Geek Stuff category archive

Wired weird:

Five Rochdale (U. K.-ed.) men have been jailed for using iTunes music gift vouchers to launder money in an internet scam.

The men used stolen credit card numbers to buy £750,000 worth of vouchers to sell at cheaper prices through eBay.

Speak up for your privacy. Sign the ACLU’s petition.

We are all Philip Marlowe now:

The two trends — more snooping and more publicizing our lives online — have dovetailed to create a background-checking free-for-all. And while many of the websites can swiftly and benignly link you to an old classmate or a missing aunt, the same technology raises troubling questions about privacy for ordinary citizens whose online information may not be as secure as they think. Internet security expert Ryan C. Barnett says many users aren’t connecting the dots when they give up their birth date, e-mail address and dog’s name at multiple way stations across the Internet.

“These sites are so spread out that a lot of users volunteering all these separate bits of information don’t think about all of it together in totality,” he says. “People think this social-networking stuff is so cool, but they don’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes.”

Read the story and be guided accordingly.

Now, automated twits!

Heaven protect us.

I upgraded the Ubuntu Linux OS on my laptop to the newest Ubuntu release this weekend. Except for a hiccup from my ISP, it was flawless.

Read more at Geekazine.

In a world without walls, who needs Windows?

Last night, I was upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx (don’t blame me for the names–blame Mark Shuttleworth).

After two hours, with 11 minutes to go in the download, the cable connection rolled over and played dead. I had to power down the router (that’s fancy talk for pull the power plug out), then power down the modem, reconnect the modem and wait for it to come back to life, then reconnect the router.

Fortunately for me, the download picked up where it left off.

This is not an isolated event.

My connection frequently rolls over and plays dead and I have to go through the disconnect-reconnect routine when I’m doing big downloads.

I do not do BitTorrent. I don’t even like BitTorrent.

I do not download music and movie files from illicit sites and I observe copyright, but I occasionally do big downloads–big legal downloads of free and open source Linux distributions, software upgrades, newsgroup posts, and the like. And this outfit regularly fails in the middle of them requiring me to disconnect-reconnect or, at worst, start all over and hope to get lucky.

It’s not me. I’ve been doing this stuff too long.

In five years of using Comcast, I did not encounter the problems I have encountered in five months of using this outfit.

My ISP advertises itself as “Your friend in the digital world.”

Yeah.

Right.

Steve Jobs on why Apple bans Flash from a number of its products (emphasis added–full story at the link):

Mr Jobs said Flash was made for an era of “PCs and mice” and performed poorly when translated to run on touchscreen smartphones and handheld devices.

He also criticised the technology for being only under the control of Adobe.

Control.

No doubt that is the issue. Flash is outside the walled garden.

Later that same evening:

The video is throwing an error message.

It is throwing the same error message on Raw Story, where I found it.

Conclusion: Not my problem, so I can’t fix it.

One hopes it will clear up later.

On the Media covers the Twitter conference, trying to figure out what, exactly, is the point. From the website:

Last year the buzz on Twitter was that it was a mind-bogglingly important tech innovation, the only catch being that nobody could figure out what exactly it was for. This year, the geekerati say they’ve finally answered that question. Bob headed over to the Twitter-centric 140 Character Conference to learn more.

Follow the link to listen or read the transcript (scheduled to be posted yesterday afternoon) or listen here:

The San Jose Mercury-News looks at the willingness of persons to live their lives in public.

“These companies are betting they take this data, monetize it or resell it,” said John Borthwick, an entrepreneur based in New York who advises companies like DailyBooth and Hot Potato, which lets people share plans and experiences of live events. “But the assumption that every scrap of data is actually useful to individuals, or even companies, will be tested.”

Many persons have no idea how public the internet is, such as the folks who post pictures of themselves inhaling a doobie and then wonder why no one wants to hire them.

Todd went on about the new Facebook privacy changes in today’s podcast. He was rather miffed.

So am I.

If you use Facebook, check your privacy settings carefully, particularly the ones under “Applications.” Facebook’s defaults are to let anyone in, especially Facebook’s “partners.”

Opt out information is here, courtesy Todd.

Read more »

I’ve spent the afternoon messing around with the blog, updating the sidebar to add some Virginia blogs to the list, moving stuff around to what I hope is a more convenient order, and adding a “Donate” button on the theory that it can’t hurt and might help.

Expect more tinkering over the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, I know. Nobody looks at the sidebar anyway.

Richard Clarke has a new book out, which means that “Cyberwar” hype–also known as full employment for computer security consultants–is making the rounds of the talk shows.

The list of luser$ hacker countries of which we should be very, very afraid commonly includes North Korea, China, Iran, and whatever other nation is the bad guy of the moment.

People buy into the hype because, for most of us, a computer is a magic box we don’t understand–so it’s easy to believe it can be used to saw the beautiful assistant in half and then reassemble her.

It’s akin to your older relatives who, in the early days of electricity, feared that current could somehow leak from an outlet that had no plug in it. As George Smith points out,

Why, all those wily North Koreans have to do is rent a hotel room in China and launch a cyberattack on the US on the 4th of July against government websites hardly anyone visits!

This is not to say that computer security is unimportant. It is. There are safety rules for computers just as there are for electricity.

As George Smith also wonders, does the recent boo-boo by McAfee warrant adding them to the list of rogue states?

Read more »

The Boston Globe offers a “How To Twit.”

Luk–booty on @balcony.

Bill Shein. A nugget:

QUESTION: When I opened the box, I found my new iPad was wrapped in a black turtleneck. Why?

ANSWER: The black turtleneck is the official symbol of our iLord and iMaster, Steve Jobs, praised be He. Every iPad comes lovingly wrapped in a turtleneck that has been Blessed by Steve™ at no additional charge. As you may have heard, five of these shirts were once worn by Steve. If you get one – which will smell strongly of pure genius – you’ll win a tour of Apple’s secret design studio. During your visit, you’ll learn about upcoming products like the Everlasting GatesStopper and the iHuxley, the perfect device for our brave new world of permanent distraction.

From a Twitter convert:

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden.

Read more »

Read how AT&T tried to take over the broadcast waves in 1922.

Think net neutrality.

AT&T story via GNC.

Via GNC.

The Guardian:

When Business Week reports that an iPhone app has been developed to celebrate the internet cult Epic Fail, you know – to use another meme that has penetrated popular culture – it has reached tipping point.

In truth, this probably means the putdown phrase has now – ahem – jumped the shark . . . .

In other news of fail, I was listening to Linux Outlaws yesterday when Fab tried to say “a fail on my part” and failed on his part.

Read more »

Clay Shirkey describes how major media is responding to the digital world (emphasis added):

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”