Internets of Interest:29 Dec 09

Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 29 Dec 09:

• Google’s subsidiaries allow company to avoid £450m corporation tax on UK advertising revenue | Technology | The Guardian – That's a lot of tax. To be sure, Google isn't the only company that uses this technique to avoid UK tax but professes to do no evil and the reality is that Google does LESS EVIL than other companies. ??It's worth remembering.
• Un-Facebook Yourself – Wired How-To Wiki – If only more people would do this, my life would be better. ??My Opinion: Facebook is for people who are too lazy to blog or lack enough imagination to write something properly. I don't care about your sports team, or what you just ate. What we need more of is serious, well researched, well presented and well written stories. ??Technical Stories really matter.
• Network Lights – IT Samples – Windows utility that turns the NUM LOCK and SCROLL LOCK lights on your keyboard into Network Activity lights.
• RFC 5741 – RFC Streams, Headers, and Boilerplates -
  

  This memo identifies and describes the common elements of RFC boilerplate structure, and provides a comprehensive approach to updating and using those elements to communicate, with clarity, RFC document and content status. Most of the historical structure information is collected from [RFC2223].

  I read RFC’s all the time. This document looks the conventions and layout and helps you understand all the weirdness in there.

• Body by Victoria’s Secret. – Eye opening analysis on how an image was retouched for a catalogue. They changed her dress, bust, skin colour and eye colour, removed a nipple, and the handbag.My cynicism level for marketing has increased another notch.

  PS. The comments are very interesting where the professional “artists” who retouch the photos complain how unfair this is.

• An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation – I have written before about the DRM on E-Book readers and why I am not buying one until my content is portable. I’m not against DRM, but my content must not be locked to a single device. I’m not going to buy my content twice.