Hacker-anarchists make Guy Fawkes design a best seller – swelling the coffers of the Hollywood studio it is battling
They call themselves "Anonymous", and they are the world's most famous group of hacker-anarchists. When they have left the glow of their computers to protest in public – against anti-piracy laws, perhaps, or the imprisonment of Julian Assange – they have taken, very wisely, to wearing masks. Since 2008, the mask of choice has been the eerie "Guy Fawkes" design made famous by the film of Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta.
In Moore's story, the mask is worn by a lone freedom fighter against government iniquity. Yet it is a measure of the allure of hacktivism that the real-life replica has now become one of the most popular masks worldwide. Its manufacturer, Rubies Costume Company, sells well over 100,000 every year, and the product is the best-selling mask on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. In the words of one reviewer on the site, it is "very useful to hide your identity from the public while you go about your anonymous deeds".
Now, it is not nice to sneer – nor is it wise, when one's target is a rather touchy criminal collective. But there is a tasty irony about the fact that the V mask is itself a copyrighted product. Every time that Rubies sells one – for $6.49, £5.16 or €10.50 – a cut of the profit goes to Warner Bros, which made the film. That's Warners as in one of Hollywood's six big studios, a subsidiary of TimeWarner, and a member of, yes, the Motion Picture Association of America – Anonymous's adversary in the fight over online piracy. It just goes to show. The battle for copyright may be lost, but no one flouts the law of unintended consequences.
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Does your data take refuge in DropBox? Might be time to consider relocation. This morning the staff over at Dropbox seemed to have taken leave of their senses. They posted this revision of their terms of service.

From Dropbox:

We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

This in turn ignited a storm on social media and a veritable exodus of users from the service. As could be expected there was even a twitter account created in response to the revised TOS. Amusing.

Soon after the storm blasted through the tubes of the web there was a revision to the revision to the Terms of Service as published:

[Update - 7/2] – We asked for your feedback and we’ve been listening. As a result, we’ve clarified our language on licensing:

You retain ownership to your stuff. You are also solely responsible for your conduct, the content of your files and folders, and your communications with others while using the Services.

We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

Drew & Arash

The update notwithstanding the exodus continued unabated. This coupled with their recent security failures it is no wonder that people were jumping ship. While it could be argued that DropBox intended something different than what was written. The genie was already out of the bottle. There were calls for calm but, it was too late. The camel back was broken.

So, rather than belabour the issue; what are the alternatives available?

Wuala (from LaCIE)
SpiderOak
Zumo Drive
Box.net

This is not an endorsement of any of those solutions as we have only begun testing them. It’s some guidance for potential DropBox replacements. Here is a list of 41 options that are possible choices. Use at your own discretion.

I have left DropBox myself. This may have been a gaffe on the part of DropBox but, to be honest, it is just one too many screw ups.

Our privacy on Facebook has been steadily eroding but the networking site is so powerful many people find it hard to leave
If you want to surf the zeitgeist, then look at the most common queries on Google. When I looked the other day, "How do I delete my Facebook account?" was fourth on the "How do I...?" list. Just to put this in context, number two was "How do I know if I'm pregnant?" You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to twig that something's up.
What's happened is that Facebook's latest tweak to its default privacy settings has sparked a firestorm. Four US senators have voiced their concern. Fifteen privacy groups have filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. On this side of the Atlantic, the EU's data protection working party has written to Facebook, saying recent changes that made previously private information publicly viewable by default were "unacceptable". And many online commentators, influential and otherwise, have joined the fray.
If you think that privacy is an abstract concern of EU bureaucrats and libertarians with too much time on their hands, then might I suggest that you consult youropenbook.org. This is an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook "status updates" and displays what it finds.
A search for "I cheated", for example, brings up all kinds of intriguing stuff. A nice young woman from Baltimore posted "dam right i cheated i coulnt get it from u wen i needed it". There's also the odd potentially embarrassing reference to cheating in exams. A search for "I lied" brings up updates like "I'm sorry, I lied before when I said I used to make lots of bets. My therapist tells me I should try lying a lot to help get through my... gambling problem". Another writes "im not gonna bother anymore...theres no point hiding the truth.....iv lost too much and all because i lied to the one i love...im such a fukin dick head, i fucked up the best girl i've ever had".
I could go on but you will get the point. All of these people are instantly identifiable. Millions of Facebook users are posting embarrassing or damaging messages which can be read by the entire internet. My guess is that most of them think they are just writing to their "friends" because they don't understand how to fix their privacy settings and have simply accepted the defaults provided by Facebook. There's a trend here. Privacy on Facebook has been steadily, inexorably eroding. To track the erosion, see the timeline posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or a sobering animation created by IBM researcher Matt McKeon. What we're looking at is the implementation of a corporate strategy designed to maximise return for Facebook's owners.
The response of the company's PR flacks is predictable. Users are free to set their privacy settings, they say, and if people don't like what Facebook's doing then they can always leave. Nobody's forcing them to join the network.
On the face of it, both assertions are true. It is possible permanently to delete a Facebook account, but doing so involves quite a palaver and takes about a fortnight. A bigger problem is that because the service has become so ubiquitous, many users are discovering it's become essential to their professional lives. "Don't think I don't think about [leaving]," wrote one on her blog. "I don't like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.... The rewards are concrete and immediate. The costs are abstract and ideological. When I try to balance the two, the rewards win, but that is because of my friends and despite Facebook... Telling people with complaints to leave ignores the very real value of the networks they have built and what should be their right to continue those networks on the grounds on which they were built."
Welcome to Metcalfe's Law – the idea that the value of a network increases dramatically the more people belong to it. It's the same phenomenon that keeps people using Microsoft Office – not because they love the software, but because their professional lives would be impossible if they couldn't share Office documents with workmates.
It's one of the great ironies of information technology – that the aggregate effect of billions of free choices made by independent agents results in a kind of tyranny imposed by the winner that took all. We first saw it with Microsoft, and then with Google. Is it now Facebook's turn?
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