Geek Stuff category archive
Geeking Out 0
Listing to The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart with the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu MATE under the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
I Get Mail Spam
0
This one was from
no rep Iy @ amazo n.co m
Following that was this string:
auto.confirm-[nonsense sequence of letters and numbers]@webmails-service.com/
It claimed that my account with a retail establishment was on hold because reasons.
I logged into said account, going to it directly on a whole nother computer. The account was not on hold.
Note the spaces in the sender address and the “I” instead of an “l” in “no rep Iy.”
An inspection of the headers showed that the message was sent from a NAT address and therefore, for all practical purpose, untraceable. I used whois and dig to track down webmails-service.com and the results were most interesting. Needless to say, they had nothing to do with said retail establishment.
You might want to give that a whirl, just to find out how dig and whois work. They are useful tools.
This has got to be one of the clumsiest phishing attempts I’ve ever seen.
Geeking Out 0
Debian Buster/Sid with the Plasma desktop on my new ThinkPenguin laptop. The wallpaper is from my collection.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to the BBC adaption of John Dickson Carr’s The Mad Hatter Mystery from The Old Time Radio Theater with the VLC media player on Ubuntu MATE under the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
Geeking Out 0
Updating a VirtualBox virtual machine of Fedora v. 33 on Ubuntu MATE v. 20.04 LTS with the Fluxbox window manager.
The Trollish Trait 0
Frontiers in Psychology presents a study of those who participate in hate-full conduct on line and finds a common trait. The full report detailing the study’s methodology and findings is at the link; here’s a bit (emphasis added).
It’s All about the Eyeballs 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Susan A. Nolan and Michael Kimball cite research that persons care more about eyeballs than accuracy when they “share” stuff on “social” media. Here are their main points; follow the link for a discussion of each.
- New U.S.-based research finds that we’re good at spotting inaccurate social media headlines, but if they are in line with our politics, we often share them anyway.
- When deciding what to share, we value getting likes and demonstrating our political allegiances more than we value accuracy.
- The pattern of sharing inaccurate posts occurs among both Republicans and Democrats.
Facebook Frolics 0
Zuckerborg assimilation frolics. Here’s a bit from the EFF’s deep dive into Facebook’s proposal for “reforming” the decades old law that regulation the internet; follow the link for the complete piece.
Afterthought:
I believe that law is long overdue for a second look. The central provision currently in question was designed to protect neutral platforms from liability for content posted by users.
At the time the law was enacted, the primary platforms were web hosting providers, BBSes, and services such as AOL and Compuserve.
The era of the algorithm had not yet arrived. I believe that now, in the era of the algorithm, when platforms manipulate content to promote “engagement” and “attract eyeballs,” those platforms are no longer neutral in any sense and should be held accountable for the actions of their algorithms.
But the Zuckerborg’s plan to perpetuate its predominance is not the way to go about it.
Rather, what we need is another Teddy Roosevelt.
Geeking Out 0
The Plasma Desktop on Debian Buster/Sid on my new Thinkpenguin laptop. The wallpaper is from my collection.
Geeking Out 0
I do likes me my pretty pictures.
Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
“The Siren’s (Telephone) Call” 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Matt Johnson looks at research which indicates that even the presence of a “smart” phone, say on a table or in a hand, can distract persons from their current activity, whether that activity is talking with a real live human being, doing a task, or solving a problem.
He sees attributes this to “counterfactual thinking.” Here’s a tiny bit
Follow the link the complete article.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors from the Old Time Radio Theater in VLC on Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
Meta: Blogroll 0
I’ve removed some entries from my blogroll because they have not been updated for some time or are no longer active; I do this from time to time. I shall add some new entries over the next few days.
Geeking Out 0
My new laptop from ThinkPenguin. I selected Debian for the distro, and it arrived in a timely fashion with a clean Debian install from the vendor. It’s pictured running the Plasma desktop environment; that’s swisswatch and GKrellM running on the right side of the screen. The wallpaper is from my collection.
It has an i5 CPU. a 500 GB SSD, and 16 GB RAM and works quite nicely, thank you very much.
Geeking Out 0
I do likes me my pretty pictures. This is Machu Picchu.
Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager.
