Lost generation.... Merry Textmas

A Brief History Of Web Standards [Infographic] - Data Visualization Encyclopedia, Information Technology, Symbols, Posters, Infographic

Throughout the history of the Internet, there has been an evolution of web standards. Due to these transformations, today, "the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeds the number of people on Earth." Vitamin Talent has collaborated with Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, founders of An Event Apart, to create this fantastic infographic detailing the changes of web standards during the lifetime of the Internet.

See full here: http://www.visualinformation.info/a-brief-history-of-web-standards-infographic/

Why Skyrim Is Horrible for the Economy | GeekDad | Wired.com

We live in very troubled times. Unemployment is higher than it has been in a generation and job numbers continue to be dismal; the stock market turbulently boils, destroying billions in wealth; and entire continents look to the rest of the world for bailouts. Still, there are pockets of economic hope. After a very positive October, video game sales continued to increase in November. During the week following Thanksgiving, XBox had its biggest week of hardware sales ever, moving nearly one million consoles.

Yet, in this period of bullish video game sales, there is some decidedly bad news. There is one game that is leaving a black eye on the gaming industry and single-handedly keeping us in a recession. Released one month ago, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has done more to damage our economy than a committee of congressmen with a wallet full of US Treasury credit cards and a case of whiskey.

I know what you're thinking: it's the second-best selling game in the world right now. In the first 48 hours that Skyrim was available, 3.5 million copies were sold, a number that has continued to grow. How can a game that will generate millions possibly be bad for the economy?

The answer is quite simple: Skyrim is incredible. The game's world is so big and there are so many quests to complete that those millions of dollars in sales are being nullified by players' lost productivity and lack of economic participation in the real world.

Read on at: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/12/skyrim/

Owning A Cat a biological hazard that could Void Your Computer Warranty? - The Consumerist

After 3 weeks of HP support-hell, I finally reached someone who could give me a little info on why my laptop wasn't repaired...Cat hair or not, I just want my computer fixed. It's a manufacturing defect, and it just so happens that the laptop is sprinkled with a bit of hair.

Anyway, I kept arguing with him about how that was really not a lot of cat hair. He told me that it was "covered" and that he was positive that the computer had overheated (multiple reps told me the same thing). I knew it was all a lie, I was looking at the same photos he was, and there was hardly any hair in there. I kept saying that, and I told him the computer cooled itself fine.

He seemed to relent later, and he pretty much agreed with me, so he talked to his supervisor (to make an appeal). Then he gets back on the phone with me and says that the supervisor said that there was SO MUCH cat hair that it's considered a biological hazard. That's absolutely ridiculous, and he wouldn't even give me the number for his supervisor or transfer me to him (why not?).

I probably have more cat hair on my shirt than what was in the laptop. Am I a walking "biological hazard"? I don't think so. Why don't they lock me up and throw me in jail for sending such a dangerous computer into HP's service center? 

Read the awesome at: http://consumerist.com/2011/12/cat-hair-in-hp-computer-means-no-repair-for-you.html

Social Media Facts Every Communications Person Needs to Know - OhMyGov News

 ohmygov...composed this list of impactful factoids about social media.

 

Our Top 10:

1. The average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes.

2. The average Twitter user logs on for 23 minutes.

3. More than 400 million people log on to Facebook daily.

4. There are > 1 billion social network users worldwide.

5. 38 percent of Internet users have a smart phone. They are more intensive users of social media than those without a smart phone.

6. Out of 7 billion people in the world, 2 billion have internet access.

7. Of emerging markets, India and Brazil show the highest awareness of social media.

8. 510,000 comments are uploaded to Facebook every minute.

9. 93 percent of social network users have no intention of stopping their use of social media.

10. Over 60 percent of social network users state they have no desire to change or add a new social network.

 

More Facts:

Read on at: http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2011/12/06/30-social-media-facts-every-communications-person-needs-to-know.aspx

Windows 8 will be 'largely irrelevant' on PCs, predicts IDC - Computerworld

Computerworld - Windows 8 will be "largely irrelevant" to traditional PC users, a research firm said Monday.

Microsoft faces a tough sell with the new operating system, IDC said, because Windows 8 tries to "offer the best of both worlds" with a single OS suitable for both desktops and tablets.

"Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor," said IDC.

Read on by Gregg Keizer: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222436/Windows_8_will_be_largely_irrelevant_on_PCs_predicts_IDC

U.S. tech employment nears its all-time high - Computerworld

Computerworld - The U.S. government's report today that the unemployment rate is down and hiring is up showed some good news for tech workers as well.

The tech industry added 7,100 jobs last month, an increase of .17% from the previous month, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the TechServe Alliance, an industry group that tracks labor data month to month.

This brings the overall employment number for the industry to 4.068 million, which represents a year over year gain of 2.1%.

Tech industry employment is nearing the all-time high of 4.088 million, which was set in June, 2008, according to TechServe.

Read on at: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222384/U.S._tech_employment_nears_its_all_time_high_

Drowning Starving

US Debt Crisis - 2012 Simply Explianed

MAC/PC

XKCD

Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid...

a "psychometric consulting" firm that provides hiring exams for businesses, gave online IQ tests to more than 100,000 people. Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using.

On average, Internet Explorer users fared the worst, with IE6 users at the bottom of the pile and IE8 users performing slightly better. Firefox, Chrome and Safari fell in the middle with little difference between them. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino landed on top, along with Opera, whose users scored the highest (on average).

"The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual's cognitive ability and their choice of web browser," AptiQuant concluded. "From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers."

Read on at PC World

How I reacted when I got my Google+ invite.

Buddy Chilling

Maybe?

DaVinRock

Massive botnet 'indestructible,' say researchers - TDL-4

Computerworld - A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is "practically indestructible," security researchers say.

"TDL-4," the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is "the most sophisticated threat today," said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.

"[TDL-4] is practically indestructible," Golovanov said.

The Government's Gadget Habit

"The Federal procurement database reveals millions of dollars are being spent on gadgets. Over the past 10 years, the US government has spent $117 million on BlackBerries (including service plans), almost $18 million on iOS devices, about $1 million on PS3s, over $500k on Xboxes, and somehow, $12k on Zunes." - SlashDot

Is This the Golden Age of Hacking?

"With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers." - SlashDot

LulzSec reveals massive Sony security breach

LulzSec hacks Sony Pictures, reveals 1m passwords unguarded

Sony was embarrassed again on Thursday after Lulz Security posted that it had successfully hacked Sony Pictures' website. It lived up to its earlier promise and used a basic SQL injection attack to expose one million users' personal data, 3.5 million digital coupons and 75,000 music codes. The hacking team found that the information had few defenses and that none of the data, even including passwords, were stored in clear text.

Not all of the information could be taken due to resources and time, LulzSec said. As evidence, though, it posted a selection of what it had as evidence, including databases for related sites like AutoTrader, the coupons and codes, and the plain login information for some of the database. Administrator data was compromised both at the US site as well as from Belgium and the Netherlands.

LulzSec, which doesn't pursue hacks for commercial gain, cast itself as doing both Sony and the public as a favor. The move would push Sony to lock down its security more thoroughly across its sites. For end users, it was a warning as to how easily compromised Sony's sites were even after the PSN hack and several follow-ups from different sources.

"From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING," the team said. "Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?"

Sony hadn't responded to the breach as of Thursday but was ironically due to testify at a Congress hearing the same day on its security practices

Microsoft Skype - FAIL

Joy of Tech - Facebook Teams up with Communist Party

Windows 1981 - Xerox version

What the Fark?

Here are funny measurements that some people actually use.

1 Wheaton = 500,000 Twitter followers

MAC vs PC

Ohhhh... SNAP!

Car can't run with linux...

iPad eliminating thousands of American jobs.

"on an anti-technology rant on Friday on the floor of Congress, blaming the iPad for eliminating thousands of American jobs. '
Why do you need to go to Borders anymore?' asked Jackson.
'Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble?

Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.'
 
'What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs?
And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper?
Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist.
Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He's created the iPad.
Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China.
It is not produced here in the United States."

What (anti) Social Networks are for... the truth hurts.

Cause... affect or effect?

This -  High school students assigned to online study due to teacher shortage

Should help This?
U.S. students suffering from Internet addiction

The Reality Detached American

Splinternet, Or How We Broke the Good Old Web

SlashDot - "I don't want to be that scruffy guy with 'The end is nigh' sign and some really bad dental problems, but most industry analysts already noticed that global Internet is coming apart, changing into a cluster of smaller and more closed webs. They have even created a catchy name for this Web 3.0 – the Splinternet.

New kind of quantum public key cryptography - Wooohooo!

"Public key cryptography allows anybody to encrypt a message using a public key but only those with another private key can decrypt the message. That's possible because of certain mathematical functions that are easy to perform in one direction but hard to do in reverse. The most famous example is multiplication. It's easy to multiply two numbers together to get a third but hard to start with the third number and work out its factors. Now Japanese researchers have discovered a quantum problem that is hard to solve in one direction but easy to do in reverse. This asymmetry, they say, could form the basis of a new kind of quantum public key cryptography. Their system is based on the problem of distinguishing between two ensembles of quantum states. This is similar to the problem of determining whether two graphs are identical, ie whether they correspond vertex-for-vertex and edge-for-edge. Increasing the complexity of the graph can always make this problem practically impossible for a quantum computer to solve in a reasonable time. But knowing the structure of a subset of the graph makes this problem easy, so this acts as a kind of private key for decrypting messages."

Internet on a floppy 1990

Chain of Fools : Upgrading through every version of windows (HQ)

DOA - SysAdmins

The Decline and Fall of System Administration"Deep End's Paul Venezia questions whether server virtualization technologies are contributing to the decline of real server administration skills, as more and more sysadmins argue in favor of re-imaging as a solution to Unix server woes.

'This has always been the (many times undeserved) joke about clueless Windows admins: They have a small arsenal of possible fixes, and once they've exhausted the supply, they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper. On the Unix side of the house, that concept has been met with derision since the dawn of time, but as Linux has moved into the mainstream — and the number of marginal Linux admins has grown — those ideas are suddenly somehow rational.'"

Facebook Life Fail

Let go....

123xkcd.com

MAC vs PC

Internet Kill Switch is Easy, just ask Gates

Register When US TV anchor Katie Couric asked the Microsoft co-founder and chairman if he was surprised that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak could take the unprecedented step of killing the entire Egyptian internet, Gates responded with an emphatic: "no".

"It's not that hard to shut the Internet down if you have military power where you can tell people that's what's going to happen," Gates said. "Whenever you do something extraordinary like that you're sort of showing people you're afraid of the truth getting out, so it's a very difficult tactic, but certainly it can be shut off."

The majority ISPs Internet connectivity from the rest of the world comes from a small group of backbone pipes....
"If you want people to stay at home and do nothing, why don't you turn the internet back on?" - Conan O'Brien

What’s the Internet? Today Show

Anit-Social Media

Social Media is

Facebook and Twitter The Pathological Problem

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality...

Guardian The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.


Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine.

It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.

Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.

Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes... the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.

Is this creating the uncivil culture that has no empathy? 
Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall. Read on at Guardian

Computer Virus's Turn 25

"Happy anniversary Brain Virus, the first bit of malware capable of infecting a DOS-based PC. Back in those relatively innocent times, the brothers actually embedded their real names and business address in the code and later told Time magazine they had written the virus to protect their medical software from piracy. Who knows what they were really thinking, but by all accounts the Brain Virus was relatively harmless. Twenty-five years later, most malware is anything but benign and cyber criminals pull off exploits the Alvi brothers never envisioned."
Read more of this story at Slashdot

Tweet Age Wasteland... world of the web

• 107 trillion emails were sent
• 89% of that email was spam.
• Domain Names: Over 202 million are already taken. *
• There are 1.97 billion internet users in the world. That's 14% more than last year. Asia has 825 million, Europe has 475 million, North America has 266 million.
• There are 152 million blogs
• There were 25 billion tweets sent.
• Facebook had 600 million members.

There are a lot more numbers in Pingdom's post.

GOV on Facebook

"Congress was broadcast live on Facebook for the first time in history. Now you can waste time and not get work done by watching Congress waste time and not get work done." —Jimmy Fallon

Lost and sad generation of digitally diluted.

Hope for Change in Microsoft

Apparently MS is getting tired of getting kicked around by IOS and Android... Can they catch up at this point? 

CES: Microsoft Hacks Up Next OS as SOC

With the Pre-CES Keynote made by [Steve Ballmer], the announcement came that the next iteration of their operating system being available in SOC specific form.  This will lead to windows being able to run a very diverse hardware set in a much more efficient manner than it does right now.  Microsoft displayed 4 different versions of what the next generation prototypes are from 4 different manufacturers but there has been no work done yet on the GUI for SOC as [Ballmer] was very clear to mention that more than a couple of times. 

The picture below is Intel's iteration of System on a Chip.

Read more at HackAday

How you can't avoid online tracking....

Where ever, where ever you are... I will follow

Even after you set your browser to delete existing cookies and ban new ones, download super-cookies and use the tools created by pro-privacy programmers, there's one data-gathering technique that you simply cannot avoid. Your computer has hundreds of settings that control things like the main interface language (English, Korean, etc.), sound and screen resolution settings, and the color schemes people set for their Microsoft Word documents.

As you scroll the Internet, most websites automatically take snapshots of your settings. That information, combined with data on where you connect to the internet, can be used to track your movements around the web and build a profile about each visitor. To see how effective this is at tracing individual users, I ran a test designed by Eckerseley called Panopticlick on my own computer. I've only had this computer for about a month, so I haven't even taken the time to open my control panel and customize the settings for the track pad, keyboard, screen, etc. (The program doesn't search for computers or beacons on your computer.)

Nevertheless, Panopticlick found 20 bits of identifying information on my Mac. Using those bits, it could tell that I was a unique user and not one of the 1.3 million people who ran the test before me.

How to avoid online tracking. (Hint: you can't.)