NOTE: This blog is left online as an archive.
Liam Keane's latest journal entries can be found at the always fresh
LiamKeane.com.
Facebook Profiles = Circumstantial Evidence
Apparently, UC Santa Barbara is starting a new policy of collecting images posted to
facebook.com as evidence in disciplinary actions against students. According to
this Daily Nexus article, if students post an image of themselves in which they are seen violating school policy, Residence Hall staff might begin disciplinary action. And if they are pictured "doing something illegal, anyone -
RDs, staff, police - can follow up on it". The Facebook, a witness to crime.
In order for judicial action to be taken, the date, location and person in the photograph must be unambiguous... [The] action taken will depend on the offense, but it will be the same as if a staff member had personally caught the resident.
This seems a little bit odd. What if someone posts a picture in which other residents are violating school policy? Does that count? What about doctored images? Does the university have to verify that the photo hasn't been PhotoShopped? What about text? Can words posted also be included as evidence or is it only images?
My favorite part of the article was a quote by Housing and Residential Services staffmember, Lisa Slavid:
"Every university in the country is looking at this. There is no [existing] policy because this is a new sociological tool." NOTE
Wait, are you sure? It seems like the ability for students to post pictures of themselves online isn't all that novel. Sure, Facebook does bring a uniformity to individuals' profiles and connects them in a popular sub-web, but images have been on the web
since 1992. And the university itself provides all 20,559 students with
webspace just like this one.
In fact,
uweb acceptable use policies are already in place. Under Section 5.iv, the U-Web policy states "Unacceptable uses of
the U-Web Service which may be subject to disciplinary action include... posting materials that violate existing laws or the University's codes of conduct". So now this uweb.ucsb.edu policy seems to be being extended to any private website. And they also have added the threat of notifying the police. Perhaps these should be officially added to the
Electronic Communications Policy (not that anyone would ever be able to find the specific clause anyway).
I am not about to post pictures of myself breaking rules (let alone actually do anything illegal!) and so I find myself not personally concerned. Yet it is this attitude that allows civil liberties to be destroyed ("
I myself am not a breaking the law so I don't need to worry about the Patriot Act"). Therefore, I am somewhat concerned about this policy (and all-the-while skeptical that they will be able to carry it out).
UPDATE: Lisa Slavid wrote in to say that her quote was truncated by the
Daily Nexus and should have read something like "The facebook is a new sociological tool for students to communicate and connect with one another". She also insisted that she's not as much of a tool as the big-brother Nexus spin made her out to be. Which is good to hear.
See also:
Letter to the Daily Nexus from George FlahertyRelated links:
Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Electronic Privacy Information CenterTags: UCSB, The Facebook, Facebook
Yahoo Adds Katrina Metasearch
Earlier, I listed some ways to 'find people' who were missing after Katrina. The frustrating problem about the resources was that there were many different sites offering the same service. This split up listings and made all of them less valuable. Luckily,
Yahoo has offered a people metasearch that looks through all the major Katrina lists. I tried out a few test searches and it really is amazing. Yahoo has created the most valuable Katrina people finder, hands down.
UPDATE 9/12/05: Spoke too soon.
Google's got their's working now.
Direct Relief Dogears
On September 5th, I added a Direct Relief 'dogear' in the upper-right corner of all journal pages. If you would like to use this on your site, all you need to do is add a small bit of javascript. You can host the image on your own server although hotlinking is ok.
Get the code here.
University of California Offers Support
The University of California has set up a page describing
what the UC System is doing to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. At UCSB, Chancellor Yang
released a statement about UCSB's concerns and efforts from the Isla Vista Commision's website. In addition, the UCSB Associated Students Community Affairs Board has compiled a
list of resources for students to help Katrina victims. Part of the list appears to be released under a Creative Commons license but its somewhat hard to tell what part. Another part of the list seems to have been "submitted by JonathanNil"; it lists several email lists about the "Anarchist response to Katrina" which I thought was interesting.
Hurricane Resources
I didn't mention this before, but my roommate at UCSB's freshmen orientation was from the city of New Orleans. Andre decided to attend UCSB to study marine biology at the
Marine Science Institute. I really hope he is okay. I imagine that he was able to evacuate. Even if he was, his family has possibly lost their home.
The following are resouces for those who wish to help Katrina Victims:
UPDATE: I was able to contact André using facebook.com and apparently the hurricane did some damage to his house but luckily he and his family are okay.
Facebook for High Schools
Last night, I noticed on the Facebook homepage the sentence "Now there are two Facebooks: one for people in college and one for people in high school." I looked for a way for high schoolers to register and couldn't find one. The sentence soon disappeared. Today it is back and members who login are shown
a message from Mark Zuckerberg.
We're already at a lot of colleges. For the ones where we're not at, we'll be mostly there by the end of next week. The next logical thing is to expand to high schools.
The college and high school sites are completely separate. Nobody in high school can search for you, see your profile or even send you a message. You can't interact with them either, but you can help your friends in high school get on facebook by inviting them to join.
Anyhow, more things are coming soon. Stay tuned.
Mark
So it appears that Facebook is finally going to try to take on Fox's MySpace. Not only that, but at this time the high school facebook is only going to be open to kids who were invited.
Imagine that, exclusivity for a social networking site (although more like Orkut than ASmallWorld). Assuming that all 3.3 million members of Facebook were each given 7 invites, there are 23,100,000 spots available for high schoolers. Which is interesting because according to the 2000 Census, there are only 16 million children enrolled in high school. My first thought was to buy facebookswap.com (remember gmailswap?) but it seems that the staff of Facebook has given out 7 million extra invites. That can't be right, can it?
UPDATE: Bryan Veloso (from the facebook's web design team)
has announced that only college freshmen and sophmores will be allowed to invite high schoolers. I'm not sure how many people that is but as a very rough estimate I'd say it cuts the invites to about 11 million. If you have a better estimate feel free to share it here. Oh, and if you want to sign up for hs.facebook.com you can do that
here.
Tags: Facebook, TheFacebook, social networking
Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort
I know I'm late to do this and I really wish I had posted this draft earlier, but better late than never. You've probably already seen sites begging but here's another anyway.
I'm hoping that people will give to the Santa Barbara local outfit,
Direct Relief International. Direct Relief has already pledged $250,000 in cash and $35 million in medical supplies. To help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, please
DONATE NOW.
I Love LA
On Saturday, I went to the
LA Dodgers game, which was awesome. I went with my family and my friend Carlyle (who scored the tickets from a high school math teacher). Our seats were on the box level and are pretty much the best seats you can buy. So yeah, a huge thank you goes out to our 11th grade pre-calculus teacher (you know who you are).
Anyway, the Dodgers won the game (8-3). There was an stupendious Dodger home run in the 6th inning by Jeff Kent. Seeing Mayor Villaraigosa in attendence was also pretty cool. Listening to the crowd chant "Hee-Seop Choi" for the popular pinch hitter was almost spine-tingling. After the game we were invited into one of the private boxes. Our hosts let us clean up the remaining Dodger Dogs, sodas, cake, and other goodies. So overall, the game was a ton of fun. I look forward to returning (except for the part where I'll have to pay for tickets).
Can you believe where we were sitting?
Tags: Los Angeles, Dodgers, baseball
T-Shirt Contest Submission
A few days ago, Carlyle Eubank and I designed a tee shirt for Threadless. Threadless is (in their own words) "an on-going tee shirt design competition; anyone can submit their design and if it gets a high enough score and is chosen by the Threadless crew it will be printed and sold from the site." So we sent in the following design ->
Now we need your help. Click on the picture to go to
Threadless.com and vote for our design. While you're there, you might even consider picking up a t-shirt or two (they have something for everyone).
One minor detail, you will need to login to Threadless to vote or comment on our shirt. Creating an account only requires 4 pieces of information. If you want, you can use email forwarding from
Jetable or an email account from
Mailinator (we recommend against using BugMeNot).
Tags: Threadless, tee shirt, paper ninja, rock paper scissors
