Geek Stuff category archive

In New York Magazine, Graeme Wood tells a fascinating tale of digital dishwashing. A nugget:

But sometime in the last decade, the practice of furiously Googling people stopped being creepy and became standard operating procedure. Today, the market in online-reputation management is estimated to be nearly $5 billion, with hundreds of companies devoted to monitoring, improving, and even policing your online profile. The most famous of them, Reputation.com, advertises on NPR and charges in the low thousands of dollars for a basic scrubbing, which involves creating factual but flattering social-media accounts and websites, and more for bespoke guidance about how to protect your reputation online.

That work is not really any slimier than the work of PR firms offline—relentlessly accentuating the positive and hoping no one asks about the negative. But in the digital world, with anonymously registered websites, it’s easier to create natural-seeming whisper campaigns, positive or negative, and disavow any role in them. Michael Zammuto, president of Reputation Changer, founded in 2010, says he has seen numerous clients try to beat Google by flooding the web with junky self-glorifying sites. “These strategies never work over the long term,” he says. “There are no shortcuts.”

No place to hide.

Speaking of meta, I’ve gone through my blogroll (does anyone look at blogrolls any more?) and removed any sites which have not posted since 2012. If their proprietors aren’t interested in them, neither am I.

I’ve also removed Brendan Calling from the sidebar, as it seems to be MIA.

Persons who post pictures of themselves doing everything all over the innertubes have acquired a nickname: Selfies.

Not everyone considers them narcissistic trifling self-absorbed self-aggrandizing twits with nothing better to do.

But Pamela Rutledge doesn’t see it that way. The director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, which explores how humans interact with technology, sees the selfie as democratizing the once-snooty practice of self-portraiture, a tradition that long predates Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

She sees some key differences between selfies and self-portraits of yore. Unlike painted portraiture, selfies are easily deletable. And “bad or funny is good in a way that wasn’t the case when people had to pay for film to be developed,” or for a professional painter, she said.

“Albrecht Durer’s self-portraiture is these incredible self-reflections and explorations of technique, and then when Rihanna snaps her picture it’s just self-aggrandizement, or it’s promotion, so you have a fairly interesting double standard based upon who’s taking the self-portrait,” said Rutledge, in Boston.

Indeed.

Read more »

The internet is a public place.

Remember that.

“When families go on vacation, they don’t do their relatives any favors when they post Facebook pictures and tell everyone how long they’ll be gone,” said Barbara Fore, an elder-related-crimes investigator for the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. “Criminals are monitoring things like Facebook all the time, and they can often find out just about everything they need to know to run their cons.”

The grandparent scam is not new, but the social-media connection is an emerging trend, according to MoneyGram International Inc., a Dallas-based money-wire services company. Nearly one-third of consumers ages 18 to 49 reveal details of their vacations online, which criminals can exploit, according to a recent survey sponsored by the company.

Read the rest, then update your status to “Forewarned is forearmed.”

More here.

Via SMLR.

Even as the public falls on the fainting couch over the NSA, Arthur Dobrin says, “Give it up already.”

A nugget:

The reality is that almost everything about you is already known, if not by the government, then by business. Every time you get on an airplane, you are scanned. Every time you search for a product online, the information falls into the hands of retailers who want you to buy their products.

(snip)

Last year an indignant father accused Target of maligning his daughter by sending her coupons for baby items. It turns out Target knew better than the father. The girl hadn’t yet told her father the news. Data-mining did the job.

In which I surpass enlightenment.

My wired network has stopped working. The wireless seems fine, but the wired has gone MIA.

Today is a troubleshooting day.

I think I’ve identified the problem, but, while I am testing my way to certainty, I will be preoccupied from annoying people via the internet.

I love shooting trouble, when it belongs to someone else . . . .

I hate troubleshooting.

It’s the hunt that is annoying, because, to do it right, you have to do it one step at a time, working from macro to micro, ruling out possible causes with certainty at each step. And, with a wired network, that means juggling wires, lots of wires, often in difficult-to-access locations.

It’s simple (if you understand wires), tedious, and time-consuming. Mostly time-consuming.

Update:

A cable tester is your friend.

Update:

I have spotted the enemy and he has been routed.

Read more »

I’ve added a new page for the Project Files rc.firewall script. It just works, but seems to have disappeared from the inner webs.

If you are looking to configure iptables for Slackware or any *nix OS using BSD style init scripts, check it out.

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.) 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, June 6.

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)

Earlier this year, Psychology Today carried an interview with a man who makes people disappear.

He can’t use an eraser, because once it’s out there, it’s out there. So he uses misdirection.

A nugget:

In fact, you help people bury their online identities. How do you do it?

Usually I’m hired by people who want to hide something embarrassing online or by wealthy people who fear abductions—so a predator trying to plan a kidnapping won’t find any real information about their family on the Net. I take my client’s name and create fake digital identities for it with Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs, business websites. The idea is to make the false identities dimensional and give them a strong Internet presence. Then I take the content to be hidden and manipulate it. If something negative happened to Joe Johnson in L.A., I make it Chicago, then spread it online. I make it appear that the negative info is about Joe Johnson in Chicago—not the one in L.A.

A fascinating read.

(This post arose from George Smith’s comment here.)

Microsoft and Apple have used two different strategies for marketshare: “lock” vs. “lure.”

Microsoft, which has never innovated anything ever, bought promising software and re-engineered it so it only worked with Microsoft products. IE and the infamous “optimized for Internet Explorer” websites were probably the most successful example of this strategy. Eventually, though, the law and the escalating complexity of the engineering caught up with them. The silly *.docx format was probably last gasp of this.

Microsoft is now reduced to trolling Android patents for revenue.

Apple hasn’t innovated anything of note, either, at least not since the Apple II. Tablets, web-enabled phones, and music players were around before iJunk, but Apple did it prettier. Despite the eulogies, Steve jobs was not a tech genius. He was a marketing genius.

Apple build an orchard full of flowering fruit trees, invited people in, then closed the gates to the orchard behind them. And the fruit trees are so pretty that most Apple fanbots don’t even realize that their garden has a wall.

In many ways, Android is similarly locked down, but Android devices typically cost half what equivalent iJunk costs and Google, for all that it’s not a paragon of web virtue, is not nearly so predatory as Apple. Google also wants an open web–open so that they can peek in the windows, true, but open nonetheless.

There are a number of reasons I’ve migrated almost completely to Linux (I do have one Windows computer, over there, in the corner, but right now it’s booted into Linux Mint, which is where it spends most of its time). Among them is that Linux, once you stop thinking in Windows, is simpler and easier to use, more configurable, and ultimately more logical than Windows.

A big one though, is cost: Not just the dollar cost for software ($0.00), but the cost translated into time and freedom.

When I set up a computer with Linux, it is mine to use as I see fit within the terms of the GPL. I am not prisoner to unreadable EULAs; no manufacturer can suddenly revoke my “license” and make legal software (which, in Windows world, I may have paid big bucks for) inaccessible to me.

I don’t kid myself that Linux will be the next big dog. Most computer users have never and will never install an OS. It’s not difficult, but they are petrified by the prospect. Most Linux installers, because their designers know that they may be used by persons who are unfamiliar with the process, are, indeed, designed to be easy to use, but how would persons new to Linux know?

Until a prospective user can see and test Linux as easily as he or she can see and test an Android phone or tablet (how many persons know that Android is Linux?), Linux for home use will continue to be the domain of software engineers, sysadmins, and knowledgeable hobbyists.

A report from the Dutch Television Network:

Via LQ.

But the end is clearly nigh.

After all, the potential buyer is the company that spent millions to convince the public to use a brand name to mean “web search.”

And now the public does a brand name to mean “web search.”

Read more »

In which I achieve Enlightenment.

Another brainstorm from the folks who would sell you things you don’t need at prices you can’t afford. From MarketWatch:

How else to explain the announcement from Hammacher Schlemmer, the 165-year-old catalog dedicated to “offering the Best, the Only and the Unexpected,” that it’s now selling an “iPad Commode Caddy”? The $99.95 chrome-steel stand holds both a roll of toilet paper and an Apple iPad, thereby eliminating “the clutter created by magazines and newspapers,” as Hammer Schlemmer general manager Fred Berns explains.

Picture, if you give a damn, at the link.

If this thing catches on, it’s only weeks until some bozo releases a hack for the iWebcam. And a dollar to a doughnut it will be called “iSpy.”

Phishing comes to cell phones.

Like “phishing” scams, which seek personal information over the phone or via e-mail, “SMiShing” uses text messages, technically called “Short Messaging Service,” to fraudulently acquire sensitive personal information.

Sorrell’s office is reminding consumers to be wary of text messages and calls they did not initiate. And consumers should never give out personal information to an unverified source.

All the computer security in the world can’t overcome stupid.