Geek Stuff category archive

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

I’m on the agenda to talk about my new tablet.

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.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

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

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)

Fakebook.

From the Inky:

CryptoLocker, a new form of malware infecting computers nationwide, locks up files and holds them for ransom.

CryptoLocker, is not a myth or rumor, says Snopes.com, and it makes files “as good as deleted,” unless you pay as much as $300 dollars or euros, according to Sophos, an Internet security provider.

(The article goes on to detail how to protect yourself.)

I have one Windows computer; it’s set to dual-boot with Linux, meaning that, at boot time, I can choose one or the other. Mostly, I run Linux (currently, I have Mageia installed), but I periodically boot into Windows to grab updates and keep my Windows knowledge up-to-date.

Thursday, I booted over to Windows.

Thirty minutes and two reboots later, Windows declared that it was updated. Yesterday, the AV declared that it needed to be updated; as part of the update, it wanted to add a search bar to my browser and other useless stuff to the program load. It also demanded a reboot.

Then Java demanded an update, and it tried to sneak McAffee on the computer. Finally, as I tried to watch a video, the video player I have been testing wanted an update; it tried to sneak four additional things onto my computer.

It was 30 minutes before I could start watching my video.

When you give Linux permission to update programs, the updates run silently in the background and no reboot is required and no attempt is made to smuggle unwanted stuff onto the box (the only time a reboot is required is when the Linux kernel itself is updated, so you can start using the new kernel).

So this is my question for Windows users:

Why the hell do you put up with this?

Deep background in the background of the background twits.

Having worked in passenger rail, I can attest that a passenger train is a public place and should be considered as such.

The twitter may have been, at worst, rude to twit about twittees talking in a public place, but the twittees were stupid.

Also, fewer anonymous sources grinding axes on “deep background” and more willingness to stand behind one’s opinions in public would likely benefit the polity.

Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the US Senate committee charged with holding the intelligence establishment to account, declared on Monday that the National Security Agency’s mass collection of phone records is “not surveillance” and should be maintained as an essential tool to combat terrorism.

(Much more at the link.)

She’s right, though I disagree with her conclusion.

Surveillance is mindful, directed, and rational. It selects a target and follows it, whether for noble or ignoble ends.

The NSA is a mindless vacuum cleaner sucking up everything it finds just because it can, hoping it might find something. It has become a candidate for Hoarders.

I do think it’s quite wrong and illegal for it to do so, but I also think that recognizing the difference between “surveil” and “suck” is vital. The NSA doesn’t surveil.

It sucks.

Putting words in your mouse . . . .

Candice Kilpatrick couldn’t help but laugh when she came across a novelty item on Amazon.com: a latex horse’s head with a bushy mane.

Knowing her friends would get a kick out of the mask too, she shared the link on Facebook.

Soon her friends began seeing an update from Kilpatrick on their Facebook pages that appeared as if Kilpatrick was encouraging them to buy the mask: “Good news everyone. These are 40% off today.”

But Kilpatrick had not posted it. Facebook had turned the link into a personal endorsement called a “sponsored story” paid for by Amazon.

It’s growing practice. Google has given it a “+1.”

If you agreed to the TOS, you have agreed to let them do this (with Facebook, the TOS and privacy policies are moving targets–they change them so much). It’s still slimy.

Much more at the link.

Since I seem to have the mother of all colds, I took a tablet.

I ordered it last week and it arrived today, just in time to distract me from the miseries (to use the term my grandmother would have used).

It is quite nice. It’s very fast, multitasks superbly, and has a refreshing lack of “branding” crapola.

You can expect (or dread) to hear more about it later. I’m already making notes for the podcast.

The headline writers today are clutching their pearls at this:

The National Security Agency is gathering email and instant messenger contact lists from hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, many of them Americans, The Washington Post reported late Monday.

These people suffer a severe shortage of clues. They have no idea how the internet or networks work.

Email addresses and most emails travel across the net in the clear.

When an application for tracking and mapping your bicycle rides* wants access to the contact list on your phone, persons willingly run through Facebook in their digital birthday suits, phishing@hooklineandsinker.ru has been emailing everybody for years, and persons (like me) make email addresses public on blogs and websites, I just cannot get worked up over this. It is much ado about not much of anything.

________________

*Map My Ride (no link–find it yourself). And that’s why I didn’t install it. I use Move! Bike Computer.

Yesterday morning, my attempts to connect to From Pine View Farm repeatedly errorred out with this message.

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache Server at www.pineviewfarm.net Port 80

I started a support ticket with my hosting provider and called to follow up on it this afternoon.

Over the course of ninety minutes, we tried a number of diagnostics and support finally concluded that I had outgrown my hosting plan and will migrate the site to a different server with a different setup to allow more concurrent connections. (I have noticed that my stats plugin has been showing an increase from an average of 300-350 unique visitors to 500-550 unique visitors per day.)

With luck, normal inanity will resume shortly, but I’m going to allow a while for the migration to be completed smoothly.

Too many readers is not a problem I ever expected to have, but one which I find most gratifying.

Thank you, you troublemakers you, every one!

Afterthought:

If you notice any glitches, particularly with linking to or inside the site, please use the “Contact” link at the top right to report them.

Why do I find this disquieting?

Delta Air Lines is jettisoning pounds of paper navigational charts and manuals from its cockpits, replacing them with electronic versions in Microsoft Surface 2 tablets issued to 11,000 pilots.

I used to say that “if you die and go to hell on Delta, you’ll change at Atlanta.”

Now, you get a bonus wait for a virus scan and defrag.

Jack Ohman:

The world was basically a better place before Tweeting. I tweet, reluctantly, and I have some friends who tweet every hour or so. I don’t know what the revenue model is on the that, but I can assure you that what you don’t tweet can’t hurt you #askAnthonyWeiner.

One of my favorite presidents, “Silent” Calvin Coolidge–why? Because he was a jerk– was famous for his terse responses. My favorite was when a drunk woman came up to him at a reception and said, “My husband bet me I couldn’t get three words out of you.”

Coolidge responded, “You lose.”

Backstory at the link.

The ACLU takes on the Zuckerborg’s limitations of statue.

Trouble in the walled orchard’s workers’ paradise.

About 2,000 Chinese employees of an iPhone assembly company fought a pitched battle into the early hours of Monday, forcing the huge electronics plant where they work to be shut down.

Authorities in the northern city of Taiyuan sent 5,000 police to restore order after what the plant’s Taiwanese owners Foxconn Technology Group said was a personal dispute in a dormitory that erupted into a mass brawl.

However, some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory, which employs about 79,000 people and is owned by the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods.

Via LQ.

Oh, my.