Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 617 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 38 of 62).

Email to Facebook

I posted this in Facebook’s Help forum tonight. I don’t know if it will do any good but I thought I’d use Facebook’s meager feedback channels to at least attempt to alert them to this.

It seems that sometime today I unknowingly became a “fan” of the Mitt Romney page. I never clicked like on Romney’s page, nor does my Facebook activity log show any likes for Romney’s page for at least as far back as October 14, 2011.

I strongly suspect that someone has manipulated Facebook’s database to set this like status without Facebook properly logging it as it would’ve with any other likes I have chosen. Please research this and tell me when I became a fan of Mitt Romney’s page and, if you CAN’T tell me when I became a fan, please explain WHY you can’t tell.

I suspect a hack or virus is to blame. Or a breach of Facebook security.

Thanks much!

Mark Turner
Sysadmin and network security geek
Raleigh

Facebook virus forces me to “like” Mitt Romney

An unlike but no like? Something’s going on here!

Update 10 Oct 2012: Hello Mother Jones readers. Check here for my response to Erika Eichelberger’s story.

I checked Facebook this evening to find status updates from Mitt Romney’s campaign in my Facebook news feed. Thinking this was one of those stupid “promoted” updates that you see on Twitter, I gave it no mind. That is, until I found yet another update from the Romney campaign in my news feed. It was then that I surfed over to the Mitt Romney Facebook page and discovered to my shock that I was listed as “liking” that page.

Umm, no. Obama has raised my ire more than once, of course, but there is no way I’m voting for that clueless millionaire buffoon I call “Rmoney.” How Facebook came to think I would like the Romney page is quite the mystery.

A fellow geek suggested (I assume half-jokingly) that a Romney virus might be responsible for the status change. While I laughed at the suggestion, now I’m wondering if there might be truth to it. I have seen updates saying some friend of mine liked Mitt Romney, only to be surprised that person would do so knowing what I know of them. Not everyone wears their politics on their sleeve the way I do, but when you see multiple instances of this kid of thing you do begin to wonder if these choices aren’t being made without the knowledge of the account holders.
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The case of the broken cooler door

A cooler mystery you’ll never find


I walked into the office break room morning to discover that the glass door on our drink machine was shattered. No one in the office seems to know what happened to it.

I speculated that the office cleaning crew might have accidentally busted it while cleaning the break room, but later as I thought about it I decided that didn’t make sense. The focus of the break was too high up the door to be from something like a vacuum. The break room’s floor is tile, too, so a vacuum wouldn’t be needed. The “point of impact” shows no penetration: the spot doesn’t show any inward or outward bend. The glass is shattered but the individual pieces are still held in place by the glass’s coating.
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Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica

Dan Goodin of Ars Technica wrote an eye-opening piece on the astonishing state of password cracking. Passwords once thought a few years ago to be safe enough to outlast a century of cracking attempts can now be broken in a matter of days (or even hours) – with a $1000 computer, no less.

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

via Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.

Pussy Riot case shows Russia’s dark path

Last week, Russian authorities handed down a harsh sentance to the three members of the female punk band Pussy Riot, after the band staged an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a Russian Orthodox Church. It shows the increasingly autocratic ways of Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin, who is apparently leading the country away from its experiments as an open society (while lining his own pockets at the same time).

Below is a statement from one of the band members which was posted to one of the band’s support groups on Facebook. She is absolutely correct when she writes that the country’s heavy-handed response to their stunt shows the Russian leadership’s fear of opposition.

I hope their case will wake other Russians to Putin’s looting of their country and their rights.
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Google Image search is creepy powerful

Google Image Search can read T-shirts


When I want to see if a particular photo on the web is of a real person or just a stock photograph (also of a real person but a model, of course), I like to plug that photo into Google Image Search (GIS). Google can now search the web for similar images and often if several duplicates of an image show up there’s a good chance that image is a stock photo.

In an effort to see if he is who he says he is, today I searched on an image of a man wearing a T-shirt. Google did not find any matching images to the one I provided, which was somewhat expected. What was not expected was that the Goog was able to identify the man’s T-shirt and provide links to stores selling that same T-shirt! Google’s search actually read the wording on this shirt and matched it up with others!

This capability is quite astonishing, and also quite worrisome. Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” If the company chose, it could become the best friend of any repressive government.

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did – Forbes

Here’s an eye-opening look at how closely (and eerily) Target tracks its customers’ purchases.

This isn’t the half of what stores can do, though. Before I got my current gig, I did a telephone interview with a company which made recognition software for in-store video systems. Supposedly this software could track customers as they made their way around the store, including how long a customer lingered on a particular aisle. It was Big Brother to the extreme and while I needed the work, I’m glad I didn’t have to get into that spooky stuff.

Confused 911 caller outs NYPD spying in NJ

This is quite alarming. The NYPD was caught spying … in New Jersey! Be sure to listen to the 911 call for yourself.

A building superintendent at an apartment complex just off the Rutgers University campus called the New Brunswick Police 911 line in June 2009. He said his staff had been conducting a routine inspection and came across something suspicious.

“What’s suspicious?” the dispatcher asked.

“Suspicious in the sense that the apartment has about — has no furniture except two beds, has no clothing, has New York City Police Department radios.”

“Really?” the dispatcher asked, her voice rising with surprise.

The caller, Salil Sheth, had stumbled upon one of the NYPD’s biggest secrets: a safe house, a place where undercover officers working well outside the department’s jurisdiction could lie low and coordinate surveillance. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NYPD, with training and guidance from the CIA, has monitored the activities of Muslims in New York and far beyond. Detectives infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and kept tabs on Muslim student groups, including at Rutgers.

via “What?” Confused 911 caller outs NYPD spying in NJ :: WRAL.com.

Malware may knock thousands off Internet on Monday

Looks like malware has been found to change a computer’s DNS settings. This could pose a problem for thousands of computer users when the FBI shuts down their “safety net” systems on Monday morning.

Folks in the US can go to this site to check whether their computer is infected or not. It takes just a seconds to test your PC. More info below from the AP.

WASHINGTON — The warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google. Internet service providers have sent notices, and the FBI set up a special website.

But tens of thousands of Americans may still lose their Internet service Monday unless they do a quick check of their computers for malware that could have taken over their machines more than a year ago.

Despite repeated alerts, the number of computers that probably are infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, down from about 360,000 in April. Of those still infected, the FBI believes that about 64,000 are in the United States.

Users whose computers are still infected Monday will lose their ability to go online, and they will have to call their service providers for help deleting the malware and reconnecting to the Internet.

via Malware may knock thousands off Internet on Monday :: WRAL.com.

Progress CEO is out as Duke, Progress complete merger

Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Progress CEO Bill Johnson takes whatever golden parachute he was offered and bails. Feels like a bait and switch. If I didn’t have reason to suspect this deal wasn’t a good one for the public, now my suspicions are on high alert.

It makes me all the more curious as to why the public wasn’t privy to the backroom deals that were made to ram this merger through. I sure hope the N&O and other news organizations are successful in dragging these private deals into the light. There’s smoke: now go find the fire.

Duke Chairman and CEO Jim Rogers had been scheduled to serve as chairman and [Bill] Johnson as president and CEO when the two utilities merged to create the nation’s largest electric utility.

However, in the announcement early Tuesday of the formal merger closing and the formation of a new board of directors, the new Duke Energy said Rogers was staying and Johnson was out.

Johnson “resigned” through “mutual agreement” Duke said. He had been a strong advocate for the merger.

via Progress CEO is out as Duke, Progress complete merger :: WRAL.com.