cat /dev/brain > /www/blog

A few days ago Stan Schroeder of Mashable posted a entry entitled Facebook Trumps Most Photo Sharing Sites With 10 Billion Photos. In it he says about Flickr that "ultimately people use Facebook for the same thing - sharing photos with their friends" and that "It’ll be interesting to see what photo sharing social networks will do to differentiate from Facebook".

It is possible that Stan still uses Flickr in this way, but I suspect many people already use large social networks (like Facebook) if they only want to share photos with their friends.

This is not a problem for Flickr, however. Flickr has established a community of people who want to share their photos with the world. Links to photos on Twitter or blogs often use Flickr for that purpose because twitter and blogs are by their nature public and Facebook is not. Through Flickr I have (re-)discovered photography, Flickr has a fascinating array of photos on it which can be easily found by going to the interestingness pages or one of numerous groups. Flickr also has a number of features which support it as a place to share photos with the world, not just your friends:

• Tags
• Public Groups
• The API and various applications built on it (e.g. bighugelabs)
  
• A community of photographers
• Geo tagging
• Search

(Facebook also has something called tags but that is for tagging people, which makes it useful for sharing with friends but is not the same as what Flickr uses tags for)

In short, Flickr is a way to share your photos with the world and Facebook is way to share photos with your friends.

It seems everyone is talking about disqus these days so I have added it to my blog.

There is a new article on ReadWriteWeb now featuring updated Digg graphs that I gave them, "The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg".

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 has been released today which contains the fix to a security bug I reported, details are in the security announcement.

As a follow up to my last entry, Tech stories percentage dropping on Digg", I thought I would do some more digg stats.
First up is the digg stories by number of popular stories rather than percentages:I also looked at what Technology is made up of. It perhaps not surprising that a lot of the news is about Apple (dark blue) or Linux (light blue), with the generic "Industry News" making up the majority:
and here is the same data by percentage:
I wanted to get some of the data for submissions though it seems I can't get data from the API for that from before the 30th December, last year.

There was a story on Mashable today about the number of tech stories on Digg dropping, though the method they used was by looking at wayback machine results. However since Digg have all this information available in their API, we can get a much more accurate picture of what has happened. So here is a graph of the percentage of stories in each 'Container'. Each data point is for a full week of stories, so this should cover every story since the 1st of January 2006 until the 3rd of February 2008. (click on the image to view it full size)

I couldn't quite believe it when I heard that HM Revenue and Customs have 'lost' 25 million child benefit records. It does seem that the data was password protected, but that presumably means something like a zip file or MS Excel password, then this is akin to losing a suit case with millions of pounds in it and then mentioning it had one of those tiny suit case padlocks on it.

It should be clear to any organization, that handles this kind of data, especially in this volume, that security is of paramount importance. Here some the security measures I think should have been in place and would have prevented this from happening:

• No one should be able to download large portions of the data without special procedures for data security being enforced (say more than 1,000 records)
• Any data that is transfered should be encrypted with strong cryptography. The key(s) to this encryption should be sent separately to the data and only after the data is acknowledged to arrived safely.
• All data of this type should be sent by a secure transportation company such as Securicor.
• If at all possible the data should never leave the secure site where it is normally resident
  
• If anyone requests data the bare minimum that they require should be provided with no extra fields.
• Anyone who goes anywhere near this kind of data should be given comprehensive security training.
  

Even if all but one of these measures were to fail, this breach would still not have happened.

The sad fact is that any security professional or group should have been able to tell them this (and whole lot more for other scenarios), but for some reason HM Revenue and Customs didn't take this type of advice or maybe didn't implement it properly.

Before this story surfaced I had already been very skeptical of the ID cards project. It would be very hard to keep this data safe. If the data were ever lost it would be a lot more serious than what has been lost in this case, both in the number of people and the amount of data about each person. I am now even more skeptical since it seems the government can't even handle quite basic data security concepts like the ones I have outlined.