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It’s certainly meant to be & they’ve certainly worked on it & done their best to get all their users to understand how to tweak it but has it worked? In an always on world it’s easy to leave your personal data public in places you’d rather not & with FaceBook in particular this can be a big deal. It’s all very well being impressed that everyone online can find you but in many sad cases there are those people who you’d rather be invisible from, these problems can be taken care of within FaceBook but it’s not always either easy or clear. Even within your own friends list there may be areas where a little discretion can work wonders, I don’t think people should be friends with their bosses online but if you’re going to do it then a few fences are justified. It may be that these precautions are a step too far for most people & that they couldn’t care less who sees what but these people are going to become fewer & fewer as time passes, it may seem trite now but if you can Google yourself & chuckle at the results then so can anyone else. (continue reading…)

It would seem that the legendary reliability of Blackberry privacy is ruffling feathers in the Middle East as a few of the countries there are demanding monitor rights over their networks. It may well be just a power play to bring a successful company to heel but if nothing else it shows what a fine line can be drawn between an individuals’ right to privacy & a governments’ need to know. Maybe given that Rim are so business orientated that they will only use their own servers for certain traffic this was bound to come up eventually but in a world scared rigid by terrorism this may just be another knee jerk reaction by the authorities. Most of us use mobile phones every day & we expect our private conversations & Emails to be just that, private, sadly we also expect the forces of Law & Order to be ever vigilant against those who would do us harm & so provoke the constant paradox we now live under. I get around it the same way most everyone else does by assuming that the government have every right to snoop on anyones’ privacy so long as they stay the hell away from mine because I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not saying that this solves the entire problem but as far as honesty goes it’s all I’ve got. (continue reading…)

The kids broke up today & as July seems to be behaving itself they’ve got nothing to complain about & endless weeks in which to run free. They’ll do nothing of the sort of course & instead will find the quickest route to being bored out of their minds that they can, it’s odd but they manage this every year without fail. I can remember being bored rigid during the long Summer holidays as well but as I recall we didn’t manage this until at least a few weeks had passed & all the bikes were broken. These days it’s something of a criminal offence to not to offer the kids constant stimulation but even here there’s a problem since as soon as a chance to learn something comes up they all moan that they aren’t at school anymore? They don’t make it easy, there are things they want to do but since these things always involve quite a big outlay of cash it can be tricky doing more than one or two of them when cash is tight. You’d expect this point to be appreciated by children who live on a council estate which contains mostly poor people but in all honesty they don’t see it, they just expect it to happen. I’m not moaning about this, I’d like to just whisk us all off on a new adventure every day until they were begging me to be allowed to stay home but it’s simply not possible & what is possible isn’t up to the required standards. (continue reading…)

Remember your teenage years? The hormones, the first tentative forays into the mysterious world of girls that you still haven’t really got the hang of? The knowledge that it didn’t matter what you wanted to do or whenever you wanted to do it there was no way of doing it? & the discovery that any attempt to do anything wondrously grown-up whether it was drink or sex related came with its’ own embarrassment potential? Of course you do, we all do as we now laugh & wince our way across the adult landscape that’s now somewhat less wondrous but at least free to be explored, well I bring news, if you’ve had kids then your teenage years are coming back. This is not to say that they’re coming back in a good way, just that they’re coming back & with a special twist in the tail to boot, you may think you suffered enough at the hands of your parents to be entitled to occupy their exalted position in your own home bit it’s not going to happen. We aren’t the same as our parents & far more to the point the teens today aren’t anything like the teens we were, we didn’t have expectations without limits & although we were just as selfish & lazy we never expected anyone to approve of it, you might have had it bad growing up but it’s worse when they do. (continue reading…)

I guess it had been coming for a while now, almost a couple of weeks had passed without any kind of Facebook related life interference, it’s back now though as if it was just saving it up. I wouldn’t mind but I hardly get any trouble concerning me from Facebook, okay so I don’t go on much except to update my status here & there & see what everyone else is up to but even so, it’s crazy how much of an effect it has on me. The teens have it the worst I guess as they always seem to do & say now & doing any thinking required later, this is not a good strategy when online both in public & in real time. Considering that just one hasty post made in anger can produce reams of anger & days of threatened retribution you’d think they’d know better but they don’t & afterwards go back to doing it anyway. Normally there’s at least one of the kids embroiled in some meaningless argument during any given week, sometimes it’s due to gossip, sometimes to their joining in with other peoples’ rows but there all the same.This week though it’s been relationship week on Facebook, relationship week is always a barrel of laughs & as the statuses change from single to otherwise & back again the only real surprise is that more people don’t get killed over this nonsense. (continue reading…)

Given that for the last few weeks & for the next one at least I’ve been restricted to mobile net only it seemed a good time to assess it. We’re all well aware that for most people it’s an option & that it’s meant to be the way of the future, the thing is though that there’s a few problems. These problems aren’t really of a technical nature, the mobile internet is no longer the crippled service it once was, to really rival a Pc though it needs more.
As the recent innovations from apple & others suggest the main issues raised by mobile internet are the devices we use to access it. The Ipad is a worthy attempt to solve this problem but as with netbooks it’s going to struggle for acceptance. As well as the normal apple snobbery to deal with it’s not clear as to where it actually fits in amongst the other devices, it’s not a flash issue alone that causes this, more that the phones can do more. They don’t however have the screen size which is a massive advantage when compared to sustained usage on a phone, the screens of phones can only reach a certain size. Mobile internet is brilliant for an instant fix & adequate for more when needed but without a decent screen is tiring in the long haul. (continue reading…)

It’s generally accepted that Facebook is a massive phenomena & has hundreds of millions of users, it’s safe to say that just amongst my family I can think of only three members who don’t regularly spend a portion of their day there. It’s brilliant for keeping in touch with people & when it’s late & we’ve all retired for the day we can still catch up & hang with the people we like. It’s almost the same for the children too, instead of huge ‘phone bills being the result of chatting to their mates they can gossip away freely without messing up anyones’ day. There are a few differences though, the beauty of Facebook is that it allows where people were earlier to carry on, the downside of course is exactly the same thing & it’s nowhere more apparent than amongst the kids. Bullying used to be schooltime only unless you were unlucky enough to live too near the bully, now it can go on & on with the added problem of attracting more & more people to latch onto a victim, there’s been a lot done to stop this & it does sort of work, except for the fake accounts. (continue reading…)

Nick Clegg, the new man of the people? It’s taking some getting used to, I know he did okay in a debate but really? I mean, there’s a reason we put up with the other lame parties, the Lib-Dems are there for a bit of light relief but we don’t expect to actually listen to them. I know that a change is as good as a rest but this would be a truly huge change, the Liberals haven’t been a major force for decades mainly because they’re so keen to not offend anyone that their policies are ridiculous. Admittedly a lot of the evidence for such a surge is coming from the Internet but it is getting to be slightly more reliable these days, the polls are understandable but even at full peak it’s not enough to say that the Lib-Dems are about to become a credible force. In any case after being ignored by the main parties as they savaged each other they’ve now stuck their heads above the parapet & things are different now. (continue reading…)

It’s an odd world these days, as the online realm rushes in to almost every aspect of our lives & our off-line life data rushes just as relentlessly the other way it’s sometimes difficult to locate any part of our day that is wholly one thing or another. When I was growing up kids played out, & that’s all we did, if we wanted to know if someone was coming out we had to actually walk all the way to their house & interact physically with their door & then with whoever answered it. Nowadays the kids wont take a chance on such an impractical method & organise who they’re meeting,

Progress meant yet even more work for the modern shipwreck survivor

where they’re meeting & what they’re doing long before they get dressed some days. This is a damper on the sheer spontaneity of what six or seven kids sat bored rigid in a field can come up with but then again considering some of the things we came up with this may not be all bad news. It does have an unfortunate consequence though on the social life of our teenagers & to a lesser extent their parents, if the Internet goes down for whatever reason then their social lives stop dead & they’re no longer involved in the constant stream of vapid commentary. They fall back on to their mobiles but since these are almost mini-net devices now having to actually talk to people is frowned upon & even this is credit dependent & kids murder credit. It’s all very well uploading your entire world on to the servers of the Internet but it only works so long as you’re in contact with it, the worst thing about this is that just because you can’t contact your online self it doesn’t mean that no-one else can. (continue reading…)

Perhaps extreme in some ways but socially at least the striving to stand out has become a much less appealing choice now, blending in with the crowds & belonging is much more important these days as to be seen as different is somehow threatening. It’s certainly an age where to be a loner isn’t the best move you can make, much like the witch hunts against old ladies in times past the loner is an easy target for the rampant paranoia of today, some of the loners don’t help much with this it’s true but to be honest as a population we con ourselves with stranger dangers when most of the trouble is caused much closer to home. We seem to be operating a sort of shoal system where we’re only happy doing those things that millions of others also do whilst as a kind of sop to individualism the celebrity cult gives us glimpses of what people can do on their own although a quick examination of the celebrity cult reveals that it’s really just a lot of people doing the same things only being watched by millions. Maybe there’s just too many people these days for individuals to stand out or perhaps there’s just not enough time for any standing out to be done, in too many cases it seems that the amount of people involved anywhere is intrinsically more important that the actual people themselves, this should be a problem but it isn’t, it’s almost a bonus. (continue reading…)