New "how private is Facebook" article in the NYTimes:

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

See? This is why I like Flickr for photos

An info@ account for one of the sites I admin ended up with this gem in the inbox. The emphasis is mine.

Declined, till the invitations ceased. It would even earlier than this, for five fragments have it is best that these
people should know there of a metal band, which has not
been found. This educate but, before all its other advantages
charm, fell down her thin cheek. It’s you who are punishing
shock: it meant an earlier separation than i had see reggie
enjoying himself. I fancy the poor known for the known what?
said madeleine faintly. Repetition. The ghosts that vanished
when the i would then madame, with her teeth set, tied watched
giraud at work, i was keenly interested. The suspicious
quickness with which he said, ‘not i nodded, my interest
growing. ‘and the daughter?’ ah.t ce bon japp,’ said poirot.
what does he want,.

I run most of my accounts through email through Gmail and other providers, so I don’t get a chance to see the occasional diamonds in the porn-ad-filled rough of the spam world.

(Via ArsTechnica)

I swear — our lawmakers’ lack of tech knowledge will eventually be our downfall:

Despite the MPAA's recent admission that its collegiate file-swapping numbers were wildly inaccurate, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act sailed through the House today by a 354-58 margin with its controversial intellectual property provisions still in place.

COAA makes a host of changes to the higher education landscape in the US, but for our purposes, the most interesting was the requirement that schools make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping and that they also make plans to implement network filtering. Not making such plans would carry no consequences, however, and we're told by House staffers that no one's federal financial aid is in danger.

Yeah right. If it’s not there, then how on Earth would the Feds enforce this? And why are attempts to ensure that no one jacks with federal funding being driven away in a cloud of procedural obfuscation and spin?

Intense opposition has also come from groups that believe the measure would cut federal funding to schools that don’t comply (see this Santa Clara University newspaper article for an example).

While Congressional staffers insist this isn’t true, others in Congress have gone so far as to offer amendments spelling it out explicitly. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced and then pulled such an amendment yesterday, with his staff telling reporters that Cohen wanted to offer the amendment himself; when that proved impossible due to his travel schedule, he apparently decided to pull it. It’s an odd explanation, but it’s the only one were getting right now.

Shut down the P2P network traffic inbound to universities and you’ll stop what—a couple per cent of all illegal P2P? Why even waste the country’s time? Oh wait. I know why. The RIAA. They can’t get ISPs to do their dirty work, so they come up with a plan B — get lobbying stooges to lean on the feds and pick on universities to force compliance or risk losing federal money.

The big joke in DC is that our nation’s laws are written by the 20-something staffers that work for Senators and reps, so I have to ask how a piece of legislation so ignorant of the internet’s functioning gets created in the first place. I mean we know that these people’s bosses don’t know anything about the “series of tubes,” but we can depend on the twentysomethings to be savvy, can’t we?

When oh when are we going to get something like this here in the US? I know that the fact that the US is vastly bigger than Spain or France or Germany makes comparisons a little difficult, but my feeling is that a 220mph train a la Europe would have a lot of fans all over the country.

While flying will still be marginally faster, the evidence is strong that many people will choose to stay firmly on the ground, given the choice. On a similar route between Madrid and Seville that is already in operation, more than 80% of travelers choose the train.

You could imagine something like this doing well connecting Chicago and NYC or Washington DC to NYC. You could also see how people might want to take it across the southwest — like a Phoenix to Houston express or something. Of course, it would definitely take government intervention/stimulus to actually bring it about, and for that we’ve got to have a change in political priorities.

I’m not sure exactly how this news matches up with this innaugural post, but they’re both in the same ballpark, numbers-wise, and they both are saying the same thing — US broadband sucks, and it’s only going to get worse unless we have some legislative action to deal with it. This alone is pretty breathtaking:

US broadband might now be widely available, but it's slow and relatively expensive. Between 1999 and 2006, the US fell from third place to 20th in the International Telecommunications Union's broadband usage measurements.When it comes to average connection speeds, the US isn't beaten just by Japan but also by France, Korea, Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Germany. And it's not about population size or density, either; Finland, Sweden, and Canada beat us on most broadband metrics despite having lower population density. Finally, we're getting beat on price, coming in 18th worldwide when it comes to cost per megabyte.

So basically, we get slower broadband for more money in the US. That’s what the fealty to “the free market” has gotten us in this case. Never mind that there’s really no such thing as a “free market” when you talk about top-level IP communications; there’s maybe 2 or 3 companies, even in a giant, powerhouse economy like the US, capable of going to the trouble to actually upgrade the national network. When you’ve got such a small group of capable actors, the competitive incentive basically falls to zero.

The lack of national leadership (usually explained as a need to let the market do its thing without interference) has meant that broadband is still not treated as a utility that is made available to all people at reasonable prices. States have recognized the problem, and many (such as California and Kentucky) have launched innovative public/private partnerships of their own to bring broadband to all members of the state.

Here’s my favorite part of the post, and it gets back to my comparison from my earlier post on the subject—we can have all of this for about the same amount of money as a relatively minor chunk of time in Iraq. By spreading the cost around among state governments, the feds, and a TBD public or private-sector entity, we’ll effectively reduce the cost of this upgrade to $32 billion:

All that’s needed is $8 billion a year for four years from the feds, with the states also coming up (collectively) with the same amount. Put another way, 116 days of the Iraq war could fund the entire federal $32 billion contribution. We’ve made such investments before, and not just in roads and highways; the Universal Service Fund continue to dole out billions of dollars to fund rural phone connections, for instance.

Hopefully we’ll have the political will to pull this off this year. If not, it should happen in 2009 when we’ve finally got a Democrat in the White House.