nathan hammond

Chatroulette.

2010-02-22T04:02:01-05:00

I've just spent a few hours observing the patrons of Chatroulette. During that time I've witnessed a great many things that would give my grandmother a heart attack, and had exactly two real conversations. But let me first describe the setup of the social experiment: I simply sat at my computer and did other things while leaving Chatroulette running in the background and observed people while giving them absolutely no reaction.

I sincerely wish that I had kept track of the statistics but I've seen everything from trolls to stuffed animals to men masturbating to people intentionally being offensive. Shortly after starting Michael introduced me to Soundflower which I then proceeded to set up and use to pipe whatever audio I wanted to the application. This resulted in some dancing, and some music critiques.

But more interesting are the conversations that I actually engaged in. First, there was Jay, Jen, and their dog from Los Angeles. Jay was so set on getting me to react that I was unable not to. He played me a song on guitar and eventually I started a conversation with him. After chatting (him by voice, me by text) for a while Jen (a girl he is acquainted with) joined the conversation and eventually read me some of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Mask of Anarchy." This continued for quite a while, but they eventually wanted to move on to their data collection. So, one genuine person I run into on the site and they're doing the same thing I am.

And the other amusing conversation I had was with a troll that I identified immediately. After calling him on it, he and I actually had a pretty interesting conversation about "anonymous" and what his take on it was. He (I believe) and I talked for a bit about his technical setup for trolling and about setting up a fmylife + 419eater mashup for the best trolls of people on Chatroulette.

In fact, I might build that. All in all, a very amusing few hours.

Facebook Application Dashboard Privacy Fail

2010-02-04T21:39:27-05:00

Give me a second to scoop Facebook on their own announcement for their newest ~~update~~privacy mistake: the application and game dashboards.

These two dashboards are part of the new redesign that Facebook is rolling out right now. If nothing has changed yet and you don't see these links in your normal interface you soon will. In any case, you can still see the preview links above.

Anything stand out to you? Like the fact that your application activity is now available to all of your friends by default? Let me paint a scene for you: taking a glance at the dashboard and finding that Joe Married is using an application called "One Night Stand" ... oops. Or your boss notices that you've been playing one of those awful games all day at work. These are intentionally extreme examples, but are still well within the realm of occurrence.

The problem isn't that this feature exists, the problem is that this feature is opt-out. I would recommend you go on and do that by setting the "Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards" setting to "Only Me." NOTE: this option only seems to appear once you've been migrated to the new design.

You would think that Facebook would have learned not to do this with Beacon.

OCD Much? Normalizing Your OS X Address Book

2010-02-01T14:45:07-05:00

While working on another project that will be modifying my OS X Address Book, I happened to notice that all of my phone numbers were being output in a non-standard way on vCards. Rather than dealing with it in subsequent steps, I decided to resolve the issue at the source (in other words, my other project is allowed to be fragile because it is just for me). Solution?

#!/bin/sh
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/AddressBook-v22.abcddb ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/AddressBook-v22.bak
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/AddressBook-v22.abcddb "update ZABCDPHONENUMBER set ZFULLNUMBER = replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(ZFULLNUMBER, '(', ''), ')', ''), '-', ''), ' ', ''), '.', '');"

Simple enough. Enjoy!

Quote From Slashdot Comments

2010-01-09T16:29:49-05:00

This is exactly why I have an iPhone. Not because it's the best phone available, which it might or might not be depending on who you ask, but because there's a guy in Cupertino with a black turtleneck, a borrowed liver, and a really shitty attitude who owns the exact same phone I do, and who has the power to make it suck less. Even if he has to stare down AT&T to do it. What other phone manufacturer can go to bat for their customers like that?

Slashdot's Man On Pink Corner on Sunday December 27, @07:41PM. I find this heartwarming for some odd reason.

Privacy in the Modern Era Experiment Update

2010-01-07T12:59:03-05:00

Well, I've got three volunteers for my privacy experiment: a friend of mine I see at least every other week and have known since high school, a person who I met through a friend that I've spent some time with, and a person I've never met who is from the UK. I'll be getting back in touch with these folks after I've exhausted all of the information I can find about them and let them see what I found before I publish it.

I must say that I'm especially amused about the volunteer from the UK. I haven't yet any clue how to go about researching people outside of the USA, so that will be a fun new challenge.