Geek Stuff category archive

Stu Bykofsky offers a typology of Facebook friends at Philly dot com. Follow the link for his comments on Facebook’s friend suggestions.

• Me, ME, ME!!: Braggers and self-promoters. I do some promoting myself, when I post a column that I think far-flung FFFs might enjoy. But I’m not running an Amway operation, selling mood rings, gold or vitamin supplements, like some FFFs.
• Bold Liars: “I’m taking Janice to Paris for the weekend,” Jim writes. I know him. He’ll be diving in Dumpsters on Moravian Street for dinner.
• Collectors: Overly competitive, they promiscuously sign up thousands of FFFs. (The greater the number, the higher the PQ – Pathetic Quotient.)
• Self-Impressed: “I’m going to lunch with my favorite judge.” “I just got back from the Super Bowl.” “I went to the ballet.” Not a word about what happened, just “I went, I did.”

Afterthought:

I’m torn. Can’t decide whether I belong in the first category of the last one.

Building a better Watson:

Via the San Jose Mercury-News, which reports

Relax, humans. Watson may have beat the most successful champions of “Jeopardy,” but it doesn’t mean machines are ready to take over the world.

Even Dan Gruhl, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose who worked on Watson — a four-year project that involved about 20 to 25 people throughout IBM’s eight research labs — says so. He points to the 55 sparring sessions that Watson took part in from November to January before the big showdown with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the game show’s most successful champions, this week. Watson — which IBM calls a DeepQA machine made up of custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and “many, many CPUs,” — won 71 percent of those mock games. Was Watson’s progress incremental, GMSV asked Gruhl in a phone interview Wednesday. “Oh, heck yeah,” he said.

Apparently, this is some kind of automated alert device:

The Palo Alto Police Department on Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate a mobile device that flooded the city’s emergency communications center with 566 calls over a five-hour period in January, according to a police official.

“I asked (the FCC) to open an investigation … on the problems this device was creating,” said Charles Cullen, technical services director for the Palo Alto Police Department. “And that’s where they have jurisdiction, because it’s a mobile device.”

The phantom calls started pouring into the city’s emergency communications center the night of Jan. 13 and continued into the early morning hours of Jan. 14. Cullen said it appears the device was in a Mercedes-Benz and is also likely responsible for flooding the California Highway Patrol’s Vallejo dispatch center with 2,225 calls over a roughly 21-hour period between Jan. 25 and 26.

In both cases, it comes out to over 100 calls per hour, indicating a redial after each disconnect.

The BBC reports some sensible comments. No doubt they will be lost in the rush to sell scary books and make scary headlines (emphasis added):

Bruce Schneier claims that emotive rhetoric around the term does not match the reality.

He warned that using sensational phrases such as “cyber armageddon” only inflames the situation.

Mr Schneier, who is chief security officer for BT, is due to address the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week

Speaking ahead of the event, he told BBC News that there was a power struggle going on, involving a “battle of metaphors”.

(snip)

His point of view was backed by Howard Schmidt, cyber security co-ordinator for the White House.

“We really need to define this word because words do matter,” said Mr Schmidt.

“Cyber war is a turbo metaphor that does not address the issues we are looking at like cyber espionage, cyber crime, identity theft, credit card fraud.“

The portion I put in bold illustrates part of the reason for the success of the “cyberwar” hype.

Unscrupulous persons do lots of different nasty things.

Nasty things done with computers have in common one thing: they are done on (gasp!) computers.

Many persons, even those adept at using individual computer applications, such as a web browser or an office suite, have no idea how a computer or a network does what it does. Therefore the hypesters can fool persons into thinking that the many nasty things are actually one nasty thing–“cyyyyyyyyyyybeeeeerwaaaaar”–because they are done on (gasp!) computers.

They can therefore write white papers, sell scary books, get interview gigs on telly vision, and, perhaps most significantly, get lucrative consultancy gigs writing more white papers, promoting more scary books, and appearing in more interviews on the telly vision.

I’m not saying there is no reason to worry. Both individual computer users and system admins should practice safe HEX.

But there’s no reason to predict cybergeddon.

I’m rooting for Watson.

Watson, by the way, runs Linux.

According to David Davidian, an IBM Senior System Architect, “Watson is a massively parallel system based on the IBM POWER7 750 in a standard rack mounted configuration.” It can run AIX, IBM’s house-brand Unix; IBM I; and Linux. To compete on Jeopardy Watson is running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. Davidian sontinued, “This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.”

I haven’t visited the Huffington Post regularly for almost two years. I used to visit it almost daily, but it’s gotten too cluttered and OMG celebrities! a la Gawker and TMZ for me. About the only time I go there is when Bob Cesca has a new piece.

AOL’s purchase of HuffPo is likely the next step on HuffPo’s march to frivolous irrelevance, but, hey! frivolous irrelevance sells these days. It’s easier than thinking.*

With those thoughts, I commend to your attention this prediction for the fate of HuffingtonAOL.

________________

*Me, I try to be relevantly frivolous.

Dick Destiny gets real. A nugget:

DD, through wearing of the senior fellow hat at GlobalSecurity, received a query from a reporter at the biggest newspaper last week. Could I talk about Egypt and the Internet?

No, not really. I indicated I didn’t have interest in the story that Facebook and Twitter had been significant to the Egyptian uprising.

I did see that US-made M1 tanks were laying smoke screens and refraining from shelling and machine-gunning crowds.

Which doesn’t jive with the regular make-stuff-up things passed off by US media.

The internet is a public place.

Words have consequences.*

Mistakenly believing that a middle school classmate had caused the arrest of a friend, a quartet of Florida teenagers exchanged Facebook messages discussing the killing of the suspected “snitch,” according to police.

The students–three 14-year-olds and a 13-year-old–were arrested yesterday at school and charged with aggravated stalking, a felony.

_______________________

*Unless you are Republican or Fox News “personality.”

Good-bye, Mr. Chips:

A hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 400 billion virtual poker chips.

In court Ashley Mitchell admitted penetrating the systems of online gaming firm Zynga to steal the chips.

He laundered the haul via a series of Facebook accounts in a bid to escape being caught.

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-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, February 3.

Directions: Lake Taylor Hospital-1309, Kempsville Road, Norfolk, 23502 (Kempsville Rd. at Lowry Rd.) 461-5001

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks) at Uno Chicago Grill, Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). Accessible through the Janaf parking lot or directly from the ramp from Virginia Beach Blvd. to Military Highway north.

John Cass of the Chicago Trib takes on Deion Sanders, Jay Cutler, Carlton Fisk, and news reporters’ fascination with twits (emphasis added):

Cutler was roughed up again and again in that game last Sunday with the Green Bay Packers. Finally, after being smashed by one 300-pound lineman after another — after an entire season of being smashed — Cutler’s knee gave way.

Cutler couldn’t play, the Bears lost and Sanders decided to tweet to all his fans that Cutler had no guts. A few other morons followed suit, then many ignorant, anonymously malicious fans joined in.

Sports reporters mined these seething electronic nuggets, although I don’t think they went to journalism school to report on the electronic equivalent of what was scribbled on the urinal wall in a gas station.

Follow the link to find out what Carlton Fisk has to do with all this.

Heh.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page has been hacked by an unknown person who posted a status update suggesting that the site should let people invest in it rather than going to the banks.

The page belonging to the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was named Time’s Man of the Year in 2010, was hacked some time on Tuesday.

The message left by the hacker read: “”Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus described it? What do you think? #hackercup2011”.

(snip)

Embarrassingly for Facebook, more than 1800 people “liked” the update before the company took down its chief executive’s page. Facebook has made no public statement about how the hack occurred.

Add another one to the list of reasons I’m losing interest in college football.

If you think the fuss over the NFL draft is over the top (face it, televising the draft is a strategy for ESPN to sell more NFL-related ad time and nothing more), consider this:

Facebookers have started harassing high-school athletes over what colleges they sign with. A high school star from Mississippi has quit Facebook:

“I saw rumors on the Internet with people saying I decommitted from Mississippi State because my momma has been working for this Ole Miss guy and she cleaned his house up for a year and she made $100,000,” he told the paper. “If my momma made $100,000 a year, I wouldn’t be driving the truck that I’m driving. I would have had a vehicle a long time ago. It’s just the little stuff like that.

“I got a lot of trash talking by both schools on Facebook, but that didn’t have a lot to do with it. But when you start getting my mom involved and my family involved, that takes it to a whole another level.”

On Tuesday, C.J. Johnson said goodbye to Facebook with this post:

“This is my last Facebook post and I’m gonna leave facebook with this. Linda Johnson has never worked as a house worker making 100,000 dollars a year and I will not be a Mississippi state bulldog and I’m not considering Mississippi state anymore bc you have constantly comment on my page send me crazy inboxes and has made my recruiting experience a living nightmare. Goodbye facebook.”

It’s only a damned game, for Pete’s sake.

Coincidently, I received this picture in an email about five minutes before stumbling over that news item (picture below the fold):

Read more »

Alex Beam wonders about the Library of Congress Twitter archive:

Cast your mind back to last April when the Library of Congress breathlessly announced the creation of a Twitter archive. Oh, brave new world! The thoughts of Ashton Kutcher (“I’m co-hosting Regis and Kelly today’’) memorialized for the ages. The media went nuts, and Library officials were sounding off to anyone with questions about this important new historical resource, available to — nice Orwellian touch here — “qualified researchers.’’

Now you could hear a pin drop.

Follow the link to see how many persons have twitted the article.

Next up: Archiving old “While You Were Out” phone messages–but only the pink ones.

I know it is a silly thing to be excited about, but I am still excited about it.

I’ve made enough posts at LQ to qualify as a “Senior Member.”

Rep’s not bad either.

3,994 more posts and I get to be a “Guru.”

I think I got me some geek cred.

All joking aside, when I was first learning my way around Linux, LQ was indispensable to me. The folks there are quite tolerant of newbies and willing to answer questions, even when they are badly asked.

It is nice to be able to pay it forward.

One of the members of my LUG posted this to the list.

Be guided by it.

Oh, for the good old days, when teepeeing someone’s front yard was the be all and end all.

Actually, the most ambitious stunt I remember was when some of my classmates stole an outhouse–yes, some country folk still had outhouses back then–and left it in someone’s driveway. Never did find out whose privacy they spirited away.

On Oct. 8, the teen created a fake Facebook profile as a transfer student at Clearview from outside the area. He threatened a shooting rampage and targeted specific students and teachers, authorities said. In addition, he used online chat rooms to conceal phone threats called into emergency dispatchers in Mantua Township.

“All those calls resulted in a police response,” Dalton said.

On Oct. 16, the teen called 911 and reported that a gunman had shot and slashed several people at the Telford Inn on Route 45. Some people were dead, he said, and others were injured. There was a “massive response” as authorities from more than five jurisdictions flooded the area, closing down the normally busy highway shortly after 4 p.m.

On Oct. 18, Harrison Township police learned about the Clearview threats on Facebook and turned to the prosecutor’s High-Tech Crime Unit for assistance.

The teen faces seven charges, including bias intimidation, disorderly conduct, and conspiracy.

Shaun Mullen lays out the issue as clearly as can be. A nugget:

What Verizon and its brethren really want to do, of course, is impose tiered service on you and I in order to reduce competition, block certain services, force subscribers to buy their own services no matter how uncompetitive they may be, and impose premiums for heavy use and bandwidth hungry peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent.

Comcast, for its part, has twice been caught red handed trying to choke off peer-to-peer traffic. It backed off both times, but is now suing the FCC for the right to control the Internet tap as it sees fit. And lurking in the background is the aforementioned threat to innovation.

Cable companies, phone companies, and other providers of the internet connection pipelines are utilities and should be treated as such.

Their job–and charges–should begin and end with making sure the pipes are working. End of story.