Saturday, July 4, 2009

Human corruption

I got this feed from Ars technica while reading using my Google reader...

Are "deleted" photos really gone from Facebook? Not always

companion photo for Are "deleted" photos really gone from Facebook? Not always

In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.

If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.

We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

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Wow... Facebook , MySpace ....etc... are such 'dishonest' sites. Imagine you posted some ahem... pictures and you regretted it and want to delete it, the pictures aren't deleted from the hosting servers but just marked as 'not there' or something similar... it would be easy to look through their server caches or whatever ways available and still find the pictures. These social sites are simply a breach in security because they don't follow by the rules of human morality but by the rules of making money , getting more people to join them ....etc.

And there I thought I have had enough of reading news where companies play dirty...here's another feed from Slashdot this time...

Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine

BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

I hope human society would not just improve technologically but also improve morally and spiritually thus striking a balance and evolving further. if you noticed, the more technologically advance, the more morally corrupted (in many cases). Let's hope it isn't true though.

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