Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

July 22nd, 2010

AT&T
This one is just charmingly funny. Someone made a serious booboo at AT&T recently which resulted in every customer getting an email announcing new store openings in the midwest. It’s nice and all that there’s a new store opening in Michigan, but I live in Philadelphia. Oh, okay, wait, there’s another store opening somewhere else I can’t easily get to? La de fuckin’ da. Twitter is abuzz about this snafu. Will AT&T send yet another email apologizing or come up with a more creative way of harassing their customers to apologize for harassing them?

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

August 12th, 2009

It’s everything I’d hoped and more. That is all. Also, I’m typing this from my phone.

July 10th, 2009

kyo: i added a little warning at the bottom that tells you that your browser is retarded and that you should get ie 8 or firefox

me: don’t be that guy

kyo: not in those words

me: doesn’t matter

kyo: it’s just a little warning in the footer

me: out of curiosity, does the old version if IE give you a security warning when you click the link to go to the new version? because if it does, i suspect it’s become self-aware and afraid of its own mortality
“nooooooooo fred! I thought we were frieeeeeends” keep reading »

June 1st, 2009

I am growing increasingly disgusted and apprehensive about privacy issues, especially in this country. As various departments, companies and organizations embrace the digital age, more personal and private information becomes available. Information that really should not be easily accessed, especially anonymously online.

There are two sides to the personal privacy issue. One is that most companies, programmers, organizations, et al, figure that if the same data is available anyway, aggregated keep reading »