Geek Stuff category archive

Installing and bringing a network drive on line (30 minutes), then blogging about it at Geekazine (the rest of the afternoon).

Users need to understand the tools they are using:

It was the one click of a button that changed Ashley’s life. A click on her iPhone that exposed her half-naked photos to the world.

You see, Ashley used an iPhone application called Quip to send a topless picture to her husband who is serving in a warzone overseas. But Quip had a massive security flaw.

It works by storing pictures to a server. The flaw allowed users to type in any five letters or numbers and someone else’s picture would appear.

In October, thousands of pictures went public.

mistermix has an excellent post at Balloon Juice comparing Apple and Google in their approaches to world domination.

He’s not necessarily a big fan of either one and sets out his reasons quite clearly, but his post is especially notable for its excellent description of Apple’s walled orchard.

The walled orchard is one reason I shall never purchase an apple that I can’t find in the produce department at my local Farm Fresh. I refuse to feed the beast.

What persons keep forgetting is that it was persons my age and older who invented the damned thing.

From the Guardian:

A malware attack is being spread via Twitter using “zombie” accounts to push a site which claims to link to a fun video.

Using the tagline “haha this is the funniest video ive EVER SEEN!”, and a wide variety of Twitter hashtags, the website instead uses a Java exploit to drop a keylogger program and a banking Trojan (which will search your hard drive for any banking details and watch when you log in to online banking sites) on Windows computers that visit it.

It is a small victory, but it is a victory nonetheless:

The high court in 1997 upheld the 1992 law that obligates cable television companies to carry local broadcast stations. But Cablevision said circumstances have since changed and the monopolistic nature of the cable industry has been replaced by vigorous competition.

The justices rejected Cablevision’s appeal without any comment, siding with the FCC.

A U.S. appeals court in New York last year upheld the FCC’s decision to require Cablevision’s cable systems on Long Island to carry WRNN, a station from upstate New York that broadcasts mostly home-shopping programing.

Part of the bargain when cable companies came on the scene 40 years ago was that they would have to carry local television stations, because television is not just entertainment, but also a public service. (I know that’s difficult to believe; television seems to have turned into pubic service interrupted by murders and fantastically stupid (un)reality shows, but even today, when there is a blizzard or a flood, most persons turn to local television news to find out what’s going on.)

This was because many persons feared that the cable companies would simply ignore the local station, turning instead to “super-stations” (like WTBS and WGN).

The fact that now many persons have choice between cable from a cable company, cable from a telephone company, and satellite television does nothing to reduce the possibility that any one or all of them might decide that carrying local programming costs too much.

In this case, one might say, “But a home-shopping station? Oh, come on.” But the issue is not the content of the station; the issue was local programming versus national programming.

We cannot depend on corporations to make decisions based on the public good. If we could, no one would have ever heard of Glenn Beck. Just look around.

Wired weird:

Five Rochdale (U. K.-ed.) men have been jailed for using iTunes music gift vouchers to launder money in an internet scam.

The men used stolen credit card numbers to buy £750,000 worth of vouchers to sell at cheaper prices through eBay.

Speak up for your privacy. Sign the ACLU’s petition.

We are all Philip Marlowe now:

The two trends — more snooping and more publicizing our lives online — have dovetailed to create a background-checking free-for-all. And while many of the websites can swiftly and benignly link you to an old classmate or a missing aunt, the same technology raises troubling questions about privacy for ordinary citizens whose online information may not be as secure as they think. Internet security expert Ryan C. Barnett says many users aren’t connecting the dots when they give up their birth date, e-mail address and dog’s name at multiple way stations across the Internet.

“These sites are so spread out that a lot of users volunteering all these separate bits of information don’t think about all of it together in totality,” he says. “People think this social-networking stuff is so cool, but they don’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes.”

Read the story and be guided accordingly.

Now, automated twits!

Heaven protect us.

I upgraded the Ubuntu Linux OS on my laptop to the newest Ubuntu release this weekend. Except for a hiccup from my ISP, it was flawless.

Read more at Geekazine.

In a world without walls, who needs Windows?

Last night, I was upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx (don’t blame me for the names–blame Mark Shuttleworth).

After two hours, with 11 minutes to go in the download, the cable connection rolled over and played dead. I had to power down the router (that’s fancy talk for pull the power plug out), then power down the modem, reconnect the modem and wait for it to come back to life, then reconnect the router.

Fortunately for me, the download picked up where it left off.

This is not an isolated event.

My connection frequently rolls over and plays dead and I have to go through the disconnect-reconnect routine when I’m doing big downloads.

I do not do BitTorrent. I don’t even like BitTorrent.

I do not download music and movie files from illicit sites and I observe copyright, but I occasionally do big downloads–big legal downloads of free and open source Linux distributions, software upgrades, newsgroup posts, and the like. And this outfit regularly fails in the middle of them requiring me to disconnect-reconnect or, at worst, start all over and hope to get lucky.

It’s not me. I’ve been doing this stuff too long.

In five years of using Comcast, I did not encounter the problems I have encountered in five months of using this outfit.

My ISP advertises itself as “Your friend in the digital world.”

Yeah.

Right.

Steve Jobs on why Apple bans Flash from a number of its products (emphasis added–full story at the link):

Mr Jobs said Flash was made for an era of “PCs and mice” and performed poorly when translated to run on touchscreen smartphones and handheld devices.

He also criticised the technology for being only under the control of Adobe.

Control.

No doubt that is the issue. Flash is outside the walled garden.

Later that same evening:

The video is throwing an error message.

It is throwing the same error message on Raw Story, where I found it.

Conclusion: Not my problem, so I can’t fix it.

One hopes it will clear up later.

On the Media covers the Twitter conference, trying to figure out what, exactly, is the point. From the website:

Last year the buzz on Twitter was that it was a mind-bogglingly important tech innovation, the only catch being that nobody could figure out what exactly it was for. This year, the geekerati say they’ve finally answered that question. Bob headed over to the Twitter-centric 140 Character Conference to learn more.

Follow the link to listen or read the transcript (scheduled to be posted yesterday afternoon) or listen here:

The San Jose Mercury-News looks at the willingness of persons to live their lives in public.

“These companies are betting they take this data, monetize it or resell it,” said John Borthwick, an entrepreneur based in New York who advises companies like DailyBooth and Hot Potato, which lets people share plans and experiences of live events. “But the assumption that every scrap of data is actually useful to individuals, or even companies, will be tested.”

Many persons have no idea how public the internet is, such as the folks who post pictures of themselves inhaling a doobie and then wonder why no one wants to hire them.

Todd went on about the new Facebook privacy changes in today’s podcast. He was rather miffed.

So am I.

If you use Facebook, check your privacy settings carefully, particularly the ones under “Applications.” Facebook’s defaults are to let anyone in, especially Facebook’s “partners.”

Opt out information is here, courtesy Todd.

Read more »

I’ve spent the afternoon messing around with the blog, updating the sidebar to add some Virginia blogs to the list, moving stuff around to what I hope is a more convenient order, and adding a “Donate” button on the theory that it can’t hurt and might help.

Expect more tinkering over the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, I know. Nobody looks at the sidebar anyway.

Richard Clarke has a new book out, which means that “Cyberwar” hype–also known as full employment for computer security consultants–is making the rounds of the talk shows.

The list of luser$ hacker countries of which we should be very, very afraid commonly includes North Korea, China, Iran, and whatever other nation is the bad guy of the moment.

People buy into the hype because, for most of us, a computer is a magic box we don’t understand–so it’s easy to believe it can be used to saw the beautiful assistant in half and then reassemble her.

It’s akin to your older relatives who, in the early days of electricity, feared that current could somehow leak from an outlet that had no plug in it. As George Smith points out,

Why, all those wily North Koreans have to do is rent a hotel room in China and launch a cyberattack on the US on the 4th of July against government websites hardly anyone visits!

This is not to say that computer security is unimportant. It is. There are safety rules for computers just as there are for electricity.

As George Smith also wonders, does the recent boo-boo by McAfee warrant adding them to the list of rogue states?

Read more »

The Boston Globe offers a “How To Twit.”

Luk–booty on @balcony.