W. Robert Thomas

With all the talk lately about Facebook's flawed privacy systems, it's a good time to consider what you're making available elsewhere on the web and on your system. These 10 settings tweaks and setups make your web life a little less public.

Photo by Jorge Franganillo.

Note: The most basic means of boosting your privacy in any computer system is encrypting your data, but that's more of a system setup than a slight change to your usual setup. Still, it's worth looking into if you've got files for your eyes only.

10. Run a Background Check on Yourself to Know What's Out There

It takes only a few seconds to know what Google knows about you, but there are many, many other avenues into your past and present on the web. Want to know more about what a potential employer can know? Consumer action blog Consumerist has a nicely comprehensive list of background check tools to try out. You shouldn't try and run them all, but at least get a feel for what can be known about you with just a few clicks. Photo by omk_489. (Original post)

9. Skip Incognito/Private Browsing and Really Leave No Trace

Private browsing modes might prevent your coworkers or roommates from seeing where you wander on the web, but you still leave plenty of traces for someone who knows where to look. Take the How-To Geek's advice and really browse without leaving a trace. Wipe away Flash cookies, clean out DNS caches, and automate your system so every boot-up is a fresh start.

8. Pick Better Security Questions

Some security questions and password recovery schemes offered by webapps are so bad, anyone with your casual acquaintance and a small amount of Google savvy could poke into your email whenever they felt like it. To get around weak security questions, use blogger danah boyd's security question algorithm. Instead of straight-up providing your mother's maiden name, use a scheme, such as "[Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase] + [Core Noun Phrase] + [Unique Word]," so that your answer becomes "StupidQuestion MiddleName Booyah," substituting "MiddleName" for the actual answer. If you're lucky enough to be able to choose your own security questions, Lifehacker reader James has written about the best kinds of questions at his blog. (Original posts: memorable answers, good questions).

7. Set Up BitTorrent for Private Downloading

BitTorrent is a public commons of file sharing, and that means that all kinds of folks interested in, say, what your home IP address is, and what you're downloading, can dig into it. With both a proxy and settings in your favorite torrent app, you can protect your privacy when downloading. Nothing's foolproof, but a few checkboxes and a different downloading path can do a lot to give you great peace of mind.

6. Know Your Google Settings

If you're anything like us, or most of our readers, you've got a lot of your life floating around in Google's cloud-based apps. It pays, then, to know how to set what Google shares publicly about you, how much of your search history is being saved, and how to back up your data so you've always got your own copy. These are among the 10 Google settings you should know about that center on privacy and data retention, though it's always a good idea to know the parameters of the spaces you share your data in.

5. Know How to Travel Without Being Spied On

Just because some countries have widespread net access doesn't mean it's an open and private web. It's often meant to deter dissidents in strong-handed regimes, but why take the chance of letting your web data fall into the wrong hands? One Lifehacker reader, wishing to remain anonymous and in a non-specific region, crafted a survival guide for traveling where privacy isn't respected. Using secure Gmail, carrying two cloned USB sticks, relying on KeePass and TrueCrypt for passwords and encryption, and knowing how to send data over the web without having it looked at are all good skills to have, both for traveling and in general. Image a composite of photos by hemmob and nolifebeforecofee

4. Know Where You Stand With Facebook at a Glance

Facebook has promised "simplistic" privacy settings coming soon, but in the meantime, knowing exactly what you've offered to share or keep private is far from transparent. One very crafty hacker at ReclaimPrivacy has put together a settings-scanning bookmarklet that shows what you're sharing beyond your social circle, and offers links and automatic fixes for those settings. Another coder, Ka-Ping Yee, offers a site that shows what the public web can see on Facebook, some of which you can then remove. They're both excellent eye-openers, both for your own account and for friends who refuse to consider what's being shown out there. (Original posts: ReclaimPrivacy bookmarklet, Facebook public).

3. Run Your Browser Through a Proxy

It's not something you'll want to do all the time, but once in a while, you might want to hide your online tracks. To do so, you can use the go-to web randomization tool, TOR, which has tools available for nearly every OS and browser. For a DIY solution that can work from any browser, we've detailed installing the free PHProxy tool on your home computer or hosted web space to get around restrictions and slightly disguise your tracks. You could also run a proxy through Google's App Engine, and go the full-tilt geek route of encrypting your browsing with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Any way you choose, it's a smart skill to have handy for dodgy connections and restrictive networks.

2. Better Protect Your Mint.com or Other Financial Accounts

The thing that makes Mint.com such a convenient one-stop shop for financial data and budgeting also makes it a gold mine for anyone looking to learn more about you, or know which accounts they could try to jump into. Security professional Jason Owens provides some smart tips on better protecting your Mint.com account that can apply to any site where you manage your financials. Key among them—don't use your regular email address. Set up a new email address you don't tell anyone about as your login/password verification address. You can forward its mail to your main email, sure, but if someone compromises your email, don't make it too too easy for them to get a hold on your finances.

1. Stay Available on Facebook Without Really Being In It

You might have considered quitting Facebook, but stopped short because it's how a few far-flung friends and relatives stay in touch, or a place those without your email address can ping you. We can understand, and, luckily, have a halfway solution to recommend. Quit Facebook without really quitting, as Whitson did. Create a new account, linked to a different email, and set it up so that your old friends are still there, but Facebook, even at its most Draconian, can't really reveal all that much about you, and your friends can't really overshare without your permission.

What steps have you taken recently to bolster your own web or desktop privacy? What would you like to fix, but need some pointers on doing so? Let's hash it all out in the comments.

Shared by Will
Definitiely time for a Nic Cage mid- (quarter?-) career retrospective. Top pics: The Rock, Raising Arizona, Face Off (obvs) and maybe The Wicker Man. Look for it in July.

As you know by now, the FinReg bill is getting squeezed by the need to move a war supplemental and an extension of unemployment insurance next week. But it's worth taking this problem out of the context of this or that issue and just putting it on its own terms. The Senate does a lot more now than it did, say, 100 years ago. The country is bigger and more complex and there are more committees and constituencies and issues. But the Senate itself is not larger than it was in 1910, and its days have not become much longer, and the advent of air travel has made it easier for senators to head home for the weekend and so, if anything, senators spend less time in Washington than they used to.

All this creates a time crunch. Most of us only tune in for occasional big bills, but the Senate is responsible for all manner of nominations and appropriations and budgets that have to be passed even if there's no real time to pass them. And when you have lots of things to do and not that much time to do it, you can't spend enough time on each individual thing.

People normally take this as an argument that the Senate should work more. As it is, the average week is about three days long. But politicians are wise to our game on this: We want them to work more, but then we get really upset if it turns out they're not spending enough days back home and we elect the guy who keeps telling us about how he'll be back home every week no matter what. So that's what we've got, and the politicians can't work longer weeks until we decide to stop punishing them for spending a lot of time doing their job.

It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to take committees more seriously: There's not enough time to do everything on the Senate floor, but if people really trusted the committees and just gave their products a quick up-or-down vote, that would speed things along nicely. The problem there is that senators want to make changes to bills that didn't come from committees they served on. One way to handle this would be for them to vote against the bill and relay their concerns to the committee, which could then decide whether to deal with addressing them if the bill lost. But no one seems to want to do that because it means giving up valuable power and influence.

And then there's the question of the Senate rules: The practice of mounting routine filibusters even when you don't have the 40 votes necessary to keep filibustering slows the Senate floor to a crawl: It takes about three days to break a filibuster, and a single bill can face multiple filibusters, and so you can waste a week on a small bill that passes by 70 votes. The way to handle that would be to change the rules around filibusters, but it's not clear anyone is ready to do that, either.

You basically have a broken Senate but no one is willing to make the compromises necessary to do something about it, which isn't, I guess, a newsflash to readers of this blog.

Technological change has decisively tilted the balance of power away from reporters and toward powerful politicians—Obama, like his predecessor, doesn’t need to do what the White House press corps wants, and so we’ll keep reading stories like this for a while:

So when the president hosted a “news conference” in the Rose Garden with the visiting Mexican president on Wednesday, Mr. Reid thought maybe this time Mr. Obama would take questions. Instead, Mr. Obama allowed only a single question from the American media and called on a reporter from Univision, knowing that he would be unlikely to be asked about Tuesday’s anti-incumbent election results.

Two points.

One: Univision is American media. It was founded by Raul Cortez in San Antonio and its headquarters is in Miami. It’s always been an American network.

Two: This seems like a terrible way to persuade me that Obama’s refusing to kowtow to the White House press corps is bad for the nation. According to Baker, Obama’s sin is that he called on reporters he believed were likely to ask him questions about US-Mexico relations rather than on reporters he believed were likely to ask him loaded questions about horse race politics. Well guess what—after a summit with the President of Mexico, the two Presidents should be asked questions about US-Mexico relations rather than loaded process questions about domestic horse race politics.

I alluded to this a few times yesterday, so I think I should offer my recommended readings on the Panic of 2007 and the ensuing recession. These are real recommendations, actual advice about what you should do, so things like length and readability count. Rogoff & Reinhardt have done a really praiseworthy empirical research program, but you should just look up their conclusion with Google you don’t actually need to read the book. There are also books like John Cassidy’s or Justin Fox’s that I hope do well and shift conventional wisdom but that I don’t think habitual readers of liberal blogs will necessarily learn a ton of brand new ideas from. By contrast, read these:

— Gillian Tett Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. This book has the strengths and weaknesses of excellent reporting, with the weakness being that it seems too soft on its main sources at JP Morgan. The strength is that you really get to see what investment banks were doing to create these assets. The key takeaway point that I wish were better understood is that a lot of the innovations were designed with the specific intention of exploiting regulatory loopholes.

— Gary Gorton, Slapped By the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007. This is almost the reverse of Tett’s book—an account of why a collapse in asset prices leads to a generalized financial panic that abstracts away from all the particulars. This is important because the goal of financial regulation should be not just to avoid an exact repeat of the financial crisis but to resolve the structural features of the system that make it vulnerable to panics.

— Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Here we start to shift away from the shadow banking run and the “financial crisis” to the larger macroeconomic picture. Money from Germany, Japan, China, and petrostates was exported as loans to the US and Club Med where it financed both construction and consumption of exports from Germany, Japan, China, and the petrostates. This is the cycle that the panic disrupted, leaving everyone unemployed. The global economy needs to find a way to achieve decent labor market outcomes in the developed world without this dependency on unsustainable debts.

— Stephen Cohn and Brad DeLong The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money. This is a book about the really big picture—the fall of the US-centric neoliberal economic order, written by two people who sympathize with the project and appear to regret its passing. The upshot here is that even though reform proposals sometimes seem like efforts to (for better or for worse) just go back to how things were, this not only won’t work it actually can’t be done.

— George Akerlof and Robert Shiller Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. I think Shiller takes this idea too far in some of his columns, but the basic idea here is to try to really take seriously the “mania”/”panic” metaphors and see that non-rational considerations (I think “irrational” is a loaded word) drive boom/bust cycles. One important thing here is that it’s easy to look back at a crisis and point to the people who called it right and say “wow, those were smart guys, we should have listened to them” but by definition bubbles occur at times when the majority and the powers that be aren’t prepared to listen to doubters.

There have also been a lot of tick-tock narrative books about the crisis, several of which are interesting but none of which I think are particularly vital to understanding things. Michael Lewis is one of the best writers around, so his version of the crisis narrative is the most enjoyable to read.

Never feel like there's enough time in the morning? Find yourself struggling to get up or into work mode? We know the feeling. Try out these tips on waking up, getting energized, and getting things done in the early hours.

Photo by DeaPeaJay.

10. Save the Morning for Thinking

The morning tends to have a quieter, more contemplative feel to it. Take advantage of it, as one CEO recommends, by following poet William Blake's advice to divide up your day: "Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night." Even if your job's more about cranking than managing and contemplating, you can use the mornings where you're not on tight deadline to think over problems, consider future challenges, and give your tasks more mindful attention than they'll get when everyone else gets in and starts grabbing for your attention. Photo by s0ulsurfing. (Original post)

9. Track Your A.M. Habits

Why are you always late to work or school? It's not because the Earth randomly spins faster on certain days. There's a good chance you've given yourself an arbitrary time span, like an hour, rather than see what your morning really requires. The Unclutterer blog suggests a system for tracking and streamlining your routine, and determining what wild cards can throw you off-balance. Got a rough list of necessities? Make a list, follow it, then revise it—but give yourself a couple days to see what really works for you. Yeah, it feels geeky to use a timer and spreadsheet walking around your kitchen in the morning, but once it becomes habit, you can put down the pencil and get on with life. Photo by ♥ellie♥. (Original posts: tracking, planning).

8. Put Your Kids on an Itinerary

You may be master of your morning, but your smaller subjects can quickly cause it to go haywire. Gretchen Rubin, blogging at The Happiness Project, suggests a deadline-oriented, precise routine for your kids to eliminate the dreaded "One more minute!" It takes some time and consistency to enforce, but soon enough, your children will be able to actually relax in the morning, if they know they're ahead of their specific breakfast/bathroom/homework-roundup routines. Photo by D Sharon Pruitt. (Original post)

7. Eat for Better Sleep

The simple way to realign your energy throughout your day is to eat less at night, saving the big meals for when you're up and running. If the problem is that you're just not falling asleep, plan your dinners and later snacks around foods that contribute to a good night's sleep, like turkey, bananas, honey, potatoes, almonds, and others. Photo by drumecho. (Original posts: eat light, food for sleep).

6. Choose Your Most Important Task Over Email

Whatever your boss sent out at 5:45 p.m. last night likely isn't as important as the most important thing you need to work on this morning. The way most of us handle our mornings, though, you wouldn't know it. If you want to look back on your morning and not feel like it disappeared, take control of your workday by prioritizing one task—just one thing you really need to do—and put off opening your inbox for one hour. Seems sacrilegious, but if you asked your boss or clients which was more important, their answer might not surprise you. Photo by chadarizona.

5. Trade Coffee Jolts for Smaller Perk-Ups

When it comes to caffeine, a tall cup of coffee is a sledgehammer. If you're going to use caffeine to boost your morning energy, there are real benefits to spacing out smaller caffeine boosts. A 12-ounce thermos with a 3-4 ounce mug in the lid is just about perfect, as reader jopasm tells us, as you can space out your java throughout the morning and never quite get that shaky-leg feeling. Switching to tea or diet soda, if you can stomach it, also makes for a slower-dose substitute. Photo by flash.pro. (Original post)

4. Wake Up Without Any Caffeine

Blogger Scott Young, waking up at 5:30 every morning, had to find a way to convince his mind and body that it was actually time to get up. He's not a caffeine person, so he relied on other cues and tactics to wake up. Filling the room with light, tricking himself into committing to "just" 10 minutes of staying awake, doing his creative work early in the morning, and a bit of exercise worked for him. The real secret, he writes, is in getting enough sleep that mornings just feel like a soft transition from sleep, but his other strategies can help when that basic foundation fails. Photo by sleepyneko. (Original post)

3. Set a Morning Prep Reminder the Night Before

Whether it's your watch, your cellphone, or a microwave reminder, set something in your home to beep at a certain time every night. When that beep goes off, around 10 p.m., for instance, it means you should drop what you're doing and spend just a bit of time preparing for your morning, while you're actually awake. LifeClever calls it the 10 O'Clock Rule, and suggests a few things we can all do to semi-automate our mornings: set out your clothes, pocket contents, and shoes, grind coffee, check your calendar for events and reminders, and packing anything you're bound to forget into your bag. It's a night person's best hedge against the morning, and a morning person's ticket to spending their energy on more exciting things. Photo by Aidan Wojtas. (Original post)

2. Crank Out Some Push-Ups

When a loud noise wakes you up, you might notice you're not quite so groggy and annoyed as wide-awake and alert. Cranking out push-ups first thing in the morning can provide some of that same kind of bio-feedback that tells your body it's time to get up and do something, something maybe even related to caveman-instinct survival. Do as many push-ups as you can (or as many feel comfortable, without sore arms), wait 30 seconds, then repeat two more times. Personal trainer Dan Boyle swears by it, and some of our commenters find it reliable, too. Photo by whyld. (Original post).

1. Know Your Peak Performance Times

Different people find their energy, and inspiration arriving at different times, but not everybody can rearrange their work schedule. If that sounds like you, you can benefit from learning the peak times for early-risers and night owls, or learning your own energy schedule. If you're a data hound who likes specifics, you can do more than deal in generalities of morning, afternoon, and evening—you can map and graph your daily ups and downs. Photo by Hamed Saber. (Original posts: night owls, energy map)

Shared by Will
Crap.

Kenrick et al.'s experiments demonstrate that men who view photographs of physically attractive women or Playboy centerfolds subsequently find their current mates less physically attractive and become less satisfied with their current relationships. What then would be the cumulative effect of being exposed to young, attractive women on a daily basis? Would there be any real consequences to the men's dissatisfaction with their relationships? Secondary school teachers and college professors come in contact with more young women at the peak of their reproductive value than others do. The analysis of a large, representative data set from the United States indicates that, while men in general are less likely to be divorced than women, and secondary school teachers and college professors in general are less likely to be divorced than others, simultaneously being male and being a secondary school teacher or college professor statistically increases the likelihood of being divorced (p <.05).

With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you're not ready to take it that far, here's how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends.

Photo by Ludovic Berton.

Should I Quit Facebook Altogether?

We've all had that one friend who deactivated his/her Facebook and was never seen again, because no one could establish contact. As if the telephone, email, and IM were never invented, many people are at a loss as to how to contact you if your Facebook isn't an easy click away. Even if the situation isn't quite that dire, Facebook is still how a lot of people keep connected, and severing that connection completely is a big deal.

But now, privacy-minded folks have many legitimate reasons you should quit Facebook (or reasons you should but can't go through with it), the same thing is on everyone's mind: Is the grief of quitting worth avoiding future privacy breaches?

The Less Extreme Alternative

Luckily, there is another, more middle-of-the-road option. That's not to say this isn't still extreme—this isn't for the faint of heart. It isn't a tutorial about how to change your privacy settings. This is a tutorial on how to create the most minimalist Facebook profile possible, with as little information on yourself as possible, to be used only for communication between you and your friends. You won't be able to do much on the site; you probably won't even visit the site that often. This is not for people who want to continue using Facebook; it is for the people who are ready to up and quit tomorrow, but don't want to miss out on the next party just because they care about their privacy. So if you're really ready to give up wall posts, comments, Farmville, and fan pages, here's how to proceed without falling off the face of the Earth.

Create a Disposable Email Address for Your Account

We've talked about disposable email addresses before, and most people probably already have one. (The idea being that if you create a second email address for free and sign up for the sketchy sites with it, you won't have to deal with spam in your main account later on.) With all the bugs and privacy gaffes surrounding Facebook, it has certainly become one of those sites you could call sketchy.

With this email address, you can also set up notifications for messages and event invites and get all that by email (so you don't ever have to actually "check" Facebook), and even forward it to your main email account. That way, you won't have to check this separate one, but if something ever happens (like Facebook making your email public for 30 minutes), you can delete the disposable address, make a new one, link it with Facebook, and not have to deal with the spam forever. You can use any service to do this, but I'd personally just make a new Gmail address separate from my regular Google account, sign into it using Private Browsing mode (so you don't sign yourself out of your regular Gmail), set up the forwarding filters, and forget it. (To set up forwarding, just log into your disposable account, click Create Filter, and set the filter to forward any email From:facebook to your real account. If things get ugly, you can always turn the filter off.)

Create a New Account and Transfer Your Friends

Technically, this part is optional, but I also think it has the biggest impact on how the rest of your experience will pan out. You could just edit all the information on your current account, but if you make a new one and delete the old one you'll have a completely clean slate. You won't have any posts lingering around anywhere, no personal information for the taking and no photos tagged of you. Plus, this is prime time to get rid of all your friends that you don't need. Do you really still need to be Facebook friends with that girl you met at that party that time? Didn't think so.

This process is actually quite simple, especially because you have a new email address as created in step one. Log out of Facebook and create a new account using that email address. Don't enter any information, and for now, don't make any new friends except with yourself (you'll need to friend your old account for this to work smoothly). Bask in the glory of that clean, privacy-filled profile, and then log back into your old account and accept the friend request to your new one. Alternatively, open up a second browser and use one for your old account and one for your new account, just for this process—you'll be switching back and forth a lot.

Conveniently, Facebook will then ask you to suggest friends for your new account (if not, you can do so by visiting your new account's profile page from your old account). This is the part of the process in which you'll transfer over the friends you actually want with one fell swoop—no spending hours searching each and every one of them out. Go through the entire list of your friends and check off the ones you want to keep. It won't take nearly as long as you think it will, I promise. Click Send and then move over to your new account. All those suggestions will be pending friend requests that you can run through quickly and add each as a friend (again, it looks like a tedious process, but shouldn't take too long) and you'll have all the friends you need.

If you want to hold on to your old account during the transition, that's fine, but the point of making a new one is to delete all the old stuff, so when you're ready, go ahead and delete (not just deactivate) that old account. It'll try to tempt you into staying by showing you pictures of your friends, but you can press continue without guilt knowing you're still going to (mostly) be around.

Turn Off the Wall on Your Profile

There are a few privacy settings we need to tweak on the new account, so hit "Account" in the upper left hand corner of your window and click Privacy Settings. The first area we'll venture into is "Personal Information and Posts" to turn off the wall. This way, you won't have your profile covered with the stupid things your friends say; it'll just be your very barren news feed.

Everything else here can stay the same; you don't need to make anything else private. You aren't going to be making any posts, you aren't going to be filling out information, and you aren't going to be uploading photos, so no need to cover them up. Again, keep in mind—this isn't about changing privacy, this is about quitting unnecessary Facebook activity, so it doesn't matter what these privacy settings are. They're just going to go public again after the next redesign, so why mess with them now?

Hide Your Email Address

Next, head back to your Privacy settings and go to "Contact Information". You could add more info here, like your phone number, if you want your friends to have easy access, but we've already seen how Facebook can make information public, even unintentionally. That's why we created the junk email address back at the beginning of this process. I'd just leave it all blank.

Down next to your registered email address is the privacy setting for who can see it. Click on it and hit customize. In the dropdown at the top of the popup window, choose "only me" and click save. Your email address is now hidden from everyone, including your friends. If you want to make it visible to them, you can—sometimes people get in a bind and may want to contact you via email with something that physically can't be sent via Facebook message—but again, it's just a junk email address. You don't want your friends actually thinking that's your address, because then you have a lot more work to do if you ever have to trash it and get a new one as mentioned above. Just keep it a secret.

Hide Media Tagged With Your Name

As of right now, you can only keep tagged photos and videos out of search results and off your profile. There is currently no way to actually prevent people from tagging photos of you. With this setting, people won't be able to see photos of you from your profile page, but if they get to the picture by other means (by, say, looking at the actual album or linking to it from the profile of someone else tagged in it) they will still see your name on the photo. Yes, it's a glaring omission from the privacy features in Facebook, but it also doesn't matter much. Unfortunately, the responsibility does and will always have to lie with your friends that are uploading pictures. Facebook will never be able to stop them from uploading a picture of you, and they'll never be able to stop that person from tagging that photo with a name, any name (including yours), whether or not it is linked to a profile. But even if it does, your profile is completely empty. What's the difference between it linking to your empty profile and being unclickable text? The only fool-proof solution to the photo tagging problem is to kick your friends in the shin if they post embarrassing pictures of you. Or, you know, get some more mature friends.

To stop tagged photos from showing up on your profile, though, go back to Privacy Settings and hit "Friends, Tags, & Connections". Edit the "Photos and Videos of Me" setting just like you did in the last step so only you can see the tags, and save the settings. This will delete the link to "photos of you" under your profile picture.

Hide Yourself from Facebook and Google Searches

You can tweak this next step to your liking. You probably don't want your profile showing up in Google, but if you want people to find you on Facebook you might want to stay in those search results (since people won't be able to find you through activity on your friends' walls, because there won't be any). At the same time, you may wish to have complete control over who you become Facebook friends with, and that's fine too. In Privacy Settings, hit up the "Search" section and uncheck Public Search Results. Set your Facebook Search Results to whatever you want the same way you did for photos.

Lock Down Applications (Just In Case)

This is the one area where I would just make everything as private as possible. You never know what those darned applications are going to do, and while you're not going to be running around Facebook installing anything, you can never be too careful. I wouldn't even recommend you stay logged into Facebook while you browse the web, since we've all seen they're always watching you. Under Privacy Settings, head to Applications and Websites and go nuts. Edit what your friends can share about you and what you can share about your friends down to nothing, and set your activity visible only to you. Again, keep in mind that even if applications were to share your information—you don't really have any information to share, so you're probably safe. The darned things are just so annoying that I'd like to lock them down as much as possible.

I'd also go into notification settings (under Account > Account Settings > Notifications) and turn off any notifications having to do with applications. In fact, while you're there, you might as well turn everything else off except for messages, event invitations, and (if you want) photo tagging, because you won't be doing much else on Facebook, so there's no reason to clutter up your inbox. Every once in a while, it's probably a good idea to log in and clear all your unnecessary notifications, but other than that, you should be able to get the few necessary features to notify you via email.

While I'd like to say you won't have to pay attention to Facebook's privacy gaffes ever again, that just isn't the case. With each redesign, you'll want to do a quick scan of either the privacy settings, policy, or just the blogosphere to see what fresh new hell Facebook unleashes, but in general, no matter how much of your information they try to share, there isn't much on this minimal profile that can get out there. There are a few things Facebook will always have on you, such as your email address and list of friends, so these are the important things to check up on. But if you don't have anything else on your profile, it's hard to see how applications taking information from your profile is going to be a big disadvantage if there isn't anything on it to take.

Your life won't be completely free of Facebook drama, but it will be significantly easier since you won't have to pour through how-tos (like this one) trying to figure out how to get everything set straight again. It should be a pretty easy process from now on. And, best of all, your friends can't complain about you being "hard to get a hold of", and you won't miss out on the next gathering just because the invitation went out on Facebook. To be perfectly clear, though: I'm not saying this is what everybody should do. If you're not violently furious with Facebook (I'm personally not), let it go. But, if you are seriously thinking about quitting, I think this is a set-up to consider, if you haven't already. If you have, be sure to share your tips for a minimalist Facebook in the comments.

Alec Brownstein wanted a job in advertising, so he made pages that showed up as the first result when several big New York creative directors Googled themselves. He got interviews with nearly all of them. Yeah, it's pretty brilliant.

Bernstein reports on stories that weren't:

Iowa and marriage.  It's been a year now that same-sex marriage has been the law in radical lefty Iowa, and no one seems to care.  As far as I'm aware, it's not really much of an issue there; here's an article from last month giving an update.

(Image via Waking Up Now)

If you want to see the insanity of lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices thrown into sharp relief, check out Nate Silver's model that builds the life expectancy of a judge into an overall assessment of his or her value.

In the model, he compares the more-liberal Diane Wood (age 59) to Elena Kagan (age 50). Assuming that Wood will vote to please liberals 100 percent of the time and Kagan will only be with them 90 percent of the time, Silver's model ranks Kagan as the winner:

Kagan overtakes Wood even though she’s less liberal, because she’s more likely to have survived. She continues to provide excess value over Kagan from that point forward, until we reach a period 40+ years out where both women are almost certain to be dead. On balance, Kagan’s lifetime expected [value] is actually higher than that of Kagan’s (1,280 rather than 1,206, if you care), assuming that she’ll defect from the liberals 10 percent of the time whereas Wood never will.

People don't, and shouldn't, think of judges in quite such stark terms. But that's because people don't like thinking this way. The actual system we've set up actually makes this sort of analysis the most logical way to think about Supreme Court appointments.

Shared by Will
1. UM has a grad student named Spike Lee.
2. UM has grad students performing experiments on hand washing.
3. I hate cyberbullies.

Look at this magazine cover. It's Madonna. Madonna showing her breasts. Without nipples. Why? Because of Apple's silent censorship, that's why. We said it already: It's time to declare war against Apple's censorship. Steve, you are going the wrong way.

In case you are not aware of it, here's what happened: British fashion magazine Dazed & Confused has made an iPad version of their magazine. Internally, they call it the "Iran Edition" because they have to censor any nudity, no matter how innocent it is. This is not the first time that this happens, but this is even worse, because nudity in a fashion magazine is actually editorial content: There are plenty of designers who use transparent fabrics or risque cleavages. Not to mention lingerie.

Seriously, you can't keep doing this. You just can't. It's only going to explode in your face. Like all the dumb app-approval moves Apple has made in the last few months. Steve: Don't you remember the last time you tried to have full control over everything and everyone? Yes? It ended badly for you—ousted from your own company—with Apple about to die, and with Microsoft ruling the world.

See, I have been using my iPad for more than a month now. And my iPhone for almost three years. And after all this time, I still think you have the chance to redefine computers once again. In fact, I think you have set that metamorphosis in motion already. But the iPad or Apple won't be in that certain computing future if you guys keep doing this.

You just can't dictate policies that lead to the arbitrary censorship of certain applications. For political sentiments, for foul language, for showing nipples. Why do this? You have an age control system built into all your devices. Use it and let people decide on their own. Don't try to be my father or my mother. Instead, enable people to communicate with your devices. Make that policy clear to everyone. No holds. No barriers.

I know what you are going to say. Apple is your company. Yes, it is and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. But this is just not cool. This sucks. This is not you. Apple was never a fake corporation like Disney or a cold behemoth like IBM. You used to give IBM the finger, remember? And remember when you used to smoke joints while having days at the beach, enjoying the California sun and tofu burgers with the Macintosh team? Or the pirate flag at Bandley 3?

You used to be the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the square pegs in the round holes, the ones who were never fond of the rules. Remember?

People liked you because of that. And now, this is what you have become:

Jon Stewart recently pointed this out. And Bild Digital's CEO Donata Hopfen said that "today [Apple] censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content." Her prophecy became reality. So please, listen before it's to late. It's time to return that nipple to Madonna, and lift any kind of censorship from the app store. [Shiny Shiny via Vallewag]

The Senate is currently considering Richard Shelby's amendment to move the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from the Federal Reserve to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., substantially weakening it along the way. Annie Lowrey reports on how the debate is playing out:

Senators are currently debating the amendment on the floor, and they aren’t pulling their punches. A few minutes ago, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) bellowed, “[This amendment] is designed to take a knife and carve the heart out of this financial reform!”

In response, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wy.) said, “You cannot denigrate the other party and denigrate every single thing they put up as an amendment!” He added, “If every amendment is going to get the treatment this amendment is getting, … we’re not going to have much success on this bill!” He then argued that the bill, as written, would control, “every single little thing for Middle America!”

President Barack Obama also weighed into the consumer protection debate, releasing a statement that says, “Alternatives that gut consumer protections and do nothing to empower the American people by cracking down on unfair and predatory practices are unacceptable, and I urge the Senate to vote no.” He also said Shelby’s amendment had been “written by Wall Street’s lobbyists.”

World's greatest deliberative body, baby.

The Toronto Sun:

Unofficial word on Wall Street is that Shatner, who was initially paid in Priceline shares when he became pitchman for the Internet travel website startup in 1997, is now worth a cool $600 million.

Genius.

Update 7 May 2010: Shatner says it isn’t so.

For a department store in the UK:

(Hat tip: LikeCool)

I guess the Guardian asked the party leaders in the UK to write about who they admire most, and Nick Clegg offered Irish playwrite Samuel Beckett as his choice. Three reactions. One is that, as Michael Tomasky says, it seems inconceivable to imagine this happening in the United States:

You British folks understand, don’t you, that if an American presidential candidate said his hero was Samuel Beckett, he’d be finished. I mean totally finished. He couldn’t even get away with an American equivalent. It’d be one thing for a US pol to say Mark Twain. That’s about the only serious writer in history a pol could name and survive.

The second is that even though it seems inconceivable, I think Tomasky is actually wrong that it would be deadly. Presidential elections are overwhelmingly determined by the fundamentals. I think people used to think that you couldn’t win a presidential election while being a black man named “Barack Hussein Obama” whose autobiography admits to cocaine use and who used to represent Hyde Park in the State Senate while attending a black nationalist church. It just turns out that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our narrow conventional wisdom. So I wish someone would say the person he admires most is an avant-garde writer, if only to break the taboo which might, in turn, help us build a less relentlessly anti-intellectual public culture.

Third: I won’t try to claim that Beckett is the person I admire most, or even my favorite dramatist (Ibsen, I guess), but I do like him. Titling the link roundup posts “Endgame” is supposed to be a reference to his play. I won’t claim to be a brilliant expositor of this enigmatic work, but I think its themes tie in niceless with the link roundup concept—it’s an end, but utterly lacking in finality and merely doomed to be repeated again and again ad nauseam.

Jeff Sachs says "our political system regularly puts around the table people who are not the best equipped to find deep solutions to our problems." He wants outside experts to have more influence in the formulation and execution of major policy changes:

Flying Blind in Policy Reforms, by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Commentary, Scientific American: The long and divisive fight over U.S. health care reform exposed basic weaknesses in the processes of governance. As is so often true in American politics these days, politicians and lobbyists kept complex subjects to themselves, pushing expert discussion and systematic public debate to the sidelines. ...

During 14 months of debate over health care, the administration did not put forward a clear, analytical policy white paper on the aims, methods and expected results of the proposed reforms. ... The actual health consequences of the legislation were never reviewed or debated coherently. ...

One might think that the real action had all happened earlier, in congressional hearings, in brainstorming sessions and in the bargaining sessions with key stakeholders. Yet the earlier process was relentlessly driven by political and lobbying calculations and without the informed participation of the American people, who were left to vent at Tea Parties and on blog sites. The mammoth legislation is impenetrable... Experts were never invited systematically to comment or debate about it so as to help the public and politicians understand the issues. The lack of clear policy documents from the administration meant that the public had little basis for reaction other than gut instincts and fearful sentiments fanned by talk-show hosts.

In general, our political system regularly puts around the table people who are not the best equipped to find deep solutions to our problems. Certainly it has also done so on climate change... As with health care, the outcome has been House and Senate draft legislation that lacks public support. The same has been true on Afghanistan: the “war cabinet” has lacked real expertise on that country’s culture, economy and development challenges, and the U.S. public has remained uninformed of true options.

As a start toward better policy making, the administration should put forward a detailed analysis justifying each major proposed policy change. That white paper could form the basis for coherent public debate and reflection, along with Web sites where outside experts would be invited to share opinions accessible to the public. The public, too, would be invited to blog about that position paper. ... The administration and Congress would rely more heavily on external advisory panels to tap into the nation’s wealth of expertise...

I would not presume or recommend that decisions be left to the purported experts, who often represent special interests or have their own biases or narrow views. Still, a systematic vetting of policy options, with recognized experts and the public commenting and debating, will vastly improve on our current policy performance, in which we often fly blind or hand the controls over to narrow interests and viewpoints.

The problem I see, at least in economics, is not so much the absence of experts weighing in on issues. Instead, it's the inability of the press, and hence the public more generally, to distinguish between expert and non-expert opinion. All too often the two are given a false equivalence in a "he said, she said" journalistic construction that obscures and confuses people about the issue. This can even do more harm than good in terms of informing the public.