Score:5, Offtopic

In the wake of Facebook's latest privacy screwup, I've started to think about ideas for something that could be better than Facebook - providing what people like about Facebook, while providing strong privacy, and with less problems.

The basis of my idea is "spheres." Spheres would be loosely based on the idea of lists of friends, but with much more control.

Every user would begin with a public and a private sphere. Spheres would be like individual user profiles, but under the same account.

The public sphere contains information that is visible to the world. Anyone, not even a member of this site, could view content in the public sphere.

The private sphere, however, would only contain information that's visible to those that have been granted access.

Now, this setup can scale to more granular levels. Let's say you want to share some information with all of your friends, but some information with only some friends. Friends would only be able to see information in a sphere that they are granted access to - sub-spheres wouldn't be visible, unless they were explicitly granted access.

You could also set the spheres up such that a sphere can cross the public/private boundary. I'm not quite sure of the mechanics of it at this time, but you could, for example, have a work sphere that has some public information, some private information.

I may have to invert the structure of the spheres, such that you can have multiple parallel spheres with both public and private sub-spheres, rather than two all-encompassing spheres with spheres inside. However, the idea is that you could have fine-grained control over all information that you post, and who can see it, in a simple, logical manner.

BTW, if anyone's wondering why I haven't posted a "Why Apple is evil" article lately, I've been running a bit short on content. My goal is one article per day, but I never said I wouldn't make up for missed days with multiple articles. I don't want to make stuff up, or rehash stuff excessively, so that's why I haven't posted.

The rumor mill is churning out reports that the US Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are planning an antitrust probe, in response to Apple's decision to restrict iPhone app development to certain languages, and locking out translation tools.

You know you screwed up somewhere when two US government organizations are fighting over the right to anal probe you.

Source: Ars Technica

Let's see, you're using (and own some of the patents behind) a codec that's extremely popular for web media, is well-supported on mobile devices, and provides high quality and small filesizes. It's competitive on its own. However, it runs the risk of being expensive in the future, and there's a competitor that doesn't even come close to your codec on any of those, except for being an open standard. It runs the risk of defeating your codec of choice, because of that.

The logical response would be to steer the licensing body of your codec to make it very cheap, right?

No, the response that Apple appears to be choosing is to gather a bunch of patents together, and sue the makers and users of the free codec into oblivion.

I wish I were joking, but I'm not.

There have been fears of patent threats against Theora before, but this is an actual organized attack against it, simply for the sake of removing competition to H.264.

If that isn't evil, I don't know what is.

Source: The Register

This is hardly news, nor is it specific to Apple, but here we go.

The iPhone uses liquid sensors that, whenever they're exposed to liquid, notify a service technician that the device has been exposed to liquid. This is generally a good idea, that reduces warranty fraud.

However, independent studies appear to have shown that these sensors sometimes produce false positives, while in the normal operating conditions for the phone. Obviously, this could cause major issues for owners of devices that have failed, after a false positive.

A class action lawsuit against Apple has been filed.

Source: CNET

I've avoided covering anything involving the lost iPhone 4G story, because so far, Apple's actions in this case hadn't been evil. The phone was their property, and it should be returned to them. Fair enough.

You can even argue for charges to be filed against those that participated in the checkbook journalism, as they knowingly purchased property that wasn't theirs. However, allegedly, the seller contacted Apple, and they said it wasn't theirs, that it was a Chinese knockoff.

But, now, it's gone from perfectly sane to ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY ABSURD.

Apple has gotten the San Mateo police department to raid Jason Chen's home, apparently against both California law, and federal law, due to their protection of journalists and their sources.

Presumably, Apple's trying to get the cat back into the bag.

WAY TOO FUCKING LATE, APPLE.

Source: Gizmodo