Quote of the day
Angela: Ben, is your love sac as big a Fred's?
Ben: …what?
« January 2004 | Main | March 2004 »
Angela: Ben, is your love sac as big a Fred's?
Ben: …what?
I've built Subversion and all of the packages it depends on, and updated the packages in my public iDisk (wsanchez). They are all built for Mac OS X 10.3.
Note that you can't get to my iDisk using a web browser unless you know the paths to each of the files, which is unlikely. That's a drag, but not something i can fix.
Mount my public iDisk in Finder. In Panther, thats: Go -> iDisk -> Other User's Public Folder…, then enter wsanchez in the dialog. On older Mac OS X versions (or Windows), use iDisk Utility.
In case you haven't heard, Tribe is the new Friendster, and Orkut is the new Tribe.
There is a bit of angst floating around about Orkut's Terms of Service and Privacy Poilicy. Everyone seems to agree that the Privacy Policy is reasonable, but they are all up in arms about a clause in the Terms of Service. The Register, in an unsurprisingly reactionary article complains that "All your data belong to Orkut." The complaint is about this clause:
By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.
The Register dutifully flames about the terrible atrocity that is this clause while managing to saying nothing about why it's bad, other than "Microsoft did this once, too!"
Let's try reading the legalese… My read is that whatever information you post to Orkut's site, Orkut has permission to copy, modify, and display. They can do so anywhere in the world, and you can't "take it back". They will not pay you for it, and they can transfer this permission to another party. You are free to grant this same permission to other parties.
If you give your information to Orkut or post content on their site, it's not a big leap that they are going to want permission to display it; that's kind of whole point of their site. If you don't give them permission to do so, the site would be pretty damned boring, since nobody would be able to see anyone else's posts. Ths gist of this clause, as I read it, is that they don't want you to sue them for publishing what you post, and I don't really see what's unfair about that.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about the personal information they collect, and what they do with that information. That they are also bound to abide by their Privacy Policy is the good news. In that document, they state pretty clearly what information they collect, and what they may or may not do with it. This constrains their usage of the above permission into parameters that I'm comfortable with.
Did I miss something?
It is occasionally somewhat unfortunate that the W key is right next to the E key.