Facebook app shares ALL your Phone Numbers?

It is clear now that the "privacy problems" are not merely bugs, but actually endemic to their corporate culture. A new report shows Facebook's iPhone app can share all of the numbers in your address book in a public space or user consent. To protect yourself, simply (1) never add your phone number to your Facebook profile and (2) don't sync your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad address book to Facebook.

The Guardian's Charles Arthur reports that Facebook's Contact Sync feature links your friends' Facebook profile pictures to the contact telephone number in your iPhone address book. The app then pushes these private phone numbers onto Facebook's servers, and publishes them to Facebook's Phonebook app. The Facebook app also appears to share numbers for contacts that you don’t have, but your Facebook friends do. If you are logged onto Facebook, you can see your Phonebook here.

The Gulf Oil Spill could still get worse

Take this one with a grain of salt, as it comes from a comment on a discussion board. But the reasoning seems sound and predicts that the broken oil well is more broken than we think and getting worse. The cusp of the argument is speculation that the break is not just at the head of the well, but that the actual pipes deep in the seabed are broken as well. This would mean the more done to cap the well, the more flow will simply come from the hidden leaks farther down the pipe.

Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it

Flickr Co-Founders are leaving Yahoo

I have never been in favor of the Microsoft buyout of Yahoo, primarily for the likely impact on my favorite photo site: Flickr. However, it appears that the slow disintegration of Yahoo in the face of the stockholder rebellion has impacted me anyway. The two people who founded Flickr have left Yahoo and in fact have done so without any job to jump to. They apparently simply wanted to get out while the getting was good.

This is a VERY bad sign. Here is hoping the once-giant of Web 1.0 can staunch the bleeding before they completely disintegrate.