Bloggasm

Gee, I just love it when obvious-pedophiles find their way to Bloggasm through google searches in which they try to find out how to hook up with kids.

From a man with an IP address located in Murray, Kentucky: “chat room for older people trying to hook up with kids”

He arrived at Bloggasm at 9:53:44 pm and didn’t even stay for a full 1 second. I guess this post (the one he entered in) didn’t have what he was looking for.

Scary, huh? I get stuff like this semi-regularly.

Related posts: Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Stolen

Uh oh:

Garland police are searching for a truck carrying radioactive material that was stolen from a gas station Wednesday morning.

Police said the truck is a white 2001 Ford F-350 with Texas license plate 5YL-T51. The truck has flames painted on the hood and front panels and has the name Bonded Inspections, Inc. on the side.

By now, most of you have already heard about the Facebook controversy, the one where Facebook released all these news feeds that caused several privacy concerns. Well, so soon after Facebook enraged thousands of users, Livejournal is taking a similar step. They’re beta-testing a notification system with their paid users that allows you to click an icon that looks like a thumb-tack and lets you receive update messages whenever someone does something new on livejournal. They explain it thusly:

The new system works like this:

1. See something you want to track. (post, thread, journal, etc…)
2. Click this guy: Track this
3. Choose how you want to get notified:
* Message Center (always enabled)
* Email
* IM (future)
* …–… (future)
* For total dorks: web service ping to arbitrary URL (future)
4. Enjoy. Cancel or change notifications any time.

They’re being a little cautious in their wording, obviously because of the Facebook thing:

Doesn’t this let people stalk me?
It would’ve been really easy for us to build a system to enable stalking but we took a lot of effort to remove all potentially creepy features out of it:

* You can’t track things you can’t see, of course. (private, friends-only, etc)
* Even though it’s public, you can’t track “all comments anywhere by user bob”. Because that’s a little weird. Maybe bob wants that, but for now we’re focusing on things you can already add to your friends page, get RSS for, etc..

This strikes me as very similar to Mark’s argument that nothing is available that wasn’t already public, which really wasn’t the point of the whole controversy. Still, I haven’t been able to test it yet through my livejournal since I’m not a paid user, so I’ll try to keep track of what others are saying about it.

I logged into my Facebook account like I usually do about once or twice a day, and was confronted with what many bloggers have termed “Facebook’s new face-lift” (haha, clever). After looking at it for about ten minutes, I sent an instant message to one of my friends that said, “Hey, I now know how to become a professional stalker,” and before I even had a chance to send my punchline, she replied “Join Facebook?”

We had both noticed the same thing: With this new “face-lift,” you can follow just about every single move of people on your friends list through what Facebook calls “news feeds” which show up on your page once you log on. You know when they update their profile, you know when they tag a new picture, you know as soon as they’ve become single or entered a relationship, you know when they write on someone’s wall, you know when they pick their nose. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t find it all entertaining to see what my various friends were doing while on Facebook, but at the same time, this is some scary shit. And I’m not being melodramatic. In my college days, I used to spend an ungodly amount of time on Facebook, and if this feature had been around back then, people would have known what I had been up to every time I logged on. They would have known who I added as friends, who I’d been talking to the most, etc… If somebody wanted to spy in on all my facebook conversations, they could just read their news feed and just visit the profiles of those whose walls I’d written on. The possibilities are endless.

Pretty soon, Facebook will allow you to monitor who views your profile, and by then there will be absolutely no privacy to the whole thing. Like if you wanted to search for the cute girl in your History class to look at her profile and see if she’s single, she’ll automatically know you looked her up.

This is mind-blowing.