Archive for May, 2010

Oklahoma creating new felonies and increasing sentences even as corrections budget is slashed

May 11th, 2010 by genelewis | No Comments | Filed in Oklahoma, politics

Oklahoma’s prison population has grown 10 percent in the last 10 years. Fifty-three percent of the inmates were convicted of nonviolent crimes. Budget cuts threaten to eliminate 15 percent of the prison work force, and inmates are already sleeping in dining halls and exercise rooms.

What’s Republican Senate Leader Glenn Coffee’s response?

“It’s not a dollars and cents issue with me.”

The problem with Facebook

May 7th, 2010 by genelewis | No Comments | Filed in technoscience

Exhibit A: Facebook was letting friends spy on each others’ chats

Facebook chat is now down as the social network races to close a security hole that let people see their friends’ live chats. The security bug was exploited, ironically enough, by fiddling one’s privacy settings, as this TechCrunch video demonstrates.

Exhibit B: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

What I really dislike about Facebook is that you can’t export your own posts to your hard drive or another site. Facebook doesn’t respect our rights to our own content, so we get the worst of both worlds: neither privacy nor ownership. I’m still there because that is where friends are, but if there was a popular open alternative I would jump ship in a second.