As of September 5 2007, Facebook started offering data about you publicly to non-friends and non-facebook users with what as known as your Public Search Listing. Because facebook is such a popular site, if you have a unique name, often your public search listing will be one of the first sites that come up if your name is googled.

This URL of your public search listing is currently http://www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/YourFacebookID.

Supposedly, facebook allows you to control whether this page exists with the preference on your privacy page, Settings > Privacy > “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing.” If you uncheck this checkbox, and log out of facebook, your page will return a “Page not Found” error page with your image, friends, and fan pages removed.

However, this page will still remain as one of the top results for your name.

Why? Web browsers, search engines and web servers use header codes to determine the status of a page. Headers codes include 200 OK, 301 redirect, 302 found, and 404 not found. If facebook were to honestly remove your page, they would return a 404 not found header when you go to your public search listing URL. But this is not what is occurring:

Try running curl -I http://www.facebook.com/people/Your-Public-Facebook-URL, a command that returns the headers of a document. Even months after you have turned off your public search listing, this is the result:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

In my opinion this is dishonest of facebook. Google sees this “page not found” error page but doesn’t detect it as an error because the header is falsely returning 302, so it has no reason to remove the page from your search results. This combined with facebook’s policy of requiring you to use your full name, its SEO tactics of having your full name in the URL and also having it appear in the source code (via javascript) 85 times, means this link is never going to go away unless Facebook actually changes their public search listing policy. Because Facebook is such a large site, even if no one links to this page besides Facebook, it still will be a top result in google.

This is just an inconvenience for me, having anyone know that I am on facebook, but it is a real privacy issue for people who would like to reconnect with old friends but need to hide from abusive spouses, exes, stalkers or the like.

I’m taking care of a sick relative whose mother blares fox news on the TV all day, every day. As a result I have the privilege of listening to Hannity, O’Reilly and Beck every day now. There’s no escaping it; I hear the angry heads news network when I’m trying to work, trying to sleep, trying to read. Some days I can take it, other days I just want to scream back at the TV.

Tonight’s “headline” was “Is Obama in over his head?” Does he know what he’s doing? Isn’t he too inexperienced to handle this job?

Their first guest to answer the question was Newt Gingrich.

How is this a fucking news story? It’s a hit job no different than the attack ads during the campaign. Bush couldn’t even speak english, and yet it was not headline news anywhere that he was in over his head.

I *hate* how they continue to call their network fair and balanced, as if to mock us. They’ve used plenty of unfair editing tactics and just plain shouting to silence progressive guests, but it seems like they’re not even trying anymore. Your first expert on this non-news story is former speaker of the house and leader of the republican party? How many times do you have Pelosi on? Or other democratic house leaders? Hoyer? Gephardt?

You can expect these rants to continue as I continue to have to endure this loud bullshit.

Wow, this is depressing. In yet another step towards Idiocracy, students are now *less likely* to graduate high school than their parents, according to a national study. What happened to the America I knew where a large percentage of my classmates were the first in their family to go to college? Where America was a leader of science and entrepreneurship? According to Anna Habash from the article, “The U.S. is stagnating while other industrialized countries are surpassing us … The United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma.” That is sad.

I do think Obama has the right idea of making education a priority again, and I hope he makes good on his word and I hope enough dems are elected to enable him to change policy and I hope he gets elected. Things are looking good, but I’ve been disappointed and have felt swindled by polls before…Remember when Zogby called the election for Kerry? Remember when Kerry said no incumbant president with less than 50% approval rating has been elected before? Yeah, I’m still going to be donating more to the Obama campaign. I’d rather this be a landslide.

In another step towards Idiocracy, McCain was twice dumbfounded last week by the appalling ignorance of his base. These two clips from a Lakeville Minnesota rally show McCain getting booed for calling Obama a ‘decent man’, and then taking away the mic of an audience member calling Obama an Arab.

I have to say, I’ll be heartbroken if McCain wins this election, but he gets a lot of credit for playing this game fair, and by putting his base in their place even while being booed. I’m somewhat troubled by his correction of ‘Arab’ with ‘decent’ (did you mean, ‘Christian’?), but I think he was just too flabbergasted by the ignorant attacks of his audience members.

I’m heartened by McCain’s integrity in this election but depressed by how ignorant this country is.

On a side note, Obama also thanked McCain for his remarks.

Kucinich just presented thirty-five impeachment articles for President Bush, ranging from the false case for war against Iraq to secret and illegal wiretapping. Unfortunately a successful impeachment of Bush leaves a scary thought – Cheney in office for any amount of time, however brief. However, Kucinich attempted to impeach Cheney in 2007. Both acts were more or less symbolic and have little possibility of moving forward, but it is nice to hear these truths stated on record and I admire Kucinich’s bravery for voicing them formally. Listen to the video clip of his introduction – he speaks with the conviction of a prosecutor in court, and to hear truth spoken that bravely is music to my ears. Although this is not on the Drudge Report, CNN or Fox News, it is on the front page of The New York Times via Reuters and on the front page of google news and digg.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich _presents_Bush_impeachment_ articles_0609.html

This article makes me furious. From the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights

From the article:

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001.”

EIGHTY THOUSAND people? Where is the outrage? How are we, the freeest country in the world, allowing our government to “disappear” and torture people without trial? Eighty thousand? How can anyone possibly argue that eighty thousand people are guilty without trial and deserve this kind of treatment?

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

- Martin Niemöller

80,000 people, guys. 80,000.

I can’t tell you how sick I am of reading this phrase after every primary:
“Neither candidate is expected to reach the 2,026 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. That means the race is likely to be settled by “superdelegates” — party leaders and officials who will cast votes at the Democratic convention in August.”

It’s like they are copying and pasting as if to say “no new news here”.

The Pundit Analyzing Obama? Some TV Upstart Named Rove

What is “fair and balanced” about having Karl Rove as a news analyst? And what’s he doing on TV, shouldn’t he be in jail?

From U.S. News:

President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can’t be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush’s presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the historians rated Bush’s presidency in last place. Among the reasons given for his low ratings: invading Iraq, “tax breaks for the rich,” and alienating many nations around the world. Bush supporters counter that professional historians today tend to be liberal and that it’s too early to assess how his policies will turn out.

As conservative as the Drudge Report is, credit goes to him and his staff for this tip.

Just a note that The Daily Show finally broke its no-celebrity streak by hosting George Clooney on Thursday. My friends and I had noticed that as Jon Stewart has gained more control of the show and as his budget has increased, the show has focused more on political guests and less on celebrities. They’ve also expanded their coverage such as Rob Riggle’s trip to Iraq and their Indecision 2008 team. It felt like years since Jon has hosted a celebrity, though I guess they did host Phil Simms in January.
I am a fan of George Clooney for his work in Darfur, his socially active films, and his political beliefs as well as his acting, but was disappointed by this latest plug for Leatherheads which looks awful.