Crosspost from www.benjaminleach.com

This is a response to http://blog.brokep.com/2010/04/24/facebook-owns-us/

In this post, Brokep (full disclosure, former admin of The Pirate Bay and founder of Flattr) states that Facebook has gained too much power over not only our online lives, but offline as well. We put our friends, and those we once brushed by in a crowded hallway, into neat little groups. We invite them to events in real life through those groups, and if Facebook decides one of those friends are no longer worthy of belonging to Facebook, they are deleted, both from your online and offline interactions, since  you can no longer find them, and may not even know they’re missing. They don’t get invited to class reunions, business parties, or concerts their friends are putting on, just because they violated some vague term of use, and can’t even get a reason from the admins at Facebook explaining their new-found status as an outcast.

Perhaps we do need to find a new social network, one that is completely unregulated, unfiltered, and unfettered. Perhaps though, if we attempt such a project, it would not be a place we’d want our children to end up. One only needs to look at sites such as 4chan.org (inappropriate content warning here) to see what happens when we impose digital anarchy. Such a site would have to have some sort of structure. Perhaps Facebook takes that structure too far. Perhaps an account should be flagged as inappropriate before it is deleted, and require a disclaimer page between yourself and that persons profile in order to view it. I’m not sure this would be enough though.

This isn’t about Facebook though. I’m not sure that what they are doing goes quite far enough sometimes. The company I’d like to talk about though, is Google. If Facebook can be accused of being a monopoly, what then, is Google? We use them to host and index our email (Gmail). We find directions with Google Maps. We find websites with the search engine. We run our phones on their software (Android). We use them to tell us who is visiting our website and from where (Analytics). We advertise with them (AdSense). We save our documents we’re working with online with them (Google Docs). We share projects with coworkers through them (Wave). We do research through them (Google Scholar). We save our medical records online with them (Google Health). We use their social network (Orkut). We watch videos through them (YouTube). We blog with them (Blogger). We update our friends through them (Buzz).

All this information Google collects, our medical history, our call log, our physical location, what we look at online, who we talk to, what we work on, what we think, and so on, is far more dangerous for one company to have than anything Facebook can do. Google’s motto is “Don’t be Evil.” I’m afraid that their business model by its very nature goes against their motto. They are unable to not be evil, the very storage of every piece of information they can get their hands on, with absolutely no time line for deletion, is evil. It is too much power for one person, or one company to have. They cannot keep all this indefinitely. If you want to talk about a monopoly, and a site that is dangerous to trust with your information, look no further than the front page of your browser.

• Facebook
• eBay
• Email
• Microsoft Office & alternatives
• Adobe Photoshop & alternatives
• Web Development
• Financial Management
• and more!

Leave a comment and let me know what else you’d like to see covered. These will be 2-3 hour sessions, once every week or two, and we’ll keep the costs affordable. Thanks!

I went to fix a computer today for HP, they sent a network card to the client. This client lived in the country, 4 miles from the nearest DSL node, and had dial-up internet. She had told the tech on the phone she had dial-up several times, but apparently this was beyond their comprehension. A new Ethernet port was not going to fix her connectivity problem.

My parents tried to get high speed internet where they live. There is a Fairpoint DSL node a few miles away, and Time Warner has cable on their road but not to their location. Time Warner told them it would cost several thousand dollars to run the line to them. They use a Verizon Wireless USB adapter for their internet. This is less than ideal as well, since there is  a 5GB/month cap on this use, and isn’t a whole lot faster than dial-up in itself.

With so many businesses and individuals depending on the internet these days, there needs to be more of an effort made to reach these people. Without email, Skype, and even getting programs and updates in a timely manner, this can cause the economy to come to a standstill, at least an individual economy.

An acquaintance of mine put his MacBook on top of his car yesterday leaving church. He proceeded to drive over 20 miles, doing errands and heading home. When he got home, the computer was no longer on top of the car. Today, the local police brought his computer back to him unharmed. I was impressed. My computers haven’t been able to survive a cup of coffee, much less a 20 mile trip.

My last vista machine said goodbye this morning, when it was introduced to a cup of coffee by my 18 month old son. Needless to say, they didn’t take to each other very well.

I rushed to the local Walmart, where I knew they had a Compaq computer for $348. They were out. They were also out of the Toshiba for $398. One of the helpful associates was on the phone with another Walmart, checking their stock, when another one remembered that they had an e-Machine laptop on sale for $298. This was not on display, but they had a few behind the counter. I bought it.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, 250GB hard drive, 3 GB RAM, Intel processor, and a DVD drive. My wife wanted it to be able to go online. This will certainly work. Goodbye Windows Vista. We hardly knew thee.

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About a week ago, I started getting the Blue Screen of Death ( a first since installing Windows 7 in early October of 2009) on a daily basis. I have an HP dv7 laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, in case you’re wondering. The file to blame was athrx.sys. After a bit of searching on some forums, I found that it seemed to be related to the wireless driver. Sure enough, a search at HP’s website brought up my new driver. I downloaded it, ran the installer, and haven’t had a problem since. So far, so good.

Ok, for a while, I’ve neglected this blog, and had it pull content from Yahoo! Answers automatically. I’m disappointed with the quality of the posts, and for that, I apologize. It is more important for me to have quality posts than several poor posts per day, I think. I’m back, and if you tried to read this before, I’m sorry. I’m going to leave the 300 posts it pulled down in place, but don’t put too much stock in them. I’ll do better from now on, I promise.