Ins and Outs of Inputs

First of all...All hail our new overlord. And by overlord I mean year 2009. I hope you all will have a great time. I know I will :-). I didn't write for some time, because I was travelling then I was celebrating holidays with my family and friends. All in all I didn't have so much time to keep my information up to date not to mention doing anything resembling work. That's changing NOW!.

I recently bought new camera (lovely Nikon D90) and also decided I need to backup my previous photos to more than 2 places. I realized you can never have enough backups after a few failed HDDs. So what were the options I was considering?

• Google's Picasa: 20$/year for 10GB  storage space
• Flickr: 25$/year for unlimited storage and better sharing/privacy settings, presentation options etc.

I didn't consider other services because...well because I didn't.

Now the issue was...How to upload all of my photos (several gigabytes)? Flickr has client for Windows/MacOS, but not for Linux (The orignal client appears to work through wine though). Kflickr to the rescue! I started uploading photos in no time. But I wouldn't be writing this blog entry if everything went according to plan now would I?

Everything seemed to work, the photos were on the web. I could see them, organize them, tag them...you name it. Then I wanted to download original file from certain photo (for reason I don't remember). How great was my surprise when the file was <1MB in size. The originals I had were ~3 MB. Something rotten in here. The files were obviously recompressed with lower jpeg quality settings before being uploaded. Not all of them were this way though. It seemed like it has something to do with license I used for the files. Power is in the source, Luke so there I was. I wanted to investigate the problem and maybe fix it.

Unfortunately opening Kflickr project files with Kdevelop and trying to debug didn't work. For some reason the gdb was ignoring my breakpoins as if the application was compiled without debugging information. It was however compiled with -g3 (all debugging info). So far I was unable to properly diagnose the orignal bug, but I wrote to author of Kflickr asking for information. Now let's wait.

Have you ever said anything you wanted to take back right after you finished the sentence? Well maybe you got lucky and there were only a few people around. But once you put something on the web, it's there forever. Internet doesn't have concept of delete button.

There is always omnipresent cache and archives, so even deleting content from you site doesn't help. This happened recently when Apple pulled biography of their new executive Mark Papermaster from their website, after court barred him from reporting to work in Apple until his lawsuit with IBM is closed. I will not go into details (you can read Ars Technica coverage of the issue) because my point lies elsewhere. You can say what you want, if it is connected to the Internet it is public FULLSTOP

Internet is full of stories where people wanted to hide their humiliations and errors from public by injunctions, lawsuits and whatnot. The end result is almost always Streissand effect. If you read the wiki, there are some nice examples why you should keep your private things private. Once it's out, trying to censor it will only make it worse (the more famous/sexy you are the worse for you). It might be a good time to read guides to privacy right now. I know you are not going to do that anyway, but it is still my dream that once, a new generation will be able to protect their privacy online. Unfortunately anecdotal evidence suggest otherwise.

By the way. Anyone knows a simple list of things to improve your privacy online?