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

[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.)