sxa's Technical Musings

[Short link if you need it: http://goo.gl/2sKkp or retweet me ] So where do I start with this one? You all know the story that broke on July 5th 2011 about News International's UK tabloid newspaper the News Of The World (Henceforth NoTW) having "hacked" the phone of the missing Milly Dowler in 2002. Now I won't condone interfering with a police investigation and I agree that a subcontractor of the paper deleting voicemails was seriously out of line and that those individuals responsible need to be brought to account for it. But the reaction to it worried me and I believe the majority of the public got it wrong. I seemed to be one of the only people who wasn't supporting a boycott. But why? (Note,. other than in the references section, most links are to twitter posts I made at the time - this isn't just a perspective with the benefit of hindsight) For one thing, since I haven't heard otherwise, I can only assume that the 'voicemail hacking' was don...

Shortened link to this page if you need it - http://goo.gl/xqWUZ or on twitter feel free to retweet me instead . (This article split into two sections - one an overview and comparison with alternatives, second a bulletted list of observations/things to be aware of about how it works) feel free to skip to below the line if you don't want all the waffle!) I've been playing around with Google+ for a few days now, and so far I like it. They've got everything just about right, and unlike Diaspora they've got the project live in a reasonable state, although currently still limited access while they iron out the bugs (contrary to other people I think that's a good thing, and that inviting 'the masses' at the moment would be bad if they come to it believing it's a production ready facebook competitor at a time when things might not work - I think Diaspora's probably suffered a bit from that) The 'hangouts' are cool and allow multiple person videoco...

I've blogged on some of facebook's stupid changes before and there have been plenty of concerns over some of the things that they've done over time regarding privacy options. In truth most of them are reasonably valid concerns but let's be honest, they are a business and the way they are going is understandable regardless of whether or not you agree with it because they have a huge captive audience. However some of the things that they do is just purely nonsensical from the perspective of actually enabling users to put the restrictions they want in place. Despite them making strides forward with the settings, they still have glaring holes. This article will show you some of the things the just don't seem to have got right: Control of posting from external apps If you give an external app access to post to your wall, then it's impossible to set the visibility of that app's posts to anything other than your default visibility. If you use an app t...