MOBODOJO

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 Account deactivation is not a valid alternative to account deletion

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 [...]

[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 How to stop viruses and malware from getting on your computer

Microsoft is stupid. They don’t get it, and after nearly 30 years, I doubt they ever will. Gates was an opportunist and not particularly creative and Steve Ballmer is a lunatic with no real vision. What do you expect from such a pair? I challenge you to produce a single shred of evidence that Microsoft has ever created something original, and it can’t be an acquisition, either. You will find nothing. Windows 7 is such a blatant and baldfaced copy of Mac OS X its ridiculous, and that’s the only way Microsoft figures it can maintain its ever dwindling market share.

Am I an Apple fan boy? Sure as hell am! I’m not ashamed to admit it, just like I’m pleased to admit that I was an LA Kings fan back when Gretsky was still on the ice and McSorley was cracking skulls. Apple, since Steve Jobs return in 1997, has fostered a steady and relentless growth, smoothly taking the few bumps along the way in stride and never missing step (i.e., Cube, HiFi, build quality issues). Now Apple, the company the press couldn’t stop using the word ‘beleagured’ to describe, is now a powerhouse in the mobile media and smart phone industry segments, and has been steadily growing their computer systems market share.

This is not the kind of market Apple can simply take over. People are invested in hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in PC gear and software and they won’t simply dump it all because Apple says boo. Considering that, it was brilliant that Apple started up the iPod industry and reshaped the music market single-handedly. I’m betting Jobs knew that they couldn’t grow on computers alone because Microsoft had the 90% marketshare. Then Apple came out with the iPhone to show people what a real computer can be like, another brilliant stroke. How can people not wonder how easy a Mac is to use when they love their iPhone.

Continue reading What Does The iPad Mean To The Future of Computing?

Little frustrates me more than a projects inability to properly document itself. You might think that this is something which is limited to the few pundits such as myself and that most people who report on technology don’t have such issues. I beg to differ. I have conferred with a number of my colleagues and confirmed that this is an ongoing issue. Of course, this is not a rant regarding documentation, or its lack thereof, in the open source community, but of a particular issue.

I could, without question, rage on about the rampant apathy amongst so-called community support boards when regular contributors are faced with an issue they are unfamiliar with or that a coder believes they have satisfied the burden of documentation by installing a wiki, but just pointing out these related issues will remain sufficient. I speak instead of the lack of simple documentation of configuring a passwordless SSH client session in Dropbear inside of Busybox.

The situation is simple. I’ve been testing VMware’s pleasant ESXi virtualization platform and have started to look into associated projects and management tools. One such tool is OpenQRM, what appears to be a very promising open source project which was born of commercial roots. It employs PHP and MySQL for its web-based interface and has a rather extensive plug-in architecture which supports, among a host of others, VMware’s ESX/ESXi. In order for OpenQRM to see these servers, however, I must enable passwordless SSH.

Continue reading Of Dropbear, Busybox, and passwordless SSH