‘Anonymity is used as a way to stick your finger in a pot of something to see if it changes the flavor without taking responsibility for doing so.’

“The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.”

“This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.”

Sites using Facebook’s ‘social plugins’ have been chewing up memory in my Safari (stemming from, I think, based on looking at the ‘Activity’ window, a blocked request returning an error and being requested over and over again). I’m still not sure what the issue was (AdBlock or Facebook Cleaner extension conflict, probably?), but with this extension the plugins don’t have a chance to load in the first place, which is fine because I never use them and I think they’re worthless and annoying.

“There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called ‘lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!’ or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don‘t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.”

Because there's no alternative, and it is valuable. But its privacy practices are awful.

Why privacy persists. "Along with new visibilities comes social understanding of those new visibilities." "If the end of privacy comes about, it's because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. It's not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities."

If you haven't opted-out yet, do so in your Facebook preferences under "Privacy" > "External Websites."

What's new in OpenID 2.0. There are "160 million already existing OpenIDs." Still, we need "support for OpenID-authenticated commenting by the major blog hosters."

"a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving."

By Adam Rifkin. A film shot entirely by security cameras. "Secret liaisons, scary killers, seductive teens, slacker workers -- the root of all conspiracy isn’t who or what lies unseen behind the lens, it’s what is seen through it."