Geek Stuff category archive

OhMyGov! reports:

According to Mobiledia.com, after August 28th it will become illegal for teachers to become Facebook “friends” with their students (other “social network” connections are also prohibited–ed.). Instead educators will be allowed to maintain public “fan” pages where students can stay connected to them, just not necessarily friends with them.

Were I a teacher, I would consider being a Facebook “friend” with a student probably a really bad idea. I’d want to be free of the little darlings when I left work for my sanity.

Nevertheless, that does not seem to be what the law is all about.

Emi Kolawole decides to quit Facebook:

Click on the radio button that says you have privacy concerns, and a reminder pops up that you shouldn’t worry because Facebook ensures your information is private. Then, you have the opportunity to delete your account, which I chose to do. You’re then told that you have 14 days before Facebook will completely wipe your data. Log in once — just once — and you’re back. It’s as if you never left.

Two weeks after my emphatic Wall post announcement, I carried through on my threat — as painful as it was.

I didn’t get very far. Before I quit my Facebook profile, I quickly created a new, more public Facebook profile. Why, you ask? I needed a presence on the platform to manage a Facebook page for the Post.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

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, August 4.

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)

You’d be surprised–not just your seamy history of watching Angry Birds invade Farmville to attack the LOL Cats.

El Reg reports on a study by AptiQuant:

After measuring the IQs of exactly 101,326 users and correlating their scores with the browser they had used to access the test, “There was a clear indication … that the subjects using any version of Internet Explorer ranked significantly lower on an average than others,” concludes the study, conducted by the Vancouver, Canada, psychometric-assessment firm, AptiQuant.

Charts and graphs at the link.

See AptiQuant’s own press release.

Something good:

Police believe they were able to prevent a southwestern Pennsylvania man’s suicide after the man’s friend in California alerted police about a distraught Facebook posting.

The “Haters of Southampton High School.”

At Comically Vintage.

All your dataz are belongz to Facebook, Gold Card version.

“We’re running algorithms to serve you up offers that are relevant based on your likes, your preferences and your friends,” Edward Gilligan, vice chairman of New York-based AmEx, said in an interview yesterday.

Through the new “Link, Like, Love” application on the American Express Facebook page, customers can link card accounts to their own pages. Cardholders’ Facebook use and circle of online friends — what Palo Alto, California-based Facebook Inc. calls a user’s “social graph” — will be used to personalize merchant deals, entertainment offers and other perks.

Full disclosure:

I use my AmEx card to the exclusion of other cards.

AmEx has treated me well, including getting me reaccommodated in record time after a missed airline connection in Phoenix. I had arranged a new flight through them before I got through the line to the airline service desk.

I wouldn’t sign up for this on a bet.

In the Boston Globe, Jesse Singal describes the newest internet rage: TRIPE.

Check it out.

This time, a nice story:

From time to time, Ronald Lewis would dream of the ostracized girl he befriended in a dirt-poor village in South Korea when he served there decades ago in the U.S. Army.

But Lewis, of Wilmington, never dreamed of a reunion like the one they have planned for this weekend.

The withdrawn girl he knew as Kim Insoon was a 14-year-old who was treated poorly because she was fathered by an African-American soldier who left her to be raised by her single mother.

Now, she goes by Insooni.

And she’s a star.

They caught up with each other over Facebook.

The story does not say whether this does damage or is merely random vandalism:

If you receive a Facebook link promising a video of Case Anthony confessing to her attorney, DO NOT OPEN IT.

The SOPHIS NakedSecurity blog and PCWorld.com report that the link is a malware scam.

into another wall. (Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)

No, I’m not planning to join Google+.

I am considering Identi.ca.

And one of the best subheads ever:

Apple fails to get US ‘App Store’ trademark injunction

Judge backs Amazon against fruitbite cargo cult

“Fruitbite cargo cult,” indeed.

A snippet form the story:

This claim was rather undermined by Apple’s own Steve Jobs, who called Apple’s app store: “the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone”: a claim which suggests that there are other app stores and that people understand what that phrase means.

In other news, Apple is reported to be mulling plans to trademark every entry in the OED because words are used in iGadget menus.

Rescheduled to Wednesday because of a schedule conflict for the meeting room.

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 Wednesday, July 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)

Greta Garbo would never have managed to alone these days. Now there’s a new ultimate social networking app.

One app the find them,

One app to bind them,

And in the mosh pit grind them.

Sonar uses information from sites such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to show users how they are connected to other people who are checked in at the same location.

“It canvasses the Internet for people who have declared themselves there,” he said.

It then provides the user with a list of the other people at the location and how they are relevant — whether they share Facebook friends, went to the same college or like the same bands.

I’m betting it will be obsolete by Labor Day.

Actually, if the IRS thinks you qualify for a refund, say because of a mistake on your return, they just send it to you.

Dear Internal Revenue Service customer,

After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $120.50.

Please submit the tax refund form and allow us 3-5 business days in order to process it.

To access the form for your tax refund, please Click Here.

NOTE!

Thank you,
Tax Refund Deparment Internal Revenue Service.

A whois tells me the “Click Here” website is hosted in Taiwan.

whois 220.132.160.64

% [whois.apnic.net node-1]
% Whois data copyright terms http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum: 220.129.0.0 – 220.143.255.255
netname: HINET-NET
country: TW
descr: CHTD, Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd.
descr: Data-Bldg.6F, No.21, Sec.21, Hsin-Yi Rd.
descr: Taipei Taiwan 100
admin-c: HN27-AP
tech-c: HN28-AP
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
changed: hostmaster@twnic.net 20030611
mnt-by: MAINT-TW-TWNIC
source: APNIC
(snip)

Vancouver, B. C., hockey rioters being identified via Facebook. From MarketWatch:

Thousands of other riot pictures have shown the impressive power of social and digital media — good and bad — in tracking down the drunk knuckleheads (and probably a few G20-type anarchists) who trashed the lovely city’s downtown after the Vancouver Canucks lost their climactic hockey game. The riot aftermath is also proving what one caller on Vancouver radio talk station CKNW caller said last week: “The internet is forever.”

If you’ve been identified — rightly or wrongly — as one of the rioters in the hundreds of cellphone pictures posted online by outraged Vancouverites since the June 15 ugliness “you could apply for a job in 20 years and all the employer has to do is Google your name. If you’re in one of those photos, you’re out of luck,” correctly noted the Vancouver caller. Current employers of alleged and confessed rioters are also feeling the public’s wrath (more on this below).

The internet is still a public place.

My two or three regular readers know that I am skeptical about the “cloud,” the latest marketese for “file servers,” except that these servers belong to someone else, out there, out of your control.

Now there’s another reason not to put your data on their computers. Raw Story reports:

In the brave new world of cloud computing, where data is stored off-site in massive server farms instead of on a user’s local hard drive, privacy and security are paramount in the consumer’s mind.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, their concerns are essentially moot thanks to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which a key Microsoft official said recently permits the U.S. to spy on data stored within cloud servers across the European Union.

The revelation of transcontinental spying, which has long been suspected, came from Gordon Frazer, Microsoft U.K.’s managing director, speaking at an announcement event for the company’s new suite of office software.

Crackers don’t have to be smart. They just have to be not quite so dumb.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test this year to see how hard it was for hackers to corrupt workers and gain access to computer systems. Not very, it turned out.

Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.

“There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots,” said Mark Rasch, director of network security and privacy consulting for Falls Church, Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corp.(CSC)

Details and some guidelines for safe HEX at the link.

What is it about touching keyboards that disengages the brain relay, rendering the courtesy circuit inoperable?