Alrighty then. First things first, no. I’ve not been hacked. The simple answer is that I’m really not blogging on The Dojo any more. If you want that, you can head over to my blog, TylerRegas.com. What you see here now is what anyone with an even slight inclination for technology thought that Mobodojo covered; a site about motherboards.

Here’s the kicker. I’m not really going to be updating this site much. I’m going to leave that to random people who may or may not come along. If people buy through my site, I get a kickback from Amazon for pimping their shiznit. I’m fine with that. Really. I may be a liberal, but that doesn’t make me anti capitalist. Hell, making money is core to the American way.

In summary, I’ll be posting here and there, but only to give the Amazon plugin a kick in the pants and add new PC components. I may do something more some day, but probably not. What you will find here are motherboards, power supplies, RAM, video cards,  cooling fans, CPUs, and whatever other internal parts there are to be crammed into a PC case. I may even list some cases!

I wouldn’t have even brought this up, really, unless I hadn’t encountered it in two places at once. I won’t even call it a trend yet. In fact, I hope that this article sparks some public discourse of this potential issue and nips it in the bud. What I’m talking about, if not made clear in the title, is that two sites I know of are offering account deactivation instead of outright account deletion. The two sites are Facebook and Ning. I’m sure you’re familiar with Facebook, but you may not be aware of Ning, a site which offers personalized and private social networks.

I found Ning after getting out of Facebook because I still wanted a social network for my friends. I signed up for Ning only to find out that it will no longer be free starting in July and decided it wasn’t for me. While I was able to delete the single group I had created I found that the only option I have to get rid of my account is to deactivate it. This is worse than Facebook’s method of hiding the Account Deletion page and then making it take 14 days before it actually happens, but not by much.

The rationale here seems to be that once you are a member of the site, its tantamount to self destruction to let that member leave for whatever reason. They must have thought that they would simply fix whatever issues the member is having and that everything would be good. In the case of deactivating your account in Facebook, they assume you simply don’t understand how to use the site, and try to redirect you to the Help Center to educate you. Continue reading…

Yesterday I posted that I am done with Facebook. Today, Facebook’s entire company (according to them) had a sit-down regarding privacy. Another thing that happened today. I received a Welcome Back email from Facebook, even though this was the second time I’d told them I wanted my account deleted. As a result, I spent half an hour in the privacy settings turning off every option, making it so that I would be the only person to see anything, and canceling all 3rd party tool access and canceled yet again.

Last night I found out about Diaspora. Dan, Max, Elliot, and Rafi decided that they, too, had their fill of crap from the likes of Facebook and are now building an open source alternative. They made a video and stuck it up on KickStarter and passed around the news to various sites like Engadget. The idea has very quickly caught on, and their $10,000 goal has been well surpassed. As of 9:30PM in SoCal, they have raised $123,958.00 and they still have 18 days to go.

I very strongly suggest that you go check it out and make a pledge. Support this project and these guys will make it happen. We need something like this. The social power of the internet is a critical tool in the development and growth of the world. It brings people from every walk of life and social background closer together, while services like Facebook only serve their investors and advertisers. Get to it and pass it along!

As you mayhaps have divined from the title of this post, I have decided to abandon the trainwreck formerly known as Facebook. I want to make it clear up front that it has nothing to do with any of my friends or anything which anyone I know has done something. This is all on Facebook and their lack of integrity and complete unwillingness to protect their member’s information.

The straw on the proverbial camel’s back was the Free iPad offering. I don’t fall for these scams and I don’t know anyone who would, yet Facebook joined me to a Fan Page which not only linked me to this group without my permission, but also spammed all of my friends. This is unconscionable behavior and I will not tolerate it.

Prior to this particular event, Facebook could not stop screwing around with their privacy policy and kept opting people in to things that members weren’t asked about. Facebook has also modified the privacy settings to make them difficult to use. You can’t even cancel an account without having to wait 14 days!

While I have no proof, I could easily speculate that their financial partners have been putting pressure on them to monetize the site somehow. After all, those Ziinga people have been pounding out millions of dollars in revenues from Facebook members, and I don’t think FB sees any of that. Word is that Facebook is going to change how that all works, and that Ziinga could be creating their own network in reaction.

[UPDATE: I'm a dork. I didn't realize that the article I was responding to was from 2005. My analysis remains valid, though. It would be interesting to find out how many verified exploit potentials have been found in Mac OS X and Safari which have been actively pursued. I'm betting the number is really small. -TCR]

The time has come. Symantec has officially come out and stated that there is an active malware infection potential for Mac OS X in the wild. Many people unfamiliar with the superior operating system have claimed that the Mac wasn’t getting noticed because it was too small a target. Now Symantec is saying that Mac OS X isn’t any more secure than Windows. I can take the former statement, even though there has never been less than 30 million Mac users in the last 10 years (this is a non-verified datum point, but I’m pretty confident I’m relatively close). There are far more Apple product users now, so I’d have to say that its extremely unlikely that anyone, anywhere has no clue who Apple Inc. is. That just seems ignorant.

That leaves us with the latter statement, that Mac OS X is as secure as Windows is. That’s like saying a Lamborghini Murcielago and Tata Nano are equal in capabilities because they are both cars. The very simple fact of the matter is that Windows is a sieve because it was designed that way. Microsoft has developed a load of scripting interfaces for Windows to facilitate developer diversity, they stick hooks to these technologies in everything, including IE, then they integrate IE into the OS, and literally millions of exploitation points are born. As long as a user’s IE security settings are turned down enough to allow scripts developed by legitimate programmers to run, there are plenty of holes into IE for malware to slip in. Continue reading…