Hotmail Crash & Burn - using MSN support

I installed a "silly" (MSN recommended) security feature in place to "block cookies" on our work systems as recommended BY MS.

I then went to access my hotmail account (VIA pop) and low and behold, pop not working.

While I assumed it was the new cookie blocker... I just thought I would "follow the rules" and go to the MSN hotmail help site.

The image below is a screen shot of what I got. Zip, nothing the MSN "help" is down.

While I know they were not trying to be "funny" by alerting me to a cookie flaw and how to fix it that intern generated and security flaw that finally brought me to the originating help site that was "down".... This was a I.T. scream of a joke on me. You guys bust me up...

The "Person Of The Year" self absorb "megalomaniac" who needs constant self approval

You — Yes, You — you shallow, self absorb "megalomaniac" have listened to enough media to believe that you alone Are TIME's Person of the Year I remember how self absorbed & oblivious I was when I entered the internet age over a decade ago. As time progress I found myself not becoming "me" but becoming more of "them".

So when they say "YOU" are the "Person Of The Year", what they mean is THEY are. Because YOU have become "content" utilized for marketing and social change at their hands.

As humans we ALL beg for acceptance, individualism, recognition and self affirmation... general media knows clearly knows this and uses the internet to take advantage of every issue that makes "YOU" feel that you are "important". ( Condition know as NPD - Narcissistic Personality Disorder )

How to write context for new media articles (paid for by their sponsors ;-)

• Yes - buying that dress shows you care about animals, buy it!
• Yes - you look very smart in that suit, buy it!
• Smart people buy this car, buy it!
• Caring people donate here - donate now!
• rep/dec vote this way based on this "stuff" so vote now based on this "stuff"
• This "stuff" is better, throw out your old "stuff" and buy better....
• People who care about the environment buy this stuff or vote this way - SO DO WHAT WE SAY or your a bad person!

Hey I could do this all day folks, bottom line is that the internet makes far less of "YOU" than you could ever imagine... you just become one of them.

Picture rights of slate.com

Is your IT budget an Oxymoron

Paul Strassmann is a fellow who has been critical of IT spending for some time now. His resume is about as impressive as they come; he has also authored many seminal works in the field, including the Squandered Computer, which I have reviewed before ( The ROI Hath No Clothes .)

A good exercise for the start of the new year will be to calculate your Information Productivity Index, which measures exactly how much output you are getting out of your information processing dollars. Paul explains exactly how to do this in this Baseline 500 writeup. You will probably be surprised at how low your score is; in fact, half of all companies don't even get a positive score, implying their entire IT program is just a hobby. Where are you?

 

Linked from ecoiron.blogspot.com (Thanks ;-)

'They're geeky, but they don't know what to do with their geekdom,'

College Freshmen Struggle With Tech Literacy

On a recent nationwide test to measure their technological 'literacy' -- their ability to use the Internet to complete class assignments -- only 49 percent of the test-takers correctly evaluated a set of Web sites for objectivity, authority and timeliness. Only 35 percent could correctly narrow an overly broad Internet search."

Geek to Live: Lifehacker Zeitgeist

In the spirit of the Google Zeitgeist, today I've got Lifehacker's top dozen most popular posts of 2006.

1. Turn your $60 router into a $600 router
2. Top Firefox 2 config tweaks
3. Windows Vista Beta: How to dual-boot Windows XP and Windows Vista
4. Automatically back up your hard drive
5. Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks
6. Build your own DVR
7. How to format your hard drive and install Windows XP from scratch
8. Become a Gmail master
9. One-click DVD rips
10. Automatically download your favorite TV shows
11. The self-sustaining iPod
12. Lifehacker Pack

Harvard Spot on Digital Disobedience

...we're holding an event on Cyberactivism and Culture Jamming ... where we'll explore the interplay between digital technologies, activism, and the ability to modify and critique cultural institutions.

 

A  Harvard University panel presentation entitled "Digital Disobedience: Cyberactivism and Culture Jamming."

 

Here are the details:

Ji Lee, Artist and Creator of the Bubble Project
J. Salvatore Testa, Defender of Truth and Liberty, Hacktivismo
Prof. Fred Turner, Stanford University and author of "From Counterculture to Cyberculture"
Prof. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard VES Dept., teaching "Art and Activism since 1989: Culture Jam"

 

Sponsored by Harvard College Free Culture and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with support from the MIT Computing Culture Group and the Culture Jam course.

Here's a video of the event "left" (click to play, ) Also for cDc -   Syndicate of London have recently released a book (entitled End of Dayz) of Britain's finest t-files from the early 1990s to the present.  End of Dayz is a selection of the best articles released in the SOL journal since its foundation.

Not all things are black and white

Wired- "futurism has no future,"

The bubble-era vision of a utopian Internet is dented and dirty. Technophobic refuseniks are likely to carry out violent resistance, and they may have good reason: Out-of-control technology is a distinct risk.

 

The erosion of our future?

 The future of the Internet lies not with institutions but with individuals. The Net itself will recede into the background. If you're under 21, you likely don't care much about any supposed difference between virtual and actual, online and off.

 

Erosion of self

...only to have my paperback writing slow down as I began to spend uncontrollable amounts of time surfing and blogging. This experience is both grand and problematic. It reflects not two extremes but the slider-bar that is my everyday life.

 

...development doesn't surprise me. Frankly, I saw it coming.   Read full from - Bruce Sterling here

 

First sign on the apocalypse

Lock up your daughters and backdoor and run for your life!

The November Comscore numbers show the inevitable: MySpace Is Biggest Site on InternetFox Interactive (mostly MySpace) now has more page views than the combined Yahoo sites, taking the no. 1 spot for the first time.

This was less to do with MySpace growth than with a 9% dip in overall Yahoo traffic (total Internet traffic for all sites in November dipped just 3%; Google was up 5%).

 

Still, MySpace has every reason to pop the champagne today and celebrate their 200% growth in page views over the last twelve months.

VIA-www.techcrunch.com (thanks guys)

IBM and the Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust (VIA hugg.com)- Short video based on the Pulitzer Prize-nominated international bestseller book "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black. The book, which documents IBM's direct links to Hilter and his so-called "Final Solution" by providing the Third Reich with census machines and punch card technology, caused IBM to issue a formal statement claiming that the Nazis controlled the operations of IBM Germany during the war.  » original news

Hacking A reputation in MySpace and Facebook

Schneier on Security "Fake Your Space" is a site where you can hire fake friends to leave their pictures and personalized comments on your page. Now you can pretend that you're more popular than you actually are... What's next? Services that verify friends on your friends' MySpace pages? Services that block friend verification services? Where will this all end up?

Comments I left are said at best...

---

After 20 years of being part of the "collective" (since Commodork64 BBS years)

I must "assimilate" my life and take back the creative, unique, professional & social skills that the "collective" internet has eroded in me... because "the Internet is way better at letting us be weird than it was at helping us be normal."

I have great fear for my family, my friends & our future after watching the "social" networks turn our great nation into criminal, self absorbed, socially dysfunctional, deviant junkies... I thought that was the governments job ;-)

Wow, a reference to "Whuffie"... I love your readers!

Internet is better at letting us be weird than helping us be normal.

The internet will suck you in, and you'll never escape.... ha, ha, ha, hahhhaaa!

Andrew Sullivan has posted a youtube of the old AT&T "You Will" ads about all the things AT&T would make possible through the Internet. I think these are the most emblematic advertisements of the era, defining the way that big companies totally missed the point of the Internet. They were like Thomas Edison declaring that the phone would bring opera to America's living rooms -- AT&T posited that the Internet would just amplify our normal, everyday lives, so you could "tuck your kid in from a phonebooth."

What they missed was that for all the normalcy that the Internet could enable, it would be much, much better at enabling deviance -- all the behaviors that were suppressed by society, or impossible to engage in given social constraints. Also Because There are no more good Hackers - Just Evil and Anyone can say anything on the Internet but that doesn't make it true or right

Go ahead follow the weird online. Link (via Global Nerdy -VIA (boingboing.com)

Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy

Slashdot.org reports "Trojan horses masquerading as 'cracks for Vista' are starting to appear on pirate boards. More worrying though, Microsoft has confirmed that Vista's image-based install process is designed to allow third-party software to be slipstreamed into the installation DVD. Great for corporate deployment of Vista with software pre-installed, but also a huge benefit for malware writers, who can distribute Vista images with deeply-rooted malware." Link

Goolge drops honest webmaster after site was hacked

J. J. Ramsey writes "Talk.Origins Google pulled the plug on its search engine, giving only the vague reason: 'No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines.' This was apparently triggered by a recent cracking of the site that added 'hidden links to non-topical sites,' but Google won't say just what the violations were. Talk.Origins webmaster Wesley R. Elsberry believes that this Google policy harms honest webmasters."

Pic supplied by cDc - cuz da bitz nooz its bad 2 Hotlink ;-)

GATES will give it all away... can't take iot with him

El Lobo writes "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation To Spend All Its Assets within 50 years of both of them dying. The foundation focuses on improving health and economic development globally, and improving education and increasing access to technology. It also focuses on fighting diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The Seattle-based foundation plans to increase spending to about $3.5 billion a year beginning in 2009 and continuing through the next decade, up from about $1.75 billion this year." The Wall Street Journal (excerpted at the link above) called the foundation's decision "a decisive move in a continuing debate in philanthropy about whether such groups should live on forever." Link

Your not dumb, your just running DOS

The brain is like a computer... so there really aren't any stupid people.

Just people running DOS.

Tips from the Ririan Project ;-)