Technocrank

Bruce Shneier makes some great points about Eric Schmidt’s unbelievably narrow-minded take on privacy issues, but one that’s glossed over is his statement that “we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act.”

It’s true, though: if you’re a witch, you won’t drown.

It’s been reported that Steve Jobs responded to an iPhone app developer who was told by Apple legal to change his app’s name. Apparently, he suggested that changing the name of the app as demanded wasn’t that big of a deal.

In the same spirit, I’m going to start a company called Apple. I think they’ll understand when my legal team demands they change their name. Not that big of a deal.

Just today I logged into Facebook and discovered that it felt that the email address I had supplied as a contact was no longer valid.  It provided me an inline form to give them a new address as well as a link to click if I thought this message was in error.  Action on either front made it cough back an message saying what I’d given them was still invalid.

I did a bit of digging around the site’s help pages and I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that it’s pretty much impossible to contact an actual person to help you out.  I do have to credit the CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s enormous ego with creating what is possibly one of the most successful sites with the paradoxically worst support system ever.  The customer forum is composed of an unbelievably byzantine interface link structure that rivals Microsoft’s.  It’s pretty much impossible to find the answer to a problem which they don’t deem to be an official “issue”, nevermind one they do.

Anyway, I did eventually find a solution (without input, of course, from any Facebook staff, possibly from Google).  For some reason, they’ve started scanning their database for contact emails that they deem “generic” (e.g. “mail@…” and “info@…”).  At their request, I changed mine to something else, something equally generic but not what they’re flagging and then set it on my email server side to forward to the address I had previously given Facebook.  This seemed to satisfy it.

I did notice in the “help” pages that some customers had tried to follow Facebook’s instructions but on doing so, became locked out of their accounts.  They’re now stuck in purgatory.  I won’t dwell on this too long, since it’s only a matter of time until I too, am banished with all my contacts, groups and fan pages blown to dust.

Seriously, Facebook:  F.O.

Also, anecdotally (from the “help” pages), more than one customer had reported finding a help page in there somewhere that directed them to contact Facebook support at the following address: “info@facebook.com”.

Just as I was starting to feel settled in and enjoying the speed of Firefox 3.5 (with Gears – yay!), a security vulnerability has been found in the JIT JavaScript engine that makes FF3.5 so snappy.  The temporary solution is to go into about:config and disable it.

I’m very, very crankie right now.  I swear to god, I hope they’re quick about fixing it.  Safari is feeling mighty close…

Google Gears (0.5.29) has just been released and now works with Firefox 3.5.  I’ve only tested it so far with Wordpress.