Geek Stuff category archive

Microsoft, which is congenitally unable to innovate–everything they sell was created by someone else and either bought or copied and coopted by Redmond–except in “marketing,” has another strategy for ruling the world‘s pocketbooks.

Learn more here and share the link.

And I don’t mean “swipe” as in “bankster”:

Via El Reg.

And strong passwords won’t help with this. El Reg reports:

Home Depot, The Wall Street Journal, Photobucket, and hundreds of other websites share visitor’s names, usernames, or other personal information with advertisers or other third parties, often without disclosing the practice in privacy policies, academic researchers said.

Sixty-one percent of websites tested by researchers from Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society leaked the personal information, sometimes to dozens of third-party partners. Home Depot, for example, disclosed the first names and email addresses of visitors who clicked on an ad to 13 companies. The Wall Street Journal divulged to seven of its partners the email address of users who enter the wrong password. And Photobucket handed over the usernames of those who use the site to share images with their friends.

Q. What is the major cause of computer security problems?

In the agony column.

What does “Ask Amy” get horribly wrong in her answer?

Twitter this week lost a key court ruling in a patent infringement case and will be forced to go to trial unless the two sides can settle beforehand.

(snip)

An expert hired by patent attorney and inventor Dinesh Agarwal says Twitter owes him between $11 million and $41 million in royalties. Ten years ago, Agarwal invented an online interactive system for following famous people but never developed it commercially. He alleges Twitter used his idea to develop a similar interactive program on its website last year.

As much as I disdain Twitter and its tittering twits, I must say this is absurd.

The plaintiff fits the absolute definition of a patent troll and illustrates why software patents (which are patents on ideas, as opposed to a copyright on code, since code is a real thing) are a bad idea.

No place to hide:

An Associated Press-MTV poll finds 3 in 10 teens and young adults have had people log on to their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other Internet accounts and either impersonate or spy on them. That’s nearly double the level seen in 2009.

The poll found solid majorities saying they knew who was behind it.

Arresting status updates:

A Montgomery County (Pennsylvania–ed.) man was charged Monday in an alleged extortion attempt involving a sex tape of his ex-girlfriend, police said.

The investigation into the video collection of Omari Listenbee, 33, of Glenside, began when a 37-year-old Exton woman filed a report with West Whiteland Township police.

The woman said Listenbee, her former boyfriend, had threatened to post sexually explicit videos of her on the Internet, including the Facebook accounts of all of her friends, unless she paid him $3,000, said West Whiteland Sgt. Martin Malloy.

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 6.

Note: Meetings are normally on the first Thursday of each month.

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)

Demonstration here.

Breaking: When people are in a bad mood, their twits reflect it.

Drawing on messages posted by more than 2 million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages follows a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.

The report, by sociologists at Cornell University in New York and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms within the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies also have mined the mountains of data pouring into social-media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet but looked at collective moods over time, in different time zones or during holidays.

In other news, sky blue, apple red.

Nude on the net:

Thanks to European data privacy rules, some folks have successfully requested and received a detailed list of all the data that Facebook has kept about them. They’ve released a redacted version of the document for one person, which comes in at a hefty 880 pages. To be honest, nothing in this is all that surprising, but it does highlight just how much data Facebook ends up with and that it appears to not delete very much, if anything, ever.

The parts that seemed a bit questionable to me were things like recording every computer from which you’d ever logged in… as well as a list of all other Facebook people who have logged in from that same machine. I’m assuming they use this for security/anti-phishing, but it’s still a bit creepy to keep all that information. The other part that’s a bit strange is that Facebook keeps deleted messages. That’s a bit more troubling, since most people expect that when they delete things, they’re really deleted. Still, while a lot of people may make a big deal out of this, it still doesn’t seem particularly surprising or really bad. At best it’s just a reminder of how much info you’re giving out, and that Facebook is hanging onto… forever. Perhaps your “permanent record” is becoming a real thing.

I have decided that, whenever I visit Facebook, I shall do so in a private browser session, because of this.

Via GNC.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

At sfgate dot com, James Temple expresses his qualms about Facebook’s creepy internet stalking “frictionless sharing.” Then he describes how to tweak your privacy settings:

Click the little downward facing arrow in the upper right hand corner of your Facebook page and select “privacy settings.” Then select “edit settings” under “apps and websites.”

From there, click on each app (I had 26), and change the selection following “Who can see posts and activity from this app?” from “friends” to “customize.” Finally, click to change the setting to “only me.”

Despite the pain, this can be a useful exercise. You’ll likely be shocked at the number of apps that a) you never realized you authorized b) have the right to post to Facebook “as you” and c) have access to your photos, videos, relationships and other information generally irrelevant to their stated function.

The Chicago Tribune wonders:

Which brings us back to the crossroads.

Market research is nothing new. The concentration of data in the hands of one company is, though, and it should raise concern. The data (and those patterns) provided by his 750 million users — us — is marketing gold that will be parlayed into enormous financial gain for Facebook and its partners (there’s a Facebook IPO just around the corner).

Swept up by the feel-good effects of “friends” and “like” buttons, 750 million of us have unwittingly allowed a business model that relies on our giving away information and then celebrating the “free” access we have to it.

Shouldn’t Mark Zuckerberg be paying us?

The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here.”

A neutrino walks through the door.

Via KPO.

Political frolic leads trial and acquittal:

The case against Zimbabwean Vikas Mavhudzi, accused of subversion because of an alleged post on the social media site Facebook, has collapsed.

Prosecutors failed to retrieve the message he allegedly posted on Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s page in February that praised Egypt’s uprising.

Vikas Mavhudzi is not an obscure private person. He’s the Prime Minister’s primary political opponent.

A devastateding combining of intellectual power.

Facebook members will soon be able to pipe their profile directly to a connected Twitter account.

The social networking giant said it was working on the feature in a document sent to developers about upcoming changes.

Netflix Twits:

Netflix’s plans to re-name its DVD rental business Qwikster have hit problems.

While the firm has secured the web domain for Qwikster, the Twitter handle for it is the property of an American man called Jason Castillo.

Aside:

Where do people get the time to watch all those movies?

Wubi is the Windows Ubuntu Installer; it installs a stripped-down Ubuntu Linux in a container on a Windows system. Instead of installing a full office suite, for example, it installs a word processor and a spreadsheet application.

You need not repartition the hard drive or touch your Windows installation. Instead, Wubi creates a “virtual” hard drive in a container on the actual hard drive.

I started playing with it a couple of days ago and am typing this under Wubi. I wanted to verify that all the hardware in this here XP box would work fine with Linux, because I’m considering Linux-fying it, since I have a newer Windows machine at my disposal.* (Linux hardware issues are rare these days, but they can still happen, primarily with a couple of brands of wireless chipsets, some USB network adapters, and certain brands of printers: Lexmarks and Canons are notoriously cranky with Linux; HPs and Epsons usually work smoothly.).

If you are curious about Linux, but don’t have a spare computer to throw it on, aren’t ready to make a complete switch, or are hesitant about setting up dual-boot, Wubi will satisfy your curiosity.

Read more »

“Here’s looking at you,” writes Ed Chen at Science 2.0:

Facebook has always been plagued with privacy issues, such as revealing to third parties personal information which may be used to sell you goods and services . . . . However, there is a far more insidious algorithm embedded in facebook. By a few refreshes and a few clicks, you can easily see who has most recently been looking at your facebook profile, down to a timeframe of 36 hours, as well as who your overall top stalkers are. Of course, they may not be exactly stalking you, but they are watching you.

He goes on to describe several techniques for following your followers.