Yeah, that's (part of) why I'm not totally entrusting my stuff to the cloud services. And that's also part of why I'm running Linux instead of a proprietary OS like Windows or Mac. These companies may be able to restrict how you can use their platform/service, but they can only do that <b>if you use</b> their platform/service. - Blake from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Nice post Sarah. Whether known or not, we've all agreed to a certain "social contract" with computing since even the earliest days. It's a natural part of the continuum, just as in civil society, you trade freedom for safety but then must constantly iterate to strike a balance. One has to hope that as the social services and cloud computing offerings experiment with this balance, those that truly abuse will eventually be routed around. Even now you see early examples as iPhones are jailbroken, social graphs are extracted from services, and free (as in speech) services arise with similar functionality as older tightly controlled ones. Protecting us from ourselves is almost as old as computing, privledged modes, private API's, and protected memory are just some examples. - mikepk from FriendFeed MT Plugin

partial tinfoil hat but just partial - adolfo foronda