To the one person who refuses to neither accept nor deny my Facebook friend request:

I don’t know if you will read this, but I am not-so-secretly hoping that you do. That’s why I’ve opened this note up to friends of friends. We have around 50 mutual friends, so this has a better chance of getting to you than a bottled note set out to sea.

I hope this letter finds you in good health and good spirits as I would never wish anything ill on any so-called friend of mine.

I’m writing this because you have had me patiently waiting in Facebook friend purgatory for more than a year now. I feel like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix: Revolutions, trapped in between two worlds waiting to be saved by the Train Man. But I don’t think this train is ever gonna come.

Why have you not acted? Seriously. Enough white people decided in the last year that they could consciously vote for a man based on the content of his character, and not his color. Now, a black man is president. But it takes you more than a year to decide whether or not we can be virtual friends? Did you even vote?

I mean, I obviously know we aren’t the best of friends. But we’ve had many good conversations over the years. OK, maybe they were four or five years ago. And maybe those stimulating dialogues weren’t as frequent as I’d like to remember.

I do remember you scowling at me from time to time when you thought I may have maliciously wronged you or because you’d heard some random rumor. But I thought all of that was smoothed over with the engaging, yet sporadic, instant message conversations we had after graduation.

Surely, I thought we were cool enough to be Facebook friends. I mean, I did take you out for dessert once. So what if I paid for it with a gift certificate I won with a raffle ticket I didn’t buy. I still took you.

I guess we’re not that cool.

It’s crazy because even all of my exes, the ones on Facebook, are my friends. But not you. I’m friends with people I’m not even sure I remember, but have so many common friends with that I feel compelled to accept their requests. But not you. Former bosses, old co-workers, wives of people I met once and even a few people who, on sight, might confuse me with another one of my black Facebook buddies litter my friends list. But not you.

God forbid she ever joins Facebook, but I’d confirm my mother as a friend. I think. Well, maybe not my mother, but you get the point.

For a while I wondered if this was just some bad karma coming back at me like a misguided boomerang. See, I do have one person sitting in my pending friend box that I refuse to confirm or deny. But that’s because the first time I denied said person, he wouldn’t believe that I didn’t want to be his friend. He unwittingly tried again.

So there that person sits, idle, in friend request purgatory, but with reason. I’ve only requested you once, and had you denied me of said internet friendship then, I would have accepted that with some semblance of humility.

I wouldn’t be dumb enough to request you again. I would understand that you don’t want to be Facebook stalked by me.

But you, you have no justifiable cause for leaving our friendship or non-friendship idling behind the gray words “Friend Requested.” No grounds. No excuse. No case. No rationale. No … yes, I used the thesaurus to search for more appropriate synonyms for “no reasoning” just to keep saying you’re wrong. None seemed to work.

Like our non-existent friendship.

It’s OK, though. There are still 540-plus people/friends who are willing to accept that we are, or once were, somewhat familiar with each other in this life (There are definitely a few I might have deleted before that Burger King promotion lost its legs, and I still might. But I’ll save the why for another note).

I guess they’ll have to suffice. And this will just have to be another long-winded version of self-medication. Yes, I write letters that I will never send. But this isn’t one of those.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t even want to know the why (i.e., don’t reply). Just click “Ignore” already.

Your Former Acquaintance,

Damon

P.S. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you accepted my friendship on MySpace, and subsequently deleted it for no reason a year later. lol.

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The upcoming feature is part of Facebook’s new Subscriber functionality, which lets you adjust the amount and type of activity you see from friends, follow the public updates of people on Facebook who are not your friends and opt in to share your public updates with people you don’t know but who might be interested in you.  Once again Facebook is giving users granular control over what they share, when, and with who they share it with.

This probably won’t be much of a change for people who already update their Facebook status using their Twitter account, but for those who are on Facebook more than they are on Twitter this will be a valuable way for them to keep their Twitter streams updated more often.  It remains to be seen how this is going to curtail the impending release of Google+ when it gets out of Beta, because the choice to use either is going to come down to where people want to spend their time.

Google+ will be the first major competitor to Facebook since they won the battle against Myspace, but it remains to be seen that a large number of people will flock to Google+ and leave Facebook completely.  The most likely scenario is that people will have both services, and split their time on both depending on where the majority of their friends spend their time.   Features will help, but ultimately social networking is about friends and that’s what will determine who wins this battle.  What about you, will you use Facebook or Google+ as your primary social network?

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When Cornish and other employees were finally let go for good a few months later, the company apparently did a bad job of revoking network passwords with administrative access.  Cornish’s former boss refused to hand over hand over network passwords to company officials when requested and he was subsequently fired as well.

Cornish apparently still upset over the whole thing went to a McDonald’s in Smyrna, Georgia and logged into the company’s network from a public McDonald’s Internet connection and started up a vSphere VMware management console.  He secretly installed this on the company’s servers a few weeks prior to leaving the company, and he subsequently used this access to delete 88 company servers from the company’s VMware farm.  This shut down Shionogi for several days as the company could not cut checks, ship packages, or do much of anything with the servers wiped out.

The attack ultimately cost Shionogi $800,000 and a big black eye, and Cornish was eventually caught and admitted to the crime.  He was charged and confessed to computer intrusion charges, which rewarded him with a 10 year prison sentence.  That little taste of revenge cost Cornish a lot more than $800,000 and he probably thinks about it as each day passes from his jail cell.  The worst part is Cornish was only caught because he used his credit card to make a $5 purchase at the McDonald’s where he launched the attack only minutes before he executed it.  This highlights the importance of not letting people get to you in the workplace, VMWare engineers are paid well and Mr. Cornish could have probably found another job and avoided going to jail.

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Rather than repeat this over and over, I thought it would be helpful if I published a short timeline of events, from the day my MacBook was stolen, until today when I picked it up.

• My MacBook was stolen on March 21, 2011 from my apartment in Oakland, CA. It happened during the day while I wasn’t home.
• I reported the crime on the same day to an officer from the Oakland Police Department. For verification, the original police report was 11-014180.
• I immediately began to gather photos, network and location information about my stolen MacBook using Hidden.
• I followed up with an investigator at Oakland Police Department on April 25, presenting him with this additional evidence, which was attached to my previous report
• I contacted the investigator twice via email, asking him if he was able to make any progress on my case, but I didn’t hear anything back.
• On Friday, May 27, I decided to set up a tumblelog with photos of the current owner (who may or may not be the thief) in order to get some media attention.
• The tumblelog didn’t receive much attention until I tweeted about it on the morning of Tuesday, May 31. Within a few hours, it was tweeted and liked thousands of times.
• Late Tuesday afternoon, I received a call from Officer Joshi of the Oakland Police Department after she was contacted by Good Morning America. She told me that the Oakland Police Department would be following up on my case immediately.
• On the evening of Tuesday May 31, two officers from the Oakland Police Department arrested the guy who had my laptop. The police used evidence I had gathered using Hidden (an email address which pointed to a cab service) that he was a driver and tricked him into picking them up.
• Later that evening the officers acquired my MacBook from his home.
• I picked it up from the Oakland Police Department on the morning of June 1.

The pictures of the thief are just epic, and the fact that he was able to get his computer back makes it even better.  It’s kind of funny that the thief never thought that the user might have some sort of LoJack or other program installed as those are common these days.  Stealing a laptop to actually use it on a regular basis is just plain dumb, if he was going to sell it to someone for a quick dollar that would have made more sense.  I guess that is why he is a criminal and getting pictures taken of him sleeping on the couch rather than him working somewhere.

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We can see positives and negatives to this if it gets approved.  If you have ever been to a concert then you have probably seen any number of people (probably a few thousand) who are holding their phones over their head recording the song or snapping photos of the performance.  This can become highly annoying because they are more than likely already standing up and partially in your way, now the sliver of a gap you found to see the performance their arm is now in the way.  All of this for a few seconds of shaky and grainy video footage?

The worth of capturing that video or moment is really a waste of time using a camera phone, and then posting the video on Youtube to show how cool you are is equally dumb.  That fact that music companies get up in arms over grainy cell phone video of an “exclusive” performance makes no sense at all, and it would be sensible to assume that they are part of the reason behind this technology.  From the pure annoyance standpoint for people that attend concerts it can be viewed as a positive thing to make their experience more enjoyable, but the control being exerted over thing people pay for can’t be ignored.

A person purchases a device (very expensive one at that) which has the capability of taking pictures and video, but the same company that sold them the device now wants to tell them how and when they can use it?  That is just not right as people take cameras to concerts all the time, it is common knowledge that video cameras are not normally allowed, but a smart phone is a bit of a gray area.  Since it can take video recordings (average quality at best) does that give the venue the right to disable functions of my phone?  If the device is a problem then they should deny a person entry into the venue who is carrying one of those devices, but they would never do it because they want to make money.

Apple has a right to patent anything they want, but implementing and using this is too much of a big brother mentality.  Apple’s motivation is to make money as well, and they will make a lot off of this if concert promoters see it as a viable way to promise that the concerts will be exclusive and they will control the distribution of the media.  The other part of this is while all the iPhones would be blacked out all of the Blackberries, Droids, and Windows 7 phones would still be recording video.  For Apple that would be a scenario they wouldn’t allow to happen.

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I can clearly remember having first discovered Pandora at work after a friend recommended the website as a way to help pass the monotonous workday with customizable streaming music stations, and the toe-tapping joy that instantly washed over me. Within a few weeks however, my employer started hating and made Pandora inaccessible from company workstations. As a result, my musical jubilation was unceremoniously replaced with seemingly longer work hours and daily doldrums.

Then as fate and technology would have it, the folks of the Music Genome Project got wise and developed Pandora as a smartphone application. And just like that, with the use of a Bluetooth earpiece and phone charger, I was back in melodious workday business!

But for as convenient as Pandora is while on the job, at the kids’ practices or while grocery shopping, it has crossed my mind on more than one occasion how Pandora has been able to provide such user specific music at practically no cost to the listener. I mean sure, I do realize that the advertising spots during the brief intervals between musical sets pays the Pandora bills in a big way, but that still has done nothing to negate my feelings that Pandora has always seemed to be one of those sites/applications that was simply too good to be true. Well, according to a recent Wall Street Journal Blog article, it is:

More than half of the smart phone apps tested by the Wall Street Journal found that they were sending users personal information such as location, age, gender, and a phone’s unique identifier to advertisers; often without user consent. Among the worst offenders were popular music streaming service Pandora and text messaging app TextPlus 4 from app developer GOGII.

The Journal tested 101 apps that run on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile platforms, and found that 56 of them sent a phone’s unique identifier to third parties without user consent, 47 transmitted a phone’s location, and five sent out user demographic information.

TextPlus4 sent a phone’s unique ID (UDID) number to eight different advertising companies, and also sent a phone’s zip code and user age and gender to two of them. The app is only available for iOS. Meanwhile the Android and iOS versions of Pandora sent information to eight third parties, included location data to seven of those, a phone’s unique ID to three of them, and demographic data to two.

The makers of TextPlus 4 and Pandora said that information sent to third parties is not connected to a user’s name, and that personal information such as age and gender is offered by users. However the most transmitted bit of information was the phone’s unique identifier, a number unique to every phone that can be used by advertisers to track each phone owner’s behavior.

“We use listener data in accordance with our privacy policy” a spokeswoman for Pandora told the Journal. The policy states that the company will share “non-personally identifiable information.”

The biggest recipient of user data was Google, through its AdMob, AdSense, Analytics and DoubleClick subsidiaries. And apps on Apple’s iOS app store were chattier with advertisers than on the Android marketplace, despite Apple’s more rigid approval process.

Now, unless you’ve been living under a dial-up modem, it is common knowledge that many third party apps, social networking sites and even ad supported webmail programs that require some sort of login credentials and user profiles share the information that is provided to them with advertising companies who pay for such data to target users who fit within a certain promotional mix they may be seeking. Still, the idea that sites like Pandora may be collecting user trends, activity and other information, then providing it to third-parties without user consent is just a bit unnerving. Although for the most part, this sort of data collection is designed to be processed anonymously and in batches so that advertisers can’t identify one user from the other, it only takes one cyber ne’er do well with no friends and too much time on his hands to develop some sort of archived database that links UDID and other personal information together (that a user submits through sites and apps who’s fine print relationships with ad companies are direct results of their profitable bottom lines) to really put a glitch in the matrix!

What’s funny is that I’ve oftentimes joked that with the directions that society and technology are rapidly taking, how imperative it would be for me to learn to live off the grid, but who’d have ever thought that Pandora’s privacy policy would be pushing me closer toward Morpheus and the red pill?

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It was rumored it would replace the old Windows 95 style interface, with a user experience that would beat every interface out there.  The truth is the interface on WP7 is probably the cleanest and sleekest out there, so in a lot of cases it can be said that that goal was accomplished.  The reason Microsoft is behind in market share is because they sat on their laurels when Windows Mobile was dominating the smartphone market.  The let Apple and Google enter the race almost uncontested and now they are trying to fight their way back into relevance.

The other issue is the availability of WP7 handsets, which are only available on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.  Once the phones start to hit Verizon and Microsoft increases the amount of phones they offer then they may easily surpass RIM who is sitting at 15% market share.  In all honesty it is much too early to tell if the WP7 phone is a failure as users of the phone are happy with it, but the number and type of Apps available for it will be the determining factor of its success or failure.

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Being that the phone is being released on Verizon wireless then you know that it will have some sort of custom Verizon modifications to the software, and Verizon is pushing their V Cast App store over the Android Market even though both will come installed on the device.  The phone is going to come with a similar directional pad to what you find on the Playstation controller, a select and start button and the same four buttons as you find on the Sony Playstation controller.

To get people excited about the release of the phone it will come preloaded with six games, Madden NFL 11, Bruce lee Dragon Warrior, Ashphalt 6: Adrenaline, Star Battalion, The Sims 3, and Crash Bandicoot.  All of those bundled games cover a varying degree of popular gaming genres, so the appeal of the device should reach a fair amount of gamers.  There are also several games already available for the device in the V Cast App Store Assassins Creed, Need for speed, and Guitar Hero just to name a few.

This phone should be a no brainer for people who identify themselves as gamers, and those who already own a Sony Playstation.  People have talked in the past about Apple’s IOS being a gaming platform, but the truth is the platform is limited with the types of games you can develop for it just like any mobile platform.  Angry Birds is a great game, but how many times can you launch a bird at something before it gets a bit old?  Imagine playing Assassins creed while you are on a long trip and actually being able to immerse yourself into the action of the game and control it just like your Playstation?  That is the advantage to this phone, it definitely is not a phone that is going to appeal to the masses, but it can probably easily be called the first true mobile gaming phone.

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The malware is called MacDefender, Mac Security, and Mac Protector depending on what version you catch it can be named any one of those three.  The program is designed to fake an antivirus program and scare the user into thinking that they have a virus or malware on their computer that they need to use a credit card to have the program clean it up.  A user gets the virus from an infected website that shows up high in search results on search engines using popular topics, these sites are changed fairly regularly so shutting them down can be problematic.

There are varied rumors about how widespread it is, but there has been an influx of calls to Apple support on this issue.  On top of that there has been an uptick in forum posts from concerned Mac users who may have gotten the malware on their system, so it has definitely had an effect.  There has also been a confirmation that on an underground hacker site a new crimeware kit that that makes it easy for hackers to write malicious programs for OSX has been released.

What this means is that more viruses and malware are going to show up on Apple machines, and users who thought they had a “safe haven” by moving to Apple have to realize it is only temporary.  Does t his mean that Apple is not a secure operating system?  That is a difficult question to answer as Windows is not as unsecure as people make it out to be, all software whether written by Apple or Microsoft has security flaws and vulnerabilities in them.  These programs exploit the one factor programmers can’t really control which is users, any malware or viruses get on a machine because users are no careful about what they download and run.  That will always be a constant, and if you are running a Mac the frequency of these types of programs is going to increase as more people convert to Apple.

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If you have a Sony internet connected gaming device you may be upset right now because the Playstation Network has been unavailable to users for the last seven days or so.  Many people initially had no idea why they could not connect to get their trophies, or play their favorite games online with friends.

In recent days Sony started sending emails out to explain what happened, and what actions they were taking.  Here is an excerpt of the email that they sent:

“Valued PlayStation(R)Network/Qriocity Customer:

We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill
as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and
efficiently as practicable.”

They go on to say that it does not appear that credit card information was compromised, but they recommend customers act as if their information was stolen and monitor their credit reports closely.  Many users are in an outrage because they say Sony waited several days to notify them that their personal information was compromised.  These users need to take one thing into account, Sony still does not even know exactly when the attack happened.  They have narrowed it down to a two day period, so if they can’t even pinpoint when it happened how can they tell you what was stolen?

If Sony came out and said all your credit card information was stolen seven days ago, what would you have done differently?  The truth is if you do any kind of business on the internet then your personal information has probably already been stolen, or compromised several times already.  The theft of names, address, and email are not that big of deal since most of that can be easily found with a Google search.  Your PSN login ID and handle simply need to have their passwords reset upon restoration of the PSN Network service.

Then on the chance that the attackers did manage to get credit card information, cancel the card and get a new one.  If you want to prevent that in the future, buy Playstation Network gift cards (problem solved).  We are not saying Sony didn’t screw up here, but there have been so many data breaches in the past three years it’s bound to affect you.  You should already take precautions to secure your personal information and monitor your bank charges on a regular basis if you do any business online.  Sony has given no ETA on when PSN will be back up, but they hope it will be within a week.

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