I have some kind of a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I like being up to speed on what people I know or once knew are up to and the network site allows to me to conveniently stay in contact with people without any effort on my part. That said, Facebook has a questionable reputation where it comes to privacy and for Facebook to be useful to you, you have to post private stuff, like your birthday, relationship status, holiday pictures, who your friends are or what’s on your mind. Some people go even further, by posting more explicit pictures or revealing their moment-to-moment location, but I don’t do that. Sure, you can lock your account to people not in your network, but Facebook has an interest in me sharing as much as I can, so how can I trust them?

Enter Diaspora. From Wikipedia:

Diaspora (also Diaspora*) is an open-source personal web server software intended to provide a distributed social networking service, a decentralized alternative to Facebook. The initial developer release was on the 15th September 2010 and a consumer alpha is planned for October 2010.

The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers (called “seeds”) so that users can “fully control the information they share.”

September 15th was yesterday, so I decided to try it out. The website tells you how to build it on Ubuntu, Fedora or MacOS, so I adapted the instructions for my favorite OS, Arch:

These steps expect two things:

• AUR to be setup. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository on how to do that.
• You don’t have ruby 1.9 installed. Diaspora has ruby gems working only in ruby 1.8

Install dependencies using pacman:

# sudo pacman -S openssl imagemagick git libffi libxslt

There could be dependencies that I didn’t notice because I had them already installed, but these are noted on the website. Then, install ruby 1.8, ruby-gems and bundler:

# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby1.8/ruby1.8.tar.gz
# tar xzvf ruby1.8.tar.gz
# cd ruby1.8
# makepkg -s (installed tk, tcl)
# sudo pacman -U ruby1.8-1.8.7_p302-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz



# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rubygems1.8/rubygems1.8.tar.gz
# tar xzvf rubygems1.8.tar.gz
# cd rubygems1.8
# makepkg -s
# sudo pacman -U rubygems1.8-1.3.7-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz



# sudo gem-1.8 install bundler
# PATH=$PATH:/opt/ruby1.8/bin/


Install mongodb:

# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mongodb/mongodb.tar.gz
# tar xzvf mongodb.tar.gz
# cd mongodb
# makepkg -s (also installed spidermonkey, scons, boost, sconsboost-lib, nspr; took a long time).
# sudo pacman -U mongodb-1.6.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz


Clone and build Diaspora:

# git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
# cd diaspora
# bundle install (will fetch source index and ask for your password)


And finally, run Diaspora:

# sudo /etc/rc.d/mongodb start
# rake db:seed:tom
# bundle exec thin start


Now direct your browser to http://localhost:3000/, then login with user tom and password evankorth. More information can be found here.

On Christmas Day, a young misguided Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to cause an explosion on flight NW253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. He brought with him 80 grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a useful amount for his purposes, but insufficient knowledge on how to use it. There was only one way he could have caused serious damage to the plane, which involved putting it in a box and banging it against the wall. The way he did it, there was never any danger (Google translation from Dutch to English).

Since the incident, travellers on flights to the U.S. and on U.S. internal flights have had to endure heightened security measures and the minister of justice in the Netherlands is using this incident as a means to force the E.U.’s plans of using  full body scanners at air ports. Body scanners are devices that pierce through one’s clothing to see what he or she is carrying, greatly compromising the privacy of countless people, who are, let’s not forget still innocent. With these devices, the pentaerythritol tetranitrate on Abdulmutallab would have been found.

Abdulmutallab’s father had been warning U.S. authorities that his son was growing more radical for some time, but the man was ignored. Not because of policy, but because someone didn’t pay attention. Had these warnings been taken seriously, Abdulmutallab’s name would have been placed on a no-fly list, and he would never have gotten on board flight NW253, or any other flight toward the U.S. No body scan needed.

We give up irresponsible amounts or our civil rights into the hands of those we put in charge of our safety, because they deem it necessary, and when they screw up, the solution is to give up more privacy? Why not just fire the ones who were sleeping and tell the rest to actually use the power we gave them?