Geek Stuff category archive

For iJunkies, available for $199.00:

If he can get iJunkies to spring two hundred simoleons for this, more power to him. They are already willing to pay twice as much for half as good.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long article about cell phone text message spam.

Text spam has increased significantly with sales of smart phones, since the recipient can click on a link right there on the handset. Carriers do not believe that your number has been specifically compromised, but that the spammers are using war dialers.

I’ve gotten a few of these and, following instructions from my carrier, forwarded them directly to 7726 (that’s S P A M on the dialer). Once I do, I almost immediately get a text from my carrier asking for the “from” number for the text, so be prepared with the number.

If you have a smart phone, read the article. It will help you practice Safe HEX.a href=”http://www.ajc.com/news/business/text-spam-messages-on-the-rise/nSW3C/”

Facebook: self-love.

Turns out that when you think of Facebook, you may be feeling a hunka-hunka burning love.

Cue the Barry White makeout music.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business say the desire to indulge in Facebook, Twitter and other social-media pastimes is among the strongest temptations we now face — right up there with sex and cigarettes.

New York City spreads cyber-dragnet.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Tuesday that he’s doubling the number of detectives assigned to combating local teen gangs and that increased surveillance of social networks will be a major part of the strategy.

Join us Thursday.

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 Thursday, October 4.

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)

For some fool reason, as I listened to this episode of Radio Times about “wearable computers,” I was unable to shake this image:

Via Sampler, an image site. Some images NSFW.

You’ve seen Facebook Connect.

When a website invites you to login with your Facebook credentials, that’s Facebook Connect.

I always refuse that invitation, because, by so doing, I am not just logging into that website. I am also telling Facebook that I am logging in and permitting Facebook to track my actions while I’m there. I do the same if I login with Google, Twitter, or other credentials–I open myself to be tracked, then have my behavior sliced, diced, and sold to the highest bidder.

That is not safe HEX.

Indeed, if a site or service requires me to use my Facebook credentials, as Pandora does, I won’t use that site or service.

At MarketWatch, Jake Mann and Meena Krishnamsetty think that Facebook Connect is Facebook’s secret weapon to keep from becoming another penny stock:

If the social media company did choose to slap a price tag of, let’s say $24.99 a month (LinkedIn Premium’s charge, according to the column–ed.), on the service, third-party sites would have little choice but to comply. Any site bold enough to resist this charge would risk losing the fraction of their user base that was signed up exclusively through Connect. In today’s rough-and-tumble e-marketplace, we’re willing to bet that this is a setback that no site, large or small, could afford.

If Facebook does choose to start charging for Connect, it would realize an additional $4.5 billion in annual revenues by the end of 2015. Considering the fact that current estimates from Wedbush Securities and eMarketer expect the company to finish 2012 with close to $5 billion in revenues, we can immediately see that any monetization of Facebook Connect would be material to the company’s bottom line.

And, regarding the slicing, dicing and selling, read this report at EFF.

Read it now.

We’ve been seeing a range of reports about Facebook partnering up with marketing company Datalogix to assess whether users go to stores in the physical world and buy the products they saw in Facebook advertisements. A lot of the reports aren’t getting into the nitty gritty of what data is actually shared between Facebook and Datalogix, so the goal of this blog post is to dive into the details. We’re glad to see that Facebook is taking a number of steps to avoid sharing sensitive data with Datalogix, but users who are uncomfortable with the program should opt out (directions below). Hopefully, reporting on this issue will make more people aware of how our shopping data is being used for a lot more than offering us discounts on tomato soup.

Lord love a duck.

With so much at stake, would you be willing to protect your social networks by purchasing social media insurance?

Justin Basini, CEO of the United Kingdom-based privacy company Allow, hopes this will be a trend that catches on. For £3.99 ($6.46) a month, the company provides a number of services to protect your social media networks and your personal information. Allow will provide legal advice if you are attacked online and want to sue. The company will also help to stop any legal action taken against you that was caused by the hacking.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and simpler just to learn to practice safe HEX?

I have another podcast up at HPR.

This one may be of wider interest than the others I have there. It describes how I use the free and open source Gnu Image Manipulation Project (commonly called the GIMP) to edit pictures for posting here. The GIMP is freely available for Unix, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

I based the podcast on this picture.

It is hardly an exhaustive description of the GIMP, which is a huge and powerful program, but, if you are interested in exploring the GIMP and freeing yourself of proprietary image-editing programs that cost umpty-ump hundreds of dollars, I think you will find it a useful introduction.

For detailed tutorials on the GIMP, you can do no better than this.

First, they lull you into a sense of security, and then . . . .

Truckers following faulty directions by global positioning systems devices have hit bridges in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County more than 200 times in the past two years, the New York Democrat said in a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood yesterday.

About 80 percent of bridge strikes in New York state, where parkways with low overpasses are supposed to be closed to commercial traffic, are caused by GPS misdirection, Schumer said. Even if the roads are well-marked, GPS devices may not note restrictions on trucks and buses, he said.

Senator Schumer wants the government to update GPS technology.

In the meantime, maybe the truckers should consider supplementing their gadgets with a fallback technology.

I believe it’s called “road sign.”

The Denver Post explores how Apple ihypes its iJunk while herds of iJunkies line for their iFixes. You’d think it was a the holy iGrail.

Some consumers, such as Aurora resident Darvell Davenport, say they enjoy the experience of showing up early for a product launch.

“It’s fun, you meet new people and interact,” said the 21-year-old, who

Customers line up outside Park Meadows mall near Denver Friday morning in hopes of being among the first to snag an iPhone 5. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)
has also camped out for an iPad and basketball sneakers. “Just the sleep part is messed up.”

(snip)

“We’re very social animals,” (Univ. of Colo. Professor Phil–ed.) Fernbach said. “When we see someone else doing something, we automatically infer from that that it might be a good thing to do.”

At the San Jose Mercury-News, Apple’s local rag, Larry Magid worries about whether the media are playing into Apple’s hype strategy:

I don’t blame Apple for all the hype. It’s their job to maximize interest in their products. But I do blame the press — myself included — for obsessing over them. I keep telling myself to put Apple products into perspective, but I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to covering Apple more than other companies. It’s partially competitive pressure and, in my case, it’s partially demand from radio and TV stations I work with. And when it comes to blog posts, there’s another incentive — stories about Apple products get more hits than other stories. So if you’re looking to maximize viewers (which often translates into more revenue), then you can’t go wrong by writing about Apple, which, of course, is exactly what I just did.

Trending downward:

But the really bad news for the Romney campaign is that the trend has been downhill, not uphill, since the Democrats left Charlotte. In fact, Romney’s best day on Facebook since the (Democratic) convention wasn’t as good as his worst day during the convention.

Facebook’s facial recognition feature is one of the creepiest of may creepy things Facebook does.

Facebook said Friday it had switched off the facial-recognition tool that prompts users to “tag” photographs uploaded to its website following a privacy investigation.

The feature was identified by regulators as one of the main privacy threats posed by the social networking site.

The story implies that this is only for Europe and that Facebook plans to find some way to turn the feature back by sneaking some kind of “user consent” past the regulators. If they do, no doubt they will turn it on, change everybody’s settings, bury the facial recognition settings many fathoms deep, and dare users to find it.

That’s just how they roll.

Fruit users, take note: The aRrogance of Apple aCcelerates aPace:

Apple is being insane enough to sue an online grocery store! Reuters is reporting that Apple is suing an online Polish grocery retailer named A.pl, which is an obvious pun to the fruit name “Apple” that happens to be their company name too. Apple has also filed a complaint with the Polish Patent Office claiming that the Polish company copied Apple’s logos on its website.

Follow the link to compare the logos. Then point and laugh.

Via LQ.

Via PoliticalProf.

My hosting provider had some issues this afternoon, but seems to have everything up and running now.

Nevertheless, I will leave the site be until tomorrow, so my hosting service can finish cleaning out the dustbunnies.

I’m not complaining. They’ve been rock solid for two and a half years. Computers are stuff. Stuff breaks.

Addendum, the Next Day:

Todd gives a good explanation of what is known so far in his most recent podcast. The relevant part starts about ten minutes in.

Facebook never deletes anything. They may remove it from view, but it’s there somewhere in the Faceborg.

According to the warrant, White’s Facebook account is being maintained by someone else while he is in custody. Police believe White is Facebook friends with possible witnesses in the case, and the warrant said investigators have “knowledge of personal threats against complying witnesses,” but no one has been charged with making threats in the case, Johnson said Friday.

Police are investigating “the deleting of information” and believe access to the account “may reveal information related to Defendant’s pre-murder behavior, associations, and activities as well as post murder behavior and conversations,” the warrant said.

Mark Cuban, who is rich because he knew when to get out of the dot-com bubble, says wasn’t suckered in Facebook stock. Instead, he zucked himself.

(Cuban wrote–ed.) “I bought and sold FB shares as a TRADE, not an investment. I lost money. When the stock didn’t bounce as I thought/hoped it would, I realized I was wrong and got out. It wasn’t the fault of the FB CFO that I lost money. It was my fault. I know that no one sells me shares of stock because they expect the price of the stock to go up. So someone saw me coming and they sold me the stock. That is the way the stock market works. When you sit at the trading terminal you look for the sucker. When you don’t see one, it’s you. In this case it was me.”

(snip)

(Blomberg’s Jonathan Wiel comments–ed.) In spite of the shareholder lawsuits filed against Facebook, I have seen no indication that the company’s executives lied to the public about its performance or prospects. Facebook’s prospectus warned about the risks. The decline in Facebook’s rate of revenue growth shouldn’t have surprised anyone. In 2010, sales grew 154 percent. In 2011, they rose 88 percent. By the first quarter of this year, the year- over-year rate was 45 percent. Last quarter, Facebook’s first as a public company, it was down to 32 percent.

Russia doesn’t trust Google. Asia Times reports:

It has been well publicized that Google collects personal data from Android users in order to target them with advertising. Less than pleased that that sensitive information could find its way into US government, the Russian defense ministry has developed its own stripped-down and encrypted version of the operating system especially for government and military devices. This week it was announced that the prototype platform would be available to the public by the end of the year.

Lots of details at the link.