Get the hell off Google Buzz as absolutely soon as possible.

[reddragdiva]

• London bus maps as a plain web page. Way cool. (courtesy pir)

Google Buzz is completely fucked-up and broken shit. It's utterly superfluous ("That is the biggest problem with Buzz — it was invented not for us but for Google"), it comes with default huge privacy flaws for anyone using it, to the point of causing personal physical danger to Gmail users who haven't even switched it on.

I live in my Gmail — I remain a happy user for six years — and I can see why they put it there. But that this is deeply, deeply fucked up stupidity (hey, it worked inside a corporation for the engineers, let's release it as-is into the real world!) rather than culpable negligence (à la Facebook: privacy gets in the way of ads). But that's arguably worse, as it means less chance of stopping the next blithering fuckup on this scale. Google has a blog post up that singularly fails to address the seriousness of the problems or the blithering stupidity in causing them in the first place. If that's really the best they can do for a response, then Google has gone really, really fucking dumb way too quickly.

Switch it off and keep it off. If you have a Google profile (e.g. if you've ever used Google Reader), you'll need to clean that out too, even if you never switched Buzz on.

(Anyone who answers "But Facebook is bad too!" is an idiot with the logical thinking powers of a climate change creationist.)

Finally got the new Solaris box set up sensibly. Mirrored ZFS everywhere, two zones (which install much more smoothly if you haven't trashed your package database). Now setting up CruiseControl to duplicate our previous setup. The fun thing about working for a living is BIG toys to play with. And the coke, hookers and dumptrucks full of money, of course.* [*money, coke and hookers may settle in transit]

I've worked from home yesterday and today. Just because I can.

I've been reading LiveJournal for the first time in about eighteen months. Good Lord.

Anything on this weekend?

Update: I realise geeks are arrogant and contrary by nature, but the victim-blaming going on here is disgusting. Look at yourselves.

It's up to those of us who understand this stuff to help those that don't, not shit on them for not being us.

Update 2: More #buzzfail:

• Your location down to the address being posted automatically.
• It opts you in even if you say no. I thought that sorta shit went out with RealPlayer.
• A journalist claims grabs photos off her Android phone that she'd never uploaded. (arkady: "Right, that's it, I was going to get an Android, but now I'm getting an iPhone!")

(Comments on DreamWidth; comments on LiveJournal.)

Comments

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Google sometimes seem to have a case of institutional Asperger's Syndrome. They do the technical stuff really well, but are tone-deaf to the nuances of how social things work. This is evident in their (technically impressive, if practically not quite right) attempts at competing with other social platforms (Picasa vs. Flickr, Google Friend Connect which stagnated until Facebook showed them how it's done and took their lunch, &c.), and most recently in getting so swept up in the technical niftiness of automatically inferring social graphs to miss the pretty bloody obvious differences between private contact lists and public declarations of friendship.

Having said that, I'm not convinced that this is as catastrophic as you say. Google aren't the only one who have made such mistakes (Facebook had their privacy snafus, for example), and hopefully they'll lift their game. (Aside: bradfitz now works at Google on, among other things, their Social Graph API. Hopefully he'll be involved in future Google social pletforms, as he seems to get privacy (as evident in LiveJournal).)

[reddragdiva]

Facebook are negligent verging on malice. They have that reputation, Google so far haven't. This is very disappointing.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Facebook seem to put a lot of thought into the design of their social features, and mostly with good intentions. They just don't seem to put as much into the implementation and quality control.

[reddragdiva]

Their behaviour suggests they consider privacy only an impediment to the flow of marketing information. So far Google don't seem to have embraced such an attitude.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Their recent behaviour doesn't seem too bad. Granted, them using users' pictures in ads was unacceptable, but they do have robust privacy controls for posts (though the friend list editing UI could do with some improvement), and let you compartmentalise your information with a fine-grained level of control. One thing they seem to get is that, for their business model to work, users have to trust Facebook to protect their data and posts, and to allow them to compartmentalise their online presence between the various circles they're in.

[kest]

The mistake people make is that they think that they (we) are the customer in these situations. Facebook's customer is the advertiser, and the same is also true of Google. This is why paying for your services may actually be a good thing.

[reddragdiva]

Well, yeah. But Google have hitherto not been appalling about it.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I agree that in general, a service supported by paid users is preferable to one supported by advertisers (hence it being a bit of a shame to see LJ switch from the former model to the latter).

On the other hand, on an individual level, I'm not sure that paying for your service gives you any benefit. You might feel like you have more of a right to complain, but this doesn't necessarily make it work again any quicker. (E.g., I've currently been without my paid-for ISP's email service for a week thanks to the muppets at Virgin Media (and indeed, I stopped using as my main account years ago when it regularly had problems such as emails taking weeks to be delivered), but my freely run email accounts are fine, and rarely have had problems.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. Or one could take the view that Brad-who-invented-friendslists (and the associated drama) has just had another go at producing drama on an industrial scale.

[reddragdiva]

Apparently they used Buzz internally for a long while and found it was really great! ... in a single corporation engineering environment. So of course it was ready to be let loose, without even an opt-in beta.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The underlying tech appears tolerably handy. Were one of a mind to build a distributed LJ, that's where one would start. However, linking it directly to yr gmail account (which generally has a Real Name) and attempting some auto-population so no-one feels like Billy No-mates? So fucking not helping there.

[jauncourt.livejournal.com]

IAWTC. Completely.

I'm pretty much too livid right now to articulate it that well, thanks.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

NP.

I'm badly torn on this. On one hand, I'm fed up to the back teeth with white middle-class males (of which I are one) telling me that it's all lovely, privacy's a myth and I should get over it.

On the other hand, stalkery tosspots are using this kit right now, and I'm reasonably convinced their targets aren't those while males. It makes life relatively simple for junior skript kiddies, tiresome usenet performance artists and the rest of the fulminating obsessives to really dig for imagined dirt.

On the other other hand, I'm very much a fan of the Shockwave Rider, so the idea of there being no secret data rather appeals. Tabloid-driven purse-mouthed society isn't ready for that.

And as a security geek I'm completely aware that security and privacy are polite fictions.

Ugh. Rambling.

[reddragdiva]

"polite fiction" is another term for "social convention" or "don't be a dick." This is the sense in which Google have been very dickish here.

[reddragdiva]

I have read a vague intimation that it's based on the Google Wave thing that no-one could work out what to do with. The server for which is or will be open-source.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

If that's the PubSubHubbub stuff that (ex) Dear Leader Brad was working on a few months ago, then yes. There's some other malarkey in there to enable what appears to be cross-site commenting. Threaded, even.

The kids over at Making Light are going to hate that.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

LiveJournal social functionality is reasonably well designed, especially considering its age. The fact that you can have subgroups, whose membership is not published, and use that to discreetly control who can read which post on a per-post basis is an essential part of making a social network scalable beyond one set of social circles. (Otherwise you end up either having to juggle pseudonyms/profiles for different parts of your identity or, if you're too busy/lazy, self-censor down to a lowest common denominator that won't shock, offend or bore anybody.) And the only major flaws in LJ's design I see are (a) that friendship isn't split into reading and giving access (which Dreamwidth fixes), and (b) that users are notified when they are unfriended (a surefire drama generator, though not as egregious as MySpace's "Top 8", for example).

[reddragdiva]

Actually, only paid users are notified of unfriendings now.