The Financial Times is stupid

So, if a nonsubscriber (like myself) goes to the Financial Times' website and tries to click through to an article, it takes you to the page for the article, but the page remains blank and a box pops up instead saying, "FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers. Register FREE now for increased access" and then there's a link that says "Register Here." If you click to close the box, it just takes you back to the front page.

BUT, if you search with Google and it returns an article from FT, you can just click straight through and read the article, no problem. Do a site-specific search and it's even the exact same results you get from the search on their own website, except you can actually read the articles.

Also, if you try to copy and paste so much as one sentence from one of their articles (say, to pull out a quote and comment on it in a blog post), when you try to paste it, you get the following:

Please use the link to reference this article. Do not copy & paste articles which is a breach of FT.com's Ts&Cs (www.ft.com/servicestools/help/terms) and is copyright infringement. Send a link for free or email ftsales.support@ft.com to purchase rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5bb39488-ea99-11df-b28d-00144feab49a.html#ixzz15VXwqCMB

The development of a monetary system to succeed “Bretton Woods II”, launched in 1971, will take time.

Take note: the final sentence there is the one I was trying, for the purpose of this exercise, to copy-paste. So not only can anyone easily circumnavigate their subscriber wall, but they piss and moan about not copy-pasting their articles, while still allowing you to do it. There is nothing stopping me from deleting that little please-use-the-link paragraph.

Seriously, FT, a big part of blogging is pulling quotes from news stories to comment on them. The message doesn't happen when I try to copy-paste a single character, or even a couple of words, so clearly you have the ability to specify how much is too much to copy and paste; a single sentence does not an article make, but it does make a nice teaser quote to get an interested party to come read the actual article. And if you're that worried about people copying your articles wholesale, don't allow them to do it at all. You clearly already know how to mess with the copy-paste function, so you can't be entirely computer-illiterate. The way it works now, it only ticks off people who are legitimately trying to discuss your article, and does nothing to actually prevent people from stealing it.

The way it stands, you've managed to tick off legit reader/commenters like myself, while at the same time doing nothing to stop actual thieves. And now, instead of a blog post discussing your article, I have written a blog post about how stupid your website is. Well done.

Facebook apps will eat your children

Hi, everyone. Yes, I'm still alive. I've been meaning to get back here and post for a while, but every time I thought of something I wanted to write about, it was like, really? That is what's making you break your (accidental) blog-silence after this long? So finally I figured, screw it, it's got to be something, may as well be this. So here, a post about, yes, Facebook.

So, ragging on Facebook for being a menace to people's privacy seems to have become the thing to do. To me, some of these complaints seem legit; others, not so much. But sometimes, things just aren't that big a deal. And furthermore, there comes a point when the fault is no longer Facebook's, and people need to take responsibility for their own online activity. I've seen a number of stories about this latest issue, but this Huffington Post article seems to give it a pretty good overview.

Readers Digest Condensed Version: popular apps like Farmville have been "leaking" their users' personally identifiable information to ad companies, namely their FB ID numbers.

And apparently, this is a HUGE PROBLEM. HUGE. Do you realize what potentially lethal information they get from this? They get - brace yourself - your name. Scary, right?

According to the EFF guy quoted in the article, "The problem is that ad companies can know who you are at all." But the thing is, well, they really don't. I mean, unless your name is Snotface McJingleheimer Hammerpants, your name probably isn't that memorable to most people. A lot of times, it's not even a uniquely identifying feature. Try it - search for "Andrea Johnston" on Facebook. I'm not by a long shot the only one that comes up. I know three different people named Sarah Williams. Even my mother's name, which is relatively unique, comes up with more than one hit on Facebook. Names are not as unique as people think. If you do have a fairly unique name and you're particularly worried about it, you can even change your Facebook name; I know people that go by first name + last initial, first name + middle name, or even their D&D character names. There's no reason you have to use your complete, real name.

And even if you do, that's still all they are guaranteed to get. If they get anything else, it's your fault.

Now, I realize there have been complaints about how complicated Facebook's privacy controls are, but the current configuration, if you actually look at the page and read through your options, is really not that difficult. I stand by what I said. As things currently stand, if you fuck up your Facebook privacy settings, it is not Facebook's fault. It is yours, because you didn't read the options, and therefore you didn't set up your privacy controls properly. If you can't read, you shouldn't be on the internet. If you can't take the time to understand what you're doing with your personal information, you shouldn't be on Facebook. It's as simple as that.

Everything on your profile, including information you put up, things you "like," and things you post, has the option to be visible to "Everyone," "Friends of Friends," "Friends Only," or some combination of people and/or friend lists that you can choose yourself.

Now, if you have some portion of your profile set so that "Everyone" can see it, then yes, that information will be available to anyone who navigates to your page, which would be possible with your FB ID number. Or by searching for you and clicking on your name. It's not hard.*

So what's a concerned citizen to do? Is there some arcane magic spell one must know to protect their information? Well, no, actually, it's much more simple than that. Just don't set anything to be visible to "Everyone." Then, voila, even if an ad company tries to get info from your page, or if some creeper manages to arrive there, all they can see is your name, gender, and profile pic. For even more caution, you can refuse to list your gender on your profile (I did), and you can make your profile pic be something that's not your identifiable face. (Closeup of your left eye, picture of your cat, snapshot of the Eiffel Tower from your trip to Paris - there are any number of options.) And as I said before, you can go by something that is not your real, complete name. Now, no one who is not friends with you, be it an ad company or an internet creeper, has access to any identifying information whatsoever about you. And all this can be completed in less than five minutes with a few clicks of your mouse.**

As far as applications go, there is also a page in your privacy settings specifically dedicated to them. Some apps require you to let them access certain parts of your profile; they tell you this when you add them, and you can choose to allow them access and use them, or just not use them. I can assure you, no Facebook app is that necessary. Others have optional settings that you can control, also from this page. This is also the page where the one legitimately creepy factor shows up: apps your friends use can see some of your information, whether you have added them or not. BUT, never fear, you also have control over this: in the "Info accessible through your friends" section, just uncheck every box, and then they can no longer see that info. I'll agree that the default setting should not be to share this info automatically, but if you actually read the updates, they do tell you when they add things like this. And as I said, it is very simple to just uncheck every box. Issue solved.

As to the larger issue, I'm not saying that Facebook is always blameless, and I'm not saying that it's not a greedy, money-hungry company looking to make dough off advertising to its users. But that is what the internet (and indeed, a lot of modern media) is all about. They (and their advertisers) aren't out to steal your identity, and it is in their best interest to make sure that people who are don't have access to your info. And if you properly set up your privacy settings, they won't have the required info to do so anyway. As the guy said at the end of the article, "the worst harm is that someone delivers to you a more targeted ad." And if you don't want that to happen, you can just do like I did and install adblock, and you'll never see ads on Facebook anyway.

tl;dr: Stop whining and take responsibility for your own information.


<sub>*Unless you've set your profile not to come up in searches, which you can also do without too much difficulty, from the "Privacy Settings" page.

**It will take longer if you go to the trouble of making friend lists and customizing each setting, but if you're in a hurry, it is very easy to just set everything to "Friends Only," and that will have you covered for a start. You can go back and change it later, if you so desire, when you've got more time to tweak things.</sub>

radio free Andi

So, now and again, when my vast music collection starts to bore me (as it occasionally does), I hop online and listen to Pandora, which, for those of you who don't know, is a particularly wonderful internet radio website. You tell them a song or artist you like, and it finds other songs and artists like it, and plays them to you. You can also create multiple stations, for when you want to listen to different kinds of music — for example, I've got some stations with names like "Sunny Day," "Sleepy Time," and "Rainy Afternoon," plus a whole station dedicated to Spanish pop-rock. It's a good deal, and it's all free. Or at least, it was.

Being that I like Pandora and have some interest in the things it does, I became a fan of it on Facebook, and yesterday, the Pandora Facebook page published a note saying, among other things, that they are going to start limiting free listening to 40 hours per month, and then charging $.99 for unlimited listening after that. (This of course doesn't affect paid subscribers, who already paid, so they get unlimited listening as well as no ads.) The reasoning behind this is that apparently, the music industry people (I don't know who, as I haven't been following this issue much) want to get royalties for when their songs get played on the radio. It then goes on to make this comment:

The system as it stands today remains fundamentally unfair both to Internet radio services like Pandora, which pay higher royalties than other forms of radio, and to musical artists, who receive no compensation at all when their music is played on AM/FM radio.

Now wait. I thought the point of radio was that you want them to play your songs, so that people hear them and think, "Oh, hey, that's a cool song, I should learn more about that artist/buy that song/buy that album." I should think that would be true with Pandora especially, because you seed it with stuff you like, and then it plays other stuff like that, and sometimes it's really off-the-wall, obscure stuff, that you otherwise would probably have never heard of (I get a lot of that, anyway). And since it shares important qualities with music that you've told it you like, there's a very good chance you'll like this other stuff too, even though you've never heard of it. And, with radio (in principal) being free for the end user, it seems bizarre that people should feel entitled to money for things being played on it.

I mean, with most things, it's the other way around — advertisers, for example, pay the radio station to play their stuff. And it used to be that way even for music (though not necessarily legally so).

At any rate, it's no huge deal for me, personally — I doubt I listen to Pandora for 40 hours in a month anyway, and even if I somehow manage to hit the limit, I still have my own vast collection of music to sustain me. And really, a dollar is hardly a terrible expense for those that want more Pandora. My problem really isn't the outcome of the issue; it's more the fact that the issue exists in the first place. It's a bizarre change in attitude from the way radio used to work.

Poe's law

Okay, so it's actually satire. I was unsure for awhile there. But it's still the funniest damn thing I've seen in quite some time. Oh, fundamentalism.

history

So, back in May, I did a presentation for my gender and women's studies class about advertising, specifically the portrayal of women in ads and especially the gratuitous use of sex or sexiness in said ads. It was quite a good presentation, in my own humble opinion—at least, I got a lot of positive feedback from my classmates—and the most effective part, I think, was probably the Ad or Porn Quiz, where I showed a bunch of pictures and had the class guess which ones were ads and which were from porn movies or websites. This was the part that drew the most comments, and I was really happy with how it went over, and especially the grade I ended up with (^_^).

Now, you are probably asking what brought this up, so I'll explain: in the course of putting together the aforementioned quiz, I spent a lot of time on this very laptop looking up porn on the internet. (This led to some hilarious conversations between myself and my roommate.) I did all my searching on Google, and of course, I never bothered to clear out my history, because honestly, who uses my computer but me? And I promptly forgot all about that, until tonight when I happened to open the Google homepage by mistake and on a whim, I clicked to see what the first few things that came up on my history were, and thanks to the magic of alphabetization, they were all porn. In fact, scrolling down the list, more than half of the items on it were porn, some obviously so from the names, and others less obvious, but I remember searching for them, so I know that's what they are. My history, I notice, is different on the actual webpage than the one I get from the search box built into my browser, which is much longer and more up-to-date, so I guess when I search from there (which is much more often), it doesn't go into the same list as the one for the actual webpage? I'm not sure how that all works.

At any rate, this still wouldn't bother me, except I let my 14-year-old cousin use my laptop when she was staying with us last week, and I'm pretty sure she didn't go anyplace much except for Hotmail and Myspace, but not entirely sure, because the history doesn't differentiate between my usage and hers, and I'm on Google all the damn time. So it all boils down to the fact that she probably didn't see any of that, and if she did, she didn't say anything, but still, what if—?

Time to go "Clear Private Data" and all that jazz.

whoa...

So, after I made my post on July 4, I was looking at the main page of my blog, and all the text except the main part of that (then) most recent post was _{very small}, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. The only thing I could think of was that I'd been looking at another page in a different tab earlier that had some very small text, and so I'd used ctrl+ to make it bigger so I could read it, and then ctrl- to shrink it down again; I thought maybe for some reason the browser was screwing up and was somehow stuck in tiny mode or something, and perhaps a restart would fix it, but I had three windows with a bunch of tabs open in each and didn't want to go through the hassle of bookmarking everything (I rarely shut down my browser completely—is that bad?) so I went to bed and promptly forgot about it the next morning.

I didn't remember again until just now, when I made that last post, and then I went to the front page of my blog and it was doing the same thing: the most recent post and the one before (from July 4) were normal-sized, and everything else on the page (the rest of the entries, the index links on the left-hand side, basically everything else but the header) were tiny. And then I realized what the deal was: at the bottom of my July 4 post, I put a footnote in subscript and forgot to close the tag. It's not that I typed it wrong—Blogger won't let you put up a post with a broken tag—I simply forgot to close it at all. And somehow, that affected not only the other posts, but the entire page. I don't know enough about website design to know if that's weird or not, but it surprised me, anyway. It always seems to me like bits of layout I haven't consciously altered (like the predesigned layouts on this site) shouldn't be subject to change in response to anything I do (as opposed to Myspace, where I—with the help of a code-generating website—specify exactly how I want each element of my page to look). I really wish I understood more about this stuff; it is one of my goals to take a computer science class at Knox before I graduate.

Of course, I harbor no illusions that anyone actually looks at this blog, except perhaps my mother every now and again (Hi Mom!), so it's not like it would've mattered much anyway, but hey, I like to keep things tidy online. It's may way of compensating for living in a room that could be mistaken for a disaster area.

wasting time

Should you find yourself bored and unable to sleep sometime (as I seem to be wont to do lately), you might check out this fascinating site. It has a bunch of these so-called IAT tests, which test your unconscious preference of things over other things, e.g. presidential candidates, or old vs. young people, etc. I took the candidates one, as well as the gay people vs. straight people one, and (surprise surprise) I like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton (apparently not a completely up-to-date test) and not John McCain, and I have somewhere between a moderate and a strong preference of gay people over straight ones (I took it twice).

Or, alternately, you could follow my lead and become obsessed with Shoebox. Which I am probably going to go read now.

I have to work in the morning. Goddammit.

a long-ish post about very little

Happy Fourth of July!

So, I haven't posted in awhile. I would apologize, except there has been absolutely nothing of interest about which to post. There still isn't, really, but sometimes I get this nagging fear that if I don't post anything for a long enough period of time, I'll simply cease to exist. Okay, not really.

_{(Sort of.)}

Anyway, here we are. The reasons for my lack of online activity lately are many and varied—well, that's a lie. There are three basic reasons: I've either been at Dad's and unable to find a wireless signal (sometimes true), or I've been sleeping (often true), or I've been working (virtually always true, seems like). 'Cause I've been working rather a lot. And by "a lot" I mean I've been scheduled an average of 38 hours per week, and actually working between 40 and 42. And of course, this isn't counting my second job of the summer, which I just started this week: custodian of Seminary church (the one Mom goes to) in Roanoke. They needed somebody, and I was there, and voila! Another four hours of my life sold weekly to The Man.

Of course, it's nice that I'm working a lot, because it means I'm getting paid for a significant portion of my time that would otherwise be spent not making money in some form or another, but it also means that I'm tired a lot more, and when I'm not working, I'm quite often sleeping. This means that time I would otherwise be spending in at least a semi-productive manner ends up slept away, and thus I have written nothing (I had so many ideas at the end of last term!), read nothing (my list of must-reads grows steadily longer), and just generally done very little that makes my life feel worthwhile.

That's not to say I haven't done anything, of course. They've just been mostly little things. For example, in mid-June, I made two rhubarb pies, which were delicious. I also did a lot of online shopping, intending to purchase a Game Cube, but I ended up deciding to wait and ask for one for Christmas instead, because a) I am cheap, and b) my brother has one here and I will be abroad fall term, so I wouldn't have much call for one of my own until January anyway.

More recently, I have re-discovered The Shoebox Project, which, in case you didn't know, is basically the end-all be-all of Harry Potter fanfiction.* Seriously. I mean, I don't really get much into fanfics—I had a brief, mild obsession with fanfiction.net when the first LotR movie came out, but that, like my flirtation with MSN chat and my ninth grade crush, eventually faded. However, a friend sent me the link to this one and insisted I read it, so despite my misgivings (which were many—there's a lot of baaaaad fanfiction out there), I skimmed through part one, and then I had to go back and read it again, and then part two, and on and on and...it's so amazing. But anyway, the other day, I happened to go check it out again, and there was a post up from May that I hadn't seen, so I had to read that, and then I went back and reread some old parts, and and then of course I had to go reread HP 7, and part of 6, and now everything in the world reminds me of HP, or Shoebox, or both. Yes, I'm a dork, we've been over this, I know.

I must say though, going back, I was a little disappointed with the actual books after reading the fanfic. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed them immensely, and I still bawled like a baby at that one part in book seven (gets me every time!), but after taking Fiction Workshop last year and looking so closely at what makes good writing *good*, it struck me how very mediocre J.K.'s is at times. I mean, I like the stories—the plots and action are excellent, and the characters are for the most part good—but word choice, J.K., word choice! (Though it was nothing near as bad as Eragon—I picked that up on a number of friends' recommendations and couldn't even finish it, and that was my senior year of high school!)

Shoebox, however, seems to suffer much less from this sort of problem; granted, it's a piece of fanfiction posted on the internet, so there are the occasional errors and things that a good editor would otherwise catch, but it is so SO excellent in terms of character and sheer wit that I simply cannot compare it to the original books. It is co-authored by two girls, one of whom has just recently had an actual original book published (co-authored with somebody else), which I really really want to find and read now, because it sounds rather fabulous.

Anyway, I really have very little else to say just now, so I think I'll go to bed. Bed sounds nice. (Bed always sounds nice lately.) Cheerio, darlings.

_{*It's a slash fic (Remus/Sirius), just FYI for any snitty canon-worshiping link-clickers out there. Wouldn't want to offend anyone's delicate sensibilities by letting them get all caught up in such a wonderful story only to have it go someplace they don't want it to (but seriously, after reading the first half-dozen or so parts, who wouldn't want it to?).}

entirely inappropriate

...and yet so amusing.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I porn-surfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious porn-site of "hot chicks galore",
While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour,
"Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my free hardcore!"
Quoth the server, "404."