Loosing Your Rights

I was poking around the web again today and found an interesting article on the BBC Technology site. The below is a brief summary of the bits I found interesting.

While reading it turns out that you have to be very careful when using ‘free’ online publishing services. For example, Microsoft took the rights to do whatever it wanted with everything sent via the Microsoft Passport, and as pointed out in the article, this means anything sent via Hotmail, including your latest business plan or idea.

Google has done the same with Orkut and even the BBC in its own article points out the dangers of submitting photos to its own site.

This is a good article worthy of a read. If nothing else, it emphasises the need to not undertake business via anything except your own servers, and do everything you can yourself.

Using free services is just lazy. The technology is not difficult to reproduce with a database and web server, and there are more than enough free, open source applications to do the majority of the work for you. You can pick up a server of your own for £50, a domain for a couple of quid, apache for free, Oracle for free. If your information isn’t worth £52 its not worth publishing.

Useful links

• Full BBC Article
• Apache Web Server
• 1&1 Internet Hosting
• Jive Software (MSN Alternative)

Oh, and yes, use linux! OpenSuSE