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While it is true that Microsoft has a technologica non grata list. Macs aren't on it. In fact there's an employee discount for purchases through the apple store. Microsoft makes Office for the Mac. Why shouldn't the company encourage people to run that? MSR researcher danah boyd famously kept her mac when going to MSR.

danah boyd did this: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/02/18/licensing_your.html

If you read the real original post instead of the blog which only mentions this one you'll notice that it affected Tumblr and that the lady in question wasn't very active there.

If you hang on to a free service like Tumblr and are hardly active I don't think it to be that strange that they'll prefer someone more active using your alias.

This is also mentioned in their Terms of service and in a rather fair way IMO: right at the top under the first header "1. Access to services":

"Tumblr may change, suspend or discontinue the Services at any time, including the availability of any feature, database, or Content. Tumblr may also impose limits on certain features and services or restrict Subscriberâ(TM)s access to parts or all of the Services without notice or liability. Tumblr reserves the right, at its discretion, to modify these Terms of Service at any time by posting revised Terms of Service on the Site and by providing notice via e-mail, where possible, or on the Site. Subscriber shall be responsible for reviewing and becoming familiar with any such modifications."

Question should be obvious: If you're that scared of your identify why bother signing up for a service which makes it very obvious that your presence isn't fully yours ? Also note how easy this is to find: find Tumblr using Google and on the main page simply click "Terms of Services" at the bottom. This text will be right there, nearly at the top.

Want some quality with the service you're using? Consider getting a paid account instead, that is bound to remain the same no matter what!

never mind

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-disappeared-me.html

Should have bought your own domain name instead.

Should have read the article instead. I quote: "Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared." The link goes to a page on zephoria.org about how the username zephoria on Tumblr got reassigned and then reinstated.

There are obvious reasons why there are federal age requirements for Internet use: sexual predators, cyberbullying, adult content and explicit language.

Those are the obvious reasons. But none of those are correct.

[U.S. Congress] wanted to make certain that corporations could not collect or sell data about children under the age of 13 without parental permission, so they created a requirement to check age and get parental permission for those under 13. Most companies took one look at COPPA and decided that the process of getting parental consent was far too onerous so they simply required all participants to be at least 13 years of age.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/10/how-coppa-fails-parents-educators-youth.html

Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html

I have read similar comments by young people before. I believe it was in the Amazon reviews of Generation Me, which I discovered via an article on danah boyd's blog. boyd says she has found the same thing in her research (she studies young people's use of social software).

In a serious scientific discussion, yes.

To be fair, I saw this earlier this morning when danah (the author) first linked it off her blog (which I read); the announcement there was along the lines of "here's this thing I've been looking into, I don't have anything formal or rigorous yet but I wanted to throw out some thoughts on it real quick", not "this is a serious, finalized paper on the topic".

Her actual (formally) published work is, as one would expect, of much higher quality.

MySpace Spaces Out MySpace splinters as teens head for niche sites. [....] Possible, but I doubt it. Most people are too lazy to move.

That might not be true.

I've been using Gmail since 2004, and it has radically changed the way I maintain contact with people. It's clear to me that The integration of Google Talk into gmail is just another step Google is taking that characterizes their approach to email. Microsoft and Yahoo just don't get it, and they've spent their time merely trying to bring the desktop GUI to email. Google, on the other hand, is redefining email.

Not that they haven't already. The conversation view means that I can email, "What did you think of last night's Battlestar Galactica?" to five other friends on gmail, and each person can respond without flooding each other's inboxes. Emails through gmail tend to be shorter, a kind of proof of presence more than anything else. Some of our conversations distribute to 10-20 other friends with gmail, and we've broken the 150 message ceiling more than once. I'm not being trite to say that Gmail has brought me closer to friends I would not have otherwise had regular contact with. For example, we have some friends teaching in Thailand, and while the rest of us sit at desks, we can include them in our gmails knowing that instead of plowing through 100 new emails, they will see only one highlighted thread. The search and labeling/flat-hierachies enable us to send out entire cut and pasted articles from the web, with the potential of being able to find reference these later.

And now, Google is blurring the line between email and IM (aka "proof of presence") by adding in-browser google talk. It's brilliant. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft think they're cool because users can right click in the web interface.

Lots of people are complaining about privacy, and rightfully so. But we should also be discussing how Google is changing the way people perceive and use email.

Name one attack on a Federal building prior to (or after!) McVeigh.

He was a typical macho failed-to-get-into-Ranger-school-so-he-left-the-Ar my dumbfuck that gave other Desert Storm vets like me a bad name for a long time.

I guarantee that no amount of purely symbolic random bombing is going result in anything more than further oppression.

The government doesn't care about some guy on a message board spouting off about patriotism.