This week’s blog post is written by fellow PhD Candidate Nicholas Gorski, who came across yet another bug in Facebook’s privacy during the latest rollout. The post germinates from a discussion about how the motto “Move Fast, Break Stuff” sounds fun for an engineer, but is this attitude apt when it comes to your relationships with your friends and family? As an explicit clarification to the engineers at Facebook: This post is intended to incite thought about attitudes towards privacy models, and not make any claims about coding abilities or the inevitability of bugs. —arnab

Mark Zuckerberg’s motto for Facebook, now used as company differentiator in engineering recruiting pitches, is “move fast, break stuff.” As previously reported, Facebook certainly broke things in changes pushed out Tuesday evening: By previewing the effects of your privacy settings, you were briefly able to see your profile as if you were logged in to a friend’s account, which enabled you to view your friends’ live chats as they were taking place, as well as look at pending friend requests.

Tuesday’s changes apparently also broke another privacy setting, though. By now, everyone is aware that Facebook exposes privacy settings for personal information in your profile. This includes items such as your Bio, description, Interested In and Looking For, and Religious and Political Views. However, Tuesday’s changes appear to expose this information to everyone in your network regardless of your privacy settings and even whether or not they are your friend.

[click the pictures to enlarge]

Try it out for yourself. First, set the privacy settings for some of your personal information to exclude certain friends of yours that are in your network, and then preview your profile as them. If the privacy breach hasn’t been fixed yet, your friend will still be able to see your personal information even though they shouldn’t be able to according to your privacy settings. As we mentioned, this extends beyond your friends: anyone in your network may be able to view your personal information (it may even extend beyond your network).

(Note: the privacy leak may have since been fixed… although an awful lot of people now have public quotations on their profiles.)

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this bug is going to get the attention that it deserves. Facebook is exposing a privacy policy to its users, but is broken such that it ignores this policy. Upon rolling out Buzz, Google was lambasted in the press for defaulting to a public privacy policy for your contacts – if you opted in to creating a public profile. In this case, Facebook let you set an explicit privacy policy, but then exposed that information anyway.

How could this seemingly minor privacy leak hurt anyone, you might ask? The canonical example of the danger of Buzz’s public contacts was the case of the female blogger with an abusive ex-husband. No harm actually befell this security-conscious blogger, but it certainly could have. In the case of Facebook’s privacy breach, the information that was made public was only profile information relating to your biography, religion and romantic preferences. Given the masses of Facebook users, how many people’s sexual preferences could have been inadvertently outed? How many people could have had potentially embarrassing biography information exposed to their parents, people in their network, or potential employers? The privacy safeguards are there for a reason, after all.

One might be inclined to write it off as a mistake, potentially a bug in a PHP script written by a junior software engineer — something hard to believe, given the reported talent of their employees. But Facebook’s motto, and their current agenda, makes it clear that the privacy leaks that have come to light this week are more than that. They are a product of corporate indifference to privacy; indeed, Facebook’s corporate strategy for monetizing their site depends on making as much of your information public as they can. The EFF has repeatedly sounded alarms about the erosion of privacy on Facebook, but is it too late?

Much of the information that was once personal and guarded by privacy settings has now migrated to the public portion of the site, and has been standardized in order to facilitate companies using your personal information to tie in to their marketing and advertising campaigns. The books that you like, the music that you listen to, your favorite movies: all of these are valuable data that companies will pay Facebook for, in aggregate. It will allow them to target you more specifically. When you expose this information publicly, though, are you really aware of how it will be used – not just today, but tomorrow? Information will persist forever in Facebook’s databases, long after you delete it from your profile.

In the meantime, Facebook’s corporate attitude of playing fast and loose with your profile information makes it likely that future privacy leaks will occur — that is, if any of your profile information remains private for much longer.

Facebook just launched a super-easy widget called "The Facebook Like Button". Website owners can add a simple iframe snippet to their html, enabling a nice "Like" button with a count of other people's "Likes" and a list of faces of people if any of them are your friends. The advantage of this new tool is that you don't need any fancy coding. Just fill up a simple wizard , and paste the embed code in, just like you do with Youtube, etc.

However, this simplicity has a cost: Users can be tricked into "Like"ing pages they're not at.

For example, try pressing this "Like" button below:

I used BritneySpears.com as an example here to be work/family-safe; you're free to come up with examples of other sites you wouldn't want on your Facebook profile! :)

Important note: Removing the feed item from your newsfeed does not remove your like -- it stays in your profile. You have to click the button again to remove the "Like" relationship.

This works because the iframe lets me set up any URL I want. Due to the crossdomain browser security, the "Like Button" iframe really has no way to communicate with the website it's a part of. Facebook "Connect" system solved this using a crossdomain proxy, which requires uploading a file, etc. The new button trades off this security for convenience.

An argument in Facebook's favor is that no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive the visitor! This is true, the motivation to deceive isn't very strong, but if I am an enterprising spammer, I can set up content farms posing as humble websites and use those "Like" buttons to sell, say Teeth Whitening formulas to my visitor's friends. Or, if I'm a warez / pirated movie site, I'm going to trick you with overlays, opacities and other spam tricks and sell your click on an "innocent" movie review page to a porn site, similar to what is done with Captchas. I'm going to call this new form of spam Newsfeed Spam.

This is scary because any victim to this is immediately going to become wary of using social networking buttons after the event; and will even stay away from a "Share on Twitter" button because "bad things have happened in the past with these newfangled things"!

I don't have a good solution to this problem; this sort of spam would be hard to detect or enforce since Facebook doesn't see the parent page.

• One weak solution is to use the iframe's HTTP_REFERER to prohibit crossdomain Likes. I'm not sure how reliable this is; it depends on the browser's security policies.

• Yet another solution is to provide the user with information about the target of the Like. e.g. it can be:

• Shown in the initial text, i.e. "and 2,025 others like this" now becomes "and 2,025 others like "Britney Spears"..." The downside to this is that it can't be shown in the compact form of the button.
• Shown upon clicking, i.e. "You just liked BritneySpears.com"
• (my favorite) Shown on mouseover the button expands to show the domain, "Click to Like britneyspears.com/...."

This problem is an interesting mix of privacy and usability; would love to see a good solution!

Just built this yesterday, was well worth the effort!

Made with a 1926 yearbook I found at an antique book store, suede leather (left panel / screen cover), Elastic band, duct tape and plastic sheeting from IKEA frames (for mounting the elastic)

My apologies to Drury College’s class of 1926 whose yearbook I pillaged for this project. I plan to scan the contents of the book into the iPad, so that it remains true to its origin!

I am looking for confirmations from other Drupal developers regarding details and corroborations. Comments are welcome here. PHBs need not worry, your Drupal site is just fine.

This post is about an inherent problem with Google’s recently announced “Speed-as-a-ranking-feature” and its problems with content-management systems like Drupal and Wordpress. For an auto-generated website, Google is often the first and only visitor to a lot of pages. Since Drupal spends a lot of time in the first render of the page, Google will likely see this delay. This is both due to a problem with how Drupal generates pages, and Google’s metric.

Google recently announced that as a part of it’s quest to making the web a faster place, it will penalize slow websites in its ranking:

today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Since Google’s nice enough to provide webmaster tools, I looked up how my site was doing, and got this disappointing set of numbers:

I’m aware 3 seconds is too long. Other Drupal folks have reported ~600ms averages. My current site does under 1s second on average based on my measurements. This is probably because I occasionally have some funky experiments going on in some parts of the site that run expensive queries. Still, some other results were surprising:

Investigating further, it looks like there are 3 problems:

DNS issues & Multiple CSS: Since Google Analytics is on a large number of websites, so I’m expecting their DNS to be prefetched. CSS is not an issue since the 2 files are client media specific(print / screen).

GZip Compression: Now this is very odd. I’m pretty sure I have gzip compression enabled in Drupal (Admin > Performance > Compression). Why is Google reporting lack of compression? To check, I ran some tests, and discovered that since Google usually sees the page before it’s cached, it’s getting a non-gzipped version. This happens due to the way Drupal’s cache behaves, and is fixable. Ordinarily, this is a small problem, since uncached pages are rendered for only the first visitor. But since Google is the first visitor to a majority of the pages in a less popular site, it thinks the entire site is uncompressed. I’ve started a bug report for the uncached page gzip problem.

A flawed metric: The other problem is that Drupal (and Wordpress etc) use a fry model ; pages are generated on the fly per request. On the other hand, Movable Type, etc., bake their pages beforehand, so anything served up doesn’t go through the CMS. Caching in fry-based systems is typically done on the first-render, i.e. the first visit to a page is generated from scratch and written to the database/filesystem, any successive visitor to that page will see a render from the cache.

Since the Googlebot is usually the first (and only) visitor to many pages in a small site, the average crawl would hit a large number of pages where Drupal is writing things to cache for the next visitor. This means every page Googlebot visits costs a write to the database. While afaik Drupal runs page_set_cache after rendering the entire page and hence the user experience is snappy, I’m assuming Google counts time to connection close and not the closing </html> tag, resulting in a bad rendering time evaluation.

This means that Google’s Site Speed is not representative of the average user(i.e. second, third, fourth etc visitors that read from the cache), it only represents the absolute worst case situation for the website, which is hardly a fair metric. (Note that this is based on my speculation of what Site Speed means, based on the existing documentation.)

You blew away 500$ on the craps table at Vegas flirting with the waitress in the low cut dress. I bought an iPad. So let’s call it even and stop judging, shall we?

Since everybody and their mother is writing an iPad review, I’ve decided to do the Internet a favor and not contribute to the hypefest. Instead, let’s talk about an interesting “design bug” in the keyboard layouts.

Due to the touch screen nature of the device, the iPad takes a leaf from the iPhone and implements multiple keyboard layouts, depending on the application context. I’m calling four of these layouts “Email mode”, “URL Mode”, “Text Mode” and “Special Character Mode”. Here’s a side-by-side of the first three modes:

This morning, my roommate Meg pointed out an interesting observation in the Text Mode layout. the iPad has an interesting placement of the question mark (”?”) character as a shift-modifier for a comma(”,”). Now, there’s this “?123” button that when pressed, shows you special characters and number keys. But when you press it, the “?” key disappears! Where did it go?

Closer inspection shows that it has moved to the center of the keyboard. This is odd, you’d think: The question mark has always been right next to the shift key since the beginning of time. Further, this bizarre disappearing act when switching modes is unintuitive. Why would someone make such a design decision? Let’s take a look at iPhone’s Special Character Mode for an answer:

Notice how the “?” character on the iPhone is at the center, unlike classic keyboard layouts, where it’s to the left of the shift (which in turn has been replaced by the backspace key). The iPad is clearly trying to maintain consistency with it’s iPhone heritage. However, since it is a very different beast, it also tries to be change things up a bit and borrow from it’s big-boy-computer heritage; ending up with strange design oddities like these. Which begs the question, should a tablet be designed as a larger phone, a smaller computer, a bit of both, or just something completely different?

While this is a fairly minor quirk, it is representative of many oddities in the design of the interface across the board. Despite Apple’s willingness to throw the past out and redesign UIs, the need for consistency with its own family of products often creates ugly contradictions.

Short Filmmaker Casey Neistat has a wonderful 6 minute film about the video chat rage Chatroulette, with statistics and more:

From my roommate Tim’s New Zealand travelogue, that I recently discovered:

The whole cost? Twenty-five dollars (and those are New Zealand dollars, it was $13 American).

For the curious ones among you, he has strained his lateral tendons and may have inflamed some of the nerves in his arm. If it’s not better in six weeks, we’ll find another clinic and he’ll be taking care of for twelve dollars. Amazing.

The woman we were staying with described the wonders of socialized medicine and reasonable pension plans and all things New Zealand. All I could think about was how much it all cost and how it was paid for. She seemed to anticipate my question and explained “Of course it helps when you’re not paying to build nuclear weapons and fight illegal wars.” There it is. As a country, the United States has chosen war and destruction over education, medicine, science, and infrastructure. What a choice.

This is why travel is important. It allows you to see other systems, meet other people, and experience the roads not taken. It makes you a better citizen of the world and of your community. The world is a big place and you should always try to see more of it than you have. And there the lesson ends.

From Eyewriter:

Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.

Also see Dasher.