Slashdot Mirror
Breaking Open Facebook With FOSS
NewsCloud writes "Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users and third-party developers have launched more than 6,000 applications with its API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends. Microsoft's recent $240 million investment in the company gives it all the capital it needs for further growth. Last August, Wired published two unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third-party services to emulate Facebook, and ultimately calling on the open-source software community to build alternatives to the service. Inspired in part by Wired, I've posted some ideas describing what would be needed for an open source architecture for social networking."
It sounds great! But EVERYTIME they fight eachother you get a notice of it. So I log in every morning(at work of course) to find out theres about 35 fights to go through.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
and every single one drives me nuts. No, I don't want to post on your fucking SUPERWALL, be in your TOP FRIENDS list, or answer pointless quizzes.
There should be a way to turn off app requests...
For many users, there wouldn't be a noticeable difference...
Indeed...
I don't know what "us" you are talking about, but I've realized for years that Facebook has no effect on who, when, what, and how I connect with friends, and that's unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
I think the secret to efficient social networking is decentralization, both of content and of standards. This is achieved by the semantic web... Take a look at FOAF, it's a simple exemple of how it could work. Host a RDF/XML file anywhere describing your connections and you're done. Extend the kind of vocabulary describing your information and your relation to people at anytime using OWL.
RDF and OWL provide ways to develop a huge social networks with different features, different takes on it , with decentralized development and decentralized content while still maintaining interoperability. Support the semantic web it rocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)
\u262D = \u5350
It's about time that there was some way to focus on the social network you're already with versus wading through "invitation-only hype" to get there.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends
Especially since we just learned that Facebook considers it a "perk" to allow their employees to surf people's profiles, read their email (which they're pushing HARD to get people to use as a sort of bastardized webmail) and see their "private" photos and such.
Oh yeah, and get your password, log in to your account, and upload explicit photos.
Please help metamoderate.
if you want convenience, you don't get privacy
if you want privacy, you don't get convenience
and some people are shocked, shocked i tell you, to find out that a lot of people don't treat their private life with the security protocols of a swiss bank. because they simply don't care
next nonissue please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
perhaps slashdot could build comment moderation profiles and then offer a filter of only the type of comments I'm going to want to read.... As it is, the moderation system on slashdot creates one messy big profile for all readers.
Everyone could moderate all the time for this system. Then my profile develops a network of other readers who share my preferences for comments. As I visit Slashdot stories that have been moderated by thousands of readers, my shared-perspective readers would bubble up the comments that will most appeal to me-- not just the popular comments that appeal to the largest number of moderators.
Maybe this doesn't match the topic here. Sorry- the topic made me think of this...
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Has that actually been verified by a real news source?
Building an Open Source version of Facebook is probably one of the smartest thing people can do right now in this Web 2.0 (*shudder*) world. More to the point, privacy advocates should be actively boycotting Facebook if they know what is good for them. I refuse to use it. The people who maintain it have too much power and it has reached a level of social and interpersonal networking utility that trumps novelty and freedom for conformity.
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
I don't know, but that whole story smells funny.
An employee looked up a user's password? Ummmm... OK, I guess it would be possible, assuming that every engineer who had anything to do with their systems is a total moron they _might_ have put the system together in that way.
Much more likely: the person who made up the story is a moron who doesn't understand how passwords are stored.
I thought serious companies we're supposed to not give employees access to customer passwords.
Why does facebook need to be replaced by something open source? Is it offensive for them to make money?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
XFN, the XHTML Friends aims to identify relationships with links.
Imagine if everybody had a blog that used OpenID. This could be decentralized. Friends could then login with OpenId and be identified what relationship they are with the OpenID URL from XFN.
http://gmpg.org/xfn/
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Sorry, i should be clearer. Decentralization without 100% open access to outside networks makes any effort to "free" data from proprietary networks impossible. What i describe could be considered decentralized in a sense (in that parts of a universal network would be owned by different entities), but there would have to be agreement on what sort of interface would be used for reciprocal transactions (friending across disparate pars of the network), so it would still need a centralized standards body to define the conventions that all the sub-networks would follow.
There are lives at stake here!
Cloning Facebook would be pointless. Unless your providing something above and beyond what Facebook offers, why bother? Average users won't be engaged by the privacy angle and so, won't switch.
Cool idea though. The real take away is that creating services like facebook are fairly trivial from a development standpoint. All these features are being reabsorbed by the various web app framework makers right now. Building a facebook2 should take a lot less than a quarter billion : )
if you weren't so lame you would get invites.
PS Nifong was wrong
That's a bad thing? Frankly I expect to see a lot of these communities come and go. The only thing I find a little alarming is the hype that surrounds them. If the open source community wants to jump in, great and if not, great. Frankly I don't see the difference. Maybe after the hype has died down some of these sites will have hit on something substantial that can be wrapped into the kind of utility generally provided by the developer community, but until then all I see is a series of social and commercial experiments that frankly aren't that gripping helping people find something on the net.
Quack, quack.
How hard would it be to get the electoral roll data and plug it into a facebook like thing. Then you could have "Friends", "Relatives" and "Colleagues". You would have everyone in there and half the really important relationships ready made for you.
Where could you get the colleague data from? How do you know who works where?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
it may be the only way to clear up Facebook and remove the acne.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
There are probably other FOSS projects to create a truly decentralized, federated social-networking and collaboration package, but the one I'm intimately familiar with is
OpenQabal. OQ is all about developing social-networking and collaboration software that puts users in control of their own information (including the much mentioned "social graph"), supports identity federation, and facilitates distributed conversations. Development is just getting started, but we're working off of a couple of existing code-bases to get a headstart.
Disclaimer: I'm the originator, chief architect and, so far, sole developer on the project, so everything I say may be considered biased, slanted, unreliable, or whatever else your skeptical little heart pleases.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
And sadly, those of us who are involved programmers in the FOSS community aren't social enough to have a Facebook profile.
/* No Comment */
I think I missed a boat somewhere. :)
I don't understand the appeal of sites like "Facebook" or "Myspace". What they look like to me is web-based personal-website-creation tools. What is so interesting about a site that lets people make web sites about themselves? What am I missing? I already have a web site hosted on my own domain. Why would I want a Facebook or Myspace web site?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
If you think millions of kids are signing up to Facebook for its function, you're probably wrong. Most likely they're doing this to be in with the groovy (or whatever they're called now) kids. That relies on branding and brand awareness.
An OSS facebook has no branding and coolness (perhaps geekiness, but that is not cool). Just like Coke would not care about an opensource cola, Facebook does not care about an open source service.
And do you really think that youngsters are worried about privacy?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Centralized data source? The operators of the data source are always a security concern. They need to be both honest (and not invade your privacy) and noble (and not sell your data to third parties for a profit). It seems like pointing this out is the focus of the article, but it is not new information. Decentralized data source? You operate what data goes where, but it is a much harder system to support. The reason MySpace and Facebook are popular is because they are easy-to-use and non-technical people have adopted them as de-facto social meet/discussion places. I dare you to implement an easy-to-use decentralized social network. For Facebook in specific, it sucks that they took $$$ from Microsoft. This puts them in bed with a powerful influence in the software arena... and one that is not trustworthy for having any business ethics. By itself, I trusted Facebook. I still won't put anything on my Facebook profile that I would need to keep private. With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site...
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is my social networking, mmo, blogging, news aggregator site built on foss.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
/etc/init.d/net.social stop
These basic ideas are already being worked on with such systems as myVocs (pdf), IAMSuite, and CoManage. It is an idea whose time has come due. It's basically about the web maturing and adopting system boundaries (however loose or tightly you want to define them). It's a similar transition from DOS->Win->NT (or any batch to multitask migration you want to draw a parallel to). The web is about like DOS right now.
With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site.
If you already put anything on Facebook that really shouldn't be there, it is far too late to take it down now. People don't seem to grasp the Ollie North effect: just because you "deleted" something doesn't mean it was removed from existence. Google won't even guarantee that it can permanently delete anything, and any major site is going to retain archived records for an indefinite period, which means it can still be distributed and sold to others long after you officially "deleted" it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The "obvious" approach for an Open Source solution is to have a core component that is fairly generic, fairly light, permits data exchange between sites no matter how they specialize, and permits plug-ins to enable that specialization. (There's no shortage of object exchange and data exchange protocols, so I really can't think of anything in the core component that couldn't be slapped together from pre-existing Open Source code.)
You want something that's generic, because you want a reason for people to use the Open Source solution besides politics. If a person can totally customize their space to suit the specific sort - or sorts - of social networking they want to do, then you have a reason. Instead of maintaining one account for each and every type of social networking you want to do, you have one account, one repository and an infinite ways to tailor and filter it for each social circle you're interested in.
I really can't see anybody really leaping onto Facebook II or MySpace II - if they wanted to do social networking, they'd already have accounts on the originals. The only reason anyone might want a new system is if it can do something the existing systems can't. One thing the existing systems can't do is share data. Another thing they can't do is be polymorphic. Ergo, those are the two things a FOSS social networking site would need to do to offer anything new and exciting.
Would that be enough, though? Probably not. Hence the plugins, to allow users to include webapps and other features. Each user would then be able to do more than just include photographs and text.
Again, would this be enough? No idea. It would have novelty and personalizability, but it may be so flexible that it's unusable, people may be getting burned out on such networks, and existing systems have the edge just by being there first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think the best part is... it's a blog that people actually read. When I post stuff on my :)
Facebook profile nearly all of my (Facebook) Friends! They sometimes comment - that is great.
When I had a blog before it seemed that nobody read it. Of course, the downside is that I
have to read their posts too
Its this mutual blogging that's the best for me.
I am sure it could be done with RSS and FOAF. I would love to get out of Facebook's garden.
sometimes, privacy is of secondary importance
a good example being: you just provided one above, thanks
a lot of people, slashdot being hotbed of such privacy fundamentalists, are of this weird hyperactive hysterical panic over every privacy transgression: showing your receipt when you leave a store, cameras in the innercity, etc.
in their mind, they can't balance some prudent, common sense situations where, frankly, your privacy doesn't matter. at all
privacy is AN issue to consider on complex topics. it is not THE issue. sometimes, privacy is the most important concern. and other times, privacy ranks lower in importance than other concerns. like before you get on an airplane. there are people in this world who want to blow up airplanes. therefore, people have to submit to privacy intrusions before getting on airplanes. beginning and end of story
but you listen to some people, and it's like the second coming of hitler, the shocktroops of a new fascism. well yeah, if you got your social education from a comic book and you are a paranoid schizophrenic, i guess
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A lot of the "replace facebook" commentary seems to miss what facebook's killer app is. The applications are a pretty recent addition; they're cool, and it's a good platform for them, but that's not what makes facebook dominate. The "social networking" component helped a lot, but facebook isn't the greatest networking tool out there either. The market niche facebook captured was the digital equivalent of the college facebook. Facebook's killer app is search--the ability to meet a person in real life and then find them online. One of the things it did really well in the startup phase was to capture institutional-specific data; for college students, things like residence hall, major, etc--the kinds of things that come up when you're having an awkward conversation at a party. Because it did this well, it became the de facto place to go to find someone, and that's the edge that led it to beat out other, more feature-rich platforms. Anyone trying to take them down should keep that in mind.
Yes and we all believe a story that is labeled as "Rumormonger: Facebook employees meddling with profiles?" maybe thats just you but I would like to hear you know facts, quotes, and I don't know sources. I'm not a huge fan of facebook but seriously don't spread rumors.
Especially since we just learned that Facebook considers it a "perk" to allow their employees to surf people's profiles, read their email (which they're pushing HARD to get people to use as a sort of bastardized webmail) and see their "private" photos and such.
Oh yeah, and get your password, log in to your account, and upload explicit photos.
Do you have anything to back up any of those claims, presumably articles which don't have the subtitle "rumormonger"?
I thought serious websites were supposed to store passwords as a hash, not as plaintext. So you can't just "look up" someone's password even if you have access to the database. This story is poorly concocted fiction.
-- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
Isn't Mugshot an Open Source social networking endeavour?
I haven't used it but it looks like it makes sharing the sort of the stuff that gets shared on facebook fairly easy (perhaps with a little less crack).
I'm not sure if it tell you when it's someone you know's birthday. That's just about the only useful feature I've seen on Facebook.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Alright, I have a facebook account, and I have tons of friends, and now I come to Slashdot or some other site. I want to find out which of my friends are user of Slashdot too and I want to be able to add them into my social network in Slashdot, I want Slashdot's People modifier to work as it should without doing lots of work. I want to able to manage my network not only from Facebook but also from Slashdot, I want to find new friends through friends of friends or connection graph inside Slashdot, I want to add those friends in Slashdot and update the connection automatically to Facebook too.
I have a blog on Blogger, but I don't want to import my social network into my Google account. I want to let only my friends to post comment to my blog, but my friends don't have Google account or don't want to create or import his/her social network to Google. I want Blogger to be able to verify some anonymous to be actually my friends before allowing to post comment.
I have a Friendster account and I like Friendster more. I have some friends who only use Friendster and some friends who only use Facebook. I want my network to be synchronized within these 2 social network manager, and when I visit other site like Slashdot, I want to be able to import the 2 or more networks automatically.
I have a group of high school friends in Facebook and our group decides to create a new website. The group is well managed and controlled by ensuring everyone in the group know each other and are from the same school. Our new website want to be able to allow registration only from this group of people, so we want a verification system from Facebook between our website and our group.
I don't want to let everybody know who is my friend and how I connected to other people. I don't want to put what FOAF file on my website and let any people mine my private network information. I want to keep my social graph private and only available to my friends and sites I use, and I want authentication based on the social network. When I visit other sites like Slashdot, I don't want to tell Slashdot who are all the friends I have, I only want Facebook to find out from Slashdot that which are my friends are also using Slashdot and return the subset of list of friends. Social network should be private and it is very important to not expose it completely to public.
This is what the things that is needed, not what fancy profile or what superpoke application. With the power of a distributed social graph, alot of powerful things can be done. Other than that, privacy is IMPORTANT and should be always kept in mind. For this to work I have an architecture in mind and I think I should write on my blog now to share with you. Nevertheless, your direction is correct and I like this idea, lets do it together and make it a better social web!
Who didn't think that the article title referred to circumventing the security model of facebook, via Open Source?
Now, I am well aware that information posted to a social networking site is not especially private, but what is probably the main draw of Facebook over MySpace is networks. By default, only people in one's network can see one's profile and Facebook allows one to set whether each part of one's profile is viewable by everyone, people on the same network, friends even with limited rights, or friends with non-limited rights. (Having a limited rights level for friends seems silly to me, but it is in there.) The network plans discussed in the article are all completely open so anyone can see anyone else's profile. That is not what I, nor likely many college students, want in a social networking site.
Centralization breaks the internet.
No, it is understood that deleting is not the same as destruction... but it will almost always mean that an extra effort would be needed to get access to the supposedly purged information. Even if getting access to the data is only a matter of adding an "IS_DELETED='Y'" term to a SQL Query, the extra effort will be a big enough barrier against most attempts to access my data.
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i didn't reference hitler in my argument, i alluded to those i was arguing against referencing hitler in their arguments
thereby not ending my thread, but ending their threads before they even got started
it's a reverse godwin preemptive strike
um, yeah, that's the ticket (cough)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Obviously you understand that but I will bet dollars to doughnuts that the vast majority of Facebook users believe they have the power to remove that information permanently with a few mouse clicks. They don't. And if the Feds come looking for information such barriers don't matter much ... if the data is available the company will be required to produce it, and with a National Security Letter nobody will ever know.
Oh I know, it's all a matter of risk vs. reward: personally I don't think that social networking is worth the risk. As a determinedly middle-class American with all the financial obligations that implies, I try to keep my privacy as best I can. I have too much too lose, if I were ever victimized by an identity thief. There's always some risk when doing anything online, of course, but there's no reason to make oneself into an easy target.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you have access to the db you could just change the damn picture without going through the web site layer..the whole story is bull
Red Hat is doing something close to this through their Mugshot project. It has progressed quite a bit since that Ars Technica write up and is an important component of GNOME's Online Desktop project.
Once communities begin to evolve around services like AIM they become very deeply entrenched. There are 47 million reasons to chose Facebook over its FOSS alternative.
Centralization may distress the Geek, but it makes it relatively easy to monitor abuse, set parental controls, license media content and so on.
http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Hm. You post a link to a site named "Rumormonger," where the article's writer clearly states "Truth be told, I'm a little skeptical of our tipster's tale on one count." Way to be sensational there. Also, no, "Facebook" does not consider it a "perk" to allow their employees to do the things you mention - the employees themselves consider it a perk. You make it sound like it's company policy and listed in the brochures.
What is about 8000 times more likely is that some idiot left their Facebook account logged in, and someone else came along and changed their profile picture as a joke. As for the rest of the privacy concerns you mention, sure, it's likely some employees are abusing their privileges, but that's not at all unique to Facebook.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
via Om Malik's blog tonight http://gigaom.com/2007/10/30/opensocial/ Google's (GOOG) much awaited answer to Facebook ecosystem is finally coming to light. The existence of this Google platform was first reported by TechCrunch and is going to become official tomorrow. Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and its Orkut social network are other partners such as XING, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. So, is it FOSS?
What really scares me about facebook is simply that they know what everyones face looks like. The amount of biometric information that they have direct access to is surely more than that of any three letter agency.
is a great idea. soon after it would be nice to have complete convergence of all communications... t.v., computers, cell phones, ... i guess this won't be really possible until there is an affordable reliable hand held computer
Have you ever read the terms when you sign up for the site.
They own anything you post on the site. Including your picures. I am currently a member of Facebook but I'm thinking of quiting for this very reason.
They can do anything with any of the information posted. And you cannot have a say in any of it.
#include {getoffmylawn.h}
One of the things that MOST attracted me to Facebook originally was the LACK of shit and fluff on peoples pages. There were well defined sections for interests of all sorts, a place for education and work history, a separate space for pictures, simple messaging and a plain wall for public posts.
*sigh* It was all clean and functional, unlike the all-singing, all-dancing, animated, music playing, embedded video eye-rape that is a typical Myspace page. It was also nice that only university students or grads could join, 'cause lord only knows there are enough 'tards on the net. Narrowing it down to only College-Educated-'Tards was a plus.
Now I know some apps are good, and I even use one or two, but 99% of all apps are shit, and it's because anyone can write one and put it up. If Facebook had decided on a vetted system for apps, we would (most likely) still have the good ones, and certainly much less of the fluff.
Now, with the now open-enrollment and allowing any dumb app that comes along, Facebook has opened the floodgates to Lake Shitty-ka-ka of the internet. "New" Facebook may have increased it's user base a ton, but as a result it is now more like Myspace; that's a loss in my book. The Bait-and-switch of Facebook pissed me off, but so many of my friends use it and it's still a bit better than Myspace (despite their efforts).
The point of all this being: If something FOSS could replicate the way Facebook was, I'd join in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the momentum is so great I don't see that happening.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
I have a question for the lawyers here:
After reading through Facebook's terms of use, I came across this little gem:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
To my non-lawyer mind, this seems to me like they own anything you post, bar none, full stop. They can use it however and for whatever they like and you can go cry to mommy if you don't like it.
I see the part where it says you may remove the "User Content" and the license automatically expires, but how does this jive with an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid [and] worldwide license" and "...the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content"? (Emphasis mine)
Am I wrong in assuming that Facebook can use your material however they please, sell rights to use it to whomever they want, and will retain those rights indefinitely? I'm far from a professional photographer, but I have a friend on Facebook who is an aspiring pro-photographer. I don't want my pictures used without my knowledge, but I could live with it. My buddy would be far more impacted if one of his pictures started making money for someone else and not him.
So, do I have anything to worry about here? Should I tell my buddy not to post his "professional" pictures? I can understand that there must be some sort of agreement made to host content, but this all just seems too draconian. Do other dedicated photo-sharing sites like Flikr have better terms that don't walk all over you?
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Unsurprisingly, it appears to be taken, and by a Facebook alternative.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
... until somebody abuses it in ways you did not think about.
I always throw this little cautionary tale in these situations: the way Augusto Pinochet found the most prominent communists in Chile after he took power was by going to the CP's headquarters and confiscating the party's membership lists (addresses, workplaces, even photographs, all was there).
The party's faithful clearly believed that providing all their private data was a non issue, what they failed to see is that information can be used in ways unthinkable when the information is given, so it is better to keep a close eye about how you disclose it, to whom and on which situation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Wow, another set of tail lights for the FOSS community to chase!
Microsoft is going to start getting jealous! Oh wait... MS has a stake in Facebook now, so the FOSS community is STILL dedicated toward chasing Microsoft's tail lights!
I guess the biggest problem is I /don't/ have many friends I want to keep track of.
/decrease/ my privacy exposure on the internet, not increase it, so I used a fake name.
/care/ what's going on in your life, what movies you might like, what web funny you have run across, what web games you play or any of the other trivia going on in your life. I didn't have any friends in high school so I'm not interested in looking up old classmates. I was a non-traditional college student (working full time while taking classes) so I don't have any college buddies to look up, either.
I went and made myself an account. Right off the bat, like you said, they want you to use your real name. I'm looking to
But once I had an account set up, I didn't see much to do with it. All of the people in my life that I want to keep track of I talk to on a regular basis. The rest if I haven't talked to them in months or years I figure I don't really need to know what's going on in their lives. I have enough information to process every day without adding the minutia of long forgotten acquaintances to the burden. I did type in a couple names of old long-lost friends but nothing turned up.
I keep hearing that the point of these "social websites" is to "make friends". Myself, I make my friends in person, and I have a steady group of friends that I keep in touch with at least once a month. I don't feel any need to have more "friends" in the form of digital pen pals. I do frequent a couple of internet BBSes and I guess you could say I feel I have enough digital pen pal friends from those forums.
So I poked around for about 5 minutes and was bored. I guess it's not for me. I get the feeling that maybe somehow I'm socially handicapped. Frankly, if you're not in my immediate social circle, I don't really
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
let me illustrate for you how hysteria and panic and fear get turned into slippery slope arguments:
if you let homosexual men amrry, next you will have to make pedophilia, rape, incest, bestiality and necrophilia legal
do you believe that? i will take a guess and say no
such a thought, is, of crouse, completel bullshit: people can tell the difference between a gay man and a corpse fucker
but in the mind of some social conservatives, THEY REALLY BELIEVE THIS
why? ebcause their slippery slope argument really is nothing but a rpoxy for fear, panic, hysteria. not rational thought
in the exact same way do you talk about pinochet
the average well adjusted person can easily tell the difference between security requirements at the airport and what pinochet did. just as easily as a well adjusted person can tell the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia
but social conservatives can't tell that difference, IN THE EXACT SAME WAY you can't tell the difference between prudent trangressions of privacy in certain controlled situations and all out fascism
and they, like, you, rationalize their fear and hysteria with thte exact same bullshit slippery slope argument
no, you spastic wierdo, THERE IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE
you may now conclude that i am a secret advance agent of the coming fascism
pfffffffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it