With all the hullaballoo about internet privacy prompted by Google’s recent actions, I followed a link to Life Hacker’s privacy guide. (Check it out.)
… which led me to their first recommendation: Adblock Plus.
Oh, good, I thought. Since I already use the very excellent AdBlock extension in Safari … well, ‘Plus’ has to be good, right? … er, nope.
I guess it depends:
Well, annoyance free unless you want to use Safari ... (if it works for you, great)
I’m not a big Firefox fan.
– P
Spotted this tonight …
Good grief. (Huffington Post - click)
The sight of Mitt Romney trying to out-Conservative the religious right’s darling Rick Santorum is breathtaking. Poll-driven fruitcakes.
It’s like that here in NZ (and everywhere I guess) when people throw up clichés and then pillory and demonize their ‘opponents’ — rather than argue or debate issues with them.
Here’s a clip of a conversation I was part of on Twitter last night … Cynical? Maybe. Too cynical? Hmmm
http://twitter.com/#!/FrancisUrquhart/status/171878064131809280
– P
"The best hackers are ..." shirts also available in 'Chinese, Indian, Black, White ...' (click)
From Jack Shafer’s preview of Max Holland’s book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat
Every source leaks for a reason, and it’s usually not about preserving the constitution and the American way. As Stephen Hess writes, sources have many reasons to leak. They leak to boost their own egos. They leak to make a goodwill deposit with a reporter that they hope to withdraw in the future. They leak to advance their policy initiative. They leak to launch trial balloons and sometimes even to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. But until contesting evidence arrives, it’s usually a safe bet that a leak is what Hess calls an “Animus Leak,” designed to inflict damage on another party. [emphasis added]
This is relevant today when considering the faux scandal around NZ Foreign minister Murray McCully’s ‘leaked emails’ which conveniently publicly spill trenchant criticism of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade just as the razor hovers over staff in the department in a (yawn) crackdown by a National government on ‘waste and inefficiency in the public service’ … zzzz.
It strikes me as plausible that 3 News resident ‘deceitful bastard‘ Patrick Gower may have been played like a cheap violin last night when he rather breathlessly promulgated the ‘scoop’ that ‘Russian hackers’ [cough] allegedly part of the shadowy RBN (!), had an interest in the McCully emails … and then leaked the ones about wasteful expenditure in MFAT.
Oh rilly?
Machiavelli will be licking his lips.
– P
UPDATE: Keith Ng has a good take on the plausibility [splutter] of the ‘Russian hackers’ story here at publicaddress.net including the question:
Why would a Russian hacker redact the identity of someone who’s on pretty chummy terms with McCully?
Yes.
Fran O’Sullivan, writing in the NZ Herald today about the controversial Crafar farms sales process has this exactly right, in my opinion:
Who benefits from a protracted legal dispute? The lawyers. (image: http://agapegeek.com/)
The door is open to Shanghai Pengxin to change aspects of its original application. The OIO said yesterday this often happens during the application process as “applicants refine their applications and agree to conditions of consent.”
It is not hard to foresee an outcome where the Chinese firm submits a new application which places stronger emphasis on the value proposition to New Zealand from its proposed joint-venture with Landcorp to manage the 16 farms, and on its plans in the export space.
It is also not hard to see that if that application is recommended for approval, then approved by Cabinet ministers, that it will again be challenged through a new judicial review.
The Crafar farms saga will continue to play out.
Yup and yup.
In my other life I often see disputes occur (or engineered?) which enrich the lawyers* and lighten the pockets of everyone else involved. It’s a real trap.
On Fran’s other desiccated talking points about farm sales being an eternally good thing for New Zealand’s involvement in a global economy — and to fend off “upward pressure on domestic interest rates, increasing the risk of exposure to economic shocks” (Oh noes!) … meh, not so much.
– P
* and other ‘professionals‘ like Matthew Hooton.
Can there be any doubt that the NZ Herald is taking an anti-Winston Peters editorial line?
Repeated use of an unflattering photograph of a politician is one way newspapers reveal their biases.
Here’s today’s story (by the intrepid Claire Trevett) about a recent dinner — gasp! — involving the NZ First leader and Labour Party leader David Shearer. Look at the photo of Peters. Distinctly unflattering, isn’t it?
It’s also not the first, second, third, or even fourth time the paper has chosen to use that same Mark Mitchell snapshot to illustrate a story about Peters. See links below.
Now, it’s no skin off my nose, but judging by appearances, it seems pretty plain the NZ Herald possesses, let’s call it a point of view about Winston Peters … and by the repeated use of that photo they’re letting us know what it is.
Is there another explanation? What do you think?
– P
Why, it’s almost enough to make one wonder about the credibility of the words they publish.
UPDATE: I received a response from @NZHerald. See comments.
Apropos Another Google privacy FAIL (grrr) wherein we discussed Google defeating Safari’s privacy settings to plant ‘third party cookies’ despite my specific instructions to block them … look at the privacy setting in Google Chrome…
Believe it -- or NOT?
Why should we believe them? ‘Unfair and deceptive practices‘ sounds right to me.
“Google has clearly engaged in ‘unfair and deceptive’ practices,” said Consumer Watchdog privacy project director John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director.
“They have been lying about how people can protect their privacy in their instructions about how to opt out of receiving targeted advertising.”
– P
When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9’s Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.
We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.
— IE Blog (via John Gruber)
From Gallup:
Americans Still Rate Iran Top U.S. Enemy
China is second on the “greatest enemy” list
by Frank Newport February 20, 2012PRINCETON, NJ — Americans most frequently mention Iran when asked to name the country they consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy, and the 32% who do so is up from 25% in 2011. China is second on the list, with significantly fewer Americans mentioning North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq — the countries that round out the top five. …
Full Gallup article here.
So, what do you think?:
(a) Reasoned judgement based on dispassionate analysis, by Americans, of the geopolitical factors affecting their nation?
or
(b) The result of relentless warmongering and drum beating by witting and unwitting agents of the military industrial complex? (Such as this from CNN’s Erin Burnett.)
You decide.
– P
One-point-one percent blogger Cactus Kate has written a well-worth reading column for the National Business Review website with the engaging title Who is John Banks? (I’m not kidding.)
I agree with this part (below) and have said something similar for years:
Three sides to Banks
I believe there are at least three sides to John Banks. The social conservative. The entrepreneur. Then there is the deep political pragmatist. He’s lost elections and he’s won them. He remains as emotionally void and cold in victory as he does in defeat.
Of the three sides to Banks I can identify I respect the hard-working street fighting entrepreneur. I can laugh off his moments of deep social conservatism. I can also see the advantage now in ACT having a deep political pragmatist.
As I said pre-election in Banks: Doing the basics very well the guy is an unquestionably good communicator, whether you like him/agree with him or not — being a protege of arch-populist Robert Muldoon has done him a lot of good.
Why is he now leader of ACT? Read Cathy’s column and let me know what you think…
– P
Before last November’s election I posted a comment about National Party proxy Cameron Slater’s intense and apparently undying hatred of Winston Peters in National’s desperados get perfervid about Peters.
Of course, that was when it looked like the John Key/John Banks ‘cup of tea’ — plus Peters’ own campaigning ability and talent for capitalising on the vaguest, slenderest sense of ‘outrage’ — might be turning his party’s electoral fortunes around.
As it turned out, despite the hysteria alarm and ad hominem attacks propagated by National Party figures from the lowly attack blogger up to National’s chief salesman … Peters (and his team) marched triumphantly back into Parliament with 6.6% of the vote. That’s democracy for you.
Anyway, back then I described Cameron Slater’s contribution to the political discourse in pretty negative terms:
Convicted criminal Cameron Slater delivers ‘comments’ (retch) that, if not defamatory, are personally denigrating, abusive and insulting (shrieking all the while that National’s enemies Labour and the Greens are ‘nasty’. Such rich irony).
Like a dead rat stinking and rotting in a wall, convicted criminal Cameron Slater’s deceptive and one-eyed ‘reports’ (vomit) lower the tone of political discourse around him to something worse than goofy drunken sledging. He tells people he’s ‘mellowed’, and maybe that’s true, maybe it’s just pre-election jitters at work, but what he’s been writing lately (in my personal view) is inaccurate and vile, a lot of it.
Most of the time what he says doesn’t matter. That’s probably true about this time too, since, his attempted self-aggrandising fantasy life aside, convicted criminal Cameron Slater blows his dog whistle mainly to his racist, homophobic, Tory in-crowd. Although his (no other word for it:) bullying attempts to pick a fight/entrap politicians on Twitter strike me as ‘off ‘in a different way. He’s a stalker, but then, hasn’t social media made all of us that way, a little bit?
It may appear mean-spirited of me to use the epithet ‘convicted criminal Cameron Slater’. Sure, I can understand how that could offend. But for context, read this post: Thin-skinned media critic Cameron Slater spits dummy, you’ll see that he routinely suggests those in the media and others with whom he disagrees (whether personally or um, professionally, I guess) act unethically — even illegally. So the irony of actual criminal judges like Justice Harrison and Justice Harvey being on the record with their assessment of Cameron Slater’s own actions and his plausibility should not be ignored, surely?
Anyway, since then, November, when I last wrote about Cameron, a quick review of his outpourings (yik) shows me nothing’s really changed — except perhaps an increase in the volume of bile being pressed through the distorted sphincter of Cameron’s view of reality. He’s continued to trot his chorusline — belting out his signature tunes, including his predictable loathing of anyone/anything on ‘the left’ and also his fixated personal attacks on Winston Peters, who Cameron Slater (convictions notwithstanding) calls a ‘liar‘ — and worse — on a regular basis.
I mentioned Cameron’s stalker propensity/obsession: his “…bullying attempts to pick a fight/entrap politicians on Twitter [which] strike me as ‘off ‘… “ Well, he’s still doing that too — the very epitome of an internet troll. Continue reading →
This is doing the rounds at the moment … author(s) unknown — there are versions of this cry of the small c conservative all over the internet.
WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER!
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE
1930’s 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s !
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos…
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos…
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on a Sunday, somehow we didn’t starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……..
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. Continue reading →
The Wall Street Journal reported that Google engineers had developed — and then rolled out — a ‘workaround’ to defeat MY privacy setting in Safari (oh yeah, I take it personally) where I had overtly intended to block third party cookies, viz:
A clear intention to block third parties like advertisers from setting cookies in my browser to track my history. Google found a way to defeat that and used it. Scummy. (Safari OSX)
Here’s what WSJ’s Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reported:
Google’s iPhone Tracking
Web Giant, Others Bypassed Apple Browser Settings for Guarding Privacy
By JULIA ANGWIN And JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES
Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.
The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.
Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.
That “Google disabled its code …” is followed by this damning comment …
In Google’s case, the findings appeared to contradict some of Google’s own instructions to Safari users on how to avoid tracking. Until recently, one Google site told Safari users they could rely on Safari’s privacy settings to prevent tracking by Google. Google removed that language from the site Tuesday night.
This is, of course, being discussed all over the interwebs, with Google saying it’s been misunderstood. Henry Blodget, ran a bit of defence for the many-tentacled beast search/advertising giant in GOOGLE: The Wall Street Journal Is Full Of Crap—Here’s What That Apple Safari ‘Tracking’ Was Really About but even he, in laying out the ‘facts’, says:
But it’s also no surprise that people are once again stunned by Google’s behavior here. And Google’s statement will not set everyone at ease.
The facts are that:
- Google secretly developed a way to circumvent default privacy settings established by a hated competitor, Apple
- Google enabled this workaround to further its own advertising (revenue) and social-networking goals.
- Google then used the workaround to drop ad-tracking cookies on the Safari users, which is exactly the sort of practice that Apple was trying to prevent
Given the scrutiny around Google’s power and privacy practices, Google’s decision to do this can charitably be described as tone-deaf. More accurately, it can be described as idiotic. But, as usual, there’s a backstory.
What the hell is Google thinking to design a system to 'workaround' (trick) my specific privacy settings to limit cookies? (Safari iOS settings)
I think it’s scummy of Google. Scummy. Even the very reasonable John Battelle seems to agree, provisionally:
In this case, what Google and others have done sure sounds wrong – if you’ve going to resort to tricking a browser into offering up information designated by default as private, you need to somehow message the user and explain what’s going on. Then again, in the open web, you don’t have to – most browsers let you set cookies by default. In iOS within Safari, perhaps such messaging is technically impossible, I don’t know. But these shenanigans are predictable, given the dynamic of the current food fight between Google, Apple, Facebook, and others. It’s one more example of the sad state of the Internet given the war between the Internet Big Five. And it’s only going to get worse, before, I hope, it gets better again.
John Battelle also mentions Flash — which, truth be told, I was very dubious about when I heard there was such a thing as ‘Flash cookies‘. I downloaded Flush app for OSX to get rid of them periodically *— before following John Gruber’s lead and removing the Flash plug-ins from my computer … relying on the Flash player embedded in Google Chrome (ha! the irony), which quits when I quit Chrome, unlike system-wide Flash, as I understand it.
This move from Google, following their streetview camera cars snooping on private wifi networks and in the context of their soon-to-be-unified ‘privacy policies’ makes me doubt them even more.
I think Google’s intentions are suspect, and I’m moving to a ‘guilty until proven innocent‘ attitude to them. The same view I have of Facebook, incidentally.
GOOG Safari tracking is same “co. doing something it shouldn’t, but w/o nefarious purpose” storyline appearing again & again in tech space.
Yeah, it’s a pattern.
For me, it’s time to disentangle myself from Google, if possible. They’re doing ‘evil’, in my eyes.
– P
* I just ran Flush and it cleaned out 83 flash cookies. What the hell?
Update: And yeah (hell yeah) I’ve purged the 3790 cookies stored on Safari.
I can see both sides of this conflict, which is rarely spelt out so plainly.
Honolulu mayoral candidate tries to get Civil Beat reporter thrown off campaign
by Andrew Beaujon
Published Feb. 17, 2012 11:38 am Poynter InstituteFormer Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano is running for mayor in Honolulu. And he does not like what Honolulu Civil Beat’s been writing about him.
“There is no point in talking to a reporter who accuses me of lacking in ‘believability,’” Cayetano writes to Civil Beat editor John Temple. Of City Beat reporter Michael Levine, Cayetano says, “I will not answer his questions, his phone calls or emails.”
“If Civil Beat wants my opinion on issues — send another of its reporters,” Cayetano writes.
One problem with the former governor’s media criticism: Levine didn’t write the piece Cayetano felt impugned him. Temple did.
“People in public life do not get to choose who covers them,” Temple writes.
I know from personal experience that some news media organizations cave in to political pressure far more subtle than that expressed by former Governor Cayetano. Indeed, some anticipate such objections from ‘newsmakers’. Like an approval-seeking poodle, they cravenly act to stifle coverage which, they apparently believe, may, possibly, be open to imagined criticism from those covered (or their media minders). Such shadow boxing eviscerates journalistic integrity, in my view. Say what you like.
I know that some newsroom directors and their management masters feel that opinions about politicians’ believability expressed by journalists outside the organization’s legitimate realm (i.e. outside the news ‘product’ of their newsroom, e.g. personal social media use or blogs) are a matter for a policy of control (and censorship?) by them.
This “I will not answer his questions” boycott threat is rare, and short-lived in my experience. A partisan, inaccurate or unfair journalist or reporter, as we have discussed many times here, is not doing his or her job. Their duty to their readers — and their subjects — is to be truthful and accurate in their reporting, not necessarily in their opinion about a politician’s trustworthiness.
Governor Cayetano’s complaint runs pretty close to “I don’t like that reporter”. Tough. Professional journalists observe a code of ethics. Pretend-journalists, like partisan attack bloggers, aren’t troubled by such niceties.
‘The View from Nowhere’ fake neutrality’s spell is losing its power — rightly.
– P
See my earlier post: Do your opinions invalidate your reporting?
Congratulations (whether they’re deserved or not) to spin doctor Matthew Hooton (last discussed in Matthew Hooton and the exquisite agony of being a paid shill). Look:
Oh.
Read Patrick Gower’s column here.
– P
Wow.
And he knows a few, too.
So ‘truth‘? That’s what News International and News Corporation are aiming for? *cough* Fox News *cough*
– P
Gay marriage vote in NJ faces sure veto from Gov. Chris Christie, who prefers the issue be settled by the voters via pie eating contests
Pure genius from whoever runs the parody Twitter account for New York Times public editor.
I laughed.
