Geek Stuff category archive

William Shatner is in town and his twitter feed twitted that he was planning to visit the U. S. S. Enterprise, which is being decommissioned due to old age.

Then he wasn’t. When questioned about the twit, his publicist responded as follows:

Of the Twitter post that sparked news reports of Shatner’s appearance, Hepburn said, “Oh honey, you know he doesn’t run that, right?”

Wonder how you get to be a “star’s twit”?

Afterthought:

You didn’t really believe that these important folks who consider themselves important lowered themselves to actually twit for themselves, did you? Tell me you didn’t.

They hire twits to twit.

All seriousness aside, any legal mumbo-jumbo you post on Facebook, or any other site with a “Terms of Service” that you agreed to, means nothing. The TOS pwns you, baby.

At Science 2 dot 0, Kimberly Crandell considers real versus artificial trees from an environmental perspective. A nugget:

While chopping down a living tree may see like the most un-environment friendly thing you can do, in this situation it actually appears to be the “greener” choice. Because it’s not so much about how many uses you can get from your tree… as it is about what the tree is made of, and what it does to the environment when it is created and when you dispose of it.

Artificial trees are manufactured using a polyvinyl chloride (or PVC), which is a petroleum-derived plastic. The raw material for fake Christmas trees is both non-renewable and polluting. Furthermore, PVC production results in the unhealthy emission of a number of carcinogens, such as dioxin, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride.

More at the link.

Jimmy Fallon:

Facebook and the Department of Labor have teamed up for a new app that displays job openings. It’ll be weird when people find a job because of Facebook, then get fired from that job for using Facebook, then use Facebook to find another job.

I have another podcast up at Hacker Public Radio. In this one, I discuss the Move! Bike Computer Android app. If you bike, hike, or run and want to keep track of your route and performance, you might want to check it out.

In the Guardian, Henry Porter considers the allure of twitterers.

Twitter is not alien or new to humanity. It is part of us and shaped by the extrovert side of human nature. Spend time in a room of strangers and it is easy to spot the tweeters, not simply because of the phone in their hands, but they are usually extroverts or have something to sell. A game for an idle moment is to choose natural tweeters from history. Dickens, yes; Austen, no; Sir Joseph Banks, yes; Darwin, no; John Wilkes, yes; Dr Johnson, no; Disraeli, yes Gladstone, no. Shelley, yes; Keats, no. You may disagree with my take, but you see the point: not every personality is naturally drawn to the marketplace.

Facebook will begin rolling out on Friday a new tool which will allow online retailers to track purchases by members of the social network who have viewed their ads.

(snip)

The sales information that advertisers receive is anonymous, said Baser. “You would see the number of people who bought shoes,” he said, using the example of an online shoe retailer. But marketers would not be able to get information that could identify the people, he added.

Remember that, when you drill back far enough, at some point the information is no longer anonymous. Facebook knows who clicked what. In fact, with their persistent cookies, they can know even if you are not logged in to Facebook.

Juan Cole explains how your data is sliced, diced, repackaged, and sold.

Via LQ.

I have a new podcast up at HPR (and still another that I recorded yesterday and will edit today).

This one concerns KeepassX, a free and open source cross-platform password vault that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is compatible with an keepassdroid for Android. I resisted password vaults for years until I was introduced to KeepassX; its cross-platform operation and versatility have converted me.

If you have a number of important passwords to manage (I just counted–I have over 40 that must be secure and therefore unique and that I use regularly), check it out.

Please practice Safe HEX.

Smartphone users are putting themselves at risk of having their identities stolen by failing to log out of apps and clear their browser histories.

A survey by credit reference agency Equifax has found that while more than a quarter of people do online banking on their phone, a third don’t log out of social media or banking websites, 42% fail to clear their browser history and 45% do not protect their smartphones with passwords.

More at the link.

For iJunkies, available for $199.00:

If he can get iJunkies to spring two hundred simoleons for this, more power to him. They are already willing to pay twice as much for half as good.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long article about cell phone text message spam.

Text spam has increased significantly with sales of smart phones, since the recipient can click on a link right there on the handset. Carriers do not believe that your number has been specifically compromised, but that the spammers are using war dialers.

I’ve gotten a few of these and, following instructions from my carrier, forwarded them directly to 7726 (that’s S P A M on the dialer). Once I do, I almost immediately get a text from my carrier asking for the “from” number for the text, so be prepared with the number.

If you have a smart phone, read the article. It will help you practice Safe HEX.a href=”http://www.ajc.com/news/business/text-spam-messages-on-the-rise/nSW3C/”

Facebook: self-love.

Turns out that when you think of Facebook, you may be feeling a hunka-hunka burning love.

Cue the Barry White makeout music.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business say the desire to indulge in Facebook, Twitter and other social-media pastimes is among the strongest temptations we now face — right up there with sex and cigarettes.

New York City spreads cyber-dragnet.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Tuesday that he’s doubling the number of detectives assigned to combating local teen gangs and that increased surveillance of social networks will be a major part of the strategy.

Join us Thursday.

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 4.

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)

For some fool reason, as I listened to this episode of Radio Times about “wearable computers,” I was unable to shake this image:

Via Sampler, an image site. Some images NSFW.

You’ve seen Facebook Connect.

When a website invites you to login with your Facebook credentials, that’s Facebook Connect.

I always refuse that invitation, because, by so doing, I am not just logging into that website. I am also telling Facebook that I am logging in and permitting Facebook to track my actions while I’m there. I do the same if I login with Google, Twitter, or other credentials–I open myself to be tracked, then have my behavior sliced, diced, and sold to the highest bidder.

That is not safe HEX.

Indeed, if a site or service requires me to use my Facebook credentials, as Pandora does, I won’t use that site or service.

At MarketWatch, Jake Mann and Meena Krishnamsetty think that Facebook Connect is Facebook’s secret weapon to keep from becoming another penny stock:

If the social media company did choose to slap a price tag of, let’s say $24.99 a month (LinkedIn Premium’s charge, according to the column–ed.), on the service, third-party sites would have little choice but to comply. Any site bold enough to resist this charge would risk losing the fraction of their user base that was signed up exclusively through Connect. In today’s rough-and-tumble e-marketplace, we’re willing to bet that this is a setback that no site, large or small, could afford.

If Facebook does choose to start charging for Connect, it would realize an additional $4.5 billion in annual revenues by the end of 2015. Considering the fact that current estimates from Wedbush Securities and eMarketer expect the company to finish 2012 with close to $5 billion in revenues, we can immediately see that any monetization of Facebook Connect would be material to the company’s bottom line.

And, regarding the slicing, dicing and selling, read this report at EFF.

Read it now.

We’ve been seeing a range of reports about Facebook partnering up with marketing company Datalogix to assess whether users go to stores in the physical world and buy the products they saw in Facebook advertisements. A lot of the reports aren’t getting into the nitty gritty of what data is actually shared between Facebook and Datalogix, so the goal of this blog post is to dive into the details. We’re glad to see that Facebook is taking a number of steps to avoid sharing sensitive data with Datalogix, but users who are uncomfortable with the program should opt out (directions below). Hopefully, reporting on this issue will make more people aware of how our shopping data is being used for a lot more than offering us discounts on tomato soup.

Lord love a duck.

With so much at stake, would you be willing to protect your social networks by purchasing social media insurance?

Justin Basini, CEO of the United Kingdom-based privacy company Allow, hopes this will be a trend that catches on. For £3.99 ($6.46) a month, the company provides a number of services to protect your social media networks and your personal information. Allow will provide legal advice if you are attacked online and want to sue. The company will also help to stop any legal action taken against you that was caused by the hacking.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and simpler just to learn to practice safe HEX?