The iAds feature in Apple’s iOS 4 has caused its fair share of controversy, and Apple’s privacy policy has just been updated to reflect the changes that iAds bring to the platform.

Notably, it is possible to opt out of iAds ‘cookies’, which means that the ads you see might be less relevant, but you are able to opt out from targeted advertising, which some people may be uncomfortable with (especially considering this functionality is built in across the OS and, presumably, the analytical data Apple gather from iAds would be shared across different apps).

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

I would encourage anyone upgrading to iOS 4 or purchasing a new iOS device to consider opting out of the iAd cookies, if they feel more comfortable knowing that the advertising is ‘dumb’ and not being targeted directly at them.

As the quote from the privacy policy says, all you have to do to opt out is visit http://oo.apple.com on each iOS 4 device where you want to opt out.

Cookie image is &#8216C is for Cookie’ by amagill on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY.

UPDATE, 2011-08-29: Ben Vinegar, a Front-end Engineer at Disqus, has responded to this post. It is apparently possible for users to export their comments to a local database, display them for users without JavaScript and it is mentioned that the “scary red error box isn’t sending the right message”. These are welcome steps forward to addressing my dislike of the service.

I don᾿t like centralised commenting systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate. I am disappointed whenever I see a site using them; I want to use this post to explain why.

The Attraction to Centralised Commenting

Services like Disqus and IntenseDebate are marketed as being ‘better’ platforms for enabling commenting on blogs and articles. You essentially outsource the comments on your blog or website and have them handled by the service.

It is an attractive idea because you can outsource the more difficult things like handling spam comments and so on, and because it allows users to have a single identity with the commenting service and then use that single identity on many sites.

Making Commenting on the Web Proprietary

The primary reason that I do not like such services is because they seek to make commenting on the web proprietary. The web should be open. The web is open, for the most part, and I think it should remain that way.

Centralising commenting on your site is taking the control over the discussion over your content and handing that control to a third-party.

I think comments on blogs and so on should be as open and as simple as possible — enter a name and email address and just write a comment. Yes, that way of doing things is more open to absue such as the misuse of identity and spam and it doesn’t have the advantages of being able to connect comments from a single person together.

» Read the rest of this post…

Facebook is one of the most important social platforms on the internet today. I joined it probably several years ago now, not long after Facebook Applications were introduced.

Those of you that follow me on my personal Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible account, @strategyoracle will probably know that I keep that account protected — i.e. only those that request to follow me and I allow can read my tweets. I do that because that is the way that I feel most comfortable using the service and it is how Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is most useful to me. I have tried using that account both publicly and privately, and ultimately it was more useful and more comfortable to keep it protected.

On Facebook, I have also used the privacy options to make Facebook a tool that is useful to me and that I feel comfortable with. I was able to keep most of my information inside a small group of trusted friends and in doing so, I felt comfortable using it and sharing with it.

In recent years, though, the degree of control that Facebook gives you has eroded. This EFF post demonstrates how the service and its privacy policy has changed in this respect since 2005. I have found it more and more difficult to feel comfortable using Facebook in the context of these changes.

The final straw came today.

Now, it seems that any ‘connection’ that you make — whether it be with a friend, or a page that you ‘like’, has to be public.

Facebook came up with a screen asking me to make many ‘page’ connections public, based on my interests and activities that I had previously entered. Even leaving aside the fact that it showed me interests I had previously deleted from my profile, I was horrified to learn that unchecking all of the boxes to share the information actually removed all that information from my profile! There is now apparently no way to restrict information such as my activities and interests and only show that to trusted people. It’s share all, or have nothing, when it comes to this information.

It is quite clear to me that this is now the choice:

You either use Facebook as publicly as they want you to (even as that changes in the future), or you don’t use it at all.

I choose the latter. Assuming I don’t get convinced otherwise in the next few hours, I consider it pretty likely that I will delete my Facebook account. After all, I can always create one again later.

I am hugely disappointed that it seems Facebook doesn᾿t seem to respect people who are more private by nature. I am sorry to all those who may prefer Facebook as a medium for communication and will not be able to contact me there.

UPDATE: I went ahead with the delete. I can always create an account again later and remember you can always send me an email or request to follow me on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible (or follow my public Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible account too).

Three years ago, I made the slightly crazy decision to run this website from my own server. This page is brought to you by a four-year-old generic PC that sits under my desk and dutifully hands out the web pages of my site to anyone from anywhere on the internet that asks for them.

Over the last three years, running my own server has taught me a lot. It has given me complete freedom and control, as well as complete responsibility over my own website. The hardware, software and configuration are all my own thing — if I get it wrong, I have to fix it.

» Read the rest of this post…

UPDATE: the scrolling fix doesn’t now work, as of 2010-11-08. This appears to be a server-side change and unfortunately I am not aware of a solution. 🙁

I put together a short screencast on how to access Gmail’s new iPad interface on your Mac. If you’re a fan of Gmail’s web interface on the iPad and would like to use it on your desktop computer too, this is a cool trick.

The user agent you need to enter into Fluid is:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

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April Fools’ Day can be a lot of fun. There are certainly some cool technology hoaxes that have happened on this day — even Gmail (which obviously wasn’t just a hoax) shares its birthday with the celebration. It’s often fun as well to see what respected news organisations like the BBC have to show on this day.

But do you know what? It’s OK not to like April Fools’ Day.

Often expressing the opinion that you don’t really like hoaxes or practical jokes is met with responses such as “spoilsport” or “lighten up”. They are responses that hook into our susceptibility to peer pressure.

So if, today, you don’t really want to play the April Fool game, don’t feel you have to. Don’t listen to those who may push you into liking it.

It is perfectly OK to be ‘boring’. Rumour has it that I excel at just that. 🙂

It has been quite a while since this bit of software was updated, but please welcome WPGet 1.0.

As well as the milestone of reaching version 1.0, this version now sports a host of new changes, including:

• Switched over to Perl regular expressions for better forwards compatibility
• Ability to show only posts in a specified date range in WPGet&#8217s output
• Ability to show only posts that match a specific search term in WPGet’s output.
• Support for stripping links out of WPGet’s output.
• Drops support for PHP 4

The best way to install WPGet if you’re setting up a new installation is to use the hosted WPGet Installer. Existing users can upgrade their installations by running only Step 1 (‘set up for the first time’) of the installer and uploading the updated wpget.php file that will be generated.

Alternatively, you may download the installer to run yourself from the WPGet project page (or even perform a manual install if you are proficient in PHP).

The new release is also available at the PHP Classes page for WPGet and at HotScripts.

I don’t have a single default browser that I use. I use both Firefox and Safari as my primary browsers (and I throw SRWare Iron into the mix sometimes too).

Of course, my primary OS, Mac OS X, requires me to pick one browser that is used by default when I click on a link in another application. The browser that I want to use for any given link will differ, however. I might have one of the two browsers open right now and want to use the one that is open rather than opening a new application, or it might be a potentially untrusted link, where I’ll want to use Firefox (with my restrictive NoScript configuration) rather than Safari.

Enter Choose Wisely. It is a small application which you set up with the browsers you might want to use. You then set Choose Wisely itself as your default browser. Whenever you click a link, it will pop open.

You simply click the browser you’d like to use on this occasion and the link will open as normal in your chosen browser. It is a really light, simple solution to this problem that takes no more than a second extra of your time.

Initial Setup

When you initially launch the application, there will be no browsers in the window. Go to your Applications folder in the Finder and just drag and drop the browsers you would like in the list onto the window.

You will also want to set Choose Wisely as your default browser. To do this, open Safari. In Safari > Preferences, go to the General divider and select Choose Wisely under Default web browser.

Conclusion

As I said, it is a wonderfully simple solution if, like me, you want to use different browsers for different tasks and on different occasions. Some will find it an annoying extra step — and if you’re happy with just the one browser, it won’t be any use to you at all.

But if you do like to pick and choose browsers on a per-link basis, this is a great solution. You can download it from this page (scroll down to the Download section).

This month marks three years since I purchased my white MacBook, my first Mac computer. Other than the AppleCare coverage stopping (good job they just replaced my battery, yay!), this represents quite a milestone in my technological life.

So I ask myself — objectively, why has the Mac become my primary desktop platform?

• Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This has a number of advantages, but it mainly means rock-solid reliability (in theory at least) and a decent way to interact with the machine via the command line.
• It is elegant and put together with passion and care. Some bits of software, especially third-party driver and hardware support software for other platforms, aren’t. They are hacked together at the last minute and at low budget, just to work. Almost everything that ships with the Mac and a lot of third-party stuff for it is just done in this fundamentally different way of building stuff you would be proud to show off.
• It ‘just works’. Often dismissed as hyperbole, this marketing phrase more often than not is true on the Mac. There are notable exceptions and a few annoying things that you don’t get with generic PC hardware as well, but most of the time, you plug something in, or switch something on for the first time and it just does what it is supposed to.
• Generally speaking, you get what you pay for. Apple don’t make cheap computers. But neither do I think they make overpriced ones. You pay a premium price for an Apple computer, but you get a fair return for that price in terms of the quality of the product. Again, it comes back to the point about passion — Apple will not ship something that they are not entirely happy with, so what you get is something that meets their high standards.

Having said all that, I am still very interested in using everything and anything. While the Mac may be where my primary focus is on the desktop for now and the forseeable future, I am still very much interested in what is going on in the Linux desktop and Windows worlds and you can be sure I’ll continue playing with all sorts of technology in the future.

Here’s to the next three years of Mac — and perhaps beyond!

Just a quick post to say that I’ve put up a brand new portfolio page here on my site.

The old one was way out of date and had no images, so I am pleased I have taken the time to put together the new page, which features some Software Development projects I have been working on, some Blogging and Podcasting that I do and some information about my web server and the Systems that I am familiar with.

Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.