How Facebook Tracks Users and Non-Users Alike

Ben Brooks, writing on Brooks Review:

Byron Acohido reporting on Facebook tracking cookies:

Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log. If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, or if you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging; it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information. Later Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s engineering director, is quoted as saying: “But we’re not like ad networks at all in our stewardship of the data, in the way we use it, and the way we lay everything out,” Bejar says. “We have a very clear and transparent approach to how we do advertising that I’m very proud of.” So I guess the real question is, do you trust Bejar, and therefore Facebook, in general when they say these things? What about now: Adding fuel to such concerns, Arnold Roosendaal, a doctoral candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Nik Cubrilovic, an independent Australian researcher, separately documented how Web pages containing Facebook plug-ins carried out tracking more extensive than Facebook publicly admitted to. I just don’t buy anything Facebook is saying these days. Ben has been on a roll with good commentary. I quoted entirely to much of his piece, but did so anyway because I didn't know how quote just one part without leaving out the main point of his piece. Therefore, please please go to his site and subscribe to his RSS.

Searching The Web For Planes In The Sky

Jason Kottke, writing on Kottke.org:

If you search Wolfram Alpha for "planes overhead", it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look. This is very impressive. My next question is, since Siri searches Wolfram Alpha, will this same search produce the same results using Siri on an iPhone 4S?

Keith Olbermann's Epic Takedown of Michael Bloomberg

Conservatives, In Defending Hermain Cain, Deny That Sexual Harassment Exists. Really.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate:

I have no idea what Herman Cain did with the two, or maybe three, or possibly now four women who have raised allegations of improper sexual behavior about him. I don’t know whether any of them will come forward and run the risk of being labeled a slut for their efforts to do their jobs without being treated like pole-dancers. I do know that—as Amanda Marcotte so eloquently explained this week—the very same people who insist that we don’t know what actually happened all those years ago seem to know exactly what happened: nothing. Sexual harassment is now nothing. Welcome to the era of gender harassment denialism. The harassment skeptics claim that harassment, like racism, used to exist but is now over. Twenty years ago, when charges were leveled at Clarence Thomas, supporters of the accused refused to take the accuser seriously. Now supporters of the accused refuse to take the accusation itself seriously. We have gone from not knowing what sexual harassment is to not believing it still happens. All in less than 20 years. Remember, we don’t know what happened, beyond the fact that several employees came forward with complaints and received cash settlements. That’s not a lot of information. Cain defenders could have stopped there. Instead, great swaths of them have opted to assert that there could never be a valid sex discrimination claim because the whole thing is just a racket. And they went even further: The same folks criticizing the National Restaurant Association employees who came forward with claims that they were uncomfortable in their workplace are willing to deploy the most archaic and gender-freighted stereotypes to get there. Sexual harassment can’t be “real” because the women who claim it are money-grubbing, hysterical, attention-seeking tramps. Read the rest of the piece, if like me, you want your blood pressure to skyrocket.

Herman Cain Falls On His Own Sword

Herman Cain isn't very knowledgable about… well, anything. (Especially foreign policy). This is painful to watch.

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match

Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.

Adobe: Your Questions About Flex

Adobe Q&A posted over the weekend (late Friday night, I think):

Is Adobe still committed to Flex? Yes. We know Flex provides a unique set of benefits for enterprise application developers. We also know that the technology landscape for application development is rapidly changing and our customers want more direct control over the underlying technologies they use. Given this, we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi. Daring Fireball's John Gruber sums this up aptly: Translation: “No.”

Adobe's Rehabilitation

Matt Drance, writing on Apple Outsider:

Adobe’s announcement clearly states that only Flash Player for mobile is going away. The tools — the things that Adobe’s customers really turn to Adobe for — can now grow freely to please creatives in new, forward-looking ways. I truly believe that a long-term Quixotic commitment to Flash Player would have destroyed Adobe from within. It was an expired product that distracted the company from its core competency of making tools for creative professionals. Adobe still has a lot of work to do if it wants to be a real leader in modern web technology, but this is the right first step.