Because I’m a writer, an agent suggested that I open a Facebook account to keep in touch with my readers. It is at https://www.facebook.com/vcaauthor As of this morning, it has 4953 “friends.” I was told I should accept every friend’s request. Facebook has a limit of 5000 friends so at any one time my author’s account as something close to that limit. I try to answer every message I get in a timely fashion. Some of the messages are solicitations by women inviting me to visit their website. Their websites make it very clear they are selling sex. I have to say that most of these ads come from places where prostitution is legal. I also get a smaller number of solicitations by men for gay sex. These are either to establish a free relationship or a paid relationship, male prostitution. I’ve always considered both these types of messages as nothing more than irritation, but I have warned friends about their children getting messages that are not appropriate for children. I have queried Facebook about these types of ads and have never gotten any sort of reply. I have been looking around for other sorts of ways to maintain contact with my readers. Yesterday, I got an email from the makers of Firefox about a podcast they had produced. You can listen to it at this address. https://irlpodcast.org/season4/episode6/?utm_campaign=2019irlpodcast-en&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email&utm_content=s4-e6
It is 23 minutes long, so if you don’t want to listen to it, below is the meat of the podcast.
There is a growing concern with the centralized nature of the Internet and how a few giants are controlling much of the flow of information. These include companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on. When the Internet first started out, there was no centralization. However, over time the big companies began to take over. There is no doubt that they don’t provide interesting services. To fight back against this growing centralization of the Internet, creators of new services are using decentralization and blockchain technology. Blockchain technology it’s complicated, but basically means that once something is put up on the Internet it can’t be changed without everybody knowing that it is been changed. It’s major use these days seems to be in the cryptocurrency area. If you want to know more about blockchain technology, here is the address for Wikipedia’s article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
Here is a twitter-like site https://mastodon.social/invite/Usw6HEoB
Here is a site dedicated to building privacy and security https://maidsafe.net/
Here is a site set up by a journalist using this technology https://popula.com/
If you are worried about people having access to things you have stored on Google documents, you might want to use this site https://app.graphitedocs.com/
