Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

Planning on a movie tonight...

Bought tickets on Fandango...

On the PRINT screen, a pop-up: "...added to your Facebook"

"what?!"

I log onto Facebook and see

woah.

OpenID is a decentralized, secure single sign-on system. It allows you to create a login at a site you frequent, and use that same login on any other site that supports OpenID.

Listen to TWIT's program on Open ID, how it works and what it means to you (not having to remember so many passwords for starters).

Listening to Market Place last night, I heard a story about online privacy, and privacy in general. Seems that Privacy International issued a report recently that marks Google as the worst internet company when it comes to privacy. Stop the presses!

From Wired Blog - May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC's expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

I just stumbled upon (not with suble upon though) this Scary blog post about google data mining your voice:

At CivicActions we know all about open WiFi networks, and I often get asked by friends about "internet security" and specifically, how secure their activities are when they are on open networks. David Pogue covered the issue in his column today.

While he believes his wifi traffic is not worth snooping ("Frankly, I consider the details of my life so boring to other people that I really couldn’t care less. I’ve got nothing to hide, so why not accept it?") he disabused his readers of any notion that their WiFi traffic was generally safe from snooping eyes.

DefectiveByDesign.org a joint project of teh Free Software Foundation and CivicActions got some digital ink this morning in the Chicago Tribune. Columnist Eric Zorn wrote about Amazon's Unboxed license agreement which FSF ED Peter Brown described as: [A] road map for what all content providers want to have down the line: Their goal is to have so many locks and gatekeepers that every interaction you have with copyrighted material becomes a transaction. Cory Doctorow published a point-by-point analysis of the Unboxed license which represents some of the most restrictive and anti user DRM we have ever seen.

This is why we have declared October 3rd the "Day Against DRM". DBD members around the world will be taking part in both virtual and meat-space actions to raise awareness of the dangers of DRM. Check out the site, join an action, or start your own. The only way DRM will fail is if people know about it (and don't take my word for it, that line is borrowed from a Disney Exec!).

Reports of the death of journalism

may have been exaggerated. Keith Olbermann delivered a presentation Wednesday on his MSNBC Program "Countdown" which transcended modern newscasting completely. It was, unambiguously, Murrow-like. I was transfixed, and if you haven't seen it, please click below and prepare to have your socks knocked off with pure unadulterated elocution. Democrats, wake up. This is the voice of the New American Evolution. Here's a great article about it: Richard Greene's HuffPo blog on the masterful message and the masterful messenger. Waaaaay to go Keith, and kudos to MSNBC for backing their man.

What type of searcher are you?

Slate distinguishs the seven ways people search using the mistakenly-released AOL search logs of 650,000 members.

Or go to Valleywag to search the logs yourself. Like User 1912452, "a psychiatric counselor looking for a job in Colorado, obsessed with quick weight loss. She's turned to the book of Revelation, the zodiac, psychic schools, private investigators, and Victorian poetry. She (or a patient) dreams about being drenched in blood."