Month: March 2018

Reposted Aaron Parecki on Twitter (Twitter)
It never occurred to me that people would be blaming @oauth_2 for the Facebook mess. Friendly reminder that OAuth is what lets you control *which* parts of your Facebook data apps get access to, and what lets you revoke that access, which you can do here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications
Replied to a post by Jeff Doshna (facebook.com)
I have a real problem. I HATE FACEBOOK, what they are doing with our data, how they control access to information and news for millions of people, and the fact that they've insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives.

So I'm inclined to walk away from it entirely.

But....

There's real information on here that I need, about people I care about, about things going on in my communities, and keeping connected with folks who've been part of my life over the years.

So, what to do?
You can add people to custom Facebook lists and just read those, but then you’re not necessarily getting all the data you want given the Facebook algorithm deciding what you see.

There’s lots more I could advise doing, but if you’re only using Facebook for reading content you want to get out of Facebook, then lock the whole thing down as best as you can (privacywise) and then use https://facebook-atom.appspot.com/ to suck the data you want out as a feed and pipe it into a feed reader.

You can unsubscribe or unfollow folks to limit your feeds to the bare minimum. The atom feed the appspot tool gives you will be everything and it will be reverse chronological. Good feed readers like Feed.ly and Inoreader will allow you to filter out posts you don’t want to see using a variety of keyword filters.

If you need specific help in setting it up or the instructions are unclear, let me know; I’m happy to help.

If you want to set up and run your own custom private system/server for close family, I can make some suggestions for doing that too.

📺 "The West Wing" On the Day Before S3 E5

Watched "The West Wing" On the Day Before S3 E5 from NBC (via Netflix)
Directed by Christopher Misiano. With Rob Lowe, Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney. While the White House is hosting a gala dinner for Nobel Prize winners, Leo and the president learn of a suicide bomb in an Israeli cafe that took the lives of two American students in Tel Aviv for a soccer match, and the staff attempts to manage the president's first veto, of a House bill eliminating the estate tax, and the threat of an override the same night. Sam and Toby first try to sway a contentious Dem. From Tennessee who wants a whole list of farming and ranching concessions in exchange for his vote and three proxies; after a pep talk from Leo, they devise a substitute plan that may prove even more effective, if it works. Josh takes the governor of Indiana into a private meeting to determine if the man plans to challenge Bartlet in Democratic primary. C.J. takes heat from a smarmy Dallas entertainment reporter who is in town for the Nobel dinner but winds up having to cover the veto and override vote, but after the reporter embarrasses her during a live stand-up, C.J. one ups the woman in front of the press corps. Later, Sam, Toby and Josh try to help the president decide what to say to the parents of the two murdered students.

📺 Zeynep Tufekci: Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win | TED

Watched Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win by Zeynep TufekciZeynep Tufekci from ted.com

Today, a single email can launch a worldwide movement. But as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci suggests, even though online activism is easy to grow, it often doesn't last. Why? She compares modern movements -- Gezi, Ukraine, Hong Kong -- to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and uncovers a surprising benefit of organizing protest movements the way it happened before Twitter.

📺 Zeynep Tufekci: Machine intelligence makes human morals more important | TED

Watched Machine intelligence makes human morals more important by Zeynep TufekciZeynep Tufekci from ted.com

Machine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns -- and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for. "We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines," she says. "We must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics."

🔖 Bringing interactive examples to MDN | Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

Bookmarked Bringing interactive examples to MDN by Will Bamberg (Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog)
Over the last year and a bit, the MDN Web Docs team has been designing, building, and implementing interactive examples for our reference pages. The motivation for this was the idea that MDN should do more to help “action-oriented” users: people who like to learn by seeing and playing around with example code, rather than by reading about it.

We’ve just finished adding interactive examples for the JavaScript and CSS reference pages. This post looks back at the project to see how we got here and what we learned on the way.
h/t to @rachelandrew

👓 All the URLs you need to block to *actually* stop using Facebook | Quartz

Just by the bulk of URLs, this gives a more serious view of just how ingrained Facebook is in tracking your online life.