Yes, they do in many cases. But then the discussion evolved into another topic and this got me thinking. I get emails all the time asking about Facebook privacy settings and those who are worried about certain things being discovered, and the employment problems for future reference.

With the multitude of settings, and more often than not rather confusing and somewhat contradictory, how do you effectively lock down your photos, notes, profile and information, to not only certain people but everyone else outside your close-knit networks?

There are articles already on how to lock down your Facebook through the in-built settings, and this one is particularly good. However there are tricks and subtleties I’ll mention here which you may not have considered before.

Feel free to leave verbal heckles, but in the meantime - are you sitting comfortably? Shall we move on?

Network hacking to avoid staff/student snoopage –>

The above image is from Google Maps, displaying the village of Argleton, Lancashire, in the north of the UK.

The above image is from Bing Maps, displaying the exact same area but without any reference to Argleton in the map.

The above image is from the birds-eye view from Bing Maps, which shows an aerial, high-resolution image of the area, which I have stitched together (click to enlarge into full scale; warning: 7MB). As you can see, there is nothing but a load of fields and certainly no buildings, let alone a whole village in the area.

So why does Google display this village - which I’ll point out now, categorically does not exist - and other mapping services don’t?

Some believe that the added name is due to a measure to prevent copyright violations, but Tele Atlas provide the imaging and name data and have said they provide accurate information and Google deny that they have altered it in any way. It seems in this area, Google Maps is the looking glass to external information.

The local blogosphere is already taking advantage of this “Internet sensation” with this spoof site. Yet even after months of knowing about it plus users reporting it as an error, it still hasn’t disappeared — branding Google’s mapping service as potentially inaccurate.

Mike Nolan, head of web services at Edge Hill University, wrote:

“I grew up in the area and spotted on the map one day that it said ‘Argleton’,” he says. “But it’s just a farmer’s field close to the village hall and playing fields. I think a footpath goes across the field, but that’s all. The name ‘Argleton’ is similar to ‘Aughton’. Maybe someone made a mistake when keying in the name?”

Yet the president of the Society of Cartographers, Prof. Danny Dorling, suggested that perhaps this was an additional element to a map to hide secret locations, as some may well be forced to do.

The only thing I can think of, and after trying out the name in an anagram solver which provided little except slight amusement, is that it’s a tiny Easter egg which has taken all this time to discover.

What’s your theory? Surely it can’t be as crazy as, say, a fictional village existing only within the realms of Google, can it?

FarmVille is grid based, similar to SImCity in the way that every item uses up a number of squares on the canvas you have. A chicken will take up one square, a plantation patch will take up 4×4 squares, and buildings take up far more.

Considering the game is so hefty on the computer’s resources through Flash consumption and CPU usage, even with scaling the graphics down a notch, even moving the mouse can be laggy, slow and sluggish.

But throw in the multi-touch capabilities of my laptop, I can simply tap away using multiple fingers at a time and plough, plant and harvest my entire canvas of crops in a fraction of the time simply by not using the mouse cursor.

Flash doesn’t support multi-touch just yet, but perhaps with the help of the iPhone popularity, it will soon be around the corner. But for gaming purposes, a single finger at a time is still far quicker than the mouse.

Is this the only practical use I have found for multi-touch computing? Perhaps so, yes.

At the moment the only real factor it has in its favour is the real-time collaborative space, and of course I see this as a positive from a students’ perspective in a university enterprise arena. But besides that, it has very little substance. Sure it has the avatars, the ability to change the colour of certain items here and there, and it’ll give you a contacts list. Besides that? Mostly unfinished features and no obvious end-game.

One of my favourite features so far is the “Sign out” button in the top right hand corner. This has been particularly useful when pulling out my own hair, trying to work out what the hell is going on, and becoming confused as to what is being said.

The potential

If it were to be opened up as a platform where developers could add plug-ins and additional bits of software to make the experience better (which if it isn’t already planned, Google - do it, otherwise I can’t see anything with it).

The 10 minute video showing the cut-down main features, where you can drag and drop files into a wave, doesn’t seem to work for me yet using both Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows. The video (apparently) used Safari on a Mac, so perhaps it is only available for this niche market.

For crying out loud, there aren’t even any settings to play with yet. The best bit about software in my mind is the settings to tweak, adjust, tinker with and inevitably screw up.

But maybe the long of the short of it is that it just doesn’t even feel slightly ready yet. There’s no particular way to get started, no easy way to begin, and I was immensely confused when features which weren’t available yet opened up a draft wave to explain it. There is no linear learning curve (excuse the oxymoron) and for me, is too tricky and fiddly to get working with comfortably.

Maybe, like Twitter, nobody really understands it at first, until you dive into it head first and really immerse yourself into the culture of the new product.

But everything you would hope for is there already. The search bar, the contacts pane, navigation areas (like the folders you would expect from an email account), tags, uploading and downloading, and a reading pane. Some may see a paradigm towards using Outlook or perhaps a Google’s perspective of how their version of Hotmail would look like; Gmail aside, of course.

The real-life scenario

A course colleague and I are due to give a presentation to our seminar on Wednesday. Through the typical reason of being far too busy and having many other things which take priority over a 15 minute speech on a subject, of which we have spent tens of thousands of pounds to attend a place to merely prove ourselves intellectually, we left it to the last minute.

So with this, while we both have Google Wave accounts and suggested it could have been an idea, it was down to general consensus that neither of us had any idea what we were doing on it, and went back to old school methods (excuse the pun).

I separated the topic into two sections - I took one, and he took the other - and this was suggested over email. On Tuesday evening, we’ll send each other what we both have, over email still, then to blag our way through it there and then in the seminar after e-preparation.

Email works just nicely for the time being, until Wave offers students something of more substance.

Everybody else seems to love it except me, with the heart-warming exception of fellow curmudgeony colleague, Jason Perlow. In my eyes, as a next-generation student, Wave, at the moment is doing just that, waving, as it slowly sinks beneath the icy, cold waters of the Google ocean.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, have approved a number of internationalised domain names (IDN’s) which could be rolled out as soon as next year, the BBC report.

At the moment, only the standard 26-letter English alphabet from A-Z and including 0-9 can be used. This new process will allow in theory any language using any symbol to enter web addresses.

This move will see the next generation web for non-English speaking users, and in short, will make the Internet truly local to whoever may use the web.

From two weeks time, ICANN will begin accepting applications for IDN’s and will make the first ones available from mid-2010.

Starting with the most popular languages, according to the BBC article:

“It is likely the majority of early non-Latin net addresses to be approved will be in Chinese and Arabic script, followed by Russian.

Some countries, such as China and Thailand, have already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language. However, these were not internationally approved and do not work on all computers.”

This appears to be ICANN’s first major step since receiving autonomy from the US government last month. How web browsers will respond to this it is not so clear. However, with Firefox, by entering in a non-English set of characters, seems to convert it only to English when submitted.

Will this make the Internet more accessible? Have your say.

The Digital Economy Bill, which will be brought to Parliament in the next few months, began with a good intention to bring positive change to how the country’s primary source of communication was run and would continue to work, such as:

“…delivering a universally available broadband in the UK by 2012 through a public fund, including funds released from the digital television switchover help scheme.”

However, Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary, is trying to use this legislation to follow through his apparent own agenda to fight illegal file-sharing in form of cutting offenders off the web for the maximum of a year.

Both intelligence services, MI5 and MI6 have “voiced their concerns” regarding the disconnection of citizens who are found to be file-sharing as it will make monitoring and surveillance far more difficult, while police and major law enforcement units in London are concerned due to the amount of evidence that will no longer be able to be collected as a result of these bans.

• Read more: Student suicide threat over RIAA bullying tactics
• Read more: Downloading content illegally vs. getting away with it
• Read more: Universities in hot water over students’ peer-to-peer sharing

It is important to say that Mandelson does not see “widespread account suspension” resulting, and that the “technical measures” (cutting off the Internet to offenders) will be a “last resort”.

Meanwhile, TalkTalk, a major ISP in the UK with ownership rights over Tiscali and AOL and serving over four million users, are threatening legal action against either the government for enacting the policy or even Mandelson directly.

Last month the ISP, who are massively against the three-strike plan, demonstrated how with many unsecured wireless networks still existing, how easy it would be to download illegal content or media through another connection.

With this, Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk’s executive director of strategy and regulation, has taken advantage of the Government’s e-petition service, asking the prime minster to:

“… abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal file-sharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial.”

If you have or had British citizenship, you are more than welcome to sign the petition which can be found here.

As and when news develops on this rather interesting and somewhat personal topic, you’ll find it here.

But now as the world’s largest community and social network, the company recognises that a number of users will die each and every day and that their online identities and pages should be memorialised - primarily for others to preserve their memory.

This is a personal one for me as a year and a half ago, a close friend of ours was killed. Through knowing a friend who worked at Facebook, she was able to lock down the profile page to ensure that over time it would become “read only”. Looking back at the profile now, seen below and obviously blanked out to remove identifiable information, there are a number of obvious changes:

A deceased person’s profile page will look and act quite differently. Once the form is completed to notify Facebook of a deceased person, which acts as a barrier to ensure that not only they know but also that the report is not abused, the profile page in question will be flagged and changed so:

• Sensitive information such as phone numbers, email addresses and anything on the “Info” tab will be removed;
• The profile page will be unavailable to those who are not confirmed friends and the profile page will be removed from all search results (in case this opens up for nutters trying to “get in touch” after a high profile death);
• Once the profile has been frozen, nobody else can log in to the deceased person’s account to prevent hacking;
• The ability to send a personal message will be removed;
• Any information still standing such as networks they are part of and relationship status on the main profile page will stay - regardless of whether the other person in the relationship changes theirs;
• Status updates from that person will be disabled;
• Advertisements will be removed from their profile pages;
• And any “Suggestions” used on other profile pages will not contain any information or pictures from the person who has deceased.

Any photos or videos uploaded will still be available and the wall will remain open for purposes of remembrance.

Personally I applaud this new policy of Facebook’s. Given how we interact with each other in this very technological age, this will ensure we can continue to remember those we have lost as and when we need to.

Thoughts?

Jon Newton of p2pnet, alongside Billy Bragg, musician and director of the Featured Artists Coalition, have begun work on a2f2a.com, a campaign started to discuss how artists can cut out the middleman - such as the suicide inducing RIAA - and ensure artists are fairly remunerated.

Along with their mission statement, the efforts seem to be focused towards not only admitting there is no technological solution to the problems artists already face, but that users would be “willing to pay for music if they can be sure that the money is going to the artists whose work they enjoy.”

File sharing itself is not illegal; what is shared, exactly, could be. With BitTorrent being used to distribute emerging artists’ music on a wide and free scale, or services such as BBC iPlayer which rely on peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on the central services - file sharing technology cannot be simply eradicated.

But universities are now suffering as a result of students taking advantage of the high speeds and the seemingly free access to all network resources. inQuire, the student led newspaper of Kent Union, of which I am an elected officer (see disclosure), reports the implications of students infringing their university’s network regulations.

• Read more: Student suicide threat over RIAA bullying tactics
• Read more: Kicking Internet pirates off the web
• Read more: Downloading content illegally vs. getting away with it
• Read more: Students (unaware/don’t care) about music legalities

Many universities are forced to withdraw access to students’ IT accounts to force them to see the IT department, to then explain to the student that what they are doing is against the law.

There are dozens of reports a year from campus to campus from organisations such as Paramount, Columbia, the RIAA and Tristar as a result of students’ copyright infringement. But because students are downloading music, films, software and other copyrighted media from their campus accommodation or the university library, those monitoring (see the video) see the originating IP address dedicated to that university. Unless the university can pin the blame on a student - which, rightfully so - then the university could be sued as a result.

The printed article stated the views of the students are:

“…that the issue of illegal file-sharing ‘was just more propaganda’ spread by the ‘big corporations as they are scared senseless that their sown-up distribution network could be threatened’, and wanted to ‘preserve their roles as cultural gatekeepers’”.

Also this week, the European Parliament has pushed through with plans to allow governments of EU countries to cut off persistent file sharers from the web.

As I reported around this time last year, the French government was already enacting this but other member states were holding back on the plans. Now it seems that this is going to be rolled out more further afield across Europe. The unfortunately-rejected amendment was meant to protect citizens from having their Internet access automatically disconnected.

Peter Mandelson, a British cabinet member, remains adamant on tightening up the rules to ensure that those in breach of the law will be cut off. This, even though the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, agrees with not only Finland but also this lowly blogger that, “people are as entitled to Internet access as to gas, water and electricity”.

According to the BBC article:

At network level, Internet service providers are able, if asked, to identify the particular machines from which music or other content is being illegally downloaded. But non-network piracy methods, including using instant messaging, e-mail, music blogs, Bluetooth and iPod ripping, are on the rise.

“It is likely that legislation will be too slow to catch pirates”, thinks Forrester Research analyst, Mark Mulligan.

While France’s three-strike system is now in effect, where those caught sharing copyrighted material a third time will have their Internet access disconnected for up to a year, the UK’s file sharing policy will be finalised and published before Christmas this year.

You can bet that this blogger will be sharing his thoughts as and when that happens. For the time being, would you like to share anything?

I sit here at home on a Friday morning an exhausted man. The reason? The constant influx of information from left, right, center… email account, BlackBerry, Outlook and Facebook has reached the point where I am tempted to pack the lot of them in and head to the most isolated part of England for a week.

If only life were that simple.

I have four email addresses. One is a @hotmail.com which has newsletters and mostly spam come through, and a second is a @live.com which pretty much just manages my social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. My third is an xGSi account which I now rarely use, but only use for keeping up to date with my former workplace, and my last but most important is my university email account @kent.ac.uk.

With the exception of my university email account, my communications are a shambles.

With regards to university email identities, I use my staff username which allows me to login to my student email. This enables me to use Outlook Web Access instead of Sun Java Communications Express - the web email service dedicated to students - giving me far more email storage and better features. But I cannot send or receive email through my staff identity, only my student one - which is fine, but a little confusing nonetheless.

Even though I access my web email through Outlook Web Access, I can still access it through the standard Sun Java Communications Express which for some reason forwards all email to my Gmail account. This was, however, part of an ongoing experiment to coax my old Nokia phone to accept my email without using my email server settings which it automatically rejected.

But with my welfare work and ZDNet work, the necessity to keep on top of email communications is an absolute necessity. I cannot switch off because if I do, a student could be at risk or a massive story could break and I could miss out on it. This is why I cannot be or go anywhere without my BlackBerry.

With this it means I get all of my email accounts on the go - which can be useful, but with the amount of stuff I receive, I often resort to screaming at my phone as I hold it in my hand close to my face, which is neither productive nor indicative of a man in sound mind.

But before the almighty suicide of my hard drive a few days ago, I had every email from every account stored locally on my computer through the desktop client Windows Live Mail; simply because Outlook 2007 got a little too intense for me.

Whether I use Windows Live Mail, Sun Java Communication Express, Outlook Web Access, Gmail, Hotmail or my BlackBerry, the only relief I have is that these email accounts all show exactly the same email folders and messages, as they are all interconnected with one another. The problem is that I still quite can’t get my head around how they are structured, because part of it is managed by my university IT department.

The thing is with the work we do more often than not we have to remain connected at all times. We can check our email constantly throughout the day only to discover some emails on some services aren’t flagged, are all unread, are not organised or synchronised with your end-of-day perception.

My email is essentially a slightly more complicated version of a to-do list. I read things, mark them as unread or flag them so I go back to them later on and see what else I have to do. I have no central point of viewing these things, meaning I print them off and carry them around with me.

So if anyone else has an email system like this, I feel for you. It’s technological red tape and it’s tying my hands behind my back every day with the e-bureaucracy I face using it. I’d be happy to stick to phone calls instead.

Could I be the first victim of Email Overload Syndrome? I doubt it, but I suspect I need a single dose of simplicity serum and a nice cup of shut the hell up.

How do I know? Because last night I hit the realisation that I lost everything in a blink of an eye. Here’s how, kids.

Two days ago, I was in my home office working on my degree work for the week. Just as I finish writing up a seminar, I stretch my legs, kicking out the all important power cable at the back of my machine. It’s not the first time I’ve done it, so I was annoyed at potentially losing what I had been working on but not particularly fussed.

I restarted the machine and with an element of surprise, the POST took a while longer than per usual and it stopped, not before asking me to insert boot media. At this point, I thought the master boot record used to boot up Windows was corrupted. No big deal, but the Windows 7 disk I needed was in my office on campus - over a mile away, and this was 11pm.

So I trail my way up to campus and get the almighty powerful disk I thought needed to fix my master boot record. Instead of trailing all the way back home, I decided to pull an all-nighter and get some work done. To say that I felt a little delicate the next day would have been a massive understatement.

Once I finally got home, I slam the disk in and with a little persuasion begin Windows setup to recover the drive. After a while it dawned on me that not only can Windows setup not find my drive but neither can BIOS. At this point I realise that I am in deep trouble.

With a spare tower box at my disposal, I unplug the drive and install it into the other machine, swap SATA leads, install it while Windows is running on the other machine - you name it, the combinations were countless.

At this point, it is keen to stress the importance and value of Twitter and my colleagues. With the help of the aptly name @the_pc_doc, our very own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes and a long-time friend, Robert Gale, with Twitter handle @awv named after his very popular “A Welsh View” blog, I was able to troubleshoot these issues in real time. (For those interested: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)

Through no will of trying, I have now come to a sound, unfortunate conclusion, that my hard drive is well and truly screwed. My data is fully intact but I have absolutely no way of accessing it. And did I back up my machine? Of course I did - but on a separate partition, and on that hard drive.

There are little bits and bobs floating around on my laptop, my office computer, my university network shared drive, and a bunch of flash drives that I have - as well as a “master backup” which I completed a few weeks ago once I upgraded to Windows 7 RTM on a DVD at home, but I cannot really count on those for absolutely everything.

So my wise words for the day - especially university students like me who spend tens of thousands of pounds/dollars on their university education - in large letters for emphasis on an appropriate level:

GET AN EXTERNAL SOLID-STATE DRIVE AND SET AN AUTOMATIC BACKUP TO EVERY SINGLE WEEK WITHOUT FAIL. NO EXCEPTIONS.

For the time being, I am faced with a bill of up to £750 (roughly $1200) with OnTrack, who specialise in data recovery. If you are a company (preferably in the UK), I am opening the floor up to bribes. It has now reached the point where I am so desperate to get my data back - because most of it entails two years of a degree and countless thousands of pounds getting that what is now mere bits and bytes - and I very much want it back. I have learned my lesson.

So if you want to offer me a discount which would considerably cut my costs in getting my data recovered, then please do get in touch. I’m opening the floor for offers, and the non-financial reward shall be great and not open to anybody else, i.e. service plugging on one of the most popular blog networks on the Internet.

So how long toes it take to wipe three years of work? 1 second. Weapon of choice? An outstretched leg.

But just stop and really think for a minute. If your entire hard drive was destroyed right now, how much would you panic?