Facebook Comments kill web freedom

too late for April 1st

You mean you only have login for Farcebook?

And in your real name?

"private browsing mode in nearly every browser allows for untracked activity across the web."

When did it ever claim to do that? It allows for untracked activity on your local machine, nothing more.

"Facebook is arguably one of the greatest inventions ever"

I wouldn't want to be the one arguing that...

I'd rather suffer the trolls than live in a padded room with half a billion people all channelling Ned Flanders.

This is what happens when people elevate their feelings to cult status. Everyone thinks that it's illegal for you to upset them. Boring. People used to want freedom.

A politically motivated post

From a politically motivated journalist. "Upper crust" and "proletariat" are two phrases from the politics of the last century that are outmoded and don't reflect shifting world dynamics. World wages are increasing so now workers in Botswana have greater earning power, in real terms (e.g. Accounting for inflation), as the workers in Finland in 1955. Food production is more efficient and higher than it has ever been. Now averaging 2,700 calories per day for every person on the planet. You are using class language that rather paints Apple first and Facebook second as class based oppressors of the proletariat. The problem is when the phrases were coined, only the "upper-crust" had aspirations of spending money on luxury goods (because only they had the money to spend) but now the majority of what you refer to as the proletariat share those aspirations. New luxuries (including Starbuck's coffee, trainers from Nike and cars like the New Mini) are now within the reach of "the masses" in the West (e.g. on the shopping lists of most of what used to be defined as the proletariate). It's even debatable if Apple are fully within the new luxury category, offering as they do high build and materials quality to match the price (and highly competitively priced tablets).

You are right the Internet is becoming less the wild west and sherrifs are coming into town though and no doubt there will be mist-steps along the way. And as in the real wild west, the sheriffs are supported and funded by vast private concerns and entire towns are owned by private wealth. So we need to be vigilant against the corruption of private interest. Just lay off the Marxist / 1960's class envy "Socialist Worker" language and recognise aspiration and quality as a good thing. Apple, though less immediately affordable, aren't any more beyond the aspirations of the masses than Android (or should I have said "the proletariate"?). If Matt, you are someone who sees class divisions more than a unified continuum of aspiration, perhaps that is what bothers you most?

"and everyone's already on Facebook"

Not everyone.

Have you opened a Terminal on a Mac lately?

There is plenty of "complexity" and "ugliness" in there should you wish to see it.

Biggest danger I see on the web is the media driven trend to polarise things into camps, with all the

overlooking and preconceptions that entails. But I guess that makes people easier to target.

There' space and eyeballs on the web for everything from the tech "elites" to Facebook comments, even Google's privacy to CPU cycles converter machine. If you don't like something just go somewhere else, or do it yourself.

Troll.

Thankfully

the internet is still open enough that those of us that don't have a Friendface account will still be able to communicate.

eh?

"The cool kids of yesteryear ran Linux."

On which planet was that?

Soon it will be against the law not to have a Facebook account

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsdiYUnKyzk

Anonymity also brings freedom

Imagine if every post, comment, tweet, blog, email or download got tagged with your name, address, phone number, mugshot and personal details. Who would ever send anything?

Everybody would be "on the record" all the time. Whether they were writing a literary masterpiece or a drunken rant at an ex-partner. We rightly guard against "big brother" in the form of the state from surveilling us - but what if we had to do it to ourselves. And not just for the information to appear in a closed and secret database, but to be displayed in public for everyone: parents, children, employers, prospective dates, to see, search and form opinions from.

We need a degree of anonymity (said "Pete 2", yes that is my real name - just ask Mr and Mrs. 2; my parents) on the internet just as we have in real life - where maybe one person in a thousand - who we encounter daily: on the train, in the traffic jam, in the shops - knows even the slightest thing about us.

So we should be able to live our digital lives with the same degree of anonymity that we enjoy in the real world. Anonymity is not the problem, however. The problem is the inhabitants of the internet who feel they have impunity when they do the electronic equivalent of running up to us, shouting obscenities in our face, and running away again - as happens daily, on almost every web-space, to a significant proportion of its users.

What the internet needs is not an end to anonymity, but a more widespread system of assessing the "people" we meet on it. Just like IRL, we should be able to recognise the psychos, idiots, bs-ers, wise people, comedians and our friends. Not just on each individual forum or platform, but across the system as a whole. The trick is to be able to do that without sacrificing too much in the way of personal information. Maybe that's where the true value of FB and its ilk lies: as a universal registration/recognition system to validate online identities, while still stopping people you annoy from coming round your house with a large stick.

And you point is ??????

Sites with facebook linkage get the facebook linkage blocked by noscript and similar.

I do not want my entire life online being linked together.

I may even create another facebook profile just for posting on stupid sites

Does what now?

The so-called "Do Not Track" header won't make the slightest bit of difference to 99.9 of websites/advertisers because they can choose to support it or not, which they probably won't.

"private browsing mode in nearly every browser allows for untracked activity across the web"

yeah, right!

Internet safety?

There's a problem with this position: "Most people don't want to make a statement: they just want to connect with friends, family, and work associates through email, Facebook, and other means."

That's would be fine except for the fact that it's not how "most people" use Facebook. Have you seen how many people are on the friends list of your average teenager? Tens or hundreds of people they barely know or have never met. Isn't it a basic rule of internet safety that we don't give out our names to strangers?

No thanks

A sad day indeed. I don't want my real name appearing on comments. I like to post on the Daily Mail website, writing controversial things like "Actually, paedophiles do deserve a fair trial." It's bad enough having my comment rise to the top of the "worst rated" list. I'd rather not be deluged by hate mail too.

Anonymous, for obvious reasons....

"Facebook is arguably one of the greatest inventions ever"

It's not really an invention, or at least not a new one.

The whole walled garden concept has been around since at least MSN/AOL, (maybe people can enlighten me if there was something similar before those) and i'm sure i was using something very similar to facebook around 1998. Circle something, but i can't remember exactly.

Doomsayers have been around for as long as the Internet

Been there before, seen that before. In the 90s it was the evil Microsoft that would take over the net thanks to the accepted 'standard' of IE.

Then it was Microsoft with its Live ID that would destroy anonymity and the web as we know it.

And so on and so on. What happened each time?

The _free_, as in open, market responds both actively by not participating in anything that it finds unacceptable or building alternatives to things that have none.

So forgive me if I don't buy all this doomsaying. Don't like facebook comments? Don't comment.

Websites only use facebook comments and don't let you comment otherwise? Boo-hoo, their choice. You have one too.

Apple were never top in smartphones

"The cool kids of yesteryear ran Linux. Today, they boot Macs. And tomorrow their children will use the even simpler-to-use iPads and iPhones."

Well *they* may think they're cool. The rest of us don't care. Though yes, it is a depressing point to see people who once advocated the merits and openness of Linux, now waving their locked down Ipads around.

(And as others have said, since when was Linux deemed cool? Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but I can't say being a Linux geek was ever the sort of thing you'd ever think of as fashionable or trendy.)

"Even Google's Android, which has displaced Apple at the top of the smart phone heap "

Er what? Apple were never top. It was Nokia - who are still the number one company, by the way (since Android is made up of many manufacturers). In many quarters, RIM have outsold Apple too. Even if you're just looking at the US market, RIM were the leader before Android, not Apple.

Idiotic article

As the web becomes more consumer orientated, consumers will go to consumer sites. No shit, Sherlock.

The geeks ("The cool kids use Linux" - wtf") are alive and well and still operating on the "frontier". Older technologies have been ignored by big business and are still rife with dodgy opportunities. Modern technologies aren't much different on the whole.

The article is solely about the those modern technology organisations that try to commercialise illegal activity with advertising, excessive growth, mainstream familiarity, etc, etc and inevitably get slapped down.

It's an easy mistake to make as these things are by their nature the most visible. Especially when they're being slapped down.

You enjoy your closed communities and your middle age. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that's changed is that there's so much more to play with.

On Facebook, nobody knows if you're a cat either.

I know because two of my sock puppets are.

I for one

welcome our Facebook overlords