Geek Stuff category archive

Good-bye, Mr. Chips:

A hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 400 billion virtual poker chips.

In court Ashley Mitchell admitted penetrating the systems of online gaming firm Zynga to steal the chips.

He laundered the haul via a series of Facebook accounts in a bid to escape being caught.

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-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, February 3.

Directions: Lake Taylor Hospital-1309, Kempsville Road, Norfolk, 23502 (Kempsville Rd. at Lowry Rd.) 461-5001

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks) at Uno Chicago Grill, Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). Accessible through the Janaf parking lot or directly from the ramp from Virginia Beach Blvd. to Military Highway north.

John Cass of the Chicago Trib takes on Deion Sanders, Jay Cutler, Carlton Fisk, and news reporters’ fascination with twits (emphasis added):

Cutler was roughed up again and again in that game last Sunday with the Green Bay Packers. Finally, after being smashed by one 300-pound lineman after another — after an entire season of being smashed — Cutler’s knee gave way.

Cutler couldn’t play, the Bears lost and Sanders decided to tweet to all his fans that Cutler had no guts. A few other morons followed suit, then many ignorant, anonymously malicious fans joined in.

Sports reporters mined these seething electronic nuggets, although I don’t think they went to journalism school to report on the electronic equivalent of what was scribbled on the urinal wall in a gas station.

Follow the link to find out what Carlton Fisk has to do with all this.

Heh.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page has been hacked by an unknown person who posted a status update suggesting that the site should let people invest in it rather than going to the banks.

The page belonging to the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was named Time’s Man of the Year in 2010, was hacked some time on Tuesday.

The message left by the hacker read: “”Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus described it? What do you think? #hackercup2011”.

(snip)

Embarrassingly for Facebook, more than 1800 people “liked” the update before the company took down its chief executive’s page. Facebook has made no public statement about how the hack occurred.

Add another one to the list of reasons I’m losing interest in college football.

If you think the fuss over the NFL draft is over the top (face it, televising the draft is a strategy for ESPN to sell more NFL-related ad time and nothing more), consider this:

Facebookers have started harassing high-school athletes over what colleges they sign with. A high school star from Mississippi has quit Facebook:

“I saw rumors on the Internet with people saying I decommitted from Mississippi State because my momma has been working for this Ole Miss guy and she cleaned his house up for a year and she made $100,000,” he told the paper. “If my momma made $100,000 a year, I wouldn’t be driving the truck that I’m driving. I would have had a vehicle a long time ago. It’s just the little stuff like that.

“I got a lot of trash talking by both schools on Facebook, but that didn’t have a lot to do with it. But when you start getting my mom involved and my family involved, that takes it to a whole another level.”

On Tuesday, C.J. Johnson said goodbye to Facebook with this post:

“This is my last Facebook post and I’m gonna leave facebook with this. Linda Johnson has never worked as a house worker making 100,000 dollars a year and I will not be a Mississippi state bulldog and I’m not considering Mississippi state anymore bc you have constantly comment on my page send me crazy inboxes and has made my recruiting experience a living nightmare. Goodbye facebook.”

It’s only a damned game, for Pete’s sake.

Coincidently, I received this picture in an email about five minutes before stumbling over that news item (picture below the fold):

Read more »

Alex Beam wonders about the Library of Congress Twitter archive:

Cast your mind back to last April when the Library of Congress breathlessly announced the creation of a Twitter archive. Oh, brave new world! The thoughts of Ashton Kutcher (“I’m co-hosting Regis and Kelly today’’) memorialized for the ages. The media went nuts, and Library officials were sounding off to anyone with questions about this important new historical resource, available to — nice Orwellian touch here — “qualified researchers.’’

Now you could hear a pin drop.

Follow the link to see how many persons have twitted the article.

Next up: Archiving old “While You Were Out” phone messages–but only the pink ones.

I know it is a silly thing to be excited about, but I am still excited about it.

I’ve made enough posts at LQ to qualify as a “Senior Member.”

Rep’s not bad either.

3,994 more posts and I get to be a “Guru.”

I think I got me some geek cred.

All joking aside, when I was first learning my way around Linux, LQ was indispensable to me. The folks there are quite tolerant of newbies and willing to answer questions, even when they are badly asked.

It is nice to be able to pay it forward.

One of the members of my LUG posted this to the list.

Be guided by it.

Oh, for the good old days, when teepeeing someone’s front yard was the be all and end all.

Actually, the most ambitious stunt I remember was when some of my classmates stole an outhouse–yes, some country folk still had outhouses back then–and left it in someone’s driveway. Never did find out whose privacy they spirited away.

On Oct. 8, the teen created a fake Facebook profile as a transfer student at Clearview from outside the area. He threatened a shooting rampage and targeted specific students and teachers, authorities said. In addition, he used online chat rooms to conceal phone threats called into emergency dispatchers in Mantua Township.

“All those calls resulted in a police response,” Dalton said.

On Oct. 16, the teen called 911 and reported that a gunman had shot and slashed several people at the Telford Inn on Route 45. Some people were dead, he said, and others were injured. There was a “massive response” as authorities from more than five jurisdictions flooded the area, closing down the normally busy highway shortly after 4 p.m.

On Oct. 18, Harrison Township police learned about the Clearview threats on Facebook and turned to the prosecutor’s High-Tech Crime Unit for assistance.

The teen faces seven charges, including bias intimidation, disorderly conduct, and conspiracy.

Shaun Mullen lays out the issue as clearly as can be. A nugget:

What Verizon and its brethren really want to do, of course, is impose tiered service on you and I in order to reduce competition, block certain services, force subscribers to buy their own services no matter how uncompetitive they may be, and impose premiums for heavy use and bandwidth hungry peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent.

Comcast, for its part, has twice been caught red handed trying to choke off peer-to-peer traffic. It backed off both times, but is now suing the FCC for the right to control the Internet tap as it sees fit. And lurking in the background is the aforementioned threat to innovation.

Cable companies, phone companies, and other providers of the internet connection pipelines are utilities and should be treated as such.

Their job–and charges–should begin and end with making sure the pipes are working. End of story.

Phil Sheridan is writing about a football game. His words have wider application:

The technology (Twitter–ed.) at work here is the product of genius. Unfortunately, it can be used to expose complete idiocy.

I wonder about the “genius” part.

Twitter is the pet rock of communications technology.

Facebook is its Cabbage Patch Kid.

(All that guff about “Twitter Revolutions” says more about media’s masturbatory fascination with gadgets than it does about Real Life.)

El Reg takes a look at Facebook’s current security practices.

It’s conclusion: Somewhere between non-existent and lousy:

“I definitely feel that Facebook could be doing more to both better secure their users, and to ensure that privacy is treated as a higher priority,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told El Reg.

Facebook may talk a good game but a quick search (viewable only if logged into Facebook and safe providing you don’t click on the links) shows hundreds of victims have installed a rogue app that falsely promises the ability to “see who has viewed your profile”.

Facebook ought to have someone searching for such scams and stamping them out, something that isn’t happening as yet. “Often I see these scams spreading for days on end, with no obvious action taken by Facebook,” Cluley said.

Streaming at Funny or Die.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

Busted.

Two Florida girls are facing cyberstalking charges for allegedly creating a fake Facebook profile in the name of a fellow high school student and placing obscene photos on the page, including one showing their classmate’s head atop the body of a “nude prepubescent girl’s body,” according to investigators.

More at the link.

Crackdown on twits for hire in the UK:

In the first of its kind, the OFT (Office of Fair Trading–ed.) has brought a case against a PR firm that was discovered to be paying bloggers to write effusively about its clients. The watchdog has launched an investigation into Handpicked Media, which operates a commercial blogging network – insisting that it must clearly state when promotional comments have been paid for.

In a statement, the OFT said online advertising and marketing that did not disclose paid-for promotions were “deceptive” under fair trading rules. “This includes comments about services and products on blogs and microblogs such as Twitter,” it said.

Celebrity twitter endorsements are already big business in the US, where artists such as Snoop Dogg can earn a reported $3,000 (£1,900) for sending a tweet endorsing a product. But the US Federal Trade Commission insists that such endorsements must contain the words “ad” or “spon” to show the reference has been paid for. Such a requirement does not currently exist in the UK.

This tale of suspense, betrayal, and the Golden Turnip is weirdly fascinating in a train wreck kind of way.

Background:

BIG TWEET’s power on Twitter has become a threat to celebrities, advertising agencies, network television & Twitter’s main competitor FACEBOOK. Online followers are the new currency. And BIG TWEET has them all. A billion. Whatever he says is heard. By millions. And his unmatched Internet influence has now made him (and his main girl) the number one target of the corporate underworld and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. BIG TWEET and his girl are about to be DELETED! Ordered by an underground secret corporate society, a group of Mexican gangsters have been hired to kidnap BIG TWEET and his girl. Their mission is simple. They must delete them both.

(Warning: Some language that you are likely to hear at your local school bus stop and on the Daily Show.)

Friends go wild.

An Indiana woman last night allegedly stabbed her boyfriend with a kitchen knife after he would not allow her to view his Facebook page, according to cops.

Read more »

Thomas Jones, writing at the Guardian, discusses how Facebook creates and builds on “the illusion that you are among friends.”

It is worth a read, especially the bit on how immersing oneself in Facebook narrows horizons:

And what’s in it for us?

Zuckerberg’s answer to the second question would be that the more Facebook knows about you, the more it can tailor your “experience” of the web to suit you. On the Facebook blog last April, he wrote:

“If you’re logged into Facebook and go to Pandora [an internet radio station] for the first time, now it can immediately start playing songs from bands you’ve liked across the web. And as you’re playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like.”

It’s a nice enough idea, in its limited way, though it misses one of the great points of radio, which is to expose you to music that you and your friends don’t know already: there wouldn’t be a place for someone like John Peel in Zuckerberg’s universe.