firehose

According to a Pew survey released yesterday, 91 percent of adult respondents said that consumers had "lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies." Facebook, because of its size and the scope of the information released, is one of the prime places this data is collected. And through its multiple revisions, Facebook's data use policy has frequently been obfuscatory, confusing, or incomplete — an issue that was highlighted earlier this year when researchers revealed they had slightly manipulated the News Feed to test users' emotional responses. Today, it's updating that policy again, with an eye towards making it understandable.

Facebook doesn't seem to be actually changing much about how it collects or uses information, or how you can control what people see. A lot of the new proposal is reorganization and graphic design; the relatively dry policy is now spaced out, color-coded, and rewritten in more colloquial language. It's been cut from 8,000 or more words, spread over multiple pages, to closer to 2,000, arranged in a single interactive page (more technical pages are linked for advertisers and specific topics like cookies.) The whole thing is nicer-looking and less wordy, albeit much more of a sales pitch than the original. Given the minuscule chances of anyone going through most privacy policies, that's still an improvement —.it looks like something someone actually wants you to read, even if you probably still won't do it. Users in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK will also get access to more advanced advertising preferences, a feature that came to the US this summer.

Facebook has tried to give people tools to check their privacy settings before, and it's doing it again with "Privacy Basics," which is essentially a slideshow tutorial that gives you an overall sense of what tools you might want to look for when posting. It might, however, be the point where simplicity slides into uselessness, the equivalent of someone talking... very... slowly... because they think you don't understand a concept. Reading a single menu takes multiple scrolls down the page, and while the screens let you click on little faux buttons to practice setting a post as private or delete it, it seems like an unnecessary flourish when Facebook could just make the design of its actual site clearer.

Facebook's proposal isn't final, and users have a week to comment on the new policies before they're made final. According to The Wall Street Journal, it will incorporate suggestions into a final document, to be released a month later. In more concrete changes, of course, the company tweaked its News Feed settings earlier this week, so you've already got the option to see less of your quasi-friends — not just make sure they see less of you.

"I looked at Coca-Cola not as Coca-Cola, but as I've never seen it before. And then I saw dirty brown water," artist Helmut Smits tells Wired. "It was logical to filter it to clean drinking water." Since 2006, Smits has nurtured that dream, and the results were on display at this year's Dutch Design Week. The Real Thing takes bottles of Coca-Cola and sends their contents through a filtration process designed in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam's Synthetic Organic Chemistry Group. The technology (boiling the Coke and re-condensing the water) is not precisely groundbreaking, but to Smits, the point is to make people "think about how there are places in the world where people don't have access to drinking water, but they have access to Coca-Cola." Or, alternately, "I just want people to laugh and then hopefully think about the shit that they consume."

The Coca-Cola Company, in fact, has a terrible track record with water, even leaving aside the negative health effects of its sugary signature beverage. But the problem isn't so much that its supply chain is better than local infrastructure. It's been widely mocked for selling filtered tap water under the Dasani brand, and bottled water in general is an environmental nightmare. Critics have charged it with draining India's water supply to produce its beverages, among other parasitic business practices. And then there are the endless, less credible urban legends surrounding Coke, Dasani, and other brands. The company has tried to turn its image around by setting up centers that distribute clean water, food, and Wi-Fi in developing countries, using technology developed by inventor Dean Kamen. Smits, meanwhile, says that now that he's demonstrated the concept, there's no need to take it further.

"I'm not planning on turning all the Coke in the world back into water," he says.

Amazon and Hachette, the fourth largest book publisher in the US, announced Thursday that they had come to a private agreement, ending their months-long dispute over e-book prices.

The terms of the deal are not known, but The New York Times reports that Hachette will be able to set prices on its books, following a similar deal between Amazon and Simon & Schuster. In a news alert that Amazon sent to Ars via e-mail, the company said the agreement "will take effect early in 2015. Hachette will have responsibility for setting consumer prices of its e-books and will also benefit from better terms when it delivers lower prices for readers."

"Amazon and Hachette will immediately resume normal trading, and Hachette books will be prominently featured in promotions," Amazon specified.

Disconnect

Disconnect, the public benefit corporation behind the eponymous online privacy tool and “malvertising” blocking service, released a new version of its virtual private networking and privacy protection service for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OS X this morning. Disconnect has offered versions of its service on these platforms in the past, but the latest edition is the first to bring an enhanced version of what the company first introduced on the privacy-oriented Blackphone to these other operating systems.

The service is available through Apple’s App Store and the company’s website (not the Google Play or Windows stores), and it adds filtering of cell provider “supercookies” and other common tracking data captured by websites and mobile applications. Disconnect has also inked a deal with Deutsche Telekom to offer its software and services as a promotional bundle to DT customers.

The new Disconnect app and service comes in free and premium versions. The free application simply provides the user with a visualized record of tracking performed by websites and mobile applications, showing what tracking cookies are used and whose cookies they are. It also shows any unsecured connections within sites using otherwise secure HTTPS connections.

The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth-oriented entertainments of the not-too-distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half-forgotten toys; YouTube compilations of long-lost TV-show intros; countless blogs playing “Remember when?” with movies and video games whose rose-colored recollections aren’t always properly earned. With Memory Wipe, The A.V. Club takes a look at some of our formative favorites with clearer eyes and asks that all-important question: Were they really that great to begin with? This installment looks at Follow That Bird, a 1985 movie that marked Sesame Street’s first foray into movie theaters.

I’m fairly certain that the first movie I saw in theaters was 1985’s Follow That Bird. If it wasn’t that, it was Santa Claus: The Movie, Dudley Moore’s Christmas disaster that came out a few months later. My grandpa Dean used to take me to whatever movie I wanted ...

Well, at least this was an improvement over whatever the hell last week’s mess was! “EBDBBnB,” besides having the most obnoxious episode title to write out, wasn’t exactly a return to form for the series—not in the least—but it was ... acceptable? I think that’s the most noncommittal and feeble judgment I can hand out. There were some funny lines, there were conversations about the fantasy league, there was a song from Taco (that wasn’t particularly great or funny but wasn’t grating, either!), there is a hilariously poorly acted cameo by a football player (Marshawn Lynch, who actually got me the most points in my matchup last week), there is an appearance by Russell, and there’s even a storyline with potential: Taco’s titular Eskimo Brother Database Bed And Breakfast, the abbreviation of which gets funnier every time someone says it.

Taco’s ...

The problem with most slogan flicks—movies that try to get their audience all heated up about an issue—is that they’re meant to be easily digestible, which politics rarely are. Cut out popular appeal altogether, and you end up with one of those little, airtight dialectical materialist boxes, which are pretty much unimpeachable in terms of political form, but which the average viewer doesn’t want to get into. Overdo it, and you end up with centrist mush—basic, boilerplate human-interest stuff that’s too shapeless to completely work as drama, and too depoliticized to be taken seriously as anything else. In other words, a movie like Rosewater.

The media hook for Rosewater is that it’s directed by likable television person Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, and that it’s based on an incident in which The Daily Show was indirectly involved. (Technically, it’s ...

you’re a white kid with “asian girls” as an interest and <a href="mailto:ur_gey@yahoo.com">ur_gey@yahoo.com</a> as components of your bio.

stay out of grown folks business you soggy rice cake

Movie-wise, Marvel may be beating DC in every way imaginable, but that’s because DC has yet to fully play one of the only cards it has that Marvel can’t really compete with: Wonder Woman. She’s the most famous female superhero ever, and while Marvel may be finally getting its shit together with a Captain Marvel movie, Carol Danvers is no Wonder Woman. DC and Warner Bros. know this, and they’re going to make sure everyone else knows it too by not only having Wonder Woman beat Captain Marvel into theaters, but also by getting a female director for its unfortunately unique female-led superhero movie.

Now, according to Variety, Warner Bros. has officially picked a favorite for who should take on Wonder Woman, and—if it works out—it could be a huge win for DC’s fledgling movie universe. That’s because the wondrous woman in ...