My views on things
Daily life
The Facebook privacy manual / Manuel de la vie privée sur Facebook
0It can be daunting to try and make the right changes to one’s privacy settings in Facebook, but thanks to Angela Alcorn, it’s now easier to navigate through the maze of settings with the help of this guide.
Pour tout ceux qui se sentent intimidés par toutes ces pages de paramètres à régler pour protéger sa vie privée, ce guide d’Angela Alcor est pour vous 
N.B.
This guide is not exactly new (October 2010), but you usually have to go through some registration system to get it, so I thought I would just give you the download links right away.
Amazon has just swallowed the whole of Lovefilm
01 year ago
Lovefilm has had an interesting progression. First they were shipping DVDs and Bluerays, which was a good way to watch movies in HD, but that meant planning for it and more often than once, that meant that you would have discs lying around for weeks.
So last year, they started to stream some movies online and on some TVs. That was perfect for impulsive movie watchers. The quality will never be as good as Bluerays, but who cares when you’re going to watch the latest romcom, you can always get them to send you the latest blockbuster via mail. Later on, they even managed to offer the service for the PS3, which means having access to an even larger user base.
Because it became so successful, Amazon had to buy the remaining shares it didn’t already own and I’m glad they did. With their cloud infrastructure, their books and MP3 store, this was the logical next step. They’ll probably expand the service all over Europe and will make lots of film lovers very happy .
Trapster got hacked, but at least they came through
11 year ago
If you have an account with Trapster, you should go there and change your password now. Leaks of sensitive information happen all the time, but it’s not so common for companies to communicate about it, even when it’s required by law (UK, EU, etc.).
So many little and not so small companies just don’t care about data leaks when they should. Sometimes, they don’t even realize until a customer lets them know.
And, as a consumer, how can you know? Well, unless you use this trick or that one, it’s not that easy to be able to tell what the source of the leak is. And even if you tag your connections, you never know whether some shady website owner sold your data or whether a server got hacked or simply if the person doing the mailings got his Outlook account scanned by a bot…
The “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends” Chrome extension lets you export your friends’ data
0From the description on the website:
“Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends is a Chrome extension to export your Facebook friends’ contact data.
Despite what Facebook says, if someone is your “friend” and you can see his/her email address on his/her Facebook info, they are probably OK with you emailing them.
Facebook doesn’t let you export this data, so they expect you to click on each of your friends’ pages, copy their email address (or other contact information), and paste it into your email client. Kind of ridiculous? Yes.
Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends will let you export all (or some) of your friends’ contact info, to CSV or directly to your Google Contacts (GMail).”
Get it here
Why it’s a bad idea to trust Apple with your business
0An interesting article has been published today by Derek Sivers about how CD Baby, a website selling independent music, got screwed by Apple in 2003.
It’s a well known fact that Steve Jobs is a control freak, only relaxing the rules when threatened by antitrust lawsuits and this story is just one of many that confirms how it can badly affect small businesses.
Yes, the fact that Apple is having full control over the vertical integration of its products can be a good thing for end users. Apple controls the experience and doesn’t need to justify its actions, even if there are glaring contradictions in the way apps are approved. The problem, if you’re a developer or content provider, is that you don’t know what is going to happen and if you have to make investments to publish something on the Appstore specifically, then you could end up being screwed.
It happened to Derek, to people trying to introduce widgets to iOS, hell, it even happened to Google.
Now that the mini tablet market (iPhone, Android) is blooming and that it’s becoming clear that iOS won’t own more than 20% of the market, it would be a good idea for developers to put away their flashy toys and to focus more on other platforms.
