Geek Stuff category archive

Rescheduled to Wednesday because of a schedule conflict for the meeting room.

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 Wednesday, July 6.

Note: Meetings are normally on the first Thursday of each month.

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)

Greta Garbo would never have managed to alone these days. Now there’s a new ultimate social networking app.

One app the find them,

One app to bind them,

And in the mosh pit grind them.

Sonar uses information from sites such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to show users how they are connected to other people who are checked in at the same location.

“It canvasses the Internet for people who have declared themselves there,” he said.

It then provides the user with a list of the other people at the location and how they are relevant — whether they share Facebook friends, went to the same college or like the same bands.

I’m betting it will be obsolete by Labor Day.

Actually, if the IRS thinks you qualify for a refund, say because of a mistake on your return, they just send it to you.

Dear Internal Revenue Service customer,

After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $120.50.

Please submit the tax refund form and allow us 3-5 business days in order to process it.

To access the form for your tax refund, please Click Here.

NOTE!

Thank you,
Tax Refund Deparment Internal Revenue Service.

A whois tells me the “Click Here” website is hosted in Taiwan.

whois 220.132.160.64

% [whois.apnic.net node-1]
% Whois data copyright terms http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum: 220.129.0.0 – 220.143.255.255
netname: HINET-NET
country: TW
descr: CHTD, Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd.
descr: Data-Bldg.6F, No.21, Sec.21, Hsin-Yi Rd.
descr: Taipei Taiwan 100
admin-c: HN27-AP
tech-c: HN28-AP
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
changed: hostmaster@twnic.net 20030611
mnt-by: MAINT-TW-TWNIC
source: APNIC
(snip)

Vancouver, B. C., hockey rioters being identified via Facebook. From MarketWatch:

Thousands of other riot pictures have shown the impressive power of social and digital media — good and bad — in tracking down the drunk knuckleheads (and probably a few G20-type anarchists) who trashed the lovely city’s downtown after the Vancouver Canucks lost their climactic hockey game. The riot aftermath is also proving what one caller on Vancouver radio talk station CKNW caller said last week: “The internet is forever.”

If you’ve been identified — rightly or wrongly — as one of the rioters in the hundreds of cellphone pictures posted online by outraged Vancouverites since the June 15 ugliness “you could apply for a job in 20 years and all the employer has to do is Google your name. If you’re in one of those photos, you’re out of luck,” correctly noted the Vancouver caller. Current employers of alleged and confessed rioters are also feeling the public’s wrath (more on this below).

The internet is still a public place.

My two or three regular readers know that I am skeptical about the “cloud,” the latest marketese for “file servers,” except that these servers belong to someone else, out there, out of your control.

Now there’s another reason not to put your data on their computers. Raw Story reports:

In the brave new world of cloud computing, where data is stored off-site in massive server farms instead of on a user’s local hard drive, privacy and security are paramount in the consumer’s mind.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, their concerns are essentially moot thanks to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which a key Microsoft official said recently permits the U.S. to spy on data stored within cloud servers across the European Union.

The revelation of transcontinental spying, which has long been suspected, came from Gordon Frazer, Microsoft U.K.’s managing director, speaking at an announcement event for the company’s new suite of office software.

Crackers don’t have to be smart. They just have to be not quite so dumb.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test this year to see how hard it was for hackers to corrupt workers and gain access to computer systems. Not very, it turned out.

Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.

“There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots,” said Mark Rasch, director of network security and privacy consulting for Falls Church, Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corp.(CSC)

Details and some guidelines for safe HEX at the link.

What is it about touching keyboards that disengages the brain relay, rendering the courtesy circuit inoperable?

By their status updates shall ye know them.

Science 2.0 reports that how persons behave on Facebook (and likely on other social media sites) betrays whether or not they are narcissists. A nugget:

The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Untrained observers were able to detect the narcissists also. Observers used three characteristics – quantity of social interaction, attractiveness of the individual and the degree of self promotion in the main photo – to form an impression of the individual’s personality. “People aren’t perfect in their assessments,” Buffardi said, “but our results show they’re somewhat accurate in their judgments.”

One more time, the internet is a public place.

The attorney for a Radnor High School senior arrested in connection with a video that contained a poem with violent imagery said Friday that his client never threatened anyone.

Arthur T. Donato Jr., a Media lawyer, said Zaidee S. Harrison, 18, of Wayne, did not send anything to a public or school official, faculty member, or any other public employee.

Donato said she posted on her best friend’s Facebook page a video of herself reciting the poem. Her friend was not threatened by the poem or its images, Donato said.

More at the link, including excerpts.

By these standards, someone might report somebody for “Who Killed Cock Robin.”

Aside:

This is not just a case of overreaction on the part of the authorities. It is a logical result of Facebook’s default position to strip every user’s data naked on the net.

There is an old joke that a negligee is something you think you can see through, but can’t.

Facebook “privacy settings”* are something you think others can’t see through, but they can.

It’s this kind of stuff that’s going to kill Facebook and Twitter.

_____________________

*It is to laugh.

The Nissan Leaf is tracking its drivers.

I doubt that Nissan is being evil.

Rather, it is being stupid. American companies do not have a monopoly on dumb.

The moral of the story is that doing stuff on the internet for no other reason than because you can may not be a good idea (this website excepted).

The latest news, cited at the link in the first paragraph, is that location data is no longer being published.

Via GNC.

At the Chicago Trib, Mary Schmich considers Facebook and concludes that it’s getting more and more like that guy who sits too close to you one subway. A nugget:

The newer problem is that Facebook has come to feel like a stalker. Not only does it do kinky things with your personal data, its little blue F box is more intrusive and insistent every day.

I go to my neighborhood coffeehouse and on the chalkboard out front someone has sketched the F box with the plea: Find us on Facebook!

When I look up a word, the online dictionary instantly prompts me to “share” it on my Facebook wall.

I buy shoes online, and the seller wants me to “share” my size and style with my Facebook entourage.

Twitta culpa:

Engadget:

. . . after a Malaysian political aide / social activist used Twitter to air a grievance about a pregnant friend’s employer, the publishing company turned to the social network for inspiration. Fahmi Fadzil tweeted an apology shortly after, but BluInc Media wasn’t satiated. The two parties finally reached an elementary school-esque out of court decision, requiring Fadzil to apologize for his initial statement 100 times on the microblogging service.

Via GNC.

Running spyware and malware scans on my Windows 7 box.

Something that is not part of day-to-day life in my Linux world.

It’s probably best not to violate one’s duty as a juror at a place that is basically a humongous database that is designed to remember everything for as long as advertisers want it remembered.

A juror, who contacted a defendant via Facebook, has admitted contempt of court in the first case of its kind in the UK involving the internet.

London’s High Court heard that Joanne Fraill, 40, contacted Jamie Sewart, 34, who had already been acquitted in a drugs trial costing £6m in Manchester.

The novelty is wearing off. From the Guardian:

The number of people using Facebook during May fell in the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Russia, according to new data.

That means the site’s growth has slowed for the second month in a row, even as it approaches 700 million users worldwide.

In the US the site lost about 6 million users, from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at its end, according to data gathered from Facebook’s advertising tool by the site Inside Facebook.

Canada fell by 1.52 million to 16.6 million and the UK, Norway and Russia all saw falls of more than 100,000 users, the site said.

Lower Merion School District, outside of Philly, has been sued again.

That’s the school district that was surreptitously taking pictures of schoolkids via webcams, because they could.

A school district near Philadelphia that paid out $610,000 to settle a complaint over spying allegations related to school-owned laptops has been hit with a similar lawsuit.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports a former Harriton High School student filed suit against Lower Merion School District on Monday over the monitoring software installed on laptops given to students.

The school district claims he’s suing just for the money.

I have little sympathy with them.

Let them pay. Consider it the price of arrogance.

Full Disclosure:

I used to live in Lower Merion, many years ago.

Great place to live.

Excellent schools. Great teachers. Dumb administrators. (Sort of like many other school districts.)

Twisted coverage:

What the author leaves out is that Facebook doesn’t let anyone “friend” anyone else without permission.

What privacy rights and protections do teenagers have on the Internet? In a twist of authority, Facebook won’t let parents “friend” their teens or access their accounts unless kids give parents permission.

Follow the link to read the entire tirade, unless you’ve got something better to do, like get a root canal.

If parents can’t control the “off” switch on the device, their kids are already out of control, and phony phacebook phriendships won’t make a difference. Keyloggers, anyone?

Afterthought:

This occurred to me as I drove to downtown Norfolk this evening:

If permission were not required, what kind of creeps could “friend” kids by claiming to be their parents?

There aren’t many creeps like that out there (despite the sensational press), but one is one too many.

Opera Software ASA, the Norwegian company responsible for the Opera browser, honors Oprah Winfrey by opening its archives of emails sent to them by Oprah fans who apparently believe that, in addition to being Queen of All Media, Oprah is also the world’s best web browser.

It’s a giggle.

Parallel Universes:

Opera provides their own news server with newsgroups about Opera products. Occasionally persons stumble into one of the newsgroups promoting the next performance of La Boheme. We usually suggest that they check out the Opera browser, then look two floors up and to the left for altos and tenors.

Via the Linux Outlaws.

Virtual subpoenas:

Two years after an Australian lawyer caused a stir by sending a foreclosure notice via Facebook, the practice of online legal service is spreading as a means for courts to keep their dockets moving.

Courts in New Zealand, Canada and the U.K. have adopted the Australian example to avoid having cases stall when people can’t be located and served in person. Lawyers said the U.S. may not be far behind in using the world’s most popular social- networking service.

Bet they don’t let you respond with an avatar.

Contagion:

Psychologists have long known that emotions, just like germs, are contagious. People exposed to a person experiencing strong emotions may experience similar feelings, catching them through facial expressions, tones of voice or some other means. But now there is a new means of transmission — social media.

Facebook data scientist Adam D.I. Kramer analyzed postings by about 1 million English speakers and their roughly 150 million friends in multiple countries on the social network to show that the words people use in their status updates drive the emotions of their online friends, even days later. Kramer found people who used emotionally loaded words like “happy,” “hug,” “sick,” and “vile” in their status updates sparked similar emotions in later Facebook postings by their friends.