Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

According to Om Malik, Facebook needs $300 to $500 million in order to make its site safe for children to use:

The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.

Unfortunately, I think the premise is ridiculous. Facebook provides a large number of privacy controls that would allow children to:

• Prevent people finding them in searches
• Prevent strangers from viewing their profile
• Prevent their profile from showing up in Google and other engines

I see Facebook as a piece of infrastructure, like a telephone address book and cellphone, that you find and communicate with people. Generally that lets friends talk to each other, or lonely people find other lonely people nearby; sometimes it lets perverted old men call up kids. The problem isn’t technological; it’s social, and perhaps medical.

Facebook and MySpace are just the tubes; what goes through them isn’t, and shouldn’t be, their concern.

I was looking at AAPL today and saw this:

Google doesn’t update the color when it receives new streaming quotes, so if AAPL is positive and goes negative, the price stays green. This is easy enough to fix.

The new Amazon Mp3 store gives you 256 Kb/s MP3 files without any DRM, for generally $8.99 an album. They are already ripping iTunes up on quality, price, and digital rights management. Expect them to continue to improve their selection (Amazon is famous for long tail) and interface, at which point no one will buy Steve Jobs’ crippled music.

Even better, Amazon’s system integrates cleanly with iTunes. You can one-click buy an album from Amazon, and their downloader will pick up the .amz file, grab your tracks, and automatically add them to your iTunes library. I’m also a big fan of the cover-flow like Album pickers they float on some of the mp3 pages:

Paul has it right when he says “Amazon MP3 is kicking ass and taking names.” You can also check out the official blog post or Techcrunch, who notes they are carrying 2,000,000 songs.

This is funny but true: Everything is fast for small n. Pay attention to that when coding!

Reading about the poor MIT student who was recently arrested at submachine gunpoint on BoingBoing I saw a few comments that interested me enough to write a brief rebuttal. For example, comment #63 by Jacob Davis:

On another note, to everyone saying, “It’s obviously not a bomb, they should have known better!” : that’s really condescending. My mother doesn’t know what a breadboard is. My neighbors don’t. Several of my friends don’t. I’d wager the great majority of the US doesn’t know, for better or worse. Don’t pretend that everyone else knows what you know, especially when you are judging circumstances after being given all the facts at once in hindsight.

See the problem is that security personnel, if expected to guard against bombs and bombers, should be able to positively recognize bombs. Your mother and neighbors are not airport security officers, military police, or Boston police for exactly that reason; they don’t know what bombs look like.

Then there are comments #7 and #8, which feel like the police brutality (they arrested her outside the airport with force) is justified:

Wow, she sure put the “mor[on]” in sophomore! Maybe for her next art project she can run around the airport screaming “I’m Al Qaida! Look at me! I’m Al Qaida!”

I’d have wished the above moron had written “more[on] in sophomore;” it would have bee more funny. That said, there’s nothing wrong with a geeky girl wearing a hoodie with some blinking LEDs. As far as I know (and I think the statistics support me here) no one has ever died or been injured, directly or indirectly, by an LED. And, I fully support her right to voice her political opinions, even in the airport. Unfortunate the climate these days means wearing we will not be silent arabic / english t-shirts will probably get you detained.

I thought MIT students were supposed to be a bit more intelligent than the rest of us. Walking into an airport with an electronic device strapped to her chest ….. a very stupid action. She is lucky to just be in a cell, but I have a feeling a lot of people (including her) will never understand why, this time, the Boston Police are in the right.

This one is begging for me point out that 99.99998% of people walk around airports with iPods tucked around their chest or body somewhere… and I’m not even going to start counting people with pacemakers, who actually have an electronic device embedded in their chests! An electronic device isn’t a bomb, and if you think airport security can prevent terrorism, you’re wrong.

Finally, on a lighter note, Rob Cockerham’s comment #27 takes the cake, and eats it too:

I can’t believe NBC is promoting Bionic Woman like this. What a terrible idea.