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Sharks in the phishing hole

Tag: Scuttlebutt from Twitter

My Facebook officially shut down, now what?

OK. My Facebook account is officially shut down. I euthanized it this morning.
Now, there’s the problem of filling some of that void; social media without the social media.
I found this article in some blog called the Dead Dog Cafe (hey, I don’t name these things) that is worthy of my consideration. In truth, there are no real secrets there. The writer suggests using:
  • Twitter for status messages. I do use that, but the signal-to-noise ratio is ridiculous. The infrastructure is too wide open, and you usually need some third-party software or service to filter things. It’s not as completely messed up as Facebook (give it time), but in the interim it handles my short messaging needs.
  • Pidgin for chat (although Meebo is also good for this). Generally, dust off your old chat accounts and instant messaging and use those. Do people still send instant messages?
  • Regular email for messages. OK. I still use email, and a lot of it, but I’ll admit I’m an anachronism. Email is, like, so ’90s. Do the folks of the “millennial” generation use email?
The Low Tech Times (I love the layout, by the way) echoes some of this, but adds blogging to the roll-your-own social media mix. The writer, S. P. Gass concludes: “The only reason I can think of to sign up for a Facebook account is to drive traffic to my own sites.”
Which, said and done, is the only real reason I can see for keeping Facebook around (except for my friends who are used to exchanging political comment & other nuggets of wisdom with me). But does Facebook actually drive traffic to these blogs? I can’t rightly tell, though it’s helped make my circle of friends aware of my doings and writings. 
Gass (great name) further stirs the puddin’ in an update to his original 2009 piece: Spend time with family and friends in person. Send a postcard every so often. Send an email. And he reiterated the concept of blogging, preferably in a platform where you own the words you write.
On Facebook the natives are getting restless, and you might find some new flavors of Kool-Aid around. But it doesn’t matter what flavor you’re drinking, the results are still the same.
Meanwhile, there’s a new Facebook group that apparently started within the last few minutes: “10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account.” Uhh, it ought to be interesting to see how many members it attracts:
  • Hypocrites will join the group, maintaining their Facebook accounts to do so.
  • Non-hypocrites will merely delete their accounts.
But then, you find that in the real world, too. Some folks will complain and start a movement about something that upsets them, and in doing so feed the problem. Others will quietly (or maybe not so quietly) cease to be a party to the problem. Unfortunately, our society — particularly our political structure these days — seems to favor the first course of action. 
See you around the Web …
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Author Eric PulsiferPosted on May 3, 2010Categories UncategorizedTags email, facebook, from the Web, instant message, internet, Internet privacy, Scuttlebutt from Twitter, tinfoil-hat, Watch your rightsLeave a comment on My Facebook officially shut down, now what?

Why I’m dumping Facebook like a bad habit

I never could get into the online games and other trappings, but Facebook was still one of my guilty online pleasures. Well, not exactly guilty; many of my friends are on it and that’s how we correspond.

Put all that in the past tense. By the end of this week, I will shut my Facebook account down. It’s not so much that it’s a waste of time — though in many respects it is — but the Facebook interface has gone from bad to worse.

Like it or not, Facebook is a big phenomenon in the online world. It started some years ago as an interactive message board, and from there it grew legs. By itself it made that other groundbreaking social media site, MySpace, into an irrelevancy. OK, MySpace helped Facebook along by being the overloaded piece of junk that it is. For a long time, Facebook’s big appeal in the social media world was that it wasn’t MySpace.

I’d written extensively about Facebook’s problems, mostly in the privacy realm. But many of these privacy issues in the past could be chased down to that great void that sits between chair and keyboard. If the computer operator is brain dead, then all sorts of weird things will happen with the computer.

I’ve noticed recently, though, that Facebook is playing it fast and loose with user privacy. Several new settings were implemented over the past few months, and all of these — though billed as something that would enrich your Facebook experience — tend to “share” your personal settings with everybody.

As I write this, I have a modest 104 friends on Facebook. Unlike many social media users, these are people I actually know. I’ve met nearly all of them, and the few I haven’t met I’ve corresponded with enough to call them friends.

A Facebook employee, in an off-the-record chat with New York Times reporter Nick Bilton said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really doesn’t give a rip about your privacy:  

@nickbilton: Off record chat w/ Facebook employee. Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.

Bilton’s original tweet, and it sure triggered a firestorm online. OK, you can debate this point here from a journalistic standpoint and from a factual one, but this statement certainly lines up with many of the changes I’ve seen on Facebook.

The final straw came Saturday night, when I got a video from a friend of mine. The still-shot preview showed a nearly-naked young woman, viewed from the hip. Now, I’m scratching my head. This friend of mine is a family man, one of the most honorable people I know, a good Southern Baptist, and just what is this all about? What didn’t help is that the caption called this an “optical illusion.”

OK. I’ll bite.

While I bit, I was told my video viewer was out of date. I was asked if I wanted to download a new viewer. Now, I’m thinking. I use Opera 10.50, which for Linux is still in alpha. I mean, my software is bleeding-edge stuff; why should my viewer be out of date? Like an idiot I clicked on it.

A couple of things then happened:

1) The video was automatically sent to many people on my friends’ list.

2) The .exe file to the viewer sat in my /home/download file. I noted the name and ran a Google search. The program in question, flvdirect.exe, is billed as something that would help download torrents but is actually spyware. It’ll do all sorts of nefarious things on your hard drive and it monitors your surfing habits.

For the next hour or so, I heated up my high-speed Internet line. Running Google searches on the offending software. Firing instant messages back and forth with a Facebook (actually a real) friend who also got the video — from me. Posting my findings on Facebook. I finally got to bed at 2 a.m., exhausted. Spreading malware sure is hard work.

The flvdirect.exe file did not affect my computer. I use a Linux system, which is immune to junk like that. The friend I exchanged messages with runs a Mac, which like Linux is also built off the lock-tight UNIX operating system. If I was using a Windows box it might be a different story.

All this episode did was spread on my Facebook account, and perhaps made my friends wonder if I’d flipped out. It robbed me of some valued sleep, and when you look like me you need all the beauty sleep you can get.

And it ticked me off. Completely. Enough to convince me to shut down Facebook.

OK, folks. Here’s how this works. I still have two active email addresses; you can catch me at either one. I have two phone numbers; if you have one of those numbers you can give me a holler if you need to (those who don’t have the number, well, there’s a reason for that). I have my blog; those who read my posts on Facebook can read the exact same stuff there or even grab the RSS feed for your news raleader. For social media I have Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you’re at least 50 years old you can catch my old folks’ social media page at Eons. So it’s not like I’m disappearing off the face of the earth, or even off the Web. Shoot, I make my living on the Internet; I’m not about to shut that down.

But Facebook? That’s a whole ‘nother matter.

If you use Facebook and have a Windows system, keep your virus checker and spyware screening system up to date. Seriously. AVG makes an excellent virus checker, it’s free, and I understand it does check for spyware.

Don’t click on weird-looking stuff, EVEN IF A FRIEND SENDS IT.

Got all that? Good.

In the next few days I’ll be checking on other social-media options, and reporting on them. All of these, by the way, will feed directly into my Facebook page so they can be read there. If you access my material from there, you’d better read it fast before I shut the whole thing down.

Here’s the upshot: If you’re comfortable with the direction Facebook is going, by all means use it and enjoy it. But since I’m not comfortable with any of that, you can deal me out.

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Author Eric PulsiferPosted on May 2, 2010Categories announcement, opinionTags facebook, interface, linkedin, malware, myspace, rants, Scuttlebutt from Twitter, social media, tinfoil-hat, waste of time, Watch your rights1 Comment on Why I’m dumping Facebook like a bad habit

Scuttlebutt: You might be a Lib if …

Twitter is fun, despite the sheer volume of messages and the signal-to-noise ratio. But once you get the hang of it and learn to filter the noxiouus garbage out from the regular garbage, it can be a fairly useful and enriching tool. OK, it only takes a few years to develop a system, but it is doable.

The discussion I caught was about liberals, and with a nod to my boy Jeff Foxworthy, I now present the Twitter version of “You might be a Lib if …”

… the first word in the description of your hair color is “neon.”

… you believe in censoring conservative talk radio, but not pornography.

… you think human beings are related to horseshoe crabs.

… you think plush toilet paper is evil, and we should all be forced to pick up a corn cob to do the honors (OUCH).

… you protest tonight’s execution and visit abortion clinic tomorrow.

… you’ve stood for animal rights, but wear leather belts and sandals.

… you think French is an English language.

… you are offended by guns but are pro abortion.

… you can actually take a U.S. president seriously after he said “wee wee” in a sentence.

… you think your cousin Pookie got off the couch and voted in New Jersey.

… you dont have a problem with Planned Parenthood covering for sexual predators.

… you think Hasan was a kind soul and under stress.

… you stink because you only use one sheet of toilet paper.

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Author Eric PulsiferPosted on November 12, 2009Categories UncategorizedTags fun stuff, Scuttlebutt from TwitterLeave a comment on Scuttlebutt: You might be a Lib if …

Scuttlebutt 2.0

(Again, I bring you short dispatches from Twitter. I left these verbatim, with hashtags and all. Bear in mind the nature of this feature — it’s all scuttlebutt. Links are provided for those tweets that tie in to a news story or blog. Enjoy!)

littlebytesnews: RT @leahita:”Drs Speak Out Agnst Govt Contrlld Medicine.”(VID) http://3.ly/ybM #tcot #tlot #C4L #hc09 [you’d think Congress wld listen??]

JimDeMint: There’s a very disturbing trend from this administration in favor of secrecy and against transparency.

littlebytesnews: TPO_News:PETA Killed 95% of Adoptable Pets in its Care During 2008 http://bit.ly/zX15U #tcot [wow that’s terrible,so much 4 animal rights?]

the_old_geek: “Every day you’ve got to get up and play hard.”Jeff Immelt

JTlol: If a Democrat’s teenage son got a girl pregnant & she went on to pose for Playboy, how many minutes would she get on the CBS Early Show?

Infidel007: RT @Drudge_Report: Boehner: ‘1,990 Pages Of Bureaucracy’… http://tinyurl.com/ygd9yo4

JTlol: Does Anita Dunn not know the difference between Mao Tse-tung and Sun Tzu, or does she just think the rest of us don’t? http://j.mp/4jDN6L

Infidel007: RT @heidilore: Swine Flu paranoia getting out of hand!! http://twitpic.com/htwqn

coutpost: Organ Thieves, Hyperfeminized Football & White House Maoists http://cli.gs/8Ah8t #tcot #politics

JTlol: Dude, Where’s My Czar? Or: Harold & Kumar Speak Truth to Power By Misusing Federal Agencies for Political Purposes: http://bit.ly/1YPFBD

Someguynamedpat: Govt never reduces itself. Govt progrms nvr disappr. A govt bureau is t nearest thing to eternl life we’ll ever see.. http://bit.ly/XRo08 RR

Someguynamedpat: Is health care overhaul constitutional? http://ow.ly/x9yC Constitutionality of health overhaul questioned http://ow.ly/x9yF

thejobsguy: Companies Ready to Unfreeze Salaries; Retention Worries Increase … http://tinyurl.com/ykzgjqw

JTlol: But then, the new guy has really lowered the bar, hasn’t he? http://j.mp/3SkWj2

littlebytesnews: okay ppl, spammers R out again,just got 2 dm’s from ppl I know w/ “this U on hre?” &a link….spam i’m sure!! B careful!(via @PlusSizeMommy)

Akos_Fintor: JFK knew exactly what was coming that’s why he was taken out http://bit.ly/S6Iu2

Paceset9999: RT @leahita: MANDATORY VACCINATIONS? TELL FEDS & STATES TO ‘STICK IT’ by Devvy Kidd! http://3.ly/c5Q #H1N1 #novacs

angelsbuzztap: The Orange County Register >> Angels: Now what? http://bit.ly/2cqJDu

(Shameless plug: Of course I’m on Twitter … follow me.)

Author Eric PulsiferPosted on October 30, 2009Categories UncategorizedTags Scuttlebutt from TwitterLeave a comment on Scuttlebutt 2.0

Scuttlebutt …

(This is a new feature of short dispatches from Twitter. These are almost verbatim; some editing was done for spelling and style, but the content remains. I can’t vouch for the veracity of anything here — hey, this is the Internet — so that explains why I call it “scuttlebutt.” Links are provided for those tweets that tie in to a news story or blog. Enjoy!)
Infidel007: SF could soon ban cat declawing in the city. SF is so weird. lol http://bit.ly/JiO4A
xarker: Now Facebook comes in two flavors: “Too much information,” and “Stuff you read yesterday.” Good job team!
infowarsstories: The LAPD fights crime, not illegal immigration: Los Angeles Times | Illegal Immigration is not crime? http://bit.ly/ifDSe
prespolitics: TPM Election Central: GOP Calls On Obama To Condemn Grayson’s ‘Whore’ Remark http://bit.ly/VIFbY Full http://bit.ly/twV0y
(Shameless plug: Of course I’m on Twitter … follow me.)
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Author Eric PulsiferPosted on October 28, 2009Categories UncategorizedTags Scuttlebutt from TwitterLeave a comment on Scuttlebutt …

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