Yesterday (or still today in certain time zones) was Data Privacy Day.. I was made aware of this by a doodle on DuckDuckGo.

Of course I opened a new tab and rushed to see what the search engine that I used to use before they became evil had drawn for the event... And well, funny story, Google has totally avoided the subject and instead put up a doodle celebrating the 125th birthday of the biggest recorded snowflake.. p.s. please install Chrome.. Like WTF right ?

As you may know, if you have a Gaccount (Google account), Google has changed their terms of service so that now everything "G" is unified, and what you do in Youtube directly impacts the adverts in your emails, and things you search for.. . etc etc.. And all this with the magic wandish words like "simple", "easy" and "yada yada".

So why has Google omitted Data Privacy Day ? Maybe because data privacy is irrelevant in a system where your personal data lives across over 60 different services.. .. Perhaps I am wrong and it is just an innocent obsession with snowflakes..

BTW, this does not affect you if you do not have any account with Google, so for those rare people out there, bravo. : ]

Source code for Symantec's pcAnywhere has been borrowed.. . back in 2006, but they have finally had time to get around to that and now are advising their clients to disable the software.

Why ? What is the security problem with having your source code exposed ? There are many users, including myself, who use software for which the source code is published all over the Internet.

In this case it seems like Symantec had a security breach that they were aware of and only decided to address because they heard about a leak of their source code. Something obviously doesn't add up, either they don't bother to patch their products, even when they know it's insecure OR they have their reasons for making insecure products..

Moral of the story, using non-Free software is a very big security issue. You never know what it really does nor who it's intended to really serve.

It's no news that Fox News is mostly made up of real geniuses who always deliver properly researched, reliable and fair information. Today they published an article on how"savvy moron surfers circumvent Wikipedia blackout.

The article goes on about how people have found ways of getting access to knowledge by using alternative sources (other websites!!) but the most striking part was that they announced how to get actual content from the Wikipedia itself.. ORLY!

For the diehard Wiki-fan who simply cannot do without Wikipedia, there is even a way to circumvent the blackout, using a system that relies on Google's cache of online sites.

This is how: Enter a search item in Google's search box, click on the double gray arrow that will appear when you hover your mouse on the right side of the search results. When a snapshot shows up on the right, click on "cache" ... and voila! ... you will be directed to the last snapshot of your search item in Wikipedia.

Of course, you could also click on the "Learn more" link provided by the blacked out Wikipedia page and find a simpler solution like:

During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

Of course, for Fox News it is much easier to relay the stupidest crap on earth then to go read 4 sentences.

The short version is: "Take the time to read the blog post from Mocality about how Google does evil.

In even shorter, a company based in Kenya called Mocality has created a Kenya based business directory, the entries are provided by locals who would call in and then be financially rewarded by Mocality for their efforts.

A few months ago Mocality noticed some strange web traffic which after investigation turns out to be coming from Google. The juicy part is that Google employees was scraping the website to get business numbers and then cold call these companies to sell them services. Even worse, they claimed to be working with Mocality !

You should read the Mocality's blog post as it explains in detail what, how, etc, and it's quite interesting.

One more thing about those who relentlessly defend Google with arguments such as "it was a separate team" and such (and we are not talking about a rogue employee here, this was coordinated work), please note that if Google is not responsible and it is only the fault of the groups of teams involved, should it also be the other way around when it comes to innovations ?

A couple of days ago Rick Santorum said:

The next day he said he didn't say "black people", instead he probably said "bla people"..

A friend pointed out this article on how Richard Stallman was right all along and of course, I agree and actually was not part of those who think/thought that RMS is too paranoid/crazy. I don't have a mobile phone and don't have a googlebookspace account, etc etc.. Like you too right ?

Anyway, lately pieces are being put together, SOPA (crap), ProtectIP (also crap), HADOPI (merde), Spain blocking websites, Belarus bans anything foreign, etc etc. . . Oh, and Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act which in short allows the U.S. (of North America) to detain anyone they suspect/want indefinitely..

It's all crap, and then you realise that half of the "cool Internet" has been using Godaddy as their registrar !!

The other day I read about how Go Daddy supports SOPA (and loves Microsoft and kills elephants !). Since there has been a massive move of domains out of GoDaddy, including Wikipedia (still at GoDaddy as I write, c'mon Jimmy, it's been 5 days now!).

Since GoDaddy has changed their mind about SOPA but then it appears they haven't exactly changed their minds.

If you actually use GoDaddy you can pledge to boycott GoDaddy.. . and/or you could just up and leave them, I mean who registers a domain with a company whose name is "Go Daddy" ?

Important note, if you leave, be careful where you go as there are many GoDaddy re-sellers out there.. Just go to Gandi.net or EasyDNS, they both openly oppose SOPA and aren't just doing it for marketing's sake.

When visiting youhavedownloaded.com it will show you what you may have downloaded via torrent recently.

You may also enter an IP address to see what others may be downloading. The goal of this site seems to make it clear to users what information about them is actually publicly available.

People at torrentfreak have found that Sony, Universal and Fox like torrents.

Guess who else likes torrents ? Check out Nicolas Sarkozy's home IP and another Elysee IP (The French presidential home has 62.160.71.0/24, so you can check for others).

Herman Cain on foreign policy.. More specifically on the subject of Libya.

Herman Cain mocks Uzbekistan calling it Uzbeki Beki Beki Beki Stan Stan and points out he doesn't care to know much about anything outside his electrified fence.

Now the question is: "How does our society let someone like that even get close to anything related to public responsibility ?"

Today I heard about OEmbed, my first reaction was to implement it, of course ! The idea is to define a way of providing a page preview. Say you post a link on a microblog or something, the said microblog or something can visit the link, figure out what the resource is to obtain the preview, or OEmbed version (embeddable), and then chose to display that preview. Neat.

For it to work you need what they call an OEmbed provider, A provider is another service that will return the summary (JSON, XML or HTML). Apparently the client could specify the format they want the reply in.. To get the provider it seems there is a list of "well known providers" !! This means you take your link and ask the provider (another url) to transform your initial link into an OEmbed formatted something.... . FAIL !!11!!1.

Another thing is discovery, now this is a good thing, obviously, to put in the header a link to get the OEmbed version of the page, like RSS maybe ? The stupid part is that it requires that the link contains a url GET parameter, that supposes that instead of just providing a link to a OEmbed happy version of the page you MUST provide a "OEmbed provider link" that will take the URL of the page you are visiting, parse it and.. . BROKEN.

Why can't it just be an alternate link ?

Of course there are 3rd party providers now, and that is exactly what we don't need... It's so simple to generate a JSON or XML file that why would anyone ever think of a 3rd party web site whose role it would be to scrape your site to then provide a.. .OMG BROKEN.

As the idea is good but the implementation sucks why not simplify it, lets say we either use HEAD, like Jared Hanson and Vitorio Miliano pointed out in May 2008, or just use an alternate link a la RSS feed. If it's simple and easy for everyone to implement it will work.

Over and over again corporations have been trying to control the Internet and make it their product and governments have been trying to make it their terrain. Meanwhile many, the masses, think it's fine, nothing wrong with any of this People like shiny new products and the government is just trying to protect it's people (just like in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, China, etc etc).. . ..

Since the UK riots, the UK prime minister, David Cameron, would like to have a red button that can shut down "social media" in case. In case his subjects through a fit or something. A red button that can shut down Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry Messenger and probably everything I guess because.. I mean.. wait, maybe he doesn't know about the other websites and services that exist, lets not tell him.

Not so long after that, like a few days ago, during an attempted protest in San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cut off access to the mobile phone network. So, no protest, no problems. No problems at all.

Of course Anonymous played around with the BART's website and exposed how securely they store their user's data. However, penetrating websites and exposing data, flaws, etc is just not going to be enough, BART probably does not care, they will reset their passwords, apologise to their clients and move on. As for the incident, they gave a nice explanation for their actions.

Maybe I'm just getting too paranoid, I mean, communications are private and nobody reads your emails, chat sessions and SMSes right ? Of course not, but still, police arrest a man for organising a water fight via Blackberry Messenger! A water fight !? And how did they know ... .

Maybe because Blackberry has agreed to help the police and has probably opened their doors wide open so the government can investigate on the riots. And on anything else they seem to stumble on. Like water fights ?! I still can't believe this.

Many have been comparing the looting and riots to the Arab Spring, obviously that is stupid as the UK's citizens have so much freedom compared to any Arab Spring affected country. That being said, as they are fighting and gaining freedom, others are getting very close to losing it.

Maybe we will all soon be dreaming of escaping to North Korea.