Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Internet

  • Fb Messenger virus

    Got a message from a coworker that suggested I was in a video. Naturally, I am supposed to click on it, but it felt wrong. A quick Duck Duck Go search revealed it to be a virus. If you think a virus was installed on your device, then my advice is to find a trusted […]

  • Juggling Social Roles in Social Media

    Sociology has a concept of us holding multiple social roles. At home, I am both a husband and a father. With relatives, I am a son, nephew, or cousin. At work, I am a supervisee, mentor, subject matter expert, or organization historian. Things get a bit more undefined out in the wider world, but I […]

  • Friendship Placebo

    Social media plays with our minds in allowing us to stay connected to old friendships. We feel like we are maintaining the relationship. But, it lacks something. Social media tends to bring out our worst. We portray ourselves at our best. We compare our worst to others’ best. Assumptions, gossip, and negativity abound. It really […]

  • Spoiling others on Facebook

    Dear Facebook, it would be awesome if you would create a spoilers option for posts where the poster could say what it contains. You get users feeding you data about engagement with media useful for advertisers. Nice people could contain the damage of spoilers. As it is, I saw several people created a post and […]

  • Facebook Feature Request: External content datestamp

    When people post a link, a Facebook bot looks at the content and finds the content of the <title> tag and creates a summary. My modest proposal is that it also locates the post datestamp to include here. Every Facebook post has the name of the poster with when they posted it. It might be […]

  • The Social Media Evolution

    The Make Me Smart Podcast episode 96: Do it for the ‘gram had an interesting quip that Instagram was what the Facebook News Feed was before it got corrupted by ads and political arguments: the trivialities of our daily lives. All social networks became popular because of trivialities. “What’s on your mind?” THAT is what […]

  • Facebook should honor those privacy notice hoaxes

    I’ve seen several friends post the new variant of the notice saying that in order to have privacy, you have to post the note that does not give Facebook permission to use your photos or status updates. Here is the thing. Taking away that permission makes Facebook unusable as no one can see them even […]

  • Friend Request Hoax

    A legitimate message expressing concern about your impersonation account would: Ask if you created another account. Provide the address to the new account so you can go to the profile, click the three dots on the cover photo, select Report, and follow the instructions for impersonation. Instead, the hot hoax right now says: Hi….I actually […]

  • Freelove != Free Love

    Got an email from Academia.edu saying, Dear Ezra, Alessandra Carneiro uploaded a PDF that mentions the name “Ezra Freelove”. They have a premium service where you can buy access to mentions of your name. I know of only one mention in a VSU paper as a thank you for my work there in IT in […]

  • WiFi Management for Parenting

    I’ve been futzing for what feels like a year with the WiFi trying out various things. Basically, instead of the wife turning off all the WiFi and none of us having it, I’ve been playing with a few things to bring some sanity. The first approach was the wife disconnected the wifi router. That meant […]