Joe Szilagyi

Four Ways Facebook is Slowly Destroying You | Gunaxin Gadgets

Apparently, Facebook will make you socially retarded, rewire your brain, get you fired/keep you from getting a job, and give you cancer in the end of your suffering. I guess it sucks that there are about 250,000,000 of us world wide on the site. Facebook as the new bubonic plague? Zuckerberginia pestis?

I remember when it was just random people strictly limited to connections from .edu domain names, and it was just the annoying little cousin of TOTALLY AWESOME websites like Friendster.com. Now it’s going to wipe humanity, but I’m sure the dog will outrun the status updates and live.

Banned in China: what the regime doesn’t want its people to see – Telegraph Blogs

In case you had no idea what China bans it’s one billion people from seeing:

1. Photos of of the Tiananmen Square massacre of civilians.
2. Photos of tortured Falun Gong members.
3. Searches related to Tibet, Tiananmen, democracy, rights, and privacy.
4. Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Friendster. Many online games or game-like systems.
5. iTunes store and similar stores. Many iTunes apps are filtered out by China.
6. Western news sources (most).
7. Wiki-type open editing sites (such as Wikipedia).

More details here, and that’s just the stuff we know about. Even more:

This website is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s an insanely bizarre news hybrid of weird far right, weird far left, and just… odd. I’m probably misreading it because some of it’s over the top, but it reads to me at times like the Weekly World News doing hard political news almost at times:

BATBOY FOUND IN OVAL OFFICE WITH SECRET KENYAN 9/11 FILES!

A random hodgepodge of crap I just clicked into, as a preview: “A little discussion about Revolution and the Declaration of Independance.”

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Quoting the Declaration of Independence? Sure, we’re off to a good start. We could be heading up the crazy train to Wasila, Alaska for a Tea Party, or we could be heading for a rousing and soul-baring discussion of what it means to be American.

The question is not if they are allowed to continue, as they have violated the Constitution for the majority of the last 100 years. There is historical validity to eliminate the government we currently have.

The question, is who will fire the first shot?

I think someone fired up the steam engine on this train. But maybe that’s nothing…

Bow down to your masters, for you are not my countrymen. Lick the hand that gives you scraps, for they are your masters and betters. Bring not your insults or provocations before me, for I will not bow to any man, for I am a Free and Sovereign Individual with no preconceived notion, that any are better than I, or my fellow man.

Wait, what? That’s not Tea Party talk. Did this train derail heading from Wasila to Zion in the fucking Matrix?

If you worship socialism so much I am sure the People’s Republic of Korea has a nice big bowl of oppression warmed up for you to gobble down.

Hey, that’s better! The guy who posted that, “av8r007″–does he write Glenn Beck’s monologues? I think this train was headed for Wasila all along. Maybe it’s right where I’m expecting things to be:

The colonists only fought back after the English marched to disarm the militias at Lexington and Concord. If blood must be shed, it should be clear that the Govt fired the 1st shot. If we start the shooting war we’ll be branded as terrorists and radicals. If the govt shoots 1st we can claim self defence.

Oh hell, apparently it is One Of Those Crazy Discussions, as now scenarios are being bandied about on how to make it look like the United States government is going to incite an armed revolution against Obama. And here I was worried for nothing. Reasonable commentary, right? Far out, Right? Get it? I kill myself.

But, before you think it’s all just “Let’s overthrow the Evil Black President’s Shadow America,” we get discussions about 9/11 Congressional reports being lies; Christian missionaries trapped in Haiti–but only the “posers, pretend Christian wannabees going on exotic vacations and calling it mission work“; and various areas to explore ATS Skunk Works, Secret Societies, New World Order, Space Exploration, Aliens and UFOs, Paranormal Studies, Cryptozoology & Mythical Beasts, and finally a section for simply the hoaxes rather than the real studies and scholarly research (like my above quoted discussion about the merits of freedom versus tyranny).

These guys aren’t just thinking that Obama is a dethawed socialist Manchurian Candidate bred in a 1941 German cloning facility outside of Dusseldorf, AKA Kenya. Hell no–this is like Fox Mulder’s personal online message board.

It’s like a supermarket of awesome.

In regards to this blog post from four days ago, I just found this in my inbox tonight:

Back in 2007, King County initiated discussions with the federal government’s Department of General Services Administration (GSA), who administers the DOTGOV domains on the Internet, regarding King County’s web address. King County wanted to register the user-friendly address “kingcounty.gov”. Simultaneously, the GSA wanted King County to relinquish the address “metrokc.gov” in order to comply with their web address policies and also due to possible confusion with the city of Kansas City, Missouri. After negotiations, it was agreed that both would occur–King County would receive use of the domain name “kingcounty.gov” and King County would relinquish control of the domain name “metrokc.gov” effective January 31, 2009.

…

We share your concern for effective and consistent service to our citizens. King County’s web site is critical to those services. It was for that reason that King County pursued the “kingcounty.gov” name. In fact, as you can see from the GSA’s policies regarding naming conventions (http://www.dotgov.gov/dnc.aspx#county), GSA policy requires us to have the web address “kingcounty.wa.gov” or “kingcounty-wa.gov”, however, in our negotiations with the GSA, we sought a very simple name to ensure that our citizens receive the benefit of the most logical and easy to remember address possible. It was for the reason of compliance with GSA policy that we surrender the legacy name, and with the impending shut-down of that old address, King County is now in compliance with that federal directive.

There’s a bit more and a tiny bit of interesting metrics on usage of the old name, but that’s the gist of the situation I mentioned.

Absolutely reasonable and absolutely understandable given the situation, but almost completely (near as I can see) unexplained until I fired off a “what is this?” e-mail that also CC’d the King County Executive’s office. From some searching around just now, I can’t easily find any reference to nor mention of the specifics behind this online. That’s the sort of stuff that should be, you know, mentioned to your users and stake holders. King County has a blog–it takes only one quick blog post or alternately a press release to communicate this out.

If they already did message this out back in 2007 or 2008, they didn’t apparently do so again almost a year later (a scale of years, in Internet Standard Time) when they finally flipped the magic switch before the old domain name goes dark for our regional government. An IT department’s job is to over-communicate. It doesn’t take much to do this. Lack of communications from IT is one of my biggest pet peeves professionally. Good on them to explaining it to me in e-mail, but now I wonder if they’ll actually post the reason behind this. At the least, it’s rather interesting for nerds. For everyone else around here, it will give people another reason to grumble about Kansas City and the Midwest. They steal our basketball team, now they steal one of our domain names…

The group that manages the official King County web sites has apparently retired it’s longstanding metrokc.gov domain to replace it with kingcounty.gov, which is all well and good. It’s a better name, anyway. But what they’ve done is redirect ALL requests for the old host names to a useless dumping ground instead of just aliasing the old names over the new ones. This is what they have done:

Why is this incredibly stupid and improperly done? Say you have any number of bookmarks or embedded tools (say, mobile applications–iPhone or other) that aim at http://tripplanner.metrokc.gov. That now arbitrarily dumps you on http://www.kingcounty.gov/About/metrokc.aspx rather than forward you to the matching URL on the new host on http://tripplanner.kingcounty.gov/. This applies to all of these in the chart above. Who on Earth approved this way to do it? No one just “retires” and kills off a major domain name, let alone one so old and embedded all over who knows where. All you’ve done is now break all prior internet connectivity to various parts of the county’s web infrastructure.

You also did no favors to search engine optimization and Google searches for the county, either.

If you’re in King County please e-mail them at:

http://info.kingcounty.gov/about/contact/default.aspx

To let them know what a bone head move this is.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that the KC “old” domain name previously forwarded to the new one, on a 1:1 URL basis, but that was discontinued as a practice last week. Why would you stop doing that? It makes perfectly logical sense that you do that indefinitely. Unless you wanted to actually repurpose metrokc.gov for some completely separate purpose, which would be odd and pointless, the actual stopping of the forwarding is… odd, pointless, and disruptive to all users of the web site. It needs to be fixed.

I was thinking about what happened to our Comcast service when we first moved to Seattle, after our recent slight mix ups with their digital conversion. We moved into our new apartment, and mysteriously, Comcast on every channel is just one thing: hard core, and I mean REALLY hard core porn. Specifically, the audio is nothing but flesh slapping flesh for minutes on end combined with screaming. I have no idea what channel it was, and while it was fun for a few jokes and “Wow, is this for real?” moments, we wanted regular TV in the end.

The field lady that come out to investigate–the Comcast dispatcher thought we were kidding–took one look at it, handed me a replacement box to hold a moment while she bent over to undo the old one from Connecticut–and said:

“I don’t see a problem with that,” and couldn’t stop laughing, but neither could we. It was the first time I ever had fun with someone coming out to fix something. Win! The local Seattle staff for them has always been awesome. National, definitely not so much, but with 100,000 employees I suppose it has to be a dice roll there. But local Seattle staff? Always fantastic.

Update: It turns out our recent problem was also caused by the fact that our older Series 2 Tivo apparently doesn’t play nice with the Comcast digital conversions and most “standard” Tivo setups with Comcast converter boxes. That’s now a 3rd or 4th very nice Comcast trip out to our place in as many years. Sadly, no incredibly cute/hot repair lady to chuckle over porn, but this last guy totally looked like Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly).

Mainly, this is since S2 Tivos have only internal analog converter cards. We use the infrared controller, that Tivo supplies, so this lets us control the Comcast channel changing via our Tivo remote. We can still control and run the operation, but had lost most of our basic cable because of this. Reformatting the Tivo into old school single tuner mode (AKA, “The Fancy VCR”) let us get the channels back. The problem is that a lot of the magic firepower of Tivo is with the dual tuner, to let you record two things and watch a third, and that is now gone on the S2 models. We ended up biting the bullet and ordering a Series 3 Tivo because of this, and because Tivo had a conveniently priced (and timed!) upgrade offer for old-timer customers like us. All digital, three signals again, and we can stream Netflix directly into the new one.

A letter I just sent off to my state senator and representatives. If you’re in Washington state, I suggest you do likewise.

Hello,

Thank you all for your continued hard work and service.

I came across this news story, about the TVW and Dow Constantine situation. If you are unfamiliar with this, I implore you to read the below news article. This is troubling for all Washington state taxpayers.

Background: TVW is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation, not a government agency. It is governed by an independent board of directors. The majority of TVW’s operating cash – approximately $2.5 million per year – comes from the Legislature via a contract-for-service through the Secretary of State. TVW receives more than $11 million per year in the form of in-kind contributions of channel space from Washington’s cable television industry.

The story about TVW and Down Constantine is here: http://publicola.net/?p=17512

Politics aside, I am troubled by the fact that materials produced by money levied from taxes paid for by Washington citizens are being held in some form of “copyright” claim by a private entity like TVW, or anyone else. Many US state governments (and many foreign governments) are moving toward any materials produced by the government being “free”, in the public domain or under what is known as a Creative Commons license, which is increasingly popular year over year.

For example, this is a list of state-level US agencies and some Federal that issue content under Creative Commons:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Government_use_of_CC_licenses#United_States

Virginia’s stance is particularly strong:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?091+ful+CHAP0791

Washington is a leading state in the fields of technology. We have many prominent tech corporations, innumerable technology start-ups, and are known nationally on this stage. The ideals of ‘open sourcing’ and free licensing are a core component of the ethos of many of these corporations. Our state government should at the least be in compliance with what is becoming nationally standard.

What I would like to request is consideration for a bill like the above Virginia one, but with stronger language, that any goods “produced” with tax funding in a fixed form: written text, visual recordings, maps, videos, audio, anything official to come out of Olympia or local government, state and local laws, a random video the City of Spokane may make, etc. be required to be produced and released under a license such as the Creative Commons licensing that simply requires “Attribution”.

This link details the specifics of the licensing I think would be best:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

Washington state would still ultimately retain ownership of all the content in this scenario, but by law it should be mandatory that any government-funded (in any way) materials should be freely available, with no copyright restriction beyond attribution. I have zero problem with an entity like TVW turning an ultimate profit from what they’re doing, that originated with state dollars. Anyone is welcome to do that–good for TVW for coming up with a successful model. But they, nor anyone else, should have exclusive claim over content *I* paid for.

What I’m upset about is that any organization then leveraging copyright claims to squash what is protected “fair use” of their materials that were paid for by my tax dollars. In the wake of the Constantine fiasco posted about on Publicola, they are now going after a political blogger for reposting the now notorious video on another “video sharing” service, as detailed at this link: http://horsesass.org/?p=21640

Please help Washington state be a leader in the realm of intellectual property law, and allow us to do better than other states, such as Virginia. Please initiate legislation based on the Virginia example above, but with stronger language than the “preference” tone they set. Make it mandatory, to allow Washington state tax payers to always have free access to what we have already paid for with our taxes.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joseph Szilagyi

This is more for the networking geeks out there, rather than your average iPhone user. Brough Turner, a veteran telecom guru and several-time CTO has got a theory. The short version is that AT&T has enough capacity to handle the massive amounts of traffic that the iPhone users consume, contrary to a lot of the news reports out there. The real problem is that AT&T has screwed up the configuration of their wireless network, he says.

The bottleneck link is the over-the-air link, i.e. the connection from radio access network or UTRAN to the Mobile Statation (MS) in the above diagram, therefore the critical buffers are those at the UTRAN. In practice the UTRAN includes both the basestations (called Node-Bs) and the Radio Network Controllers (RNCs) which coordinate handovers between basestations (among other things). Because of hand-overs, the amount of data buffered at the Node-B is relatively small. It’s the buffers at the RNC that must be large enough to deal with the delay variations in the radio network and yet small enough to induce packet loss when the network gets congested.

I have no idea if he’s right, but it makes sense. Good read, if you know networking.

Found in a Slashdot comment. Yes, the youth of today are clearly going to ruin the world with all their Tweeting and Facebooking and e-high jinks.

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.


– Hesiod, 700 BC

Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

– Assyrian tablet, 2800 BC

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect
 their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently
 inhabit taverns and have no self control.


– Egyptian tomb, 4000 BC

For those that want a very in-depth review from someone who simply gets both film AND comics.

Read this article…

The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, is also believed to be gone.

What the Hell? Talk about missing your target audience…

I think some of them will never even be looked at by myself, but some of them do sound pretty useful. Maybe one for you?

And for the half dozen Internets people that never saw the original…

Russert was one of the good ones, and one of the very, very, very, very few political correspondents I actually paid attention to.

Apparently, theres another group now out to “get” the Scientologists. Comments about targets being low-lying fruit aside, I wonder if this group that calls themselves “Anonymous” is the same group called “Anonymous” that was mentioned on Fox News last year.

read more | digg story

Add me as a friend, Internets!

It’s like MySpace 2.0, but it doesn’t suck.

Comcast’s filtering/throttling of torrent traffic involves forging TCP reset packets, pretending to be from one end of the torrent session. This is the same technique used by the Great Firewall of China, and a pretty clear violation of various states’ criminal impersonation statues. Could Comcast face legal action?

read more | digg story

Via Digg: “Adblock Plus, the Firefox browser plug-in that erases advertisements from web pages, is a killer of a killer app … or it could be if it became really popular.The widespread adoption of ad-blocking software could totally atomize online advertising. But, the numbers still aren’t high enough YET to spur a counterattack by the big guns, like Google.”

If this ever does take off and reached critical mass, I wonder what sort of outcry we’d see, from it, on the part of e-business. Personally, I don’t see any harm in web advertising, or targeted web advertising: bandwidth is NOT free, up or down the Internets, and ultimately someone needs to pay for it. The vast majority of websites, even high quality ones, are done by hobbyists–they don’t make a profit. They need a way to recoup bandwidth and hostings costs at the least.

read more | digg story

Swedish grannies are connecting to the net at 40 gigabits per second.

read more | digg story