WAYS (the World Association of Young Scientists) and PYRN (the Permafrost Young Researchers Network) are two projects among many other science-focused social networking initiatives I work on. They are featured in this video (German only) on wisskomm.tv. On one hand it's great to see our networks start to gain some critical mass and exposure, and on the other it's mostly just fun for me to hear my buddy Hugues speaking German...

May 21st is UNESCO World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

Wednesday night Tonight! in the Viger Atrium of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec - one of the nicest lecture rooms I've seen so far in the city - I'll be giving a short lecture on the use of technology in the context of culture, knowledge and dialog.

I'll demo three videos as well, two of which are mine and another from the participants of Convergentes.

My talk runs from about 7:15pm until 8:00pm, though I'm also participating in a round table about "Issues of Identity" and "Cultural diversity and building bridges between cultures" from 6:00pm to 7:00pm.

Then from 8:00pm until 8:45pm we'll be treated to a sure-to-be-awesome multilingual spoken word performance hosted by my good friend Elizabeth Robert featuring Endre Farkas, Pauline Michel, Judith Munira Avinger, Alejandro Saravia and Dwayne Morgan.

BAnQ Auditorium
Centre d’Archives de Montréal
535 Viger Street East, Montréal

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In case you needed yet another reason why Bell Canada is the absolute worst company in the Canadian telecom space, they've quietly begun throttling traffic on independent, small ISPs who lease their lines.

This means that if you're anything like me - and by Gosh, you oughta be! - your ISP is small, progressive, and independent... and soon to get much, much slower. I use Radioactif / Aei, though there are many other good ones to choose from. However, since the lines are all owned by Big Brother Bell, they all end up leasing their lines from them. So far, this agreement had maintained a precarious balance, allowing small, innovative ISPs to crop up here and there and offer innovative service coupled with low prices, and Bell had managed to maintain control of its own lines.

If you're coming here via the CBC Daybreak show this morning, here are some relevant links you might be interested in:

• The original post I wrote complaining about the inability to delete Facebook accounts - warning: strong language and vitriol...
• New York Times piece about Facebook's privacy policy, referencing my article
• Great article in The Guardian about exactly what's so wrong with Facebook
• Follow-up article in the New York Times about Facebook backing off on holding on to user accounts indefinitely (but still not allowing you to close your account yourself)
• Interesting and educational video about the process and people behind Facebook
• Reactions to my article from around the web
• Overview of various Facebook Privacy Policy responses
• All of my [mostly] non-Facebook Montreal related posts

Apart from my apparent inability to pronounce "irrevocable", that went rather well.

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I'll be speaking on CBC's Daybreak tomorrow (Thursday) morning at about 7:40 AM.

It's at 88.5 on the FM dial for those of you who don't know. You can also listen live online on the Daybreak website if you're not local.

I'll be talking about Internet policy, privacy, and - you guessed it - Facebook.

Following Maria Aspan's excellent article in the New York Times, Facebook has apparently softened their Draconian stance on not letting users leave Facebook. They went from making it impossible to delete your account to making it only slightly less cumbersome.

This is, of course, not nearly enough.

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares.

The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday.

Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.

It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.

If you would've asked me how I felt about this a couple years ago, I would've jumped on the anti-MS bandwagon with everyone else and worried that Microsoft would ruin Yahoo and her spin-offs, but today, Yahoo is the company that needs to be saved - and why not by Microsoft?

All those complaints from us concerned web users about Facebook violating our privacy rights seem to finally be paying off:

Facebook is to be quizzed about its data protection policies by the Information Commissioner's Office.

The investigation follows a complaint by a user of the social network who was unable to fully delete their profile even after terminating their account.

This is, of course, a great first step to ensuring that the world's most powerful social networking organization realizes that its customers actually do care about how their personal information is used and how it's shared with other companies, partners, and government organizations.

For those of you following the ever-entertaining saga about Facebook data mining the entire human population (except for the smart ones), here's another zinger about their relationship with TRUSTe, the supposed Internet privacy and trust organization founded in 1997. First, some extracts from their mission statement and website:

" TRUSTe® is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling individuals and organizations to establish trusting relationships based on respect for personal identity and information in the evolving networked world.

Advancing privacy and trust for a networked world, we certify and monitor web site privacy and email policies, monitor practices, and resolve thousands of consumer privacy problems every year."

You've probably seen their logo on various sites you may visit, such as eBay. This 'privacy seal' is supposed to ensure that the website in question has trustworthy online privacy policies. Even though I've done a fair amount of work on the periphery of web privacy standards in Canada in the past few years, I'd never really crossed paths with TRUSTe other than noticing their seal on a few sites, and automatically assuming that the site in question cared more about privacy or protecting user data than another site which doesn't have the seal. For someone like me and the other eight people or so who actually care about user privacy on the web, it was like a warm fuzzy blanket that made me feel more comfortable visiting the site in question, and I never paid more heed to it than that.

So it looks like the version of Recaptcha I was using (or the Drupal plugin) was buggy and causing Internet Explorer 6 and 7 users to be unable to view my posts for the past week or so.

I hadn't noticed because I seldom browse from my Vista box.

I've removed recaptcha until it's fixed, so feel free to flame away, IE users!