Geek Stuff category archive

Facebook attempts to bamboozle users into using at-facebook-dot-com email addresses.

Typical.

The link describes how to stop displaying the at-facebook-dot-com email address, but, consistent with its practice, Facebook moved the settings around again and it took me about five minutes to find it. There is no way to make that at-facebook-dot-com email address go away, though.

Anyone who tries to email me at that address, forget it. I’ll never check it and, if I stumble over it in a drunken stupor, I’ll just delete the mails.

Thanks to Todd for reporting this.

Via TuxRadar.

Science 2.0 considers the signs of the fail:

A report from market research agency Conquest into the social media habits of 14-24 year olds claims that Facebook’s core audience – teenagers – are starting to fall out of love with the website and that activity may have peaked amid a groundswell of dissatisfaction and concerns over privacy and even bullying.

. . . Grievances triggered by Facebook’s culture include obsession with appearance and acceptance of sexually provocative behavior; increased negative self esteem, vulnerability to bullying, depression caused by jealousy and comparing one’s life to peers and inability to project one’s true self.

In other words, the same problems teens have had for thousands of years, but now we can blame social media.

Follow the link to find out what the heck “fuicide” is.

First, a judge gave Oracle their walking papers, and now, this:

A U.S. judge on Friday ruled that Apple Inc. cannot pursue an injunction against Google’s Motorola Mobility unit, effectively ending a key case for the iPhone maker in the smartphone patent wars.

The ruling came from Judge Richard Posner in Chicago federal court. He dismissed the litigation between Apple and Motorola Mobility with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled.

Judges seem to be educating themselves to see through the lawyerly smokescreen about software patents.

Software patents are ludicrous, because they are attempts to patent ideas–attempts to keep other persons from carrying out that idea in a better way. Suppose some dude in the 1880’s had patented the concept of powered heavier-than-air flight and threatened to sue the Wright brothers when they finally got it–er–wrignt?

We would never have had the opportunity to sit in metal tubes for hours at a time without air conditioning while waiting for those “mechanical difficulties” to be remedied.

What can be copyrighted and licensed is software code, which is a work product, the fruition of an idea.

Even a Forbes columnist thinks they are evil.

A hoot.

Warning: Language.

Don’t worry about translating. Just watch.

H/T Susan for the link.

Microsoft unveiled its tablet yesterday.

I predict that it will be almost as successful as the Windows phone.

Pat is the benevolent dictator of Slackware, the oldest named Linux distribution still actively maintained (it’s older than Red Hat and Debian by a matter of months). It was also my first and remains my preferred Linux distro.

In the course of the interview, Pat manages to quote both Einstein and Lao Tsu. Read it now.

My two or three longtime readers will remember that this site started out self-hosted with dynamic DNS from no-ip.com (whose service was excellent and whom I recommend unconditionally). The free domain name from no-ip was frankwbell.no-ip.info.

About two years in, I got the current domain name.

I finally went back through the SQL tables and changed all the references to “frankwbell.no-ip.info” to “pineviewfarm.net.” I did it the hard way, with phpMyAdmin search, because I didn’t have the energy to work out an SQL query to do it all in one swell foop.

Now, in the first two years or so of posts, the pictures should display and the internal links should work once more.

Only five years behind schedule.

I think this is my favorite set of now-resurrected pictures.

Turn your favorite webpage into a Geocities site.

Via Thoreau.

Let Amy tell you all about it.

All ur status upd8tes r belongz to us:

What does your circle of friends say about your creditworthiness? Germany’s largest credit agency, called SCHUFA, believes the answer to that question is: “a lot.” German broadcaster NDR Info revealed on Thursday that the agency planned to mine Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social-networking sites for data to help determine an individual’s ability and willingness to pay their bills.

According to the broadcaster, SCHUFA plans to use Google-like crawlers to scoop up information available on the sites. “The goal of the project is to analyze and research web data,” the agency said in a short statement on Thursday.

German politicians and citizens are not taking this quietly.

Germany has strict laws about internet privacy (remember the great Google street view fuss). Follow the link to Der Spiegel for a roundup of comments from all sides of the spectrum.

It all comes down to copper.

Fresh Air looks at the physical infrastructure of the internet, how it works, and how it’s connected. If you use the internet and don’t understand how it works, this would be a good start. It also give you a basis to start separating fact from hype that emanates from the Cyberwar Consortium for Full-Employment of Consultants.

A snippet from the story from the bit about the transoceanic cables:

(Andrew–ed.) Blum calls these fiber-optic cables, many of which traverse the ocean bottom, the “most poetic places of the Internet.”

“They’re about the thickness of a garden hose, and they’re filled with a handful of strands of fiber-optic cable,” he says. “And light goes in one end of the ocean and out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its journey by repeaters that look like bluefin tuna underwater.”

Follow the link for the story, the transcript, and the audio.

Today, Hacker Public Radio releases episode 1,000.

Help celebrate: Hop over and have a listen. You will certainly find something that interests you (it embraces much more than computers and computing).

Better, contribute a podcast. It’s as easy as making a phone call.

Read more »

All ur data r belongz to Siri (and her corporate masters).

It came as a surprise to some folks at a recent SXSW talk that Apple’s Siri “personal assistant” isn’t just working for us, it’s working full-time for Apple too by sending lots of our personal voice and user info to Apple to stockpile in its databases. Take a peek at Siri’s privacy policy (which, by the way, is pretty difficult to find) and you’ll realize what’s happening behind the scenes.

What info of yours is being collected and how is it being used? When you use Siri, it’s sending your “Voice Input Data” and “User Data” to Apple to be used for a variety of purposes.

Apple is not talking about what it is doing with the data, but it is almost certainly not altruistic.

My fiend’s daughter loves her some Siri. She is almost certainly pwned by Apple.

Via GNC.

I’ve gotten well over 100 spam comments in the last 12 hours. That’s about five times the usual daily rate and still climbing.

Fortunately, not one has yet gotten past Akismet.

The local rag has a long article about how persons’ Facebook fulminations are coming back to haunt them in court. If you decided to misbehave and if you regularly have a few beers, then update your status on the innerwebs–or if you just delight in foolishness–you should read it. A nugget:

Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Edward W. Hanson Jr. said he’s often amazed by the self-destructive evidence people create on social-media sites.

“It shocks me sometimes, the things that people write,” he said. “We all say these words, but to see them in print, it’s just another level.”

The internet is a public place.

MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman recently upgraded his iJunk. He is not impressed with Siri:

I admit it: I had been dazzled by those catchy television commercials showing tough-talking actor Samuel L. Jackson and the ever-adorable actress/singer Zooey Deschanel doing their mundane household chores assisted by Siri, the voice-activated system on the new iPhone.

In other words, I bought the Apple-generated hype. I was a sucker.

You see, I have been disillusioned by Siri. It strikes me as some kind of gimmick for self-indulgent people with a tremendous amount of time on their hands.

For a thrilling demonstration of Siri’s skill, listen to the first five minutes of this.

Full disclosure:

I don’t have any iJunk; I refuse the pay twice as much for just as good, while living in a censored, walled orchard. My phone, though, does have a voice feature which I have played with, but hardly use. Mostly it just gets in the way when I have an attack of wrong damn button.

Eva Ritvo tries to puzzle out the hypnotic effects of Facebook and of synthetic Facebook “friends.” A snippet:

Some say that inside information is the fuel that drives Wall Street. Well, the inside dope on Facebook is dopamine, an organic chemical released in the brain and associated with pleasurable feelings.

When we view an attractive face, dopamine is released in the same reward pathway that is stimulated when we eat delicious food, make money, have sex, or use cocaine. We all post our best photos on Facebook and carefully select our profile picture to welcome friends to our page. Users can click on and feel the rush anytime they want.

Of course, sad stories or trying moments are shared too, but the goal there is to get viewers to secrete oxytocin, the “love hormone,” and elicit their help. Feeling supported during times of crisis helps mitigate the pain caused by the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. Facebook fools our brain into believing that loved ones surround us, which historically was essential to our survival. The human brain, because it evolved thousands of years before photography, fails on many levels to recognize the difference between pictures and people.