NOTE: I put this into the schedule, so don’t read too much into the post’s date in determining who inspired me to write it. Facebook has that “happy birthday” feature which I think is pretty neat because it encourages connection. Where it gets weird for me is people who are dead. I don’t feel comfortable…
I don’t get it. A few people shared posts claiming the same photo of a child from different cities was missing. It got me looking into the phenomenon. Law enforcement agencies are calling it a bait-and-switch scam. After the post gets widely shared, the creator will change it to the real purpose: malicious website, deceptive…
Someone copying the name of another person on social media is annoying, but I don’t think of it as hacking. Anyone can make an account. Social media companies made verification methods precisely because clones are easy to make and when do so about someone famous, it could lead to a devaluation of a brand. For…
Portable Document Format is a useful tool for creating printer consistent documents. In a print-centric world, they made a ton of sense. The output should match the designer vision. The assumption was the Internet was just the vehicle to get instructions to the printer. The world has changed. After my printer died 5 years ago,…
Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…
About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…
A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…
My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…
Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…