Recent Posts

3326

Living Room / Re: DOTCOM saga - updates

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 24, 2012, 12:15 AM »

"You seem to think rationality will preval".   

3327

Living Room / Re: In search of ... a hardware donee

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 10:20 PM »

Are you saying that you're shipping a full laptop to someone because it doesn't have your killer-slot?

So if I announce myself as a potential donee, I might find myself with a nice juicy laptop to play with XXXXX er do work on? : )

Edit: Or is it just a graphics card because your current comp won't use it?

3328

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu will now have Amazon ads pre-installed

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 10:11 PM »

In general I have problems with an OS with tight hooks to Advertisers. It just feels dangerous.

3329

Living Room / Re: Um...the new iphone map app is, like, the same as google maps

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 10:01 PM »

Somewhere in an Eye for an Eye, comes Legal Precedent. If Apple wins a wild lawsuit based on a rounded corner, then why not have Google win one back on Maps? It hits the meta level of what we think precedent means and how basic it can become.

Lots of pundits are looking for a watershed where we all finally say "enough - no more".

-TaoPhoenix (September 23, 2012, 08:12 PM)

Why not overturn the Apple lawsuit, instead of trying to make it legal precedent?  If you make it legal precedent, then you can bet that people will use (and misuse) it.  Again... why propagate the issue?

-wraith808 (September 23, 2012, 08:21 PM)

Of course, see Groklaw, there were several fishy things. You can bet Senior Legal Counsel of Samsung is prepping for the Appeal. You just know it won't end here. It does take time to prepare the 200 pages of appeal research though.

3330

Living Room / Re: Western Digital playing kinda loose with your privacy

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 09:57 PM »

That's pretty rough, and from a pretty wild angle. "Hard Drive makers? Since when do they play the privacy shenanigans?!" Even worse, "how much do I trust Western Digital to have good data practices?!"   I don't even KNOW how to answer that one, HD companies are so far off the radar of the usual privacy infringing suspects, I don't even know what to say.

3331

Living Room / Re: Um...the new iphone map app is, like, the same as google maps

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 08:12 PM »

Somewhere in an Eye for an Eye, comes Legal Precedent. If Apple wins a wild lawsuit based on a rounded corner, then why not have Google win one back on Maps? It hits the meta level of what we think precedent means and how basic it can become.

Lots of pundits are looking for a watershed where we all finally say "enough - no more".

3332

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu will now have Amazon ads pre-installed

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 06:49 PM »

Ubuntu is very rapidly moving away from the Linux ideals. I have not recommended them for some time, but with developments like this I probably will start advising people using it to go to Debian.

Debian is the root of Ubuntu anyway, but where Ubuntu has given in to commercial interests and popular bloatware, Debian remains pure GPL and excludes as much closed-source and privately licensed code as possible.

-SeraphimLabs (September 23, 2012, 09:27 AM)

"Pure, unprocessed Debian" strikes me like a Ginger root. Ginger is tasty, but in its native form, the root takes a lot of work!

The beauty of Linux is that there are tons of options which are Debian Not-Ubuntu. Fortunately in one sense, all of this junk became tangential for me a year or so ago when my cheap linux test box simply stopped working at one of the updates, probably some driver they didn't bother to continue using.

So though I have lost interest mostly since then, I found a couple of sub-derivatives, etc.

3333

Living Room / Re: Shit Apple Fanatics Say

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 06:43 PM »

It will be months at best (and probably years) before this debacle is fixed and by that time no one - not even the Apple fanboys - will trust Apple Maps ever again!

-Carol Haynes (September 23, 2012, 05:53 AM)

"I find your lack of faith in the Fanboys disturbing."

3334

Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 01:50 PM »

Heh drop-in-ocean and all, but I just set my user agent string to a big complicated "Creative Commons original work Non-Commercial-No Derivatives".

So if I did that right, a site can sniff it, but then they can't package it and sell data attached to it, right?

3335

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 01:46 PM »

Yes, the scammer can afford to ignore the spam-caught ones, because "throwing the email away" is just ad bad. So all he has to do is look at the ones that didn't get spam tossed. I'm presuming the email filters would see the one "bait" mail come through looking way different and let it live.

But not counting that the scammers seem to be pretty dumb, if they had any brains they'd do a word search on their email and they could for example see that "all 1842 of the mails have the phrase "shit out of luck" in them, therefore they can't be bait."

P.S. Did you turn off the engine on my account yet? : )

3336

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 11:27 AM »

Okay, that test came through, so your service makes a little more sense, though Seraphim is right that it's double edged.

It looked to me that unless I am a special case, it's the same 3 line phrase with a random 2 word leader grafted onto the front. Yahoo let about 10 of them through and the other 1800 landed in the Spam folder, so I'm not sure that helps your cause either, because 1800 of those already pre-sorted into the spam folder would leave the one real one in the spammer's inbox.

Okay, so I understand now, you can shut it off when you see this note.

3337

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 03:54 AM »

Try is now with subject test123 and I will approve it

-Webpirate (September 23, 2012, 12:42 AM)

Okay, I resent my test. But only run it for a minute or two and turn it off again. All I wanted to see was the concept. I still need that email for other obscure uses. : )

3338

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 23, 2012, 12:13 AM »

The service is not really setup for spammers. As the name says its a scammer spammer setup for the Nigerian scammers with scams like send your drivers license  and $235 to [email protected] to have your $25 million dollars sent by ATM card. While some of the scammerspammer emails end up in the trash can a scammer afford to not check everyone, even the ones in the spam box? That's 3000 - 5000 emails to sort through in the hopes that one person sent his personal information. As I said before its not meant for emails like "check out our new Viagra" or "Canadian pharmacy"....

Also: I have to verify and approve every email address submitted because people were abusing the system, but I also increased the number of emails sent and change ipaddresses every 3 days

-Webpirate (September 22, 2012, 11:29 PM)

Are you the operator of this? I was curious and submitted one of my own emails as a test (generic yahoo account) and nothing resulted from it. Aka therefore a scammer with a yahoo account presumably wouldn't see anything either.

3339

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu will now have Amazon ads pre-installed

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 22, 2012, 09:34 PM »

I'm going to hedge my wording here in case I am blundering, but I think at least some links aren't just sending affiliate info, they're sending identifiable user info of various kinds along with it.

(Peeks out from under tinfoil hat, wating for the time to verify it with facts and so remove the hat.)

3340

Living Room / Re: More Facebook Privacy Invasions

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 22, 2012, 02:36 PM »

We are on same topic, so decided to drop this link of eff.

https://www.eff.org/...es/who-has-your-back

-mahesh2k (September 22, 2012, 01:18 PM)

Here's an interesting snip from that report:
"We’re also happy to report that several of the companies included in last year’s report have stepped up their game. Facebook, Dropbox and Twitter have each upgraded their practices in the past year and earned additional stars."

Though the recent new developments from this thread almost make it sound like the EFF needs a new category entirely, something like "refrains from creating internal policies that could threaten user privacy."

3341

General Software Discussion / Re: Google says goobye to Internet Explorer 8

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 22, 2012, 02:24 PM »

Would the official end of support for XP be a big enough event to force those kinds of agencies to make the necessary changes? As long as it's "merely corporate bickering with the users" vs versions, life trundles along. But I'd ... uh ... hope that the security-conscious agencies might see a wee little problem with producing data that requires, by a couple steps of logical reasoning, to use an OS that officially has no more security updates as of X date.

3342

Living Room / Re: A Unified theory of Superman's Powers

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 09:29 PM »

Heh grab one of the art guys here, it hurts my eyes to see such brilliant text marred by that kind of xkcd-clone art! : (

3343

Living Room / Re: More Facebook Privacy Invasions

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 09:13 PM »

See, it just gets scarier and scarier. Computers love lists. So does Big Brother, and evil Corps.

Nothing short of an epic revolt is gonna get us out of this. But so far they're careful to do it all a step at a time.

3344

Living Room / Re: More Facebook Privacy Invasions

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 07:00 PM »

Pro-First-Amendment types like me have posted a lot of comments that use exploratory language to examine the state of news. The Powers That Be are getting stronger, and pretty soon we'll be in Cardinal Richelieu land, where someone paid to have too much time on their hands can sift through for example my 5,000 net posts and find 100 of them that paint me in an evil light.

3345

Living Room / Re: More Facebook Privacy Invasions

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 06:52 PM »

Lost battle revisited!

"Any sufficiently paranoid rant will become true soon enough" ... or something. Try this new addition to my themed thread!

"Now Facebook wants YOU to grass-up(snitch) friends not using their real name".
http://blogs.compute...-real-name/index.htm

http://paulbernal.wo...facebook-snitchgate/


I think I banked enough grumpy-faces that I can make a withdrawal here.

----------------------------
(Dramatization)

"Is this your friend's real name?"
Renegade

3346

Living Room / If I had a million dollars for Kickstarter

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 05:26 PM »

One way to put the national finance issues in perspective is to wonder what would happen if you took a "mere" measly million and just funded a ton of stuff from kickstarter on condition maybe to have the result Creative Commons / other licensed.

Sounds to me like you'd get more "education" than half of the wasted govt red-tape-wasted funding bills.

3347

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 03:15 PM »

Did y'all hear the one where Judge Wapner had trouble accessing DC on his iPad?

have you tried accessing the mobile version of the forum?

just add wap, wap2, ... into your url, like follows:

• https://www.donation.../forum/index.php?wap
• https://www.donation...forum/index.php?wap2

-mouser (June 05, 2012, 01:40 PM)

3348

Living Room / Re: Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 03:11 PM »

Structured Procrastination is aught but the poor stepchild of Dynamic Apathy.

I'd be happy to provide further details, but...well...you know how it is. 

------------

@A - make that 124 reads.

-40hz (September 21, 2012, 01:50 PM)

(Impassioned)
No no no! I care a great deal about Dynamic Apathy! It can teach us a great deal about ...
uh... oh wait...

3349

Living Room / Re: For XKCD fans

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 21, 2012, 03:06 PM »

Let's see, if I did that right, it actually loops back on itself.  After the LONG flat it bumps up again and starts over.  Very cool. 

-Rover (September 21, 2012, 03:01 PM)

Does that make it a paper towel tube?

3350

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 20, 2012, 11:31 PM »

Heh they originally got all grouchy with the pigs and finally someone "got it" and laughed.