- Ad nauseam is a browser extension meant to click on all the ads that you come across when browsing the web. The philosophy behind it is, that if you click on all the ads that you come across, the advertising profile that will be built from this data, about you, is useless. You have no characteristics. You like everything. If that kind of stuff is interesting to you, you should read the article “Monkeywrenching the Machine”, it's about how you can make it harder for corporate AIs to mine your data. Both are relevant in this day and age. If you prefer something less reactive, you should install EFF's Privacy Badger in your browser. It minimises how much of your activity is trackable online, by blocking ads and trackers. You can also make some internet noise to confuse data collection algorithms.
- I recently spent 3 weeks in Costa Rica on vacation. Fascinating country, warm people, and exotic animals. The Costa Rican address system is also exotic. They don’t really have a formal one, as you do in a city like London. One guesthouse we stayed at had the address “200 meters past the intersection with the church, on a particular road, in this town.” Their address system typically uses recognisable landmarks, and navigates you from there via directions. It turns out that 4 billion people in the world, live without an address, and one company trying to tackle this is What 3 Words. They do this by putting a 3mx3m grid over the entire world, and give each square a unique name, which is a combination of 3 words. It’s genius. We should all use it, it’s even good enough for Switzerland! Surprisingly Awesome did an episode on postal addresses worth a listen if you find this interesting.
- More geography fun. The United States has 10 cities where the population is more than 1 million people. For China, that number is 102. I might know a handful of them. This helped me better understand exactly how populous China is, and how concentrated the population in the US is.
Sticky links - April 14, 2018
2 min read
Profile engine
The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive (31st March 2018)
Knowledge is power and all the power is concentrated in the hands of a malevolent force - corporate Facebook.
We sued Facebook, fought hard in a David and Goliath battle and won a good settlement. One day, maybe we'll have time to tell the whole story - you'd be utterly shocked what goes on inside Facebook - what you've already heard is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a Facebook account, we strongly recommend that you delete it completely, without delay. Learn more about Facebook
We are freely and lawfully transferring this database to the Internet Archive (archive.org) as they have a long track record as a suitable, responsible long term custodian and we have the legal right to do so.
Making this data freely available and preserving it serves many purposes. Here are a few:
* Helping to reunite old friends with powerful search tools (Facebook don't provide powerful search tools because if you have to search through hundreds of pages of profiles then you view more ads than if the tools take you straight to who you want).
* Helping you to find and meet new people with common interests
* Exposing the interests and group memberships of politicians and public figures (What did they really like ten years ago before they were famous?)
* This snapshot of the early days of social networking will be invaluable to Genealogists, Social Historians and perhaps even Archaeologists in ten, fifty or even 1000 years time.
* Most importantly, this will break Facebook's monopoly over social data. People chose to make this data free and public, yet Facebook still charge for it. Not any more!
I'm not sure what to make of this. Terrible move or great move, and for who? Are these really the reasons they donated the content to archive.org?