Geek Stuff category archive

The “Grandma” scam has surfaced in these parts.

You’ve probably heard of it. Someone posting as grandkid calls up claiming to need bail or to have lost his or her wallet in some foreign clime and requests money.

How do they make themselves convincing, you ask?

From the marks’ own words. From my local rag:

Investigators say the scammers use social media to find out about the grandchildren. According to the FBI’s website, “The actual grandson may mention on his social networking site that he’s a photographer who often travels to Mexico. When contacting the grandparents, the phony grandson will say he’s calling from Mexico, where someone stole his camera equipment and passport.”

The phony grandchildren, nieces or nephews also say they don’t want to get their parents involved.

George Smith offers more tech tips:

Don’t watch Net TV on original content server websites of mega-corporations. They drip with what would have been considered malicious programming ten years ago.

Learn why at the link.

George Smith shares some hints for increasing your enjoyment of the Zuckerborg.

Then again, maybe not.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Nir Eyal explains why those smartphone programs that promise to change your life probably won’t.

Afterthought:

I do have one app that might fall in this category. It tracks my bike rides via GPS and tallies up the distances, speeds, and so on, and can map them on Google maps. (When I use it is the only time I turn on the phone’s GPS.)

It does increase the enjoyment, but it doesn’t tell me when or where or how far to ride.

Ex Post Afterthought:

Also, it does not phone home to anyone.

Fortunately enough, I’ve never had to participate in any sort of video conferencing, personal or professional, though I suspect it will eventually catch up with me. I have used Ekiga, but only to make a phone call, not to “skype in,” as folks say today.

I did see a video of an early executive video conference, ca. mid-90s, back when I worked at the railroad.

It taught me one thing vividly: Don’t eat lunch on camera.

Jack Shakely shares his own awakening in the Las Vegas Sun.

The 2-year-old resolutely refused to sit in front of the computer screen and screamed and clawed his way up his mother’s arm like a skittering spider monkey. The 4-year-old was more benign, but after wiping peanut butter and jelly all over the screen and pounding on the computer keyboard, he too lost interest and started wrestling with the dog.

I initially chalked this up to short attention spans until I looked down at the far right corner of my computer screen and saw staring back at me the grimacing death mask of a character out of the cast of “Marat/Sade.” I had Skyped my grandchildren, pulling back the curtain on a bed-headed, stubble-chinned lunatic of a grandfather. Nobody, including me, had any use for this person.

More awakening at the link.

Special July date because Independence Day fell on the first Thursday. Meetings are normally on the first Thursday of each month.

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.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, July 11.

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)

Crackdown. From The Guardian:

Facebook is to crack down on ads running next to offensive material by launching a new system that will create a blacklist of pages and groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content, even if it previously passed its community standards.

More at the link.

The surprising take-away about this is that Facebook has “community standards.”

In New York Magazine, Graeme Wood tells a fascinating tale of digital dishwashing. A nugget:

But sometime in the last decade, the practice of furiously Googling people stopped being creepy and became standard operating procedure. Today, the market in online-reputation management is estimated to be nearly $5 billion, with hundreds of companies devoted to monitoring, improving, and even policing your online profile. The most famous of them, Reputation.com, advertises on NPR and charges in the low thousands of dollars for a basic scrubbing, which involves creating factual but flattering social-media accounts and websites, and more for bespoke guidance about how to protect your reputation online.

That work is not really any slimier than the work of PR firms offline—relentlessly accentuating the positive and hoping no one asks about the negative. But in the digital world, with anonymously registered websites, it’s easier to create natural-seeming whisper campaigns, positive or negative, and disavow any role in them. Michael Zammuto, president of Reputation Changer, founded in 2010, says he has seen numerous clients try to beat Google by flooding the web with junky self-glorifying sites. “These strategies never work over the long term,” he says. “There are no shortcuts.”

No place to hide.

Speaking of meta, I’ve gone through my blogroll (does anyone look at blogrolls any more?) and removed any sites which have not posted since 2012. If their proprietors aren’t interested in them, neither am I.

I’ve also removed Brendan Calling from the sidebar, as it seems to be MIA.

Persons who post pictures of themselves doing everything all over the innertubes have acquired a nickname: Selfies.

Not everyone considers them narcissistic trifling self-absorbed self-aggrandizing twits with nothing better to do.

But Pamela Rutledge doesn’t see it that way. The director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, which explores how humans interact with technology, sees the selfie as democratizing the once-snooty practice of self-portraiture, a tradition that long predates Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

She sees some key differences between selfies and self-portraits of yore. Unlike painted portraiture, selfies are easily deletable. And “bad or funny is good in a way that wasn’t the case when people had to pay for film to be developed,” or for a professional painter, she said.

“Albrecht Durer’s self-portraiture is these incredible self-reflections and explorations of technique, and then when Rihanna snaps her picture it’s just self-aggrandizement, or it’s promotion, so you have a fairly interesting double standard based upon who’s taking the self-portrait,” said Rutledge, in Boston.

Indeed.

Read more »

The internet is a public place.

Remember that.

“When families go on vacation, they don’t do their relatives any favors when they post Facebook pictures and tell everyone how long they’ll be gone,” said Barbara Fore, an elder-related-crimes investigator for the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. “Criminals are monitoring things like Facebook all the time, and they can often find out just about everything they need to know to run their cons.”

The grandparent scam is not new, but the social-media connection is an emerging trend, according to MoneyGram International Inc., a Dallas-based money-wire services company. Nearly one-third of consumers ages 18 to 49 reveal details of their vacations online, which criminals can exploit, according to a recent survey sponsored by the company.

Read the rest, then update your status to “Forewarned is forearmed.”

More here.

Via SMLR.

Even as the public falls on the fainting couch over the NSA, Arthur Dobrin says, “Give it up already.”

A nugget:

The reality is that almost everything about you is already known, if not by the government, then by business. Every time you get on an airplane, you are scanned. Every time you search for a product online, the information falls into the hands of retailers who want you to buy their products.

(snip)

Last year an indignant father accused Target of maligning his daughter by sending her coupons for baby items. It turns out Target knew better than the father. The girl hadn’t yet told her father the news. Data-mining did the job.

In which I surpass enlightenment.

My wired network has stopped working. The wireless seems fine, but the wired has gone MIA.

Today is a troubleshooting day.

I think I’ve identified the problem, but, while I am testing my way to certainty, I will be preoccupied from annoying people via the internet.

I love shooting trouble, when it belongs to someone else . . . .

I hate troubleshooting.

It’s the hunt that is annoying, because, to do it right, you have to do it one step at a time, working from macro to micro, ruling out possible causes with certainty at each step. And, with a wired network, that means juggling wires, lots of wires, often in difficult-to-access locations.

It’s simple (if you understand wires), tedious, and time-consuming. Mostly time-consuming.

Update:

A cable tester is your friend.

Update:

I have spotted the enemy and he has been routed.

Read more »

I’ve added a new page for the Project Files rc.firewall script. It just works, but seems to have disappeared from the inner webs.

If you are looking to configure iptables for Slackware or any *nix OS using BSD style init scripts, check it out.