Live from Austin!

Facebook has recently changed its sharing permissions. A lot of people have discovered that they’ve been sharing rather more information than they intended.

Some of the permissions screens for information sharing are quite well hidden in Facebook’s array of prefence pages and tabs. There doesn’t seem to be a single place listing all the privacy-related settings pages.

I’ve attempted to assemble a list, so you can work through them one by one and make sure your Facebook sharing is set up the way you want.

• Notifications: Choose when you get e-mail or SMS from Facebook.
• Facebook Ads: Select whether ads can show your information to other people.
• Contact information: Decide who can see your various addresses and phone numbers.
• Profile information: Set who can see the miscellaneous information you put in your profile (birthday, workplaces, photos, etc.) Don’t forget to check that your religious and political views are being shared appropriately. In addition, the “Posts by me” button is important, as it determines who (by default) can see whatever you post to Facebook. This can (following a recent change) be altered per post, using the padlock icon underneath the posting box.
• Applications – friends: Facebook allows your friends to share information about you via applications. This page lets you turn that off.
• Ignored invites: Got a friend who keeps inviting you to join Scam Wars or Spamville? Add them to this list to pre-ignore their invites.
• Search: Choose whether you can be found via public search on Facebook, and/or public search engines such as Google.
• Block list: The place to name your ex-boyfriends, stalkers, and other enemies.
• Application settings: Specific settings for all applications you’ve authorized to access your Facebook account. Use the X boxes to delete ones you’re no longer using.
• Application settings – Groups: A specific application you will want to visit is Groups; I can’t link directly to the edit page, but you should find it on the application settings list. The settings for Groups determine who can see which groups you’re a member of.
• Application settings – Photos: Another one to visit, allows you to hide the photos tab from non-friends so people can’t easily find all the photos people post of you. The “publish to streams” option adjusts whether people posting photos of you results in story entries on your profile page, whether or not there’s a photos tab.

There’s one other setting that isn’t on a settings page. On your profile page, the box showing your friends has an icon of a pencil top right. Click that, and a menu pops up. Hidden in that menu is the checkbox that controls whether your friends list is public to the world.

So, 5 undersea cables have now mysteriously been severed. Iran’s telecommunications connectivity is almost destroyed. Why on earth is this happening?

Meanwhile, Iran was due to start an international oil trading organization by February 11th, which would allow oil to be traded in currencies other than US dollars.

You know who else started selling oil in currencies other than the US dollar? Iraq, in 2000.

Hmm, what a coincidence.

In case anyone’s missing the significance: the only thing propping up the value of the dollar is that everyone needs oil, and you need dollars to buy oil. If countries could buy all their oil in (say) Euros, they’d stop dealing in dollars, stop lending the US money to run the deficit, and make it impossible to run the US economy as it’s currently being run. Or as the Economist puts it:

A shift towards a looser peg in the GCC would undoubtedly hurt the greenback. At the very least, dollars would be purchased at a slower rate—leading to what Mr Lyons calls “passive diversification”. At worst, the policy might encourage others to follow, sparking panic sales of American assets.

i.e. a very real chance of the US economy entering another Great Depression.