After having spent the last six months with such an unpleasant bout of sciatica that I had to get myself a cane in order to stay upright, I went from being just a bit pudgy … to be a LOT pudgy! *cough*

This morning, I sat in my nice warm waterbed, and made a grocery list for the next week: rutabaga, turnips, carrots, diet dressings, salad veggies … etc.. I was determined that I would spend a while taking off some of the “extra” that was making my clothes look more like body paint than I’m comfortable with. (We’ve all seen the ladies who wear spandex on wayyyy too much personal span! *cringe*)

Anyway, feeling very confident in my decision to unpack some of the recent filling … I got up to face the day with determination and a sense of purpose …

… however, the first thing I saw was the dining room table … and that photo above shows what was on it: an entire tray of donuts from one of my favorite donut shops! These donuts leave the chain donut shops looking like yesterday’s leftovers. I hadn’t had any of these wonderful donuts since I had an office in Wells, ME … which was near the wonderful restaurant that makes these little beauties.

There was a note next to the donuts, written by my son Darian; it said: “Someone needs to put these away. Have at! :o)” Images of turnips and rutabagas faded from my mind like snow in July. My only concern was which one I should eat first!

Okay … so, I’m still going to diet … but it’s just been put off for a couple of days … and will last a bit longer than it would have before today! My baaaaad!

It was nice to experience Homer Simpson’s idea of a perfect Christmas morning … even it was in the middle of June! :o)

by Robin Wauters on February 17, 2009

Isn’t it ironic that Facebook, which is so often used by groups of people to protest and demand changes for just about anything, has reverted to its former Terms Of Services under pressure of the community?

After trying to calm everyone down first, Mark Zuckerberg has now posted a new blog post stating that the company will revert to its previous ToS while they “resolve the issues that people have raised” (the post is being hammered right now so it’s going up and down).

The company has even polled some of its users in news feeds asking them if they should go back to their previous ToS.

According to the young CEO, it’s a language thing and they just did a poor job explaining the changes. But those changes will still be coming in the next few weeks, this time including the Facebook user community to make sure everyone can live with it / gets it (I always thought it was impossible to please everyone, but anyway):

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

Update: Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, weighed in on the discussion on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group.

Facebook has set up a group for its “Bill Of Rights”, where people will be able to provide feedback on the ToS changes. Only 2,000 people have joined the group at the time of this writing.

This isn’t the first time the company backtracks on a decision that got its users and outsiders all riled up. Beacon, anyone?

Original article here

Let’s see what they come up with … from the sounds of this, they’re going to shove the same piece of work down our throats using different words. Be aware. It will be too late to complain when they arrogate your work (or photos, or blog posts, or … ) to themselves.

It’s beginning to look as if there’s not a single honest social networking system on the internet … and I’m sad to have to acknowledge that Facebook has joined the ranks of all of the other losers who decide that what’s yours, is theirs.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

- John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron of Acton (1834–1902)

We’ve had some recent experiences with some of these “great men” … whom I won’t name, because we all know who they are. They weren’t the first; years ago, there were other “pioneers” who allowed a bit of success to go their heads … and at that time, I figured out a few ways to get on top of the problem, and keep my intellectual property out of the greedy hands of those who would take advantage of me. It takes a bit of work, but if done properly, will allow you to disentangle yourself from a thief while leaving very little of your information and intellectual property behind.

First of all, you need to not only delete your information, you need to change …. and save it … not once, but at least twice. Hold off on changing your name and login for last, so that you can continue to log in until the job is done. It’s tedious, and may take a while.

Birthdays, and all other personal information can be overwritten with random bits of trivia, all unrelated to reality. Fill it all out again with bogus information, and save it … make another small change to anything there, then save it again. Doing it this way, the second save should not only overwrite the current information, but should also cause the backed up information to be overwritten by the bogus info you provided on the first save.

Regarding photographs, you can upload anything you want under the name of the photograph you want to replace. For example, rename a blank graphic, or any other graphic you’d like to use (I’ve made some that intend to use ¹ - and you’re welcome to copy and use them too) and rename it to the same name as the photo you’d like to replace.

That will overwrite the photo that was already there. It’s tedious, renaming a graphic over and over, and uploading it to replace what was already there, but it’s the only way that I believe you can actually “take back” your photographs and graphics.

Remember to delete your RSS links to Facebook from your blogs. Also, replace any written text with a nonsense line of text, and be certain to save it at least twice, using a tiny change in the sentence to ensure that it actually does get overwritten on the second save.

Don’t leave anything of yours behind for them to use. If you get stuck with something that you can’t seem to delete, post it in the comments, and we’ll try to figure it out together.

Let’s send out a message to all of the greedy social networking big shots who think they can get away with this stuff … let’s let them know: We won’t let them!

More info:

How to Find Your Facebook Status RSS Feed

RSS feeds on Facebook

Facebook CEO to Scared Users: Trust Us

People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)

1) Replacement banners:

Thanks to Deneen Ballard for initially calling the information to my attention.

Here we go again …

I’m going to really miss this one … :o(

Keep an eye out for a followup post: how to protect yourself as you back out of the door …

.Excerpt from Fox News

Once a Facebook member, always a member.

The Consumerist blog noticed Sunday that the social-networking giant had quietly made a change to its user Terms of Service (TOS) on Feb. 4.

Facebook now declares that it has a perpetual license to use anything you post to your own Facebook page — even if you terminate your account.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the change as necessary in a blog posting Monday afternoon.

Here’s the licensing part of the legalese, which sounds bad enough:

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

In other words, while it doesn’t actually own your photos, scribblings and status updates — you do — Facebook can do whatever it wants with it, whenever it wants, in order to promote itself or create or sell ads.

Theoretically, it can even “license” a picture of your kids for use in a third party’s ad campaign.

Most of that has been part of the Facebook Terms of Service for a while. After all, without user-generated content, Facebook would be nothing.

What’s been removed is this: “If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however (sic) you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

And what’s been added is this: “The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service” — after which follows a list of most of the sections on the Terms of Service page.

So even if you decide Facebook isn’t for you, the site can still use anything you posted. It’s all been archived.

“I’m done with Facebook,” declared blogger Ed Champion upon learning of the TOS changes.

He seemed more annoyed at the older blanket license than the new never-say-die part of the legalese — ironic considering that if he’d deleted his account before Feb. 4 his account really would have been gone for good.

In his blog posting, Zuckerberg explained that the language had to be tweaked to resolve a conflict over ownership of messages posted by one Facebook user onto another user’s page.

“When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created — one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox,” he writes. “Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.”

Zuckerberg then makes a subtle but persuasive legal argument.

“People also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them — like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on — to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information,” he points out.

“These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who [sic] you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

(All emphases mine)

Excerpt from Fox News

When I wrote the last post regarding my phone conversation with Dr. Rutledge, I said that I would be posting my own opinion in a separate post. I waited a while to do so, because I wanted some time to pass between the hype of the moment … and I also wanted to have time to mull it all over again before giving my own impression.

The entire situation has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth … and among other things, has taught me that whatever is hidden in the fine print is what you want to read first … before you read the stuff that seems too good to be true (and most like is.)

Now that it’s over, I can say that I found Dr. Rutledge to be an intelligent and solicitous individual. He sounded quite genuine in his dismay at what was happening, and I do believe that the distress was not feigned. He tried very hard to explain his own personal position, and I felt as if we both had an excellent opportunity to express ourselves without holding back.

My own impression … I believe him when he says that he never set out to deceive anyone, or with the idea of selling Wellsphere. He also insisted that the entire Wellsphere company felt the same way. I believe that he might not have had those intentions himself … although I’m not quite as charitable when I think of other people in the company. On this score, I give Dr. Rutledge a “maybe” … I do believe him when he tells me about his own personal intentions, but when it comes to a blanket explanation for the entire group at Wellshere … then no, I don’t believe it.

When pressed on whether they had removed all of the material they were asked to removed, I was confused, because his initial response sounded disingenuous. He said that the material had been removed from their server … and it could well be that it was - however, Bongi mentioned that his information was still there, although he’d made the same request as the rest of us. Also, the careful wording made me wonder if he could be “Jesuitizing” … perhaps the material was removed from the server, but there might be backups someplace? Else, why would he have said that whatever someone did at a later time, without his knowledge or consent, would be out of his control? When pressed further, he told me that there were “no copies”. Could be true … at least as far he knows, and might not be, too. Sites like that generally back things up quite often. Again, on this subject, I give Dr. Rutledge a “maybe”.

Although I stressed that as long as he was associated with the people at Wellsphere, his reputation would suffer the same damage overall, he still continued to defend his own, and their, position.

I also encouraged him several times to give the public an explanation - like he was giving me over the phone, but I got the impression that they were not going to do so. That left me feeling frustrated, because all of the angry/distraught/upset ex-Wellsphere people deserve an explanation … a public explanation. Those who are still with Wellsphere deserve one too. It made me feel as if either the head honcho thought he was so clever he could just pull it off without a word, without an explanation, without an apology … but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The situation might have toned down to a general roar, but the Medical Blogosphere has a long memory … and it’s not going to completely go away. A public word could have helped in that department, depending on what was said.

Finally, my own gripe was not quite the same as most other people’s. The sale of Wellsphere and all of the angry Twitters gave me the courage to speak up. The problem is still an issue with me. As far as I can tell from a casual visit, Wellsphere is still encouraging “Mavens” to “help” people with their health questions. What is a Maven? As far as I could tell, anyone in the Medical Blogosphere whose blog they liked, and who wasn’t practicing professional medicine (not nurses, doctors, etc.)

When I joined, I was encouraged to answer questions in the “general health” community. I tried replying to things that I knew from personal experience, but my conscience bothered because I know full well that my own experience may not be another person’s … and I could do a tremendous amount of damage. Unlike WebMD, there was practically - as far as I was able to tell, no oversight of the responses Mavens were giving the public. More questions went unanswered than were dealt with by Mavens, and far fewer were fielded by physicians. And even then … practicing medicine online is a very dangerous thing to do, no matter who or what you are.

Had I followed the request I got each time a Wellshere email appeared, I would have been pushing … trying to accumulate enough “answers” (dangerous or not) to hit the magic number of 50 … at which time would be transformed into a “Top Maven”. Yet more reason for the poor ignorants who came looking for medical advice to think that I was a safe person to give it to them!

The entire scene was competitive … the more you did, the more you advanced. This is not an environment that promotes “health” … far less common sense.

Dr. Rutledge told me that it was expected that no one would do more than they were qualified to do where questions are concerned … however, when I asked him about the oversight for all of the questions, he didn’t have an answer.

I think I can guess the answer … there just weren’t enough people dealing with the situation, and at the very least, things got badly out of control. Inviting people to ask questions of the Mavens in different communities (Chronic Conditions, Mental Health, Men’s Health, Digestive System … about 25 in all in the Health section) and then not providing oversight … or direction … or review by someone in medicine … was not only dangerous, it was also criminal. Making it competitive by promotions in rank was an exacerbation of the existing condition.

And so … my take: Dr. Rutledge appears to be a very nice person to speak with over the phone. I believe him when he says that he, personally, had no intentions of ever providing more than a good, helpful site for people to frequent, but I’m not sure I believe that he really thought that all of the “Mavens” were not overstepping their bounds.

That’s a lot of trust … if it were safe to do that, then since I’m in ESRD, I should be able to give medical advice in my nephrologists’ stead, eh?

Imagine the medmal lawyers rubbing their hands together in glee!

To sum up … I don’t think this is going to go away. We may not be Twittering about it all the time anymore, but it was a painful lesson in trust for all of us. We’ve been through a lot as a community … from the injustice done to Dr. Flea, all the way to pulling together after an impostor broke our communal sense of trust. We’ve seen blog scraping, trolling by rabid, cynical medmal lawyers (anyone remember Matt? *cough) … and we’ve survived all and continued to grow.

We’re not finished yet … and we’re wiser than we were.