Blogs in June 2011.

I thought I should see what others are doing:

Flesh is Grass has an important post on how the EDL managed to march, unescorted, from Redbridge to Dagenham.

Yaacov Lozowick has given up blogging. Pity, I didn’t agree with him, much, but he has a thoughtful way and articulates many intelligent ideas.

Johnny Guitar thinks about the Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement and the need for a South Africa-style truth commission, just not at the moment.

Weggis on the case against biofuels. Completely agree, it seems so questionable to use food stuff or related material as fuel for the internal combustion engine.

Harry Barnes on Sorting Out The Labour Party, which I think is very optimistic. In the short term they could ditch Ed Miliband, try to be a bit radical, really, seriously distance themselves from the skeleton of New Labour. Chance would be a fine thing.

In related news, I am not surprised that Ed Miliband is less popular than Iain Duncan Smith or William Hague, when they were in a similar position. Frankly, Miliband’s inarticulate, has the charisma of a saucer and he’s politically useless.

Jams looks at an evil cat, great photos.

Mark Gardner at the CST has a reflective post on the situation at UCU and its wider implications, From UCU to MEMO and “Israel’s British hirelings”.

Ten minutes hate on the ‘miracle villages’.

Chris Dillow considers Miliband’s power blindness.

Nick Lowles provides a photo and details of the EDL thugs racial attack in Dagenham.

Sorrel Moseley-Williams ponders Journalists’ Day in Argentina.

Not a blog, but worthwhile all the same. Searchlight on the BNP’s use of Facebook and Twitter.

Rosie looks at Fact and Fiction.

James Bloodworth has a couple of cracking posts, Will the Defence Secretary’s links with Sri Lanka compromise British calls for an enquiry? and Isn’t it time for an apology, Mr Chomsky?

Rebecca provides an update on the Gaza flotilla. Personally, I think the Israeli Government should allow them into Gaza with minimum fuss or hassle. I think Gazans should get as much as they can, after all living under Hamas must be terrible.

Jack of Kent looks at the arrest of blogger Jacqui Thompson and the many unanswered questions.

Greens Engage on Cynthia and Jello.

At Greater Surbiton, a guest post by David Pettigrew, Justice in Bosnia after Mladic.

Eric Reeves has a piece in the Washington Post, In Sudan, genocide anew?

Engage has an abundance of posts which should be read, just a small selection: Open antisemitism doesn’t harm your reputation, Sally Hunt pretends not to understand the term “institutional racism” and Richard Kuper on the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism (by Eve Garrard)

Enjoy!

Facebook, Another Annoyance.

I am glad I left Facebook, with its poor security. Their crude desire to make a fast buck out of people’s data was getting tedious, but existing users have more to complain about, the Register has more:

“Facebook has rolled out its facial recognition technology to countries outside of the US, but has switched the feature on by default without telling its users first.

UK-based security expert Graham Cluely noted earlier today that Facebook had slotted the tech into the social network.

The Mark Zuckerberg-run company started using its facial recognition software in December last year for its Stateside users in a move to automatically provide tags for the photos uploaded by Facebook users.

The tech works by scanning newly uploaded pics and then identifies faces from previously tagged photos already stored in Zuckerberg’s internet silo.

When the software was introduced in the US late last year, Facebook pointed out that users could disable the function.

“If for any reason you don’t want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings,” the company wrote on its blog post last December.

But now that the tech has reached other shores, Facebook clearly didn’t feel the need to alert its international stalkerbase that its facial recognition software had been switched on by default within the social network.

The “Suggest photos of me to friends” feature in question is located in the company’s privacy settings. Facebookers need to click on “customise settings” before being able to access the function and disable it, if they so wish.

“Unfortunately, once again, Facebook seems to be sharing personal information by default. Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission,” said Cluley. “

Good Bye Facebook.

I finally decided to remove my Facebook account.

Over the years using FB was agreeable and occasionally informative, but latterly it has been a pain.

FB’s desire to milk their subscribers information, changes to security settings and the hassle of trying to reverse their activities has meant that I find FB rather tedious.

You shouldn’t have to keep fiddling with your privacy settings simply because FB changes things.

So as of today I have deleted my account, after a few weeks it will go dead and hopefully in a month or two, FB permitting, it will be gone.

The way to remove a Facebook account is to click on this link:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

I am now on Twitter, which is considerably less intrusive.

I still have my blog and an email if people wish to contact me, modernityblog@gmail.com.

Update 1: This is a good explanation on how to delete a Facebook account.

Facebook, Wine And Bits.

I haven’t posted much on technology for ages, so I thought for those of you more interested in politics that I would briefly outline things.

Facebook has added “location-based services”, but if you want to turn them off here’s how to do it.

A new version of Wine is out, it allows you to run Windows applications under Linux and is first rate.

There is more than one way to execute Windows applications on Linux, using Virtual Box is another method and virtual images are exceedingly flexible, if you have the space.

Perplexed nontechnical readers may be wondering why they would want to run Linux? Basically it’s an alternative to Microsoft’s operating systems, Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.

Linux does essentially the same, better and often quicker.

Linux will run on comparatively slow hardware and make it usable, it is free and comes with access to thousands of applications, also free. Microsoft operating systems tend to need lots of memory and modern hardware to run at acceptable speeds.

If there’s a job you do under Microsoft Windows then 98% of the time you can find a good as, if not better, Linux alternative, free.

I won’t deny that initially Linux can be a little bit hard to set up, sometimes, but once it is there you’ll find it rocksolid and you won’t need to reboot every couple of hours, as with Microsoft operating systems.

Linux is used extensively in business and a sizeable percentage of Internet service providers will host their pages under Linux, my bet is that WordPress runs on Linux so you are reading these pages courtesy of Linux, either directly or via Google, which extensively uses Linux.

I favour several versions of Linux, (there are lots!) PClinuxos, MEPIS, Antix Linux and Mint. They’ll do for starters.

Basically, you download a big image (called an ISO) burn it to a CD, reboot and install using that, following the defaults, but reading the screens very carefully. Have a spare CD ready.

The alternative is to use Unetbootin. Have a blank USB ready, it will overwrite it completely. Download and execute Unetbootin, it will prompt for which version of Linux you’d like, after which it will download the ISO and burn it to the USB stick. Again, once it has been successful, reboot and install if you wish.

Personally, I would start using a spare machine if you have one, an old one, just to get use to the installation procedure.

These copies of Linux will boot a Live version running from the CD/USB and then give you the option to install on the hard drive if you want. You will need to partition the disk (the hardest part), which makes space for Linux. Then do the install. Easy. Normally takes anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes!

Have a play around on that spare machine and you can’t do much damage.

Open Violent Antisemitism And Facebook.

The climate for Jews living in the West, and in particular Europe, has changed.

This is evidenced by racist chants at past demonstrations in London, proposed boycotts, the increase in reported antisemitic attacks, the tone of newspaper articles and not least, how it has become acceptable to articulate anti-Jewish sentiment.

Now, of course, we have all heard it and before those views are openly expressed we will hear, “Some of my best friends are Jewish…”, “Criticism is not antisemitic…”, etc etc

Still I wonder how Facebook’s usage in this instance will be explained away, presumably as some juvenile prank, but I have to wonder what type of environment allowed these views to be expressed in the first place?

Facebook has a proposed event “kill a jew day” and its attendees are NOT, as far as I can see, skinheads or known neo-fascists, in fact, a few seem to be British university graduates.

Facebook event - kill a jew day

Please tell me what type of thinking and underlying sentiment in the West makes it possible for ANYONE to consider (even as a sick joke) pushing such an event?

Update 1: I will try and update the links later on

Update 2: Mary comments:

“The site was taken down, to be replaced by another, which again was taken down and now we are trying to get rid of the third.”

Update 3: The JIDF has more on these types of FB events. This is not an isolate incident

Update 4: Jpost has coverage:

“A murderous anti-Semitic theme appeared on Facebook Sunday, when a user named “Alex Cookson” launched an open invitation to an “event” called “Kill a Jew Day.”

The page on the popular social networking Web site urged users to violence “anywhere you see a Jew” between July 4 and July 22. A large image of a swastika was placed at the top of the page. Under the heading “description,” Cookson wrote, “You know the drill guys.”

It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days.

The site attracted a torrent of anti-Semitic responses.

“Can’t wait to rape the dead baby Jews,” one user wrote.

Another user posted images of corpses piled on one another. A third user posted quotes by Adolf Hitler.

Within hours, however, a large number of Israeli users converged on the site and posted comments on the page, with some expressing their disgust, and others mocking Cookson and his supporters.”

Facebook And Advertisers.

The Register has a slightly worrying story:

“Facebook has been giving advertisers data that they can use to discover users’ names and locations, contrary to its privacy policy.

The dominant social network tells users it won’t share their details without consent, but according to the Wall Street Journal, it has handed over information that advertisers can use to look up individual profiles.

MySpace had a similar loophole, it’s reported. Both sites said they were making changes to stop the handover.

Advertisers were getting reports whenever users clicked on their ads, as is typical across the web. However, Facebook and MySpace’s reports contained the URL of the user’s profile page, which often included their real name or user name. Neither site had bothered to obscure the data, in breach of their own privacy policies.”

This is the WSJ piece:

“Across the Web, it’s common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can’t be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people’s real names.

Most social networks haven’t bothered to obscure user names or ID numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the issue.

The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards, which say sites shouldn’t share and advertisers shouldn’t collect personally identifiable information without users’ permission. Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation.”

500 members?

I have no words for this:

“Police have launched an urgent investigation into a horrific Facebook group that gave graphic details of anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated by its members against Ilford’s Jewish community.

The group, created by a student at Loxford School of Science and Technology, attracted more than 500 members in two weeks following its launch last month and featured teenagers boasting about engaging in anti-Semitic behaviour.”

14 Years Ago.

Bosnian Genocide Awareness reminds us:

“Today marks the 14th Anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, part of the Bosnian Genocide which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives between 1992 and 1995.

Srebrenica had been categorized by the United Nations as a ‘safe area’ so it was guarded by only a minimal force. Due in large part to this, General Ratko Mladić and his Army of the Republika Srpska had no trouble taking the town.

The women, seniors, and children, were quickly loaded onto buses and sent away to Tuzla, a town nearby that had suffered through a massacre of its own only a few weeks earlier, and at the hands of the same troops.

This left about ten thousand Bosniaks remaining in the town, all of them males, and all of whom were promptly exterminated.

Learn more about the Srebrenica Massacre and about the Bosnian Genocide by joining us at Bosnian Genocide Awareness:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=63459249558#/group.php?gid=63459249558“

Conservatives, Facebook and MI6

Conservatives come in many shapes and sizes, and are not always found on the political right. If you hunt around your acquaintances, friends and relatives then you will probably have a few, small c, conservatives amongst them.

They might be those people who often look back to the past to some almost mythological golden age, or seek guidance from worthy but irrelevant tombs. They are far easier to spot when modern technology enters the frame, they may be the last people to discover the Internet, have a mobile phone or even use Facebook.

The latter innovation almost caused a breach of security at MI6.

The mandarins in Westminster hadn’t thought to check the Facebook pages of its senior staff for potential security leaks, or information that would have compromised the security of their operatives.

The wife of the new MI6 Director, Lady Sawer had included many personal details in her entry, and although it has been scrubbed by now I wonder if they will have learnt any lessons from their rather conservative attitude towards technology.

The Guardian reports an interesting snippet for all antifascists and scrutineers of the Far right:

“The Mail on Sunday had claimed its story – which also revealed that Shelley Sawers’s half-brother is a researcher for the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving – showed that Sawers had left himself open to a potentially catastrophic security failure.”

Hugo Haig-Thomas, apparently is a former diplomat, anyone say Maxwell Knight?