Geek Stuff category archive

Two US women discovered they were married to the same man when one of them popped up on Facebook’s “People you may know” feature, prosecutors say.

The man’s estranged wife clicked on a link to his new partner’s Facebook page to see them with a wedding cake, court documents in Washington state say.

I always wonder, when I see a story like this: One woman’s enough trouble. Why two?

I imagine Cincinnati-based photographer Mark Byron figured the same. He expressed anger about his pending divorce and child visitation issues in a forum he thought was private and contained.

“If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband’s life and take your son’s father away from him completely,” he wrote, “all you need to do is say you’re scared of your husband or domestic partner and they’ll take him away.”

Bad move.

Though Byron had blocked his estranged wife from his Facebook page, she still learned about the post and filed a motion in court accusing him of violating an earlier protection order.

A magistrate agreed with Elizabeth Byron and issued a ruling that free speech experts say is worrisome. It should also concern the bajillions of people who use the networking site as if it were the kitchen table, a place to confess over cafecito.

The article continues with a long discussion of whether the post was a threat or an expression of frustration, but skirts the real point.

The internet is a public place.

Relationship status: Strained.

The FBI hopes to raise awareness about the case of a fugitive security guard charged with killing his partner in a $2.3 million heist by showcasing it on the agency’s Facebook page, the first time a case from the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office has received such attention.

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, March 1.

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)

Alyona discusses the proposed consumer privacy “bill of rights.”

For punishment gluttons, I have another podcast up at HPR.

An Android phone is not an ideal device for editing HTML code on a remote site.

Symbolic equality the Facebook way:

KATIE MacTurk and Megan Edwards got the best Valentine’s Day gift they could have asked for yesterday.

Vindication.

St. Joseph’s University’s alumni association announced that the lesbian couple were the winners of its controversial “How I Met My Hawkmate” Facebook contest, based on the number of “likes” their entry received.

Their victory came after the university initially removed their entry from the webpage, only to reverse its decision last week amid a hail of protest.

One more time, the Internet is a public place. If it’s on the web, eventually someone’s going to see it.

Aside:

The sad aspect of these stories is that some the persons who got in trouble were not the ones who made the posts. Instead, their bad judgment was advertised through the bad judgment or sometimes the vindictiveness of others.

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.