Chris Peterson

A random response to a MacRumors thread I completely forgot I’d created years ago reminded me that I created this video back when I was an Apple Campus Rep, which demonstrates how to use a Guitar Hero controller to input music into Garageband:

It never went anywhere – the Campus Rep program never did anything with it – but it was fun as hell to work on, even if it wasn’t especially technically challenging.

Documentation on the YouTube comments if you click through.

Google’s orkut gets the right idea:

Imagine Sarah, a 21 year old girl who just created an orkut profile. To get started, she adds her college friends to her friend list. They share photos, join communities, exchange scraps, discuss everything that’s hot on campus. A few days later Sarah finds out that some friends from high school are also on orkut and adds them: what’s better than keeping in touch with old friends?

Then Sarah gets her first job and adds her office colleagues to orkut: you can’t decline a friend request from your boss, can you? Sarah’s social network keeps growing. Even her parents, aunts, uncles and cousins are on orkut, and she adds them to her friend list.

The college gang, old friends from high school, office colleagues, family, everyone is in Sarah’s friend list now. Soon enough she will not be able to share anything with anyone anymore – after all, jokes and photos from the office party should be shared only with her work colleagues. Scraps and photos of her baby nephew at the family reunion should only be seen by members of her family. The plans for Saturday night and the photos of the parties she went to should be seen only by her party friends – Sarah does not want her boss or her young cousin to see those.

Just like Sarah, we all maintain different groups of friends, and the Internet was not able to reflect that. Until now, social networks treated people from different groups like they were all the same: they were all “friends”.

So we asked ourselves: does it need to work this way on the Internet? Can we reproduce our groups of friends from real life on the Internet? The answer is “yes!” Starting today, we will change the core function of orkut so we can share and interact with different groups of friends on the Internet just like we do in real life.

At least someone has the right idea.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately – the admissions cycle is starting, which means my blogging will probably become somewhat infrequent over the coming months.

When Facebook announced its places feature, you may have wondered “hrm, how long will it be before this undermines my privacy?”

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook has some observations:

One feature that has attracted a fair amount of buzz is the ability for your friends to tag you in different places. That means you may not actually be somewhere, yet your friends will tag you as a joke and now you’re showing up at a random strip club.

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While you may be fine with Facebook’s existing Places privacy settings, I know there are plenty of friends on Facebook who I don’t want to track my location.

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One strange thing about Facebook Places is that despite controlling who can view your location information from within your profile with the previous setting, anybody who visits a location will potentially be able to view that you’ve been there before.

Nick runs through the ways to change your privacy settings. It’s worth the read, but here’s the short version:

• Go to the Privacy Tab and click “Customize Settings”
• Change your settings. For example, I disabled allowing my friends to check me in elsewhere, and noone can see where I check in.

I’m not big on the whole locations movement. Maybe you are, and that’s fine. But if you aren’t, Facebook just pitched you a curveball by opting users into the Places feature, so here’s how you opt out.

James Grimmelmann on the Google/Verizon “deal” that has been alleged to oppose net neutrality, support net neutrality, or be totally ambivalent towards it.

Grimmelmann is totally correct in the main thrust of his post:

I would like to say, though, that this secretly negotiated private “deal” is a terrible, terrible blunder on Google’s part, considered purely from the perspective of its own self-interest. Google has enjoyed a generally good relationship with many activists and civil society groups who want to protect individual freedoms online. Even if what Google is now proposing is good policy, the backroom nature of the process sends an unmistakable message to Google’s erstwhile allies: we’re with you only as long as it’s convenient for us.

and other good stuff besides.

That said it bears noting that while Grimmelmann begins his post with:

The Verizon-Google Net neutrality deal is now public. In brief: neutrality for Plain Old Internet, transparency but not neutrality for wireless, and nothing for “Additional Online Services” unless they “threaten the availability” of POI.

it may actually be a bit more complicated than that, as the actual framework appears to leave quite a bit of wiggle room.

Non-Discrimination Requirement: In providing broadband Internet access service, a provider would be prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content, application, or service in a manner that causes meaningful harm to competition or to users. Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.

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Network Management: Broadband Internet access service providers are permitted to engage in reasonable network management. Reasonable network management includes any technically sound practice: to reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network; to ensure network security or integrity; to address traffic that is unwanted by or harmful to users, the provider’s network, or the Internet; to ensure service quality to a subscriber; to provide services or capabilities consistent with a consumer’s choices; that is consistent with the technical requirements, standards, or best practices adopted by an independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization; to prioritize general classes or types of Internet traffic, based on latency; or otherwise to manage the daily operation of its network.

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Additional Online Services: A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service complying with the above principles could offer any other additional or differentiated services. Such other services would have to be distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services and could include traffic prioritization.

I would never seek to second-guess Grimmelmann’s read of the law here, and if he thinks this is still a fundamental neutrality policy, I believe him. But though this framework isn’t quite a tiered Internet, it isn’t exactly a flat neutrality policy either, at least of the kind, say, Tim Wu would advocate.

ChatRoulette collecting IP addresses, screenshots:

Now Andrey Ternovskiy, chief executive officer at Chatroulette has had enough.

“I believe that Chatroulette was great in the first honeymoon days after it was launched, before it was discovered by a strange people, who started to abuse the true freedom and democratic nature of the service,” he wrote on the site’s blog, upset at “difficulties raising venture capital”, dealing with “negative feedback” and doing what he could to ensure the site was still “legally operating in the United States territory.”

Ternovskiy said that he has had a “breakthrough” in dealing with these dramas by applying “the laws of a real world on an internet application.”

“We’ve started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations,” he said.

“We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour.

“We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have.”

The end of an era. And I can’t help but feel a strange sort of pity for those who (mistakenly) thought they’d finally found anonymity in ChatRoulette, only to discover they were actually on LogRoulette.

Site here.

This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.

Click. Installed.

From AllFacebook, on a presentation by Google on a rumored new social utility:

The overall theme of the presentation was consistent: we have multiple groups and within those groups there are individuals who we have strong ties with and many more who we have weak ties with. There are also even temporary ties, like the person at the restaurant who served you food last night. While getting the system right on this is extremely difficult, the strong vs. weak ties is something that Facebook has yet to enable users to control.

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If Paul Adams’ presentation is accepted as one of the primary perspectives of Google on social, perhaps the argument for Google’s new “Facebook killer” would be that there needs to be a more effective user-interface (UI) which helps users to control these various groups. Rather than dismissing it as a service for “advanced” users, perhaps the interface has simply not evolved far enough to give users the actual control that they want.

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That would support the argument presented by Paul Adams in the slide below which states “If your privacy practices aren’t transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower usage.” Only Facebook knows how great of an impact the latest privacy fiasco had on the company but it’s clear that Google sees this as a weakness.

If this is true, then Google has precisely the right privacy perspective to outflank Facebook on this issue. And they’re about the only company with the muscle to do it.

During the past two weeks – during which I was on a family vacation to Alaska, which is more desolate and beautiful than you could imagine – I found out, via phone, that I had achieved literary greatness: a letter to the editor published in The New Yorker.

As a newly minted and fanatical follower of Eurovision, I greatly enjoyed Anthony Lane’s piece on the contest (“Only Mr. God Knows Why,” June 28th). My only disappointment is that Lane did not mention what has arguably become the most widely beloved phenomenon of Eurovision 2010. The saxophonist from Moldova known as Epic Sax Guy entranced millions with his white Wayfarers, thrusting hips, and muscle vest. Epic Sax Guy has claimed the hearts (and perhaps the minds) of new Eurovisionistas everywhere. He is Eurovision in precipitate form, with all else boiled away until nothing is left but hips and kitsch. Long after we are dead in the ground, Epic Sax Guy’s hips and horn will be thrusting throughout the digital Zeitgeist.

For those of you who’ve missed it:

I was just elected to the board of NCAC.

From their website:

The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of fifty-two participating organizations, is dedicated to protecting free expression and access to information by:

• Providing educational resources and advocacy support to individuals and organizations responding to incidents of censorship
• Educating and empowering the public to fight censorship
• Documenting and reporting on current censorship issues
• Expanding public awareness of the prevalence of censorship and suppression of information
• Working to influence judicial opinions about free expression and access to information by submitting amici briefs.

In light of my work (along with former ABFFE intern Alita Edelman) on mapping banned books, some current members of the board nominated me. I’ll be advising them on a variety of issues, including new media, digital native perspectives on censorship and information issues, and so on.

Excited!

From Nudge blog:

The process of mentally bucketing money in multiple accounts is often combined with earmarking the accounts for specific goals…While it seems like an inconsequential process, earmarking can have a dramatic effect on retirement saving. Cheema and Soman (2009) found that earmarking savings in an envelope labeled with a picture of a couple’s children nearly doubled the savings rate of very low income parents.

The results by Cheema and Soman could explain why some US financial institutions offer clients the opportunity to label college savings accounts with a child’s name. Saving becomes easier because the money is earmarked for the education of a specific child.

I already do this with my dozen savings accounts from ING Direct – “Car”, “Rent”, “Groceries”, “Vacation”, etc – but it’s nice to have some more empirical validation for what I’m pushing.