Geek Stuff category archive

The San Jose Mercury-News reports on Southwestern Bell’s Cingular’s AT&T’s throttling the data usage of persons using its unlimited data plan for iGadgets.

AT&T claims it is cracking down on the few data hogs who are ruining life for the rest of the world. But it looks like more than that.

What’s surprising people like Trang is how little data use it takes to reach that level — sometimes less than AT&T gives people on its “limited” plans.

Trang’s iPhone was throttled just two weeks into his billing cycle, after he’d consumed 2.3 gigabytes of data. He pays $30 per month for “unlimited” data. Meanwhile, Dallas-based AT&T now sells a limited, or “tiered,” plan that provides 3 gigabytes of data for the same price.

Users report that if they call the company to ask or complain about the throttling, AT&T customer support representatives suggest they switch to the limited plan.

Dissension in the ranks.

A Chicago Police captain is suing a fellow officer for allegedly posting defamatory comments about him on Facebook, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday afternoon in Circuit Court of Cook County.

I have a new podcast up at HPR.

Aside:

I love the “long-awaited” in the description. It was submitted quite a while ago and was pushed back in the schedule because of more time-sensitive submissions–and that was good.

Under HPR practice, first submissions by new hosts take precedence and HPR’s quest for new hosts has been paying off big-time.

You too can be a host. You don’t even need a recorder; you can phone it in to USA +1-206-312-5749 or UK +44-203-432-5879 (follow the link for instructions).

Ken Eisold considers Facebook and asks, “Where does all the money come from?”

A nugget:

Facebook makes most of us think of “friends” and “likes,” birthdays and parties, vacations and photos. But the vast stores of information the social networking site has accumulated turns out to be a bonanza for investors. Personal information has become a commodity, the value of which we are just beginning to appreciate.

In other news, Facing South reports on Facebook’s holding the few jobs it provides (less than 3,500 worldwide) hostage for tax breaks.

Yahoo News considers how Facebook puts you on sale. Remember, users are not the customers; they are the product.

A snippet:

According to their filing, Facebook had 850 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) at the end of 2011. From that user base the company generated roughly $3.7b in revenue, or just under $4.50 for every member. Nearly 90% of this number comes from selling your information to advertisers who, in turn, try to sell you things Facebook says you want.

That may seem like a reasonable trade until we get to the IPO. “If this thing goes public at the price they’re expecting (Facebook) will get $120 per user,” Matt Nesto notes. Said another way, Facebook is going to sell you for 120 bucks. Wall Street bankers will get a cut of this figure, with Facebook getting the bulk of the money. FB users get nothing.

Via LXer.

Though I do think that much of what Anonymous does is the internet equivalent of toilet-papering someone’s yard, it is difficult not to take a perverse delight in their eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers.

Trading jokes and swapping leads, investigators from the FBI and Scotland Yard spent the conference call strategizing about how to bring down the hacking collective known as Anonymous, responsible for a string of embarrassing attacks across the Internet.

Unfortunately for the cybersleuths, the hackers were in on the call too — and now so is the rest of the world.

Anonymous published the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the Jan. 17 call on the Internet on Friday, gloating in a Twitter message that “the FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

At Psychology Today, Jeff Wise speculates that Facebook is on its way to being another MySpace, which itself is on its way to being another AOL.

He believes that Facebook’s “cultural moment has passed.”

A nugget:

Facebook, then, should be a focus of our online experience: it should be the irreplaceable source of the up-to-date social information that we so instinctively crave. Imagine some long-ago villager who knew exactly what everyone was up to, and could give you the low down, without boring you with useless facts about people you didn’t care about. This is the person you’d want to spend time with. This would be the person with savvy.

Once upon a time, Facebook felt like this. But the longer I use it, the less savvy it seems. Most of the information that crawls down my home page is about people I don’t even know. The information they’re conveying is stuff I wouldn’t care about, even if I did know them. Someone read an article; someone joined a group; someone commented on her own photo. The signal to noise ratio is too low. Facebook has gone from being the village yenta to the village idiot.

Philly dot com has some hints for saving money and waste caused by appliances, mostly electronic gear, sopping up stand-by power:

Standby power consumes 5 percent to 10 percent of all electricity in developed countries, but there is some debate whether consumption is growing, the folks at Lawrence Berkeley say.

An informed and aggressive approach can cut standby use about 30 percent.

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, February 2.

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)

In the Guardian, Charlie Booker considers sharing, the automated electronic version that strips your computer life naked by default.

A nugget:

It’ll only get worse. Here’s what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the 43rd minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I’m not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in The Sims. Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll.

You know how annoying it is when you’re sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future. Might as well get used to it. It’s an experience we’ll all be sharing.

Read the rest.

If you’re still not sure why all the fuss about SOPA/PIPA, listen to last week’s episode of the Network Security Podcast (podcast download at the link).

The podcast normally reviews computer security news from the week, concentrating on issues of substance, rather than the gee-whiz scary stories and consultant hackery that makes it into television news and newspapers. Such stories are designed to create FUD leading to consultancy contracts to design defenses that won’t work against threats that don’t exist. (Dick Destiny keeps a close eye on that kind of stuff).

On last week’s NetSec podcast, the panelists chose to concentrate on one issue: SOPA/PIPA and the internet protest of a week ago Wednesday. That spun into a fascinating conversation that explored copyright, piracy and allegations of piracy, and corporate business models and practices for nearly an hour–twice the usual length of the podcast.

If you were unclear on the implications of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA before, you won’t be after loading this up in your podplayer.

Selective twits:

The social network Twitter is facing a storm of criticism from users, after revealing that it has implemented a system that would let it withhold particular tweets from specific countries.

The company has insisted that it will not use the gagging system in a blanket fashion, but would apply it on a case-by-case basis, as already happens when governments or organisations complain about individual tweets.

Much more at the link.

Fed app with it all.

The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks.

It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.

Absolutely nothing could go wrong with this.

Also, pigs, wings.

The ACLU takes a look at Google’s new privacy policy.

If you ever log in to Google (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Plus, YouTube, or anything else Googly), you should read it.

Kudos to Google for explaining in plain English that you can check in, but you can never leave.

As my two or three regular readers will see, I played around with the CSS a bit yesterday, changing the

• font size of posts,
• color of links,
• padding, margins, and background color of blockquotes.

Anyone who was watching while I was testing would have seen thing change with every page refresh.

I leaned towards green rather than blue for links because of the whole pine tree thing.

Feedback welcome.

Shadowy stealth twits.

El Reg:

Clothes that track your every move could fill Apple fanbois’ wardrobes after the fruity tech titan patented new wearable technology. The designs, approved yesterday, describe “smart garments” with embedded sensors and a two-way communications link to an external database.

The more of this sort of stuff I read about, the less I participate in social spybots networks.

I would not be surprised if someone starts selling call-home clothing without telling us.

Aside:

If you are reading this on Facebook, know that the posts are automated. I actually sign in less than twice a month unless I get a message in email (also automated).

I have seen several posts from various bloggers saying that they supported yesterday’s blackout, but feared taking down their sites because they were afraid they couldn’t get them back up.

The solution is simple–you don’t take down your site. (I’m tempted to add, “For Pete’s sake!”)

When a browser hits a site, it resolves by default to a file named index.html. If no index.html is present, it looks for index.php, and so on, through the various recognized formats.

I created the redirection page to send browsers to nosopa.org and added a little text to it, so, if the redirection were delayed for some reason, users would know they had landed at the right place and why there was no there there.

I then used FTP to rename my index.html and index.php files to index.html.orig and index.php.orig (the browser doesn’t know what to do with a *.orig–my term for “original”–file) and to send my new index files to the website. I left the rest of the website untouched.

When a browser hit the site, it saw the new index files with the redirection command and sped over to nosopa.org.

Late last night, I used FTP to delete the special index files and renamed to *.orig files back to their regular names, and Viola! the site was restored.

Piece of cake.

The prosecution presents Exhibit 1,342,923,673.5.

Via Balloon Juice.

It’s been a year since I redesigned the appearance of this site and it’s time to mop up some loose ends, as well as mix a few metaphors.

Since I started this blog, I’ve chosen to surround quotations with links, rather than to insert the link to the source elsewhere in the post, which is the more common practice. It seemed to me to indicate a direct quotation without requiring extraneous words–I have enough extraneous words already.

It was the first independent design decision I recall actually thinking about.

I finally took some time to figure out how to turn off the underlining in quotations, one thing I’ve wanted to do for some time now, because it truly clutters up longer passages.

It required changing this bit of css almost halfway down the stylesheet; the change took a lot less time than tracking down the culprit:

.posttext a {
/* text-decoration:underline */
text-color:blue
}

The “/* */” at the beginning and end of the second line “remarks out” (marks to be ignored) the underlining. The third line I added so that the text color would distinguish the link. (Remarking out the entry makes it easy to undo, if need be. Undoing is, fortunately, easier to do in HTML than it is IRL.)

I also changed the global “hover” quality (“hover” is when the mouse is held over an item) to display an underline by adding the third line below, for those who might have trouble distinguishing the color (the “color” line changes the color to a shade of red on hover). “Global” means this behavior will occur everywhere in this blog:

a:hover {
color:#753206;
text-decoration:underline
}

At this point, I have one more tinker for when that round tuit finally arrives–to make the dashes longer. (Update: Done!)