Facebook 'Mirror Boy' Controversy

Last night I posted a photo of myself on Facebook.  The subject of the photo was me when I was approximately 1 year old, standing naked in front of a mirror.  After all, it was Thursday, and given that it is one of my favorite childhood photos, I thought the photo was worthy of a #TBT hashtag.  This morning I received the following email from Facebook:

Upon visiting Facebook via desktop web browser, it forced me to login despite having previously stored my username and password in my browser (the same applied to my Facebook app for iOS).  Following successful login, rather than displaying my typical feed of UFC events, nature videos, and stories illustrating that Donald Trump possesses the emotional intelligence of a chick pea, I was presented with this message:

So take that, Facebook--that's me in my birthday suit for the whole world to see.  There was certainly no pornographic intent, and clearly I had consented to posting the image since I had carefully scanned and edited (rotating, cropping, tone adjustment, and other minor edits only--nothing that would require surgical intervention to correct) the photo before posting it to my own personal Facebook feed which I make visible only to my personal contacts.  If you read the Facebook Community Standards (referenced in the above image) language on nudity, the wording all falls under the section of "Encouraging respectful behavior" where nudity, hate speech, and violence and graphic content policies are described.  The 'Mirror Boy' photo was also not intended to be disrespectful, nor do I think that most people would perceive it to be disrespectful.  I wonder if Blogger (owned by Google) would censor this image too?  I guess I'll find out after I post this blog article.

On a related topic, a controversy recently unfolded about Facebook censoring the 'Napalm Girl' photo, and following much public criticism of Facebook's policy, the photo was reinstated across the site.  You can find articles about it here, here, and here, to highlight a few of the many stories written about it.  Coincidentally, both the 'Napalm Girl' and 'Mirror Boy' photos were taken in 1972.  Should I petition to reinstate the 'Mirror Boy' photo on my Facebook feed?

Google Voice VOIP Weirdness

From time to time, I use Google Voice to make free phone calls anywhere in the United States. Typically I access Google Voice through Gmail via a desktop browser by clicking the "Make a call" link in the far left column in the Gmail interface, pictured here:

From there, I enter the area code and phone number that I need to call. Since some of my calls are web conferences, I often need to enter an access code to join a meeting. While I've never had a problem placing domestic calls, lately I've had some difficulty entering passcodes into Google Voice, and although I do not understand the root cause of the problem, I have been able to reproduce the issue.

Upon invoking Google Voice via Gmail, the calling interface is displayed at the lower right corner of the same browser window where my Gmail contents are displayed:

From here, I am able to successfully enter audio conference passcodes, both by clicking on the numbers in the keypad as well as typing the numbers on my physical keyboard.

However,  when I click the arrow at the upper right to open up the calling interface in a new window (which I often do so that I can have 2 open browser windows to look up my passcodes), the numbers do not consistently register. This happens both when I attempt to click the numbers on the keypad and when I attempt to type the numbers on a physical keyboard. The numbers that do register are delayed by about a few seconds which usually results in a failed entry when I have several digits to enter.

At least I know how to work around the issue by not opening Google Voice in a new window until AFTER I successfully enter my passcode. I think Google Voice is a great service, and if you've been plagued by the same issue, I hope this helps you too.

Living Life on the Edge with macOS Sierra

With the introduction of macOS Sierra, I wondered if my wife's 24-inch Mid-2007 iMac with 4 GB RAM would have enough horsepower to support all the new features. She is currently using Mac OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6, and while the machine runs a little bit slowly, it supports all the basic functions that my wife demands of the machine: web browsing, photo management, and synchronizing with our iPhone and iPad mobile devices.

I found the macOS Sierra hardware requirements on this page. In summary, the following Mac models are supported:

• MacBook (Late 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2010 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)
• Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer)
• iMac (Late 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Mid 2010 or newer)

Therefore, the 2007 iMac should not qualify for the upgrade. However, upon visiting the App Store, I was presented with the option to upgrade to macOS Sierra:

I am thinking of living life on the edge and see what will happen if I attempt to install the upgrade. What do you think--should I do it?

UPDATE: Since my original post on 9/24/2016, I had installed macOS 10.12 Sierra on a couple of other machines, and I found it to be similar in "bulkiness" and performance as compared with 10.11 El Capitan. Therefore, I decided to try upgrading to 10.12 Sierra on my old 24-inch Mid-2007 iMac. However, upon clicking "Download" from the App Store, I received the following message:

So I guess the system requirements are checked after being given the option to download. I am a proponent of not giving users the opportunity to make mistakes, but at least there was a safety net downstream of me deciding to install an operating system that was supposedly incompatible with my machine.

Not Just a Partial Idiot

I drove my daughter to her gymnastics class over the weekend, and since we had to make a couple of pit stops along the way, I decided to use Waze (which I've written about before) to find the fastest route to my destination. Upon arrival, I was surprised to see this message on my screen:

My first reaction was: no duh, does Waze think I am a complete idiot? Would any decent human being leave their child alone in their car? It seems incomprehensible for something like that to happen. But then again, I recall seeing videos of parents leaving babies in their cars "just to run a quick errand" so I guess these kinds of reminders may offer value to a subset of the population. But even if the problem exists, will a reminder from Waze actually mitigate the problem? I guess we'll find out. Meanwhile... SMH 1, faith in humanity 0.

More interesting, however, was my second reaction: does Waze actually know for sure that I have a child? I have never explicitly told Waze that I have a child. Could it have inferred from my destination that I was likely to be taking a child to a gymnastics class? What if I was driving my niece or a friend to gymnastics? What if instead of a child I had a dog, would it have reminded me not to leave my dog in the car on a hot day? Is Waze breaching my confidentiality or was this just a lucky guess or coincidence?

Needless to say, I tapped "No thanks" and promptly took my daughter to her gymnastics class. What do you think about reminders from Waze?

I Want the Truth!

In the past few months I've been receiving a lot of unsolicited calls on my iPhone, so based on some online reviews I decided to see if Truecaller (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/truecaller-number-search-spam/id448142450?mt=8) would help me identify "spam" phone calls ahead of time. Truecaller leverages feedback from its user base to determine if calls are "spam" and populates its database from this feedback.  If a call originates from a phone number in the Truecaller spam database, I see this warning on my phone:

Based on a limited number of calls over the past 2 weeks, I estimate that roughly half of my spam calls had been correctly identified as such (true positives). For the most part, the other half of my spam calls slipped through Truecaller (false negatives), after which I dutifully reported those numbers to Truecaller.

Today I received a call which Truecaller identified as spam, only to find out later when listening to the voice message that it was an automated call from Kaiser Permanente reminding me to get a flu shot. To me, it felt like an error (false positive) for the call from Kaiser to be identified as spam. While I can understand that some folks would prefer not to receive flu shot reminders, appointment reminders, or other automated communication from Kaiser and would report it as spam, it felt to me like a legitimate call. This initially made me wonder if people simply do not value calls from their healthcare providers. I then hypothesized that it would be more appropriate for people to opt out of phone messages from Kaiser, but when I went to the Kaiser patient portal, I could find any settings to opt out of phone calls (there were settings to opt out of automated email messages). So from that perspective, maybe it was fair to label it as spam after all.

Overall, despite intercepting only about 50% of my spam calls, that's a lot better than 0%, so Truecaller is an app that will stay on my phone for the foreseeable future.

Annual Photo and Video Storage

Out of curiosity, I charted my year-over-year hard drive storage of photos and videos. This was a relatively simple exercise since I store all of my photos and videos in parent folders named by year, so all I had to do was have the operating system calculate each folder's size. I did make some minor adjustments--for example, in 2013 I made a video of a vacation that I took back in 2002, and I stored the video in the 2002 folder, but since I created the content in 2013, I re-allocated that storage space from 2002 to 2013. So essentially the following graphic depicts storage space based on year of content creation:

As you can see, there is an upward trend of storage space consumption. This is not surprising because with each new camera purchased, along came more megapixels. Additionally, in late 2009 when my daughter was born, I began shooting in RAW (actually RAW + JPG). I believe that the combination of baby photos and the addition of RAW files sufficiently explains the jump in storage space between 2009 and 2010.

Not depicted in the figure are some milestones related to video capture. In 10/2009, I purchased a Polaroid DVG-1080P camcorder to capture videos of my then soon-to-be-born daughter. In 5/2011, I upgraded my camcorder to a Canon VIXIA HF M301 which performed much better in low light and had a far superior image stabilization feature.

There appears to be slightly higher storage space consumed in 2005 as compared with the next few years, and I attribute that to our wedding and honeymoon in April and May of 2005 where we not surprisingly generated lots of photo and video content.

Prior to 2005, I shot digital photos with a Canon PowerShot A70 (7/2003 to 6/2005), my first digital camera. However, the storage space was negligible on the above scale. I also used a Canon EOS Rebel S to shoot 35 mm film from approximately mid-1992 to mid-2003, and while I did scan all my negatives and save them as JPG files, that storage space was also negligible.

For the first half of 2016, I am at around 250 GB of storage, so extrapolation to a full year would land me at around 500 GB.  Therefore, it looks like I am leveling off at approximately half a terabyte annually. I suppose this is useful for me to know so I can estimate when I will need to buy additional external hard drives to back up my photo and video content.

Google AdSense Account Canceled

I received the following email message from Google today:

Google AdSense is a free service that allows you to earn money by placing ads on your website. I must have signed up for AdSense a long time ago just to play with it. I do not clearly recall registering, nor have I ever earned any money through AdSense. In any case, I was intrigued when apparently Google cancelled my AdSense account without any warning.

Since I do not have my own web site, I believe that I must have linked my AdSense account to either Blogger or YouTube. In reviewing the AdSense program policies, I appear to be in compliance with all requirements. I suspect that my AdSense cancellation could have something to do with my recent installation of Adguard which presumably would interfere with Google's ability to serve up ads on my browsers. Anyone else have a similar experience?

Original publication on 7/4/2016, update on 7/5/2016: Today I received the following email from Google about my AdSense account cancellation:

So mystery solved, and the Adguard theory has been officially thrown out the window. It would have been nice if Google provided an explanation upon cancellation yesterday rather than keeping me guessing as to why they cancelled the account, but better late than never I suppose.