Geek Stuff category archive

All ur status upd8tes r belongz to us:

What does your circle of friends say about your creditworthiness? Germany’s largest credit agency, called SCHUFA, believes the answer to that question is: “a lot.” German broadcaster NDR Info revealed on Thursday that the agency planned to mine Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social-networking sites for data to help determine an individual’s ability and willingness to pay their bills.

According to the broadcaster, SCHUFA plans to use Google-like crawlers to scoop up information available on the sites. “The goal of the project is to analyze and research web data,” the agency said in a short statement on Thursday.

German politicians and citizens are not taking this quietly.

Germany has strict laws about internet privacy (remember the great Google street view fuss). Follow the link to Der Spiegel for a roundup of comments from all sides of the spectrum.

It all comes down to copper.

Fresh Air looks at the physical infrastructure of the internet, how it works, and how it’s connected. If you use the internet and don’t understand how it works, this would be a good start. It also give you a basis to start separating fact from hype that emanates from the Cyberwar Consortium for Full-Employment of Consultants.

A snippet from the story from the bit about the transoceanic cables:

(Andrew–ed.) Blum calls these fiber-optic cables, many of which traverse the ocean bottom, the “most poetic places of the Internet.”

“They’re about the thickness of a garden hose, and they’re filled with a handful of strands of fiber-optic cable,” he says. “And light goes in one end of the ocean and out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its journey by repeaters that look like bluefin tuna underwater.”

Follow the link for the story, the transcript, and the audio.

Today, Hacker Public Radio releases episode 1,000.

Help celebrate: Hop over and have a listen. You will certainly find something that interests you (it embraces much more than computers and computing).

Better, contribute a podcast. It’s as easy as making a phone call.

Read more »

All ur data r belongz to Siri (and her corporate masters).

It came as a surprise to some folks at a recent SXSW talk that Apple’s Siri “personal assistant” isn’t just working for us, it’s working full-time for Apple too by sending lots of our personal voice and user info to Apple to stockpile in its databases. Take a peek at Siri’s privacy policy (which, by the way, is pretty difficult to find) and you’ll realize what’s happening behind the scenes.

What info of yours is being collected and how is it being used? When you use Siri, it’s sending your “Voice Input Data” and “User Data” to Apple to be used for a variety of purposes.

Apple is not talking about what it is doing with the data, but it is almost certainly not altruistic.

My fiend’s daughter loves her some Siri. She is almost certainly pwned by Apple.

Via GNC.

I’ve gotten well over 100 spam comments in the last 12 hours. That’s about five times the usual daily rate and still climbing.

Fortunately, not one has yet gotten past Akismet.

The local rag has a long article about how persons’ Facebook fulminations are coming back to haunt them in court. If you decided to misbehave and if you regularly have a few beers, then update your status on the innerwebs–or if you just delight in foolishness–you should read it. A nugget:

Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Edward W. Hanson Jr. said he’s often amazed by the self-destructive evidence people create on social-media sites.

“It shocks me sometimes, the things that people write,” he said. “We all say these words, but to see them in print, it’s just another level.”

The internet is a public place.

MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman recently upgraded his iJunk. He is not impressed with Siri:

I admit it: I had been dazzled by those catchy television commercials showing tough-talking actor Samuel L. Jackson and the ever-adorable actress/singer Zooey Deschanel doing their mundane household chores assisted by Siri, the voice-activated system on the new iPhone.

In other words, I bought the Apple-generated hype. I was a sucker.

You see, I have been disillusioned by Siri. It strikes me as some kind of gimmick for self-indulgent people with a tremendous amount of time on their hands.

For a thrilling demonstration of Siri’s skill, listen to the first five minutes of this.

Full disclosure:

I don’t have any iJunk; I refuse the pay twice as much for just as good, while living in a censored, walled orchard. My phone, though, does have a voice feature which I have played with, but hardly use. Mostly it just gets in the way when I have an attack of wrong damn button.

Eva Ritvo tries to puzzle out the hypnotic effects of Facebook and of synthetic Facebook “friends.” A snippet:

Some say that inside information is the fuel that drives Wall Street. Well, the inside dope on Facebook is dopamine, an organic chemical released in the brain and associated with pleasurable feelings.

When we view an attractive face, dopamine is released in the same reward pathway that is stimulated when we eat delicious food, make money, have sex, or use cocaine. We all post our best photos on Facebook and carefully select our profile picture to welcome friends to our page. Users can click on and feel the rush anytime they want.

Of course, sad stories or trying moments are shared too, but the goal there is to get viewers to secrete oxytocin, the “love hormone,” and elicit their help. Feeling supported during times of crisis helps mitigate the pain caused by the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. Facebook fools our brain into believing that loved ones surround us, which historically was essential to our survival. The human brain, because it evolved thousands of years before photography, fails on many levels to recognize the difference between pictures and people.

Jeff Gelles thinks that persons who bought into the Facebook IPO were blinded by the hype. A nugget:

Facebook’s prospectus, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February and amended several times since, gave detailed warnings about some of the risks that could undermine the company’s ambition “to make the world more open and connected” and to profit handsomely as a result.

For example, the prospectus warned repeatedly that Facebook was seeing a shift among users to mobile apps – 488 million of its monthly active users connected through mobile devices sometime in March, it said.

(snip)

So how was that IPO share price determined? In theory, it was based on factors such as the company’s so-called enterprise value, and complex models estimating the worth today of tomorrow’s profits.

But experts say that a sizable part of the calculation – say, the difference between setting the IPO price at $25 vs. $38 – isn’t about the supply and demand for company’s services, but about the supply and demand for shares of a big-buzz IPO.

At Balloon Juice, mistermix has a slightly different take:

As far as I can tell, Zuckerberg just wanted to cash in.

If you are going to follow either of the links, follow the latter. The sentence after the one I quoted pretty much sums it up.

Steven Johnson of Temple University thinks the end is nearing faster than you think:

Can you remember the last time you fired up a Netscape browser, visited a GeoCities website, or invited a friend to join AOL Instant Messenger? I’m convinced that Facebook is as doomed to fail as those ventures.

Follow the link for his reasons.

Dick Destiny offers advice on how to use Facebook, rather than have Facebook use you. His advice has merit.

A nugget:

So to make TimeLine useless, as far as my account and anyone viewing it is concerned, new material is deleted every couple days, sometimes sooner.

This had made a profile in which there are serial posts up until TimeLine was announced. And then an increasing gap, punctuated by a couple music videos I want to remain on one page of scroll, and whatever I have posted to Facebook in the last couple days.

By doing this your Facebook existence is mapped only in the present, or whatever slice of it you wish to present. All status changes and activities are immediately hidden. And if you wanted to see something posted last week, if it wasn’t one of my YouTube things, you can’t. You have to come here. Period. And if you don’t know how to do that because your primary cyberspace experience is Facebook, you won’t be able to do it. Which is fine with me.

I have taken a different approach.

The only thing I post to my Facebook page is my blog posts (the link is automated) and the occasional smapshot of a duck or a goose or a cloud. Since this blog is public, advertising it over Facebook is fair game.

Any Facebook messages I get are emailed to me. Unless they are important, I ignore them.

As First Son once observed, this has made my Facebook page a “very weird internet place.”

Zuckerberg’s Law?

Share me a break.

Aside:

Criswell predicts that, just as with so many companies during the tech bubble of the 90s, the IPO will be Facebook’s highpoint. It’s all downhill to Yahoo-ville and AOL Town from here.

At Hacker Public Radion, David Whitman has a fascinating interview with Dawn McKenna, who is an American Sign Language simultaneous translator.

She discusses training and certification and what simultaneous translation to and from sign language involves. If you are at all curious about what is going on when you see an ASL translator in that little window on your television, go listen to it now.

Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. And, in the run-up to the social network’s initial public offering of stock, half of Americans also say the social network’s expected asking price is too high.

The other half were busy posting Farmville updates.

The Guardian offers five steps to being twitterific. A nugget:

4. Never give in

Restraint. Thoughtfulness. An ability to stop when the argument is exhausted. All qualities that the dedicated Twitter fighter must strangle inside if they are to succeed. Make Courtney Love your model: the more you can blurt out, the more litigious and the less punctuated it is, the better your form will be. One sign that you’ve really got your bicker on is the “repeated goodnight” tactic, as used by Joey Barton while ranting about Alan Shearer on Match Of The Day. Barton signed off his furious tweets “goodnight”, “sleep well” and “goodnight”, all within an hour, and so demonstrated that he was definitely very calm, very contained and not hovering over his Blackberry gnarled by a fury that could never be relieved no matter how many times he tried to lance his rage-pus with tweets.

Go get your twit on.

Never fear. I shan’t be paying attention.

At what point does a Facebook chat become a confession?

Remember, the internet is a public place.

It belongs to them.

The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET.

The Bureau has been quietly meeting with representatives of these companies, as well as Microsoft (which owns Hotmail and Skype), Facebook and others to argue for a legislative proposal, drafted by the FBI, that would require social-networking sites and VoIP, instant messaging and e-mail providers to alter their code to make their products wiretap-friendly.

Via LQ.