Movie Review: The Social Network

Yesterday night I watched the movie The Social Network with my family. It's basically a dramatized documentary about the history of the founding of Facebook. Although the main people in real life were OK with this movie, as far as I know, this was not an officially-endorsed documentary, so there was a lot of dramatization especially where details were few and fuzzy. (On the other hand, things like the instant messages and emails, which have been published by Facebook, are real.) Plus, I think it's fairly well-established that Mark Zuckerberg in real life, while certainly blunt and introverted, is much more approachable and definitely not as much of an [expletive] as he was portrayed in the movie; similar things can be said about the other characters. Finally, based on Wikipedia's article about Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, the movie's snippet of text at the end about him retaining 7% of the company seems wrong; at least according to the Wikipedia article, Sean Parker was kicked out of the company immediately following his arrest for possession of cocaine and he lost all his shares.
Other than that, it's a fairly good movie. The plot never gets boring and it always stays engaging. I would recommend it to anyone who's looking for a good docudrama, although I will ask those who watch it to not rely on it for actual historical information.
On another note, I was pleased to see the presence of KDE 3 on Mark Zuckerberg's computer; the window decorations and the bottom panel with a virtual desktop switcher all scream "KDE 3". Yay! This was shown in the trailer, but many writers online suspected this computer would be replaced with an Apple Mac computer. Thankfully, that didn't happen (although there were a plethora of Macs used by other people throughout the film).

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Facebook's Worrying Privacy Changes

Over the last few months, there have been myriad changes to Facebook's privacy policy, many of them for the worse (in terms of being able to maintain privacy). This one (Robert McMillan, PCWorld via Yahoo! News), however, seems really bad, not least because Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was himself a victim of this change in the privacy policy. Basically, this new "feature" allows people to unilaterally make their friends members of groups. However, if the friend leaves that group, the original person can no longer make the friend part of any more groups. The problem with this, of course, is that unless there's some sort of notification about being made a member of a group, people won't know in what groups they are members; even if there are notifications, they will likely be ignored anyway (as they already often are). Groups and pages can often extract information from people's profiles even if those people have chosen to make certain information private, which is why this is so problematic. Considering Mark Zuckerberg was made to be a member of the NAMBLA Facebook group, I'm a little scared, honestly. People who know me on Facebook, can you please do me a favor and not be a jerk (by unilaterally making me a member of a group or a fan of a page)? I'm trying to stay away from all groups and pages that don't have to do with my high school and/or college, because I don't want other random groups and/or pages to have access to my personal information.

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