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I texted a friend about his employer showing up in a movie. He replied a few days later that the owners were excited about this free marketing. I was curious whether this has prompted people to search for them. So, I looked in Google Trends. I liked the feature showing the states and clicked on Georgia and really liked the metro area map.

It made me curious about the definition of the metro areas. It wasn’t clear whether Athens was in the Atlanta or the Augusta metro area. Clicking on the metro area does pull up an “Interest by city” but there were too few results for the employer for it to give me a report. Expanding the window of time gave me the cities list. Also, searching for UGA also gave me the cities.

Athens is at the western edge of the Atlanta one. So, now I know where I sit.

Now, I am trying to get a better sense of the western boundary of the Atlanta metro by trying to come up with searches that are both common enough to list the cities between Athens and the border with the Greenville and Augusta metro areas. Pretty sure the counties that border Athens are included in the Atlanta metro one.

It would be nice to have a list of cities, but I gave up searching for one.

Google collects and retains location data from Android-enabled mobile devices when a Google account user has enabled Google location services. The company uses this information for location-based advertising and location-based search results. This information is derived from GPS data cell site/cell tower information, and Wi-Fi access points… It is probable that the unknown suspects of this investigation had cellular telephones which utilized either Google’s Android or Apple iOS operating systems.

Like all evidence, there is potential for issues when the collectors are not scrupulous.

1. Location services might be turned off. Really, if you don’t have a need, then it should be turned off. And, they tend to drain the battery, so turning it off would mean less frequent recharging.
2. Location services might not be precise. Several apps work on geofencing. The concept being that if a phone enters a certain location, then do something. As examples, I have something that will silence my phone when I get to work. Initially, I set it for not much wider than the building, but it often didn’t run. After a few iterations of expanding the area, it is now about a quarter mile wide and seems to be consistent now.
3. Device Identities. My wife let the stepson borrow her phone to play a game. He signed into Google on the Android device. While she signed back into her account, somehow she still got his Google Hangouts messages until she replaced the device. Google might report both of them being at the phone’s location if Hangouts provides location information.

A friend’s Facebook account sent a message with a video link titled, “When was this video?” My hackles were raised because:

1. I rarely get messages from this person.
2. It reminded me of the Is This You video Facebook Messenger virus.

If you clicked on either, then go to the link on #2 to get advice on kicking off the program with access to your account.

I grabbed the link, https://mnch.at/r?act=48a93ac45jkbhf455465548bc&u=236764556620374&p=112045350166462&h=c2446617ed and had wget download the content safely. It took a couple iterations having it ignore the SSL mismatch and supply a “valid” browser user-agent.

It looks like this new to me version uses a Web Bot service called Manychat to propagate. mnch.at is a short DNS name for it. That posts to the /r URI with the act variable. That redirects to Facebook. Unfortunately, the Facebook HTML is obtuse to read, so I stopped here. I miss the days of hackers using simple HTML on compromised web servers.

Being able to host it in Facebook makes it more difficult to discover what they are doing.

If you go to manychat.com/r, then it has a redirect to send your browser to Facebook. I’m thinking the hackers are exploiting the trust of manychat to get a way to come to Facebook in a way that looks natural to tools looking to block malicious traffic. Sneaky.

Someone posted a video of a really long Chick-Fil-A drive thru line. The comment was Popeyes was getting to CFA.

It made me wonder if given the Popeyes running out created a pop in CFA business. If people primed themselves for a chicken sandwich, went to a place who was out, then they are more likely to go to another place with a chicken sandwich. Could these shortages create a bump in business for competitors?

Supposedly there is a beef between the two chicken chains. It would be hilarious if one inadvertently helped the other.

(I should have recognized this in my Shortcuts series of posts. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking > 5. Rules)

Rules exist to help reduce the friction of society so that we can more easily work with strangers. Without rules, we need to have potentially damaging interactions with individuals, establish a series of data points about them to decide what kind of person they are to know how to handle them in the future. Instead, we create laws, policies, and traditions to define how we interact with each other. This frees our brains from Dunbar’s Number such that we can have larger social groups over that about 150 person limit.

We also have an instinctive bias to when others break the rules. People who severely or habitually do so need to be punished. We will claim it to be that others see that society will not tolerate the behavior, but really it is so we feel better that a rule breaker did not get away with it this time.

I started thinking about this because I had a conversation with a coworker about an odd claim about a rule. One problem with rules is there are too many for any individual to understand them all. We have specializations, so experts in an area are expected to know the rules for that knowledge domain.

People are human and may inform us about things that are less true and more desires of the way things ought to be. Traditions can sometimes fall into the latter. Sometimes when properly challenged, traditions find their way into being codified as laws or policies so that people properly behave.

Hammurabi almost 4,000 years ago solved this misunderstanding about what the rules are by writing them down. It really is a good way to handle it. One can read the rules oneself to check to see if how it was explained is correct or missing an important distinction.

And then, there is intentional rule breaking. Do you drive faster than the speed limit? Read all the terms for using a website? Criminals are deemed people who break the rules intentionally. Most of us are breaking some rules several times a day. Some intentionally, some by ignorance. Some because we were set up for failure. Some because the likelihood of being caught and punished are so low the wasted effort at complying is not worth it.