Possible Conversation With My Brother

Facebook Publishing Settings

Facebook keeps asking me if I intend to change my privacy settings or stick with the old ones.  Well, I tried to choose the latter but it looks like my decision was not convincing for Facebook... In fact, when today it prompted me again with the same question (and I replied in the same way) I found that my "old" settings were not the old ones whatsoever.  So, I patiently had to go back, review and re-uncheck everything... because, in case you had any doubts, the default settings are such that you share everything.
So, why don't they just come clean and start asking whether you want to manage your publishing settings?

".EU" TLD in 23 Language Characters

Now we can register a domain name with all kind of Cyrillic or Greek characters, such as "Удача.eu"(*) or "Καλήτύχη.eu"(*).  This is good news!

I frankly think it is a very good marketing idea to spread ".eu" TLD names locally.  This solution will also benefit of all the proud users of á, â, é, ê í, î, ó, ø, ö,  ø, ô, ú, ü, etc.  It is a good thing... Perhaps, not really a game changing feature, but it will help many people to use the web in their own language.
However, I doubt that such use of the ".eu" TLD will also help the global audience to reach these websites.
One issue is as obvious as important: keyboards.  Not everybody will be able to use the international characters unless clearly displayed on a keyboard.
I suppose that Internet browsers will have to start working pretty soon at some version of an integrated virtual keyboard, possibly with translation features.  It's not a bad idea to drop a request to Mozilla...

(*) Both domain names mean "Good Luck."
Please do not squat this URLs :)

Privacy Means User's Education

A couple of years ago Sophos made an interesting research showing that 41% of Facebook users were happy to disclose information to strangers.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commenting the new privacy settings on Facebook, argues (among the other things) that despite the new settings allow improved privacy it is not at all easy to understand the best protective configuration.

Again, the problem ends up being that users often aren't aware of what they need to do to protect their privacy.  Probably because not everybody is entirely aware of the risks of data mishandling or identity theft.