Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook via Gizmodo

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn’t the most usable thing in the world, at least they’ve tried to stay focused and aren’t trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren’t. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn’t mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed – have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook’s revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. I don’t like their application nor how they do business and so I’ve made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Also, Facebook makes deleting your account stupid confusing. And even if you do, they wait 14 days before they actually delete it. And who really knows if it’s ever really gone.

Anyway, I deleted mine. The most interesting thing I found on that stupid site over six months was Mafia Wars, which has the same depth of skill as Whack-a-Mole. I just reclaimed about 10 minutes a day!

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/63380

There’s only one organization on Earth that can spend $2.7 billion dollars on a database system that doesn’t work that gets to stay in business. Well, I guess there are lots of organizations like that, but they are all part of the federal government.

You’ve got disinterested, overpaid bureaucrats led by political appointees who don’t really care about the process implementing a work force of unionized dimwits recruited from a pool of ACORN flops using a system engineered and administered by a legally-mandated rainbow coalition of jackasses who couldn’t cut it in the private sector.

And it’s not working so well? Hmm.

Anyway, next up, Electronic Medical Records. Yay!

Information technology problems at the U.S. Census Bureau could cause inaccuracies in this year’s constitutionally mandated count of the U.S. population, according to government auditors.

The Census Bureau is specifically having problems with two IT systems.  One is the Paper-Based Operational Control System (PBOC), which is the computer database where Census Bureau field operatives upload the data they collect from people who did not mail responses to the bureau.

The second is the Decennial Applicant Personnel and Payroll System (DAPPS), which is the system used to keep track of, and pay, the more than 600,000  temporary federal workers who help conduct the Census operations.

Last Thursday, the GAO released a report on the Census Bureau’s IT problems entitled, “Data Collection is Under Way, But Reliability of Key Information Technology Systems Remains a Risk.” The report indicated that the government has known about the problem for some time.

The report stated that last February, the GAO had testified that “key IT systems — most notably an automated system used to manage field-data collection known as the Paper-Based Operations Control System (PBOCS), and a personnel and payroll processing system called the Decennial Applicant Personnel and Payroll System (DAPPS) — were experiencing significant performance issues.”

The new GAO report concluded that IT problems have not been solved.

“Aside from the mail response rate, which is outside of the Bureau’s direct control, the most significant risk jeopardizing the cost and quality of the enumeration lies in the performance problems that continue to plague DAPPS and PBOCS,” said the report. “Indeed, neither system has yet demonstrated the ability to function reliably under full operational loads, and the limited amount of time that remains to improve the reliability of these systems creates a substantial challenge for the Bureau.”

Using the New Orleans field operations as an example, the report described how the PBOC system worked very slowly, or sometimes not at all, and that for this reason the Census Bureau had to restrict the number of field operatives who could use it.

The operating budget for the NRFU is $2.7 billion, according to Goldenkoff’s written testimony.

Goldenkoff’s also testified that the DAPPS system for handling the field workers payroll lacks capacity and is “sluggish.”

The Census Bureau’s IT deficiencies also make it difficult to accurately provide a final cost for the 2010 Census, which is currently estimated at around $14.7 billion.

“Key information technology systems continue to experience performance functionality shortfalls and these systems can affect the ultimate scheduled cost and success of the Census,” said Gordon.

Goldenkoff pointed out that not addressing the IT problems could result in the Census costing more than the estimated $14.7 billion figure.

I’m an IT geek by trade, so it’s nice when cultural and technical stuff intersect. This one is pretty interesting.

Mozilla urges users to switch to Bing

The ripples caused by Google’s Eric Schmidt’s words are spreading further and further throughout the internet. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, wrote on his blog, urging people to switch away from Google to Bing, which he claims has a better privacy policy. Dotzler points users to the Firefox Bing add-on.

We’ve all read the words from the Google CEO, but in case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll repeat them once more. "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place," Schmidt argued, "If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

"That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here," Dotzler writes, "And here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing (yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google)."

Mozilla makes the Firefox web browser, which competes directly with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft runs Bing search, which competes directly with Google Search. Google makes the Chrome web browser, which is based on Firefox, and which also competes directly with Internet Explorer.

So we have Mozilla throwing one of its most important partners under the bus in favor of their common enemy, Microsoft. And Mozilla is doing this because Google apparently has no respect for their users’ privacy.

Mozilla is the big winner here when it comes to credibility and trust.

For those of you who think that Schmidt has a point, that anybody who has something they want to hide must be guilty of something, read this from security expert Bruce Schneier:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

[...]

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

[...]

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.