I keep hear­ing the Austin is located in the “Texas Hill Coun­try.” It is slightly hilly, but less so than the “Los Ange­les Basin.” I sup­pose it’s a dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion between a state that’s mostly flat and a state that’s full of moun­tains that reach more than two miles above sea level.

New Insta­gram Terms of Ser­vice.

The Facebook-ification is starting:

Some or all of the Ser­vice may be sup­ported by adver­tis­ing
rev­enue. To help us deliver inter­est­ing paid or spon­sored
con­tent or pro­mo­tions, you agree that a busi­ness or other entity
may pay us to dis­play your user­name, like­ness, pho­tos (along
with any asso­ci­ated meta­data), and/or actions you take, in
con­nec­tion with paid or spon­sored con­tent or pro­mo­tions, with­out
any com­pen­sa­tion to you.

Where by “meta­data”, they’re not talk­ing about expo­sure and shut­ter speed. They’re talk­ing about loca­tion. Just awful.

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

It’s actu­ally much worse than that. Accord­ing to the terms of ser­vice, not only Insta­gram may do basi­cally any­thing they want with your pho­tos, includ­ing license them out to oth­ers, they also say:

You rep­re­sent and war­rant that: (i) you own the Con­tent posted by you on or through the Ser­vice or oth­er­wise have the right to grant the rights and licenses set forth in these Terms of Use; (ii) the post­ing and use of your Con­tent on or through the Ser­vice does not vio­late, mis­ap­pro­pri­ate or infringe on the rights of any third party, includ­ing, with­out lim­i­ta­tion, pri­vacy rights, pub­lic­ity rights, copy­rights, trade­mark and/or other intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights; (iii) you agree to pay for all roy­al­ties, fees, and any other monies owed by rea­son of Con­tent you post on or through the Ser­vice; and (iv) you have the legal right and capac­ity to enter into these Terms of Use in your jurisdiction.

What that means you as the pho­tog­ra­pher could eas­ily wind up in very deep, very expen­sive legal trou­ble just because you used Insta­gram. Con­sider how this could play out: you take a photo of a ran­dom com­plete stranger on the street and dis­play it freely as an exam­ple of street pho­tog­ra­phy. So far, so good. How­ever, some­one in the PR depart­ment at a generic huge cor­po­ra­tion sees the photo and pays Insta­gram $100,000 to sub­li­cense your photo for a major adver­tis­ing cam­paign. You don’t get any say, or any of the money. Now it’s not look­ing so good. Now we’re get­ting into dan­ger­ous ter­ri­tory, because use of a person’s image for com­mer­cial pur­poses requires a signed model release–which doesn’t exist.

But it gets worse! The ran­dom per­son on the street sees the adver­tise­ments promi­nently fea­tur­ing their face and decides to sue. Because of the Insta­gram terms of ser­vice, you get hung out to dry by Insta­gram and the huge cor­po­ra­tion. Con­grat­u­la­tions, your lit­tle art photo taken with Insta­gram has cost you tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. Too bad your life is ruined because you didn’t read the terms of service.

This really is just like Face­book.

I’ve noticed a few cul­tural dif­fer­ence between LA and Austin that weren’t really appar­ent before I moved. Some of the inter­est­ing ones:

1. Dogs in Austin are mostly dog-size. The lit­tle hybrid rat/dog things that are ubiq­ui­tous in LA exist here, but are a small minority.
2. White peo­ple work min­i­mum wage jobs in Austin. I don’t recall ever see­ing that in LA.
3. In Austin a total stranger say­ing “hello” on the street is just being polite. In LA, he’s about to beg for change.
4. Anorexia is rare in Austin, and com­mon in LA.

God Damn You, Amer­ica, and Your White, Priv­i­leged Grief [Once Upon a Time…]

An excel­lent (if typ­i­cally long-winded) arti­cle on the rather dis­gust­ing dis­plays of hypocrisy and nar­cis­sism in response to the recent mur­ders in Con­necti­cut. Let’s not for­get that the very same peo­ple who today are claim­ing to be oh-so-upset about a cou­ple dozen mur­ders were, just over a month ago, actively and enthu­si­as­ti­cally endors­ing the mass slaugh­ter of many hun­dreds of times as many peo­ple by the vile, mon­strous tyrant who rules in Mor­dor on the Potomac (and this includes the peo­ple who voted for his phony “oppo­nent,” who made it clear that he would do the same things).

I’ve gone back to the pre­vi­ous Word­Press theme, which is called Ahimsa.

Recently I’ve been see­ing a lot of talk about a new game Google is devel­op­ing for Android, called Ingress. I’ve noticed that so far nobody seems to have noticed an unin­tended (pre­sum­ably) con­se­quence of the game: peo­ple play­ing it will be trav­el­ing around to libraries, post offices, cour­t­houses, fire sta­tions, mon­u­ments, and the like, stand­ing around for sev­eral min­utes, and then mov­ing on to another loca­tion in a seem­ingly ran­dom pattern.

What the peo­ple writ­ing about Ingress as a game seem to have missed is that it’s fairly well known by peo­ple who pay atten­tion that the gov­ern­ment tracks everyone’s move­ments using the loca­tion data from their cell phone ser­vices. The strange and erratic move­ments of Ingress play­ers are bound to drive the secret police­men respon­si­ble for such spy­ing berserk, which I con­sider to be a huge ben­e­fit. I’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting a Nexus 7 just so I can help con­fuse Big Brother.

I’m try­ing out the Twenty Twelve theme that came with the Word­Press 3.5 update.

Staffer axed by Repub­li­can group over retracted copyright-reform memo. The Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee, a cau­cus of Repub­li­cans in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Con­gress re-convenes in Jan­u­ary. The incom­ing chair­man of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by sev­eral Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advo­cat­ing reform of copy­right law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request. [Ars Tech­nica]

Appar­ently the Repub­li­can fac­tion of the Boot On Your Neck Party wants to be sure every­one under­stands that they’re just as much in the MAFIAA’s pocket as the Demo­c­ra­tic fac­tion, and that vot­ing Repub­li­can will cer­tainly not change anything.

A huge flock of these small black birds like to gather on the power lines at Bar­ton Springs and First Street around sun­set. It’s a bit creepy.

Side note: “If you don’t, I’ll poi­son your din­ner” is a com­pelling argu­ment for a fea­ture request, but can typ­i­cally only be used once.

BBE­dit 10.5 Release Notes