Openid enabled

I’ve installed and enabled the OpenID plugin for dokuwiki. Anyone with an OpenID (more people than you might think) should be able to use it to log in. I’m just doing my part for non-evil federated identity management.

Libx for uga

I created a version of the LibX Firefox extension for the University of Georgia. It provides nice browser integration with the catalog (Voyager), OpenURL resolver (SFX), and proxy (EZ Proxy). You can install it from here.

Virtual citizenship symposium

Facebook is still tracking you

The news is in that Facebook is tweaking how their Beacon system works. Beacon is a tool a website can use to associate your actions on those sites to Facebook. There is a great post covering the technical details at Radiant Core. When you do something that triggers the Beacon (buying a table on overstock.com, for example), the information about what you did is sent to Facebook. Next, a popup appears and asks if you want to publish this information in your Facebook news feed. In the old system, if you didn’t select no an item would appear in your news feed. Publishing was opt-out. Under the new system, you must approve each item. Publishing is now opt-in. However, the information is sent to Facebook regardless. This isn’t the first time Facebook has silently collected information on its users from third-parties; they used to mine college newspapers and AOL Instant Messenger away messages. The relevant section from Facebook’s privacy policy is Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. Facebook may be just sitting on this data, but I think it’s more likely that they’re feeding into into their algorithm for targeting advertising.