Solipsism Gradient

Posted by jerryT:
LOL. No problem. It’s been great fun seeing how difficult it is to “get connected.”

Got a couple of emails from them. I was sent to a page, username recognized, and instructed to change password. Did so. Tried to login. No go. Tried the link in other email (which also gave me my username). This time it said no such username existed. LOL

Personally I think the hotshots at Google, in conjunction with the brightest lawyers of the world, have come up with a great new product: Tortureware.

If and when I ever gain access I’m hopeful I can trash my account and/or make a quick cancellation and exit. It has, however, been fun. I especially like the little game of identifying the letters in the box and trying to then type them in. It’s really quite a challenge and I heartily recommend an Apple Studio Display. LOL

jerryT

Invites at Orkut seem to be down, due to a software bug. Sorry, Jerry…

Meanwhile, Tina unjoins:

I don’t want to know that at least two of my acquaintances think intimate body piercings are hot, and I don’t want to have ‘fans’. I’m quite happy with the fans I have in real life (they’re loud, and lurking around in my bedroom… but quite useful once summer’s here) and I don’t need people to give me stars to show me that they like me. I know they do. Or do they?

And Glenn Fleishman also bows out:

But the fundamental problems for me are: I’m not dating. I’m married, happy, and not looking for more/new partners. And although I’m not a prude nor conservatively moraled, I still don’t want to know the romantic social predilections like a Elks Club badge of everyone I barely know.

I’m not looking for more friends. I have enough friends in the atomic world already to want electronic friends that I will rarely if ever meet in fleshspace. I’d rather spend more time enriching existing friendships.

…I don’t need to expose myself through yet another method. My site already exposes me enough. Even if I limit my profile, I’m providing a lot of personal detail. If I don’t fill out the profile, I’m not very interesting.

They both have good points. Interestingly, Glenn was on my Orkut friends list… I’ve actually met Glenn and his charming wife in person on the first MacMania Geek Cruise, and we’ve exchanged friendly e-mails several time since then. Still, there are people on my list whose degree of friendship with me is much greater – and others which I know even less. Shoehorning all these people into a generic “friends network” is awkward. And the whole dating/mating scene should have been fenced off into a separate section, really.

Glenn recommends LinkedIn for building business relationships. By a coincidence, I was invited to that network today by another of my Orkut “friends”, and had just filled out my profile when I read Glenn’s post. By contrast, LinkedIn is very businesslike and impersonal; almost too much so. Let’s see what will happen there…

Posted by jerryT:
Alas I still await my invitation. <sigh>

(Actually I’m trying to remember why I wanted an invitation in the first place.)

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

Channel crossing

Great cartoon on a ” revolutionary new Bluetooth feature ” (via Heli, who is otherwise in more serious mood, passing on a ‘Sorrows of Empire’ review at ‘ Heaven and Hell ‘).

I’m registered at Orkut, now. It’s an invitation-only “friends” network tied to Google. There are user profiles, messages, communities… reminds me strongly of the FirstClass-based BBS I built in the early 1990s, and its many cousins all over the world.

Of course, it’s slicker, web-accessible, and great emphasis is placed on rating people and building up a “network” of “friends” (note that these words aren’t necessarily used in their everyday acceptions here). The terms of service are not overly friendly:

By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.

Then again, in today’s lawyer-dominated society, such was to be expected. Furthermore, all personal information you put into your profile will probably be processed, summarized, injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected, put through several statistical wringers and eventually be used to do something to you that is supposed to be precisely tailored to your interests.

<digression>Today, the spam I get is very easy to filter, because spammers know nothing of me beyond my e-mail address. So, anything that mentions contracts, schools, mortgages, loans, banks, medication, orders, jobs, diplomas, delivery, health, ebay, weight, tickets, meetings, members (including the male kind ) and other similar topics must be spam. So, would I like to receive unsolicited e-mail about things that really interest me? Not easy to say, but I can’t rule it out beforehand.</digression>

Getting back to Orkut. At this writing, I’m informed that I’m “connected to 35862 people through 23 friends.” Nearly all of those I know personally or professionally. It’s very interesting to follow the network links. The communities I’m interested in have little traffic so far; I can’t see them substituting the dozens of mailing lists I subscribe to. It’s an intriguing experiment, but not truly compelling in its current incarnation; and it involves too much work. Even typing in username and password every time is sometimes too much…

As Jason Kottke said, perhaps we’ll soon need a personal social coordinator:

Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.

For a very interesting sociological analysis of social networks, see Danah Boyd‘s talk at the ETech conference.

That said, I recommend the Spherical Object Collectors community, created by my friend (in several senses) Mario AV, which already pointed me at this fascinating page about Hikaru Dorodango, or Japanese shiny mud balls.

The Presurfer points at SPOT THE FAKE SMILE, an experiment designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one.

I got 16 out of 20 right; not bad at all. The 4 I got wrong were among the 6 or so where I was in doubt, so I’ve still got something to learn. Reading facial expressions is something I used to be quite bad at, so it’s nice to know I’m learning…

I used to think my recently strengthened Meta-Disclaimer covered everything… however, LawMeme (via Boing Boing) discusses what must surely be the largest disclaimer/user agreement on the net.

I stand in awe of, and concede all claims to comprehensiveness to, whoever wrote:

…All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission  of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime.

…

You further agree to refrain from engaging in any conduct that is, or that we determine to be, in violation of this User Agreement. You acknowledge that remedies at law may be inadequate to protect against breach of our intellectual property rights, as prohibited under this Agreement, and you agree to the granting of injunctive relief without the posting of a bond or undertaking, for the protection of terms laid out in this User Agreement without proof of actual damages. You agree to undertake at your expense any measures and/or legal actions necessary to protect and defend our intellectual property by counsel reasonably accepted by us, and upon request to cooperate with us when we need to do so, and to cooperate with us as fully as reasonably required in the defense of any claim or in asserting any available defenses.  We shall have the right at our sole discretion to assume the exclusive control and defense of any matter.

This astonishing document also says:

…The use fee for a license for reproduction of text is one thousandth of a U.S. dollar per word times the number of words times the number of copies, except in the case of Internet use where we generally follow the New York Times use fee schedule of one hundred dollars per article per 30 days or fraction thereof. The amount of the use fee may be adjusted by several cents in order to facilitate electronic tracking and verification of payments.

I hope that doesn’t include the disclaimer itself…

…Additionally, in the event that your actions in violation of this User Agreement result in our being deprived of our exclusive rights to ownership and control of the intellectual property we have created in this website and its digital images and/or other content in whole or substantial part, or of the value thereof, or which would make such intellectual property unsaleable, you agree to pay us liquidated damages in the amount of the greater of five million U.S. dollars, the amount of copyright infringement statutory damages per image or other content for each and every infringement, the appraised market value of this website absent such actions, and the estimated commercial cost to create a website of like complexity and content.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

And at the very end, an important point:

The author of this publication is CPRR.org, a pseudonym. The author, an individual scholar who is not a Counsellor at Law, asserts moral rights.

The deconstruction of this paragraph is left as an exercise for the student…

The scary part is: it’s not a satire. They really mean it, they really think every one of those paragraphs is necessary. That means it probably is necessary. If this goes on, in a few decades, the only way to avoid being sued for zillions of dollars will be to live in the interior of a hollowed-out asteroid at an undisclosed location and have no communication at all with the rest of the universe.

Der Schockwellenreiter kindly links to Nudge. Vielen Dank, Jörg!

Update: Ole Saalmann follows suit, thanks!

Update#2: The Daring Fireball liked it… made my day .