Ghostery keeps places like Facebook and Google from tracking you

There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook tracking recently, specifically about how logging out isn’t enough to keep them from tracking you. It’s worrisome stuff.

So use Ghostery. Seriously, it’s great. It works as an extension for every browser and lets you configure what is allowed to track you, when and where.

Once you get it installed for your browser, you’ll see an icon with a number, telling you how many third-party sites are tracking your comings and goings on the web. From there, you can selectively turn on and off the “behavioral data trackers”, scummy “contextual” ad networks, evil in-text ad highlighting, social network sharing widgets, offsite comment engines and other privacy-destroying crap.

I like Ghostery because it’s focused specifically on privacy. It doesn’t start with a predetermined blacklist but rather lets you turn off tracking bugs as you come across them. I recommend hitting a few big aggregator type sites (Business Insider or the Huffington Post, say), which have no problem selling as much about you as they can collect, just to see how many tracking mines they lay down. Turn off anything that strikes you as evil, I tend to leave things like Mint or Google Analytics enabled.

As with many browser extensions, be aware that this may break things, particularly sites that rely on Facebook or Twitter to log in. That’s sort of the point. You can whitelist specific sites if you’d like.

I’ve been using Ghostery for a few months now and have been quite happy with it.

azspot:

Elizabeth Warren Announces Decision to Run for U.S. Senate

Oh, hell YES

Fela Soul - a De La Soul / Fela Kuti mashup. Yeah, it’s good.

The problems that your project solves shouldn’t start with “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” Instead, they should always be phrased, “X sucks because Y and Z.” You may not even have a solution. Technology may not even be the right solution. But please stop adding social layers to social layers and raising 5 million dollarbucks. Your idea is bad and you should feel bad.

—Kelly Sutton makes a smart argument for why your idea is terrible

[The Blogosphere’s Soft Corruption](http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/09/11/the-blogosphere’s-soft-corruption/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: monday-note (Monday Note))

2105:

Frédéric Filloux on TechCrunch, Arrington, AOL, CrunchFund, etc.  If you’ve avoided this story (probably for great reasons), Filloux grounds it in considering the soft corruption of journalistic ethics.

I get the sense there’s mostly a lot of shrugging about the # crunchgate fiasco and that’s a damn shame. Folks in tech are mostly scared to touch it because Arrington, gaping asshole that he is, wields a lot of power and none of the valley sycophants with their shitty c-list startups want to risk their fake money by opening their mouths.

But Arrington and this whole mess are really a distillation of a truly terrible, treacherous trend and dark side of personal publishing: that pay for play is real, it’s been legitimized and it’s here to stay. Every low-rent tech vlogger who takes a free camera or mommy blogger who gushes about her amazing new washing machine (gratis from Kenmore, be sure to check the FCC guidelines on that before hitting publish, WINK) is perpetuating this problem and it’s only going to get worse.

The lesson here seems to be that the only people who care are a handful of old media journalists. Ethics. LOL.

The American List

Fantastic list of proudly made in the USA apparel that will keep you lookin’ sharp from A Continuous Lean

After a little reflection, it was wrong of me to compare Rick Perry to Pontius Pilate the other day.

Pilate at least showed remorse. Perry is the only governor in modern U.S. history to knowingly preside over the execution of a man who was almost certainly innocent.

And he is cheered for it. Your Republican party.

Yahoo’s biggest “problem” is the huge revenue and profit it continues to make. Jobs had a big advantage when he came back to Apple – it was losing $1B/year and was about to go broke. Everything needed to change. When you have a huge business to screw up, it isn’t so easy to make a sweeping change that could disrupt the business model for years. At Yahoo you could probably cut back to 100 ops people and 200 sales people and rake in billions in revenue and profit for a decade or more. In fact, most Yahoo! die hard users would like the message “We are never going to change Yahoo! again. It will remain exactly like this from now on. No more redesigns. No new features. No changes of any kind. Your My Yahoo page is safe.” Yahoo’s business is driven by the adoption of Yahoo! Mail. Most people that use it (it is the largest email provider in the US), don’t realize they could put in mail.yahoo.com rather than yahoo.com so stop there on their way to their inbox. That is enough to power nearly every other media site they control to the #1 position with the right mix of articles on the home page.

—Spot-on analysis of the challenge facing Yahoo. They’ve got a huge legacy user base that never wants them to change anything. Maybe Yahoo was a perfect fit for Microsoft after all…

Salt & Fat: Oven-dried Tomatoes

Did everyone have a good summer? Good, now let’s get back in the kitchen, shall we? Neven’s got a perfect post about getting the most out of the end of summer with tomatoes that will carry you through to Christmas.

Machines meeting the MacBook Air’s specification can be built cheaply enough; Apple’s managing it, and Intel’s price estimates probably aren’t too far off. But they require a different approach to PC building. For example, Apple’s laptops use custom-sized lithium polymer batteries. These allow Apple to make the battery exactly fit the space available, maximizing battery life and minimizing space, but there’s a downside of sorts: Apple can’t use standard battery modules. Similarly, the MacBook Air uses a highly integrated motherboard, with almost all functionality built-in. This makes the board smaller and cheaper to produce, but it means Apple doesn’t offer a wide range of processors, GPUs, WiFi adaptors, etc.

Apple has changed the way it builds systems. The company has boasted about it, in fact; when Steve Jobs talked about the unibody construction process used since late 2008, he was, in effect, telling the PC world “we’ve made this kind of investment—catch us if you can” (and so far, the PC companies can’t). In 2010 he made the challenge again when he claimed that “We think all notebooks will look like these one day.”

Apple didn’t achieve this overnight; it was the result of close cooperation with its supply chain (changes driven by Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook), greater vertical integration, a deliberate policy of not shipping a million different models, and an absolute willingness to offer premium products at premium prices. That’s why Apple, and only Apple, can now make the MacBook Air and sell it for $999.

—Peter Bright is lamenting the fact that he can’t buy the PC equivalent of a MacBook Air, and doesn’t seem likely to be able to any time soon. It’s a long, somewhat meandering piece, but this bit really nails where the hardware industry is right now. Apple spent the past decade not only building the best computers in the business but building the best process in the industry. It’s a long-term investment that’s now starting to pay off in spades – they now have a manufacturing process that no one else can touch, which lets them build not just the best computers but to compete, head to head, on price.