Geek Stuff category archive

Dave Mandi is skeptical of storing your stuff in the “cloud” (whatever that is–as near as I can tell, it’s marketese for “remote server”). A snippet:

First off, the cloud’s owner knows about every song and book in your collection. Depending on how clean-cut you are, this may or may not be cause for concern, but “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about” is not a good reason to forfeit your privacy. You may have bought a copy of the book How to Pick Locks for educational purposes, or some of Charles Manson’s demo tapes for laughs, but you shouldn’t have to worry that someone will get the wrong idea about those purchases and report you to the authorities.

Then there are broader privacy questions. Can you be sure the cloud owner isn’t doing anything with your data? Is it conceivable that at some point in the future they might sell or rent it? Imagine how much marketing companies would be willing to pay for personal information stored in the cloud — even if it were anonymized.

If you use any kind of commercial “cloud” service, this is a must-read.

SpamSoldier spreads via text messages, saying recipients have won a $1,000 Target gift card or offering free versions of popular paid games such as “Angry Birds Space,” and on disreputable, third-party app stores, the office said. Once on a phone, it uses the subscriber’s allotment of text messages to reach more targets.

I’ve not seen this one, but from time to time–maybe once a quarter–I get texts telling me I’ve won something or other at Best Buy. Since I loathe Best Buy, they do not interest me.

I follow my carrier’s instructions and forward such messages to their spam-reporting address (7726 or “spam”).

The article goes on to state the obvious–don’t follow links in texts from unknown sources and don’t download programs from third-party app repositories.

In other words, think before you click.

The new version of WordPress seems to have issues.

When I embed a video in a post, test the post, schedule it to post at a future time (you didn’t actually think I sit here all day, did you? Heck, Wednesday I went to Williamsburg for a meeting and my Christmas posts are already lined up), then test the post, the embed works. That is, it displays and plays. Then, when the post posts, the embedded video is gone.

This started when I installed latest WordPress version.

I try to fix it when I notice the void; once the post is published, the embedded videos seem to stick around.

In the mean time, I will include a link to the source of the video in the post. If I feel truly energetic, I might even file a bug report.

Be assured that any video I choose to embed in a post is Deathless Art and Must-See viewing.

If nothing else, it’s got to be better than Honey Boo-Boo or the Six O’Clock News.

From El Reg:

Japan has been at the cutting edge of toilet design for decades and has one of the highest rates of smartphone penetration on the planet, so it’s perhaps fitting that it has now combined the two by introducing a hi-tech Android-powered loo which enables hands-free toilet action.

Video (no human beings are involved) at the link.

Hold Amazon accountable for attempting to place non-accessible devices, that is, Kindles, in schools.

Learn more here.

Via GNC.

Be popular. Fool your friends. Then post them on the innerwebs.

If the embed doesn’t work, watch here.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Police have arrested a 19-year-old Skagit County (Washington–ed.) man who threatened on Facebook to “shoot up every school within a 100-mile radius” if his gun rights were taken away after the Connecticut school massacre.

Authorities had been looking for the man, identified as Korry Martinson, 19, since Friday about 7:20 p.m., after he allegedly posted the threat on his Facebook page, police said.

Some folks aren’t bright enough to wield firearms.

Sadly, they are the ones who do.

Schleswig-Holstein doesn’t like Facebook’s lack of privacy policies.

One of Germany’s top privacy regulators has ordered Facebook to stop its real-name policy, saying it violates the country’s data protection laws.

In response to the social media site’s refusal to allow pseudonyms, the Independent State Center for Data Privacy (ULD) in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein issued an ultimatum to the company’s California headquarters on Monday.

Should Facebook Inc., which operates in the United States, and its Irish subsidiary Facebook Ltd., which runs European operations, refuse to comply within two weeks, they each face a fine of €20,000 ($26,000), ULD said.

Facebook plans to resist.

I have had no email to my primary email address for over 48 hours.

Can’t say as how I have missed it all that much.

I do have several other accounts, so I sent an email to my family telling them to use the telly fone or my Gmail address (which I seldom use but which sort of comes with an Android phone).

The ISP finally got the webmail inerface up again (even it had disappeared, turning into a big empty space in the screen), but my incoming email, which they claim to have been saving up for my future delight, hasn’t started flowing yet.

Whatever they broke, they broke it good.

In modern world, television watches you.

Ever wondered how deoderants work?

No, neither had I.

Join HPR for the 24-hour New Year’s Eve stream. All the cool kids will be there.

Learn how to participate. Coolness is just a click away.

Join the new TWUUG forums and help them grow, then join us tonight.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, December 6.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Facebook has received preliminary approval for a settlement in a class action suit over their “sponsored stories” campaign. In that method of “advertising,” they use pictures and names of Facebook “members” in “advertisements” to those members’ “friends.”

The Center for Public Interest Law is not happy:

. . . attorneys for the nonprofit Center for Public Interest Law had argued that Facebook should be required to get affirmative consent from parents before using the name or photo of any Facebook user who is under 18. Center attorney Robert Fellmeth said Monday that he will file a further objection to the settlement and vowed to take the case to appellate court if Seeborg grants final approval.

Remember, in Facebook you are not the customer. You are the product.

California is threatening to sue smartphone application designers who do not comply with the state law to post written privacy policies. Makers of “free” apps are the worst offenders.

It seems that some developers don’t want to discuss their privacy practices.

Some Silicon Valley app developers have resisted scrutiny over how personal information is collected and sold to advertisers, arguing that regulation will slow the pace of development. A September study by the technology research company Gartner Inc. predicts that the number of mobile applications downloaded will total more than 45 billion this year, nearly double last year’s number.

Even if an app maker clearly lays out its privacy policy, Higgins (Parker Higgins of the Electronic Freedom Foundation–ed.) said the most common privacy breaches come from agreements between apps and advertising networks.

Concerns over mobile apps’ access to personal data landed in court this year when a Texas man filed a lawsuit alleging the social networking app Path Inc. violated his privacy by storing his address book information on its servers without his permission.

“Slow development.” Indeed.

Noz’s iJunk won’t leave him alone and must needs chastised.

William Shatner is in town and his twitter feed twitted that he was planning to visit the U. S. S. Enterprise, which is being decommissioned due to old age.

Then he wasn’t. When questioned about the twit, his publicist responded as follows:

Of the Twitter post that sparked news reports of Shatner’s appearance, Hepburn said, “Oh honey, you know he doesn’t run that, right?”

Wonder how you get to be a “star’s twit”?

Afterthought:

You didn’t really believe that these important folks who consider themselves important lowered themselves to actually twit for themselves, did you? Tell me you didn’t.

They hire twits to twit.

All seriousness aside, any legal mumbo-jumbo you post on Facebook, or any other site with a “Terms of Service” that you agreed to, means nothing. The TOS pwns you, baby.

At Science 2 dot 0, Kimberly Crandell considers real versus artificial trees from an environmental perspective. A nugget:

While chopping down a living tree may see like the most un-environment friendly thing you can do, in this situation it actually appears to be the “greener” choice. Because it’s not so much about how many uses you can get from your tree… as it is about what the tree is made of, and what it does to the environment when it is created and when you dispose of it.

Artificial trees are manufactured using a polyvinyl chloride (or PVC), which is a petroleum-derived plastic. The raw material for fake Christmas trees is both non-renewable and polluting. Furthermore, PVC production results in the unhealthy emission of a number of carcinogens, such as dioxin, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride.

More at the link.