Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

So Apple is in the hot seat again, this time from the infamous “jailbreak” method employed to unlocked iPhones. Of course, Apple opposes this and like a reflex action, they filed a case. On the other side of the coin, third party developers Mozilla and Skype have done a tag team clothesline against Apple and made a separate filing individually. They essentially want to loosen the monopoly to allow third party applications available on the iPhone. This is reminiscent of the anti-competitive case against Microsoft when Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows, it was claimed this would give them an unfair advantage in the web browser market. I can only assume in a similar scenario Apple and co are going to the courts over this somewhere down the line.

Another potential lawsuit was winging it’s way to Facebook, since they changed their Terms and Conditions which gave them absolute right to sell or share the data held about their users on closed accounts. After much protest, they rescinded the change and re-instated the original T&C. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but as I said in my previous post, you need to be careful about what information you are putting online. Ages ago, I mentioned to friends about how an account held on their servers is persistent. Whether you choose to close the account or not is beside the point, the choice to eradicate the data held about you is not your decision to make… their current T&C isn’t exactly pro Data Protection Act. Of course, users being users, they just shrug and think nothing of it. This is nothing new at all, and has only come to light because of the media. Well it maybe too little too late for the millions of users out there, once the information is in the public domain it cannot be retracted. In liking to one of my sayings, you cannot unread something even if you wish it so.

You can perhaps hire a cat to bypass things like EULA acceptance. Maybe we can look to the animal kingdom for further help, such as using a hamster to do a key press sequence on an iPhone, which activates the jailbreak. However, animal rights activists may knock on your door proclaiming cruelty to furry things with paws. Another lawsuit, you just can’t avoid them these days.

Miscellaneous Facebook, iPhone jailbreak, Mozilla, Skype

Well this week has been catastrophic at work. Anything you could possibly imagine that could go wrong did go wrong. We’ve been given second hand server kit to build from, including the CPU which consequently gave up the ghost on first boot. My illustrious colleague had fun tackling that one and trying to convince Project Managers to source new kit, you know how that goes. The main source of cooling in the server room, the large AC at the back, spontaneously burst into flames. The smell of smoke and burning PCB was intoxicating; I had to make alternative routes to the kitchen so I could make tea. Also for the past two weeks, I have been trying to virtualise an Exchange cluster from physical boxes into ESX. The P2V worked fine, except I had no idea why this one particular server kept churning out Kerberos errors. I have tried everything, installed, uninstalled, netdom reset, went through the cluster installation documents over and over, perused over hundreds of knowledge base articles, checked Active Directory, evicted the node so many times to start afresh. System Attendant refused to start which means Exchange could be classed as dead. Suffice it to say, there was something fundamentally wrong that I had no time to troubleshoot… an executive decision was made and I am rebuilding the damn thing within ESX from OS up.  Not to mention the strange weather we are having, Chicago was getting tons of rain while we were getting the snow. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?!

But I digress, there has been some interesting news this week that I will just put into one big hat. So here we go…


Square Enix buys Eidos
Are we going to see Lara Croft standing alongside the likes of Cloud and Squall? Or maybe she can come on as a Summon using her pistols of death. Either way, Eidos’ last iteration of the Tomb Raider series did horribly, as dictated by the sales figures. It’s a shame that this franchise has gone downhill so rapidly, but I’m sure the gods at Square Enix can turn things around with the licenses they have now acquired.

1,234,567,890 – Almost like a birthday
When the clocks hit 23.31:30 UTC, it was exactly 1234567890 seconds since January 1st 1970 when the Unix clock started ticking. This event is almost like witnessing a full eclipse, and there are going to be some geeky parties going on I’m sure.

Facebook is $65 million poorer
Oh woe is me. This is probably pocket change for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, whether he really did steal the idea from his ex Harvard pals or not remains to be seen. I’m sure that if Facebook was not was as successful as it is now, they wouldn’t be suing him. The problem is, just because you have an idea does not mean you can implement it into a viable business. So considering this, some credit is due to Mr Zuckerberg.

Microsoft issues bounty for Conficker culprits
It’s that old chestnut again, what seemed to be a rather harmless worm virus (after all, it doesn’t really do much if you take precautions and implement safeguards) has turned into something of a black plague in the enterprise world, including government institutions. The person or persons involved have been marked; watch out for wanted posters on a lamp post near you.

And finally…
It’s Valentine’s Day, so I hope you all have a wonderful time with your loved ones… perhaps you will get a surprise from an unexpected someone. However, if you feel all alone sobbing in a dark, damp corner somewhere then here is an ASCII heart just for you!


_________pork and____________pork and
______pork and bea_______pork and beansp
____pork and beanspor___pork and beanspork
___pork and beanspork and beanspo_______pork
__pork and beanspork and beanspo_________pork
_pork and beanspork and beanspork a_______pork
_pork and beanspork and beanspork and b______p
pork and beanspork and beanspork and bean__por
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beans_por
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beanspork
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beanspor
_pork and beanspork and beanspork and beansp
__pork and beanspork and beanspork and bean
____pork and beanspork and beanspork and b
______pork and beanspork and beanspork a
_________pork and beanspork and beans
____________pork and beanspork and
______________pork and beanspork
_________________pork and bean
___________________pork and
_____________________pork a
______________________pork
_______________________po

Miscellaneous, Tech 1234567890 Unix time, conficker, Eidos, Facebook, Valentine's Day

Well the judgement was finalised this week against the perpetrator, but the actual event happened in August last year. A man who was separated from his wife, killed her in cold blood at her parent’s home after discovering her Facebook status had changed to “Single”. I’m not a heavy user of Facebook or any other social networking website, but I do not put any of my personal details online such as name, age, date of birth etc because of my concern for identity theft and well, because of incidents like this. Not that I am suggesting someone is stalking me right now outside my house, peering through shrubbery to watch my every move or whether I need to be worried if I wanted to pop out to buy a tin of baked beans. But there are some nutters out there and I for one would like to minimise the likelihood of encountering one. Unfortunately, in this case, possibilities like this ended with tragic circumstances. Who would have thought the use of Facebook would quite literally end one’s life, however indirectly.

The problem is, I find that people take internet socialising all too seriously and they are too open about one’s life. There have been incidents whereby a partner would find out their soul mate is having it away with their best friend, by discovering lewd comments on wall posts. I find the relaxed view of exposing one’s identity and revealing information about themselves perplexing. After Facebook became wildly popular, a little test was carried out to see how people had little regard for their personal information. Around 41% of users were willing to share their information to a complete stranger, if they received a friend invitation from someone they didn’t know. Social networking is a good way to keep in touch with long lost friends, don’t get me wrong. But we need to be vigilant on how we are exposed.

More recently, a wife divorced her husband because of his relationship with another woman in the game Second Life. His avatar was having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute, with, I can only assume, virtual private parts. For some, the defining line between fiction and reality is blurred. My boss jokingly said that my character in Warhammer Online maybe subjected to something similar. In my case, if an elf tried anything they would get a nasty surprise before they even get to take their kit off, most notably a quick death.

On a more serious note, the wealth of information floating around in cyberspace is overwhelming. Think about it, on Facebook you put your name, date of birth, where you live, pictures of yourself, hobbies, where you work, what school you went to, the list goes on. Now amalgamate all this information and you have a complete ID profile about a person at your fingertips. Just think about that the next time you sign up to an online social service.

Miscellaneous Facebook, facebook status murder, Second Life, social networking