Geek Stuff category archive

The San Jose Mercury-News has a long article about Microsoft’s advertising campaign designed to impugn Google’s integrity.*

Given Microsoft’s history of duplicitous, underhanded, and monopolistic business tactics (PDF at link), it really isn’t in the position to impugn anyone’s anything.

But there’s a bright spot.

They’ve hired someone with a proven record of fail to manage it.

Now the Redmond, Wash., software giant is waging a high-profile, election-style blitz against its Mountain View rival — using public opinion polls, for example, to shape rapid-fire attacks — with the help of Mark Penn, a veteran public relations executive and former campaign adviser to former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Penn, who previously consulted for Microsoft, was hired full time last year.

Afterthought:

I seldom use Google. I use Startpage (ixquick in the UK).

____________________

*Not that I’m a big fan of Google, but they do seem to have a shred of integrity, unlike their biggest competitors, Facebook and Microsoft. Google is not a paragon, but neither is it a paragoons.

When iJunk casts its spell (emphasis added).

A cider shop in Norfolk (UK–ed.) has had to change its name after receiving up to 24 phone calls a week from fanbois with computer problems.

Since an Apple Store opened in Norwich, locals have been calling mistakenly phoning the Apple Shop in Wroxham Barns, with their iPhone and Apple-related woes.

Apple Shop owner Geoff Fisher told the BBC: “My telephone number has a Norwich prefix and so people unawares ring up the Apple Shop. All I can say to them is, ‘I’m very sorry, I can’t help you, but please do come along and get some proper Norfolk cider to get over your sorrows’.”

Some persons couldn’t pass a licensing test for driving a computer.

(It’s probably just as well. Apple Computers probably would have sued him. They do stuff like that.)

Aside:

Funny, I thought iJunk “just worked” in a trouble-free starry-eyed paradise sort of way.

I would hate to have to index the blither.

Something’s going on out on the innerwebs.

Akismet has caught over 500 spam comments to this blog in the past 48 hours. That’s about 450 more than the normal crop for two days.

Somehow, the damned cat managed to open the Opera preferences dialog, navigate to the “Advanced” tab, scroll down to “Cookies,” and set Opera not to accept cookies (I keep it set to “Accept only from the site I visit”), thus preventing me from logging in and compelling me to use another, less feature rich, much better known, and somewhat clunkier browser, until an error message from another site (“Hey, we need to drop a cookie, doofus!”) alerted me to what might have gone wrong.

Retiring twits, who manage cover-up–oh, never mind.

In which I interview Mark A. Davis of the Tidewater Unix Users Group.

If at first . . . .

The “Facebook Stalker,” a 20-year-old South Jersey man arrested last fall for threatening a woman on the social-media network, was charged again Wednesday with making terroristic threats.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

Join the new TWUUG forums and help them grow, then join us Thursday in person.

Tidewater Unix Users Group

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, February 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)

Nowhere to hide (emphasis added):

Facebook Inc. (FB) is developing a smartphone application that will track the location of users, two people with knowledge of the matter said, bolstering efforts to benefit from growing use of social media on mobile computers.

The app, scheduled for release by mid-March, is designed to help users find nearby friends and would run even when the program isn’t open on a handset, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.

It appears that, once again, you’re zucked.

On the Media investigates the coverage of the hacking of the New York Times.

Mark Zuckerberg failed to make Business Week’s list of the worst CEOs of 2012–by the width of an electron.

Two other executives—Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Andrew Mason at Groupon (GRPN)—almost made the list. The rap on Zuckerberg is his “massive ego,” while both men get demerits for immaturity and shares that move in only one direction, and not the right one.

Follow the link to see who did make it.

Outting twits:

Twitter confirmed Friday that it had become the latest victim in a number of high-profile cyber-attacks against media companies, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users.

The surprising part of this story is that they got fined.

The operator of the popular Path social networking app is paying $800,000 to settle charges of illegally collecting personal information from mobile devices without the users’ knowledge or consent.

More at the link.

Aside:

I’ve never heard of “Path.” It seems to be a phone thingee.

Facebook says, “May I see your passport, please?”

Back in February 2012, well prior to its acquisition of Instagram in April that year, Facebook confirmed that it had begun asking some users to provide government issued photo IDs, but at that time, a Facebook PR rep told TPM that the company was only “testing this process right now with people who have a large number of subscribers,” and would “iterate based on the feedback we receive.”

That iteration seems to have extended the online ID checks to people even with relatively small numbers of Friends and followers, as one user who emailed TPM to complain only reported having about 200.

This is creepy, especially given Facebook’s history of zucking with users’ privacy.

More at the link.

The Reader’s Digest version. A sample:

1. Want to know how much Facebook knows about you?

Go to Account Settings in the Home menu and click “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

Twits with complete sentences.

The ACLU offers some hints for making sure that Facebook’s new “graph search” has not zucked your privacy settings.

DHS says turn off your java. It can’t be trusted.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp’s Java software, amplifying security experts’ prior warnings to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.

Hackers have figured out how to exploit Java to install malicious software enabling them to commit crimes ranging from identity theft to making an infected computer part of an ad-hoc network of computers that can be used to attack websites.

Oracle does not have a good record on bug fixes.

Remember that “Java” and “Javascript” are not the same thing. Javascript is not implicated in the warning.

More at the link.

Via Bartcop.