It's about the now-totally-obvious fact that our governments and
their influencers have gone publicly batshit crazy at having even a
few of their secrets exposed to public scrutiny and criticism.

The logical conclusion is that there is not one person in one
government in the world who is fit to control a model train set.

Naturally, we have all suspected that for some time, but now we have
evidence of their behavior that is hard to ignore. Personally, I
find that an uncomfortable truth to have to live with.

The next day you go back. And it's now that you notice the site is really only set up for people who want to register. If you're already registered, you have to click through to a login page. Even though you will visit the site to register ONCE, and to login MANY times. Does this scenario sound all too familiar?

I find this scenario, played out all over the Internet at sites near you, to be puzzling. Very puzzling. The subliminal message is that once you've registered, the site has lost interest in you, and you're now second class - at least, compared to people who haven't registered yet.

Size and scale are no indicator of whether sites get this one right, although the best behavior is found at http://facebook.com where the login windows are on the main page. But other major net sites have it badly wrong (and they are in the majority as far as I can tell). Some of the offenders are sites that are valuable and important to many: http://LinkedIn.com, http://foursquare.com, http://blip.fm, to name a few. http://Twitter.com has a handy drop-down, which makes the click seem less of a big deal - but why can't I enter my password when I'm on my own page on Twitter? I mean, my username is there in the URL already. LinkedIn deserves a special mention for changing things in the wrong direction - until a year or so ago, the sign in fields were right there on the front page.

Before you all rush to tell me: I know this is a small thing in the scheme of things. But as with all small things, the interesting part is when we analyze why these small things are wrong. Is it really the case that these sites care more about getting new users than accommodating their existing ones? Why do some sites get it right with no apparent effort or fuss, and others don't seem to recognize the issue? And if they are getting small details wrong, what kind of major things are they getting wrong?

Ask those questions, and you can start looking around the net, and the world, and asking yourself how things could be better. And we need more of that, we clearly do.

Sigh. Another reason to leave Facebook. The only reason I hang around Facebook is to keep up with all the good people that I've connected with on the site: family, friends, colleagues, associates, and wonderfully interesting electronic acquaintances. Once there's somewhere else that's comparable in function and reasonably secure, I'm going to vote that we all leave here and go there instead.

So we've had all the debate about privacy on Facebook for the last few
weeks, and today I got curious enough to look at Mark Zuckerberg's own
profile. The screenshot is ... interesting.

Of course, once we start thinking about this, we see very quickly that our perception of having stuff that is all new and up to date peels rapidly away. I was discussing the talk with another participant afterwards, and they were genuinely shocked when I told them that most of the web code that runs the browsers and servers was laid down in the early 1990s and probably hasn't been modified since then.

I experienced the same feeling again this morning. I opened a document to edit and create a new - up to date! - version of it and stopped when I saw that it used a custom paragraph style. I thought about it for a few minutes and worked right back through my own digital history.

I eventually realized (after I had done some memory dredging) that I had created that custom paragraph style myself.

In Microsoft Word.

On a Mac SE.

In 1990.

Now I'm editing a derivative of that same document in OpenOffice running on an AMD dualcore box running Ubuntu Linux, and I'm still using that same custom paragraph style.

And it still looks pretty good.