title. Disclaimer two: I don’t actually consider the Boxter a serious car — this is a serious Web Site on the actual Internet — but I bet the owner does.) See also…

† Yes, of course you should see it.

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PLACEBO have announced they have been forced to postpone their forthcoming tour of North America after their lead singer, Brian Molko, collapsed on stage at Summer Sonic Festival in Osaka, Japan. Brian had picked up a virus in Asia which, coupled with jet lag and exhaustion, caused the problem after the first song. […]

Riverman Management commented, “This is pretty devastating for everyone—we’ve only ever cancelled 3 shows in Placebo’s 14 year history, however Brian’s health is paramount. Our sincere apologies go out to Placebo’s loyal American fans who have waited a long time to see the band. We will try and do everything to re-arrange the dates as soon as possible.”

The band have had an intensive worldwide schedule this year, promoting their 6^th studio album ‘Battle for the Sun,’ this includes 24 high profile festival performances over the summer, an unprecedented amount for any band in 2009.

After listening to them for a few years I first saw Placebo at the Big Day Out in 2001. That was a great show. Their 1998 album Without You I’m Nothing would be among my top ten favourites, were I ever, in some Hornby-Frears-Cusackian moment, to compile such a list. Can’t wait to see them again…

One wonders: is Mac OS X’s icon for an installer package supposed to look like an Energon Cube?

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Wags on pet detection duty in Costa Rica.

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She would give Céline a run for her money, too.

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The best teams didn’t have a methodology or dogma they followed. The best teams all focused on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member.

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Examples of fluid block quotation marks

Here is some sample markup:

<blockquote>
    <p>This paragraph is the first child of the blockquote.</p>
    <p>This paragraph is the last child of the blockquote.</p>
</blockquote>

To get the result I wanted I had to rely on some CSS properties that aren’t (yet?) supported in all browsers. Still, the end result works in recent versions of Camino, Firefox, Safari, Opera (almost), OmniWeb (almost), and IE 6 and 7 using Dean Edwards’ IE7.js, if scripting is enabled. Here’s the relevant CSS:

blockquote > *:first-child {
    text-indent:-14px;
    }
blockquote > *:first-child:before {
    background:url(images/left-quote.png) no-repeat 100% 30%;
    content:"\00A0";
    padding:2em;
    padding-left:0;
    }
blockquote > *:last-child:after {
    background:url(images/right-quote.png) no-repeat 10% 70%;
    content:"\00A0";
    padding:2em;
    }
* html blockquote * {text-indent:-6px;} /* fix IE6 */

The two larger rules target the area immediately before the first child element (a p in the example above) of the blockquote, and immediately after the last child element (also a p), respectively. This method uses images of quotation marks to render the opening and closing symbols, and the images are applied as backgrounds to invisible generated content. Background image positioning made it easy to fine-tune the location of the marks.

It turns out that all of the browsers I tested support background images on generated content, but the catch is that Safari and OmniWeb don’t seem to treat a regular space character (either Unicode character 0020 or a literal space) as, well, content. No content, no background image. The trick turned out to be to use a more obscure non-visible character, in this case the “no-break space” (00A0).

Finally, the topmost rule pulls the first line to the left, and the last rule is a kludge for IE6 that overrides this behaviour. When the first line has a negative indent IE6 cuts off the overhanging part of the image. (Writing that out I just realised that I didn’t try overflow:visible.)

I did wonder if the same effect could be achieved using quotes as generated content and styling those, instead of invisible content with background images. I hit a wall on the first attempt, but I came really close in the Gecko browsers and Safari with this alternative:

blockquote > *:first-child {
    text-indent:-16px;
    }
blockquote > *:first-child:before {
    color:#CCC;
    content:"\201C";
    font:italic bold 4em Garamond,Times,"Times New Roman",serif;
    line-height:1px;
    padding-right:.2em;
    vertical-align:-1500%;
    }
blockquote > *:last-child:after {
    color:#CCC;
    content:"\201D";
    font:italic bold 4em Garamond,Times,"Times New Roman",serif;
    line-height:1px;
    margin-left:-.05em;
    vertical-align:-2700%;
    }
* html blockquote * {text-indent:-6px;} /* fix IE6 */

The main problem was that in pulling the opening quote down as low as it is I couldn’t prevent a larger line height on the first line in Opera. The bottom margin of the blockquote was also a bit taller than I wanted in several browsers because of a similar effect with the closing quote. I started reading the CSS spec on Line height calculations, but it got late and my eyes were stinging and… I’ll get back to it.

Lastly, I said “almost” for Opera and OmniWeb because their current versions don’t support last-child, so there’s no closing quote for these. Opera 9.5 will fix this; not sure about OmniWeb. But if you use either of these now you should see the one-quote effect, and I’m happy to say I’m in good company there.

Update: I changed Zero to One-Eighty’s blockquote style in December, 2008, but the screenshot above shows what they looked like when I wrote this post.

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(Even the) Pope calls for an end to the Iran Crisis:

Pope Benedict XVI has called for a negotiated solution to the Iran nuclear crisis, in his traditional Easter message in St Peter’s Square in Rome. “May an honourable solution be found for all parties, through honest and serious negotiations,” he said. He also affirmed Israel’s “just right to exist in peace” while calling on the international community to help the Palestinians move towards statehood.

Amen to that. At least it’s an ethos.

Disclaimer: If you haven’t seen The Big Lebowski then you’re like a child who wanders in in the middle of a movie…