David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

This was the last straw: New Facebook Social Features Secretly Add Apps to Your Profile.

Now, it’s true that the abiity for other websites to add apps to your Facebook profile without asking was a bug, and was corrected as soon as this story was published. The fact remains that Facebook’s new APIs, which allow any website to add a Facebook “I like this” button and link back to your Facebook account, made this behavior possible. Facebook users are now relying on Facebook and its partners to design well, program well, follow their own Terms of Service, and respect users’ privacy. But Facebook and its partners have a terrible record on this. For example, the Facebook APIs make it easy for the “Like” button on a website to actually “Like” a completely different site. And the CEO of Zynga, maker of some of Facebook’s most popular games, admits to using scams and spyware to build revenue.

I’ve known from the beginning that “on Facebook, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” Facebook provides you fun content for free, which gets your attention (“eyeballs”), which it then sells to advertisers. That’s the same deal that broadcast TV offers and I’ve been accepting that for my whole life. But changes within the last year in Facebook’s policies about users’ private information, culminating in these new APIs, change the rules of that game. Facebook is no longer selling your attention — it’s selling your private information. Basically, anything you’ve put on Facebook is visible to Facebook’s customers — advertisers, app developers, and anyone else who gives Facebook money for it — no matter what privacy level you’ve specified for it. Yeah. Read that again.

In response to these changes, yesterday I stopped leaving Facebook open all the time, instead logging out unless I was actively using it. I posted a status update to this effect, to which a couple of my more tech-savvy friends replied that they’re already using a separate browser just for Facebook, just to keep it from interacting with the other websites they visit. Furthermore, one of them said:

At first I thought that simply logging out of FB would be sufficient. Then I started looking at all the .facebook.com tracking cookies that are generated when visiting totally unrelated sites. So now I block facebook.com cookies by default and manually enable them only in a private browsing session when I want to check FB (much less often than before).

That’s when I realized that Facebook has become a malware platform.

I used to work for McAfee. I take computer security pretty seriously. One of the main reasons I switched from using a PC to using a Mac at home is that the time, effort, and aggravation involved in keeping the computer safe from malware is much less. And what I’m seeing in Facebook now is what I saw in Windows fifteen years ago: a platform that doesn’t do enough to prevent malicious software from negatively impacting users.

On Windows, security holes are patched by third-party anti-malware tools, like McAfee and Norton. On Facebook, the users must perform their own anti-malware scanning (watching out for scams and viruses in messages, blocking undesired applications, being alert for inappropriate requests for personal information, etc.) manually. I don’t think there’s any technical way for a third party to automate these scans on the Facebook platform. It’s going to have to be Facebook that does it, and given Facebook’s recent behavior that seems extremely unlikely! It’s the scammers and malware makers, not the users, who pay Facebook’s bills, so this problem is just going to get worse.

I already seem to spend just as much time on Facebook blocking unwanted applications and invitations as I do interacting with my friends. When I think about the additional work that will be required to keep my private information private, I just want to run screaming.

This is only the last straw. I’ve been annoyed for years by Facebook’s user interface (which changes frequently but never gets better), by its ads, by its psychological manipulation of its users, by the way it lets random strangers associate my name with any photo they like.

This isn’t about the time spent on Facebook, it’s about the Facebook corporation’s business practices. I have over 1000 Facebook friends; many of them are my actual friends and I enjoy reading their updates and sharing conversations with them in comments. The rest of them are, at least, potential readers of my fiction and Facebook is an excellent way to keep my name in front of them. But I’ve come to realize that, by providing interesting content for Facebook to use to attract and keep users, I’m part of the problem. I’m a professional writer who’s been giving content away to a company that I’ve come to despise.

That stops today.

My story “Citizen-Astronaut” just won second prize in the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest. This is a contest for positive stories showing the near future of manned space exploration; the stories are judged anonymously. I won a year’s membership in the National Space Society and a prize package containing various Baen Books, Jim Baen’s Universe and National Space Society merchandise. Second prize does not include publication, but I now have a very nice recommendation to include in the cover letter when I submit this story elsewhere.

I have to admit that I feel a little bit strange about this win, as I finished the story barely in time and submitted what I considered an extremely rough draft. Basically, I used the contest deadline as a goad to get me to finish the story. I always used to use the quarterly Writers of the Future Contest deadlines for this purpose and I’ve kind of been missing that lately. At the same time I submitted the story to the contest, figuring it would not win, I also sent it to my critique group, and they agreed with me that it can be improved (in particular, it’s a bit exposition-heavy and the main character’s primary problem in the the front half of the story is not as well connected to the climax as it could be).

Part of me says I should take this prize win as validation and just submit the story as-is. However, I think I will go ahead and revise it, though perhaps not as heavily as I might otherwise have done.

The next question is where to send this story (an optimistic space-based hard-SF adventure) first. It’s an excellent fit for Analog, of course, but Clarkesworld pays better, replies faster, and seems to be catching a lot of positive critical attention. Your thoughts?

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. I have a bunch of stuff to blog about, too, and I’m going to try to clear out that backlog starting now.

One of the things I’ve been doing and not blogging about is that I went to the coast last week for six days of hanging out, walking on the beach, cooking and eating, knitting, and writing writing writing with the cool folks pictured above: Jerry Oltion, Spencer Ellsworth, Janna Silverstein, Amanda Clark, Tina Connolly, Camille Alexa, Kathy Oltion, David D. Levine, Kate Yule. Not shown: Carrie Vaughn. Photo by Jerry Oltion.

I wrote over 7500 words of draft on a new project, plus 2500 words of notes and outline, and had a great time.

We also shared bits of our most embarrassing juvenilia. For myself, it wasn’t the clunky prose in my early work that really made me hang my head in shame (13-year-old me suffered from Exposition Syndrome rather than the more typical addiction to Purple Prose — obviously, the tree grows as the twig is bent) but the sexism. I cannot help but recall that when I was a young sprout my favorite TV show had only two female characters, one of whom was mute.

What can I say? I got better…

I just learned that Alembical 2 from Paper Golem Press, which includes my novella “Second Chance,” will be launching at Balticon at the end of May. That’s also Wiscon weekend, and I hope to have some copies there. Here’s the cover:

I’ve also recently learned that May should see the publication of Interzone 228, including my story “A Passion for Art;” the anthology Légendes, including the French translation of “Tale of the Golden Eagle;” and the May issue of Laptop, including a “Burning Question” section with a short essay by me about futuristic technology.

In May I will also be presenting the keynote address at the Nebulas in Florida, and if all goes well we’ll get to see a Shuttle launch while we’re there. ::squee::

And the May issue of Analog (which was of course released at the beginning of March and is off the stands by now) was reviewed in the April Locus, where Rich Horton gave my story “Teaching the Pig to Sing” a Recommended review.

Probably the single best thing about my high school years was my membership in the Shorewood High School Drama Club. SHS has a fabulous and wildly ambitious theatre program and has taken shows to the International Thespian Convention and the Edinburgh Fringe. Drama Club taught me to sing, dance, paint, do carpentry and electrical work, and sew. I even used my scene shop skills on “Mars.”

Unfortunately, budget cuts now threaten one of SHS Drama’s two remaining part-time staff members. Barbara Gensler, the dynamo who has been the heart and soul of SHS Drama for the last 40 years, is mounting a personal campaign to fund this position through donations. If you care about high school drama I hope that you will be able to contribute something.

See here for more information and to donate: Open Letter to Alumni and Friends from Barbara Gensler

I know that there are other schools that are in even more serious trouble, but the SHS Drama Club was a lifesaver to me personally and I believe that the arts are a vital part of any young person’s life. Drama Club is not a “frill,” it’s part of a well-rounded education.

There’s room for just two more writers at A Writer’s Weekend, July 22-25. “A Writer’s Weekend offers writers an excellent opportunity to make connections with people in the industry, get published, develop their craft and move their work to the next level. This year’s Writer Gurus are Jay Lake and Hugo award winner David Levine. Held at the Ocean Crest Resort on the Washington coast, this Thursday through Sunday workshop allows writers to have their work critiqued by published professionals in addition to plenty of free time for writing or revising. Other craft classes will also be provided.”

The deadline to sign up is May 15. The website is at www.WritersWeekend.com; you can email the organizers at writersweekend@hotmail.com or call 425-827-1806.

We’re at the San Jose airport on the way home. The visit started with a square dance fly-in, which featured good friends, excellent callers, and mostly good dancing. As a bonus, I won the centerpiece (a cute stuffed bunny) at the banquet and we got to visit Allan Hurst’s home and his California Desert Tortoise named Beta.

We then shifted to the lovely home of Karen Schaffer and Mike Ward, who provided an excellent home base for three days of fairly low-impact visiting with our Bay Area fan friends. On Monday we had lunch at Google and dinner with a friend who works for Intel and used to work for Apple (Allen Baum, and his wife Donya White). On Tuesday we had lunch at Apple and dinner with a friend who works for Google (Matt Austern, and his wife Janet Lafler and daughter Alice). The Google campus is amazing, with a life-sized replica of SpaceShipOne and many other cool gadgets on display, not to mention the free food. Apple seemed much more corporate by comparison. At Google I also presented my Mars talk, to about thirty people who paid close attention and asked some great questions. The talk was recorded and I believe it will be posted on YouTube at some point in the future.

We also visited the Intel Museum, toured the demonstration garden of Sunset Magazine and other gardens with Master Gardener Karen, and had an excellent lunch and ice cream with Spike Parsons.

This morning we took a ride on a Zeppelin. It was rather spur-of-the-moment and we snagged the last two tickets on the thirty-minute “taste of Zeppelin” trip from Moffat Field to Stanford and back. It was similar to the small plane trip we took from Seattle to Victoria BC a couple of years ago, only even cooler because the vehicle moved slower (only about 35 MPH), the windows were bigger, and you could move around the cabin. Got lots of great photos of which just one is shown at http://twitpic.com/1dvdes. Very, very cool and we hope we will be able to take a longer trip soon, maybe next year between Potlatch and FOGcon.

So all in all we hit just about all the Bay Area highlights, but it’s time to go home now. I’m giving my Mars talk at Powell’s Technical Books tomorrow night.

I just completed and submitted my first short story this year. After doing no writing at all in January and February due to the Mars thing, I began work on this story in March, but worked only sporadically on it during that month. I finally buckled down this week, as I had a market in mind with an April 1 deadline. I wrote 1530 words on March 31 and 2265 words on April 1, getting the completed story in at 7800 words just before deadline. It’s an un-critiqued second draft, but I feel pretty good about it.

At the moment I’m at the airport, heading for San Jose for the El Camino Reelers’ 25th-anniversary square dance fly-in. After that we’ll be hanging out in the Bay Area for a few days. This begins a summer with insane amounts of travel:

We’re not yet certain about the 4th Street Fantasy convention in June but everything else on there is committed. As I should probably be, for planning this much travel… but we want to do all these things! And as we don’t have day jobs, and we have the money for it, and we’re healthy enough to do it, we’re doing it.

The stars represent days I’ll be presenting my Mars talk. These are:

• April 5: Google, Mountain View CA
• April 8: Powell’s Technical Books, Portland OR (open to the public)
• May 15: Nebula Awards Weekend, Cocoa Beach FL
• May 29: WisCon, Madison WI
• June 20 and July 11: Washington Aerospace Scholars, Seattle WA

I’ll probably also be giving the talk at the Worldcon and Potlatch, but those are too far in the future for me to contemplate.

Why am I doing this? I’m not being paid for any of these speaking engagements and they probaby aren’t going to sell many books (I will be signing copies of Space Magic at some of these but it’s not directly connected). But it’s great exposure, and I consider it part of my job as MDRS Crew 88 Journalist to do public outreach in support of the Mars Society and humanity’s future on Mars. And I’m a huge ham.

So what the heck. Allons-y!