Geek Stuff category archive

The ACLU does not think much of Apple’s iJunk iNanny.

A nugget; much more at the link:

Wired reported last week that the Apple App Store has rejected an app that compiles news reports in order to map overseas U.S. drone strikes, and provide users a pop-up notification whenever a drone strike has been reported.

(snip)

An app providing a stream of basic information about the conduct of a policy that is the subject of current public debate would seem as American as, uh, apple pie.

Of course, Apple is a private company not covered by the First Amendment, and the App Store is not a public forum. In fact, Apple is arguably like the New York Times, with a right to pick and choose what it “publishes.”

But aside from what Apple has the right to do, you have to wonder how many of its customers say to themselves, “wow, I got a new iPhone, oh boy, now I can access all the information in the world that Apple allows to filter into my new device because nobody finds it objectionable!”

Join us tonight.

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, September 6.

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)

Facebook is cracking down on fraudulent “Likes.”

Ensuring the integrity of “Likes” is serious business for Facebook, which depends on advertising revenue. Many of the ad campaigns companies conduct on Facebook are designed to garner “Likes,” a sign that their marketing message has resonated with consumers.

“It’s their currency,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at research firm Altimeter Group. “Facebook is playing the Federal Reserve, to take the counterfeit currency off the market to ensure that there’s quality in the marketplace.”

I wonder how many regular users actually pay attention to who likes this corporation of that bit of over-priced lickspittle merchandise.

Facebook is messing with its privacy settings again with a view towards duping you into giving away your deepest darkest.

The wise Facebook user will check his or her settings immediately or, better, just get the heck out. Otherwise, you are zucked.

If I didn’t use Facebook to pimp this blog, I would have left it long ago. For years now I’ve put almost nothing but blog posts up there (First Son said that my Facebook page was “a very weird internet place”) and, even before that, I knew that the internet is a public place and exercised due care. I try to behave when I’m in a public place. It fools people.

Via the Network Security podcast, which you should subscribe to if you don’t already.

What Dick Destiny said.

Spent yesterday trying to get my new modem on line. For some fool reason, it and the router would not talk.

I actually arranged for my ISP to send out some techs. They walked into the room, looked at the modem, and it starting talking to the router.

As we used to say in tech support, FM.

Now to catch up on the old RSS feeds.

A fatwa on selling twits?

Dick Destiny explains the magic of how Facebook knows everything about you (or at least thinks it does).

The Bears have it.

Facebook Inc. (FB)’s 45 percent drop since its initial public offering generated returns of more than 500 percent for European investors that bought structured products benefiting from the stock’s decline.

A put warrant, a security for speculating on the future direction of a company’s share price, which predicted Facebook would be at $22 by March, cost 6 euro cents ($0.07) to buy in the week after Facebook went public with an initial price of $38. Today, with Facebook trading at $21.10, the warrant is worth 37 euro cents, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Follow the link for a somewhat murky explanation of the even murkier world of betting that stocks will go down.

The answer is always more technology.

Richard Parker surveys the morass of spam, phishing, and general crap that fills our email boxes and then considers one proposed solution:

IdeaPlane (a British outfit–ed.) advocates that companies ditch e-mail. Amen. But in favor of what exactly? A phone call? A meeting? A Star Trek communicator? No. Gartner, the IT research firm, predicts that in 2014 companies will substitute enterprise social networking for e-mail in 20 percent of their communications. In other words, Facebook for business.

Awesome. I’m sure that will work.

———————

*The creeping, crawling chaos.

Emphasis added:

In a return published this week, the company said 8.7% of its 955 million global users are not real.

There were 83.09 million fake users in total, which Facebook classifies into three groups. The largest is made up of almost 46 million duplicate profiles, accounting for 4.8% of all accounts. The company defined that category as “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account”.

What were deemed “user-misclassified” profiles amounted to 2.4%, almost 23 million, where Facebook says “users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation or non-human entity such as a pet”.

Finally, “undesirable” profiles accounted for the remainder, about 14 million, which are deemed to be in breach of Facebook’s terms and conditions. The company said this typically means accounts that have been set up to send spam messages or content to other Facebook users.

As much as I deride Facebook, I find the characterization “fake,” except as applied to the “undesirable” accounts, a little strange.

If someone stumbles over a Facebook profile for Cuddles Cat and can’t realize that Cuddles didn’t actually create the profile itself, that someone has no business using a computer.

More to the point, if someone maintains two Facebook accounts, a public one for customers, publicity, and professional networking,* and a private just for family and friends, I would consider neither inherently “fake,” though it is certainly likely that such accounts may also be created with fraudulent intent.

Facebook, though, does consider them inherently fraudulent, I suspect because they pose an inconvenience to Facebook’s task of assembling, sorting, and selling your data to the highest bidder.

There is much less here than meets the eye.

___________________

*Facebook wants such accounts to be moved to “Facebook Pages,” which have different privacy settings and capabilities from “Profiles,” hence the label of “misclassified.”

Join us for the special super-duper summer meeting.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Bring your old hardware to swap or to find it a new home.

What: Special Summer 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 Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available

When: Noon till 2:00 p on Saturday, August 4.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

I have escaped from that vile Meebo bar that’s crawling through the internet like some sort of evil slime mold.

Don’t think that clicking to hide it makes it go away. It’s still following you around in its seedy trench coat; you just don’t see it.

I installed the NotScript extension in Opera and the No Script extension in Firebox. (I primarily use Opera, but sometimes use Firefox.)

The Opera Not Script extension displays a little pyramid in the address bar. Clicking the icon displays the settings dialog. It may need for you to modify your Opera preferences for storing user script information; Opera’s default is no storage space. If it does require the change, clicking the message (which shows when you click the pyramid) will take you to the entry that needs modification and tell you what to enter (5000–the value is in kilobytes).

Both extensions allow you to configure them to allow scripts to run on pages where you find them useful. For instance, the WordPress post editor uses Java to handle the menu, so I allowed scripts from my own domain.

In Opera’s Not Script, I did that by clicking the pyramid for the dialog and selecting to allow scripts on from pineviewfarm.net.

Firefox’s No Script displays a message bar at the bottom of the browser window if scripts are present on the page; clicking the “Options” button to the right displays the settings menu. You can click to allow scripts there.

I took a quick look in Microsoft Internet Exploder, but could find no such functionality. Plus Internet Exploder tried to reset my default search engine to Bing! (Hoick! Ptui!) without asking permission.

I haven’t needed “no script” extensions before because my hosts file was sufficient for my needs, but Meebo make me go over the edge.

The Guardian on your legal right (in the UK, at least) to be a twit:

The right to instantaneous self-publishing – without any of the editorial or legal checks that applied in the past – carries with it a responsibility to think what you are doing. Or, at least, it does if you don’t wish to end up with egg splattered across your reputation.

(snip)

When emails were a novelty, however, few parliamentarians paid attention to e-freedoms – unaware they had anything to do with day-to-day life. Well, now they do – and so merit the old vigilance. Tweets may invite rage or ridicule. But a tweeter’s right to make a fool of themselves must be defended to the death.

Read the rest.

Your “news feed” is for sale:

As its stock continues to be battered by skeptical investors, Facebook is hoping that a new type of advertising format, called sponsored stories, may help overcome concerns about its future.

These ads, designed to join the normal streams on members’ news feeds and status updates, are already generating about $1 million per day in revenue in limited testing.

Like, no likes, dude. OhMyGov! reports on, like, like botnets:

“Spammers and malware authors can mass produce false Facebook profiles to help them spread dangerous links and spam, and trick people into befriending them” Sophos’ Graham Cluley told the BBC.

According to Cluley, most suspect accounts are usually run by a single person operating thousands of profiles via specialized computer software. Most of the fake accounts appear to come from the Middle East and the Pacific Rim.

For corporations, the revelation that most of their social media fans don’t exist may mean a redesign of their social media strategy with more sophisticated media analytics. For government agencies like the U.S. Department of State and Defense–the notion the citizens they serve may also be fake poses a problem for agencies that measure success based on only Facebook.

Nerdcore twits:

Various social networking, news aggregator, and gamer sites are atwitter about a fan who was kicked out of a show at Union Transfer in Philadelphia by the ‘nerdcore’ rapper MC Chris after sending a tweet that criticized one of the acts.

If you are not quite sure what nerdcore is, Dual Core is probably the best example (warning: the rap is good; the recording isn’t).

Found on LQ.

My friend recently got a Windows 7 computer.

She is moving slowly from her XP box to it, as she has XP tailored to her taste and isn’t eager to learn about all the changes Microsoft makes with every new version to convince you it’s something new (kind of the way car makers in the 1950s moved the chrome around with every new model year).

So it’s been sitting over there (——————>) all week doing nothing.

Apparently, it can’t deal with that. It is demanding a reboot, just because it can.

Maybe it wants its electrons stroked or something.

My old Slackware webserver, long since retired, was once up for 156 days without a reboot.

One of the members of my LUG discovered a Linux server at his work that had been running without a reboot for over three years. I say “discovered” because it was so trouble-free that the staff had forgotten about it.

And this Windows box, which has been sitting there doing nothing, now wants a reboot I guess because it’s bored because no one has taken it out to play.

It must take a lot of expertise to write code this crappy.

Words fail me.

Full Disclosure:

I’ve never gotten a message like this on my Windows 7 box, but it’s usually booted into Wubi.

Like shape-shifters, SOPA and PIPA regenerate themselves in new forms to subordinate your internet freedom to Hollywood’s inability to come up with anything more creative than yet more comic book remakes.