Would you like to be stuck on a desert island with any of them, dear reader?
Culture
I’m Like, So Totes With You There
From the Bad Science Forum thread ‘Things that really annoy even though you know they shouldn’t’ (71 pages and counting, there’s a lot of irritation out there):
There’s a girl behind me on the bus right now who is a member of that sub-species of twenty-something females who believe themselves to exist inside an episode of friends.
She’s talking loudly on the phone with plenty of forced enthusiasm and contrived amiability. She has that put-on slight transatlantic twang and is actually talking about how she and the cretin at the other end should “like, totally bond over coffee”.
I wish I had a masonry drill and a jar of concentrated carbolic acid.
Ooooh, I know.
If I read the word ‘totes’ as a synonym for ‘totally’ one more bloody time I’ll commit hara-kiri with my IV cannula.
Totes=
a] an up-itself word for the more prosaic ‘shopping bag’
or
b] the brand name of a range of mid-priced accessories.
I bet the Totes salesdroid department started this meme running as a marketing exercise, damn their eyes.
Tiny Todgers Go Boing Boing
Boing Boing, May 6:
Naked scanner reveals airport screener’s tiny penis, sparks steel baton fight with fellow officers
Wait Till They Realise Women Will See Their Tiny Penises
…..What these men pushing this horribly invasive bit of kit don’t realise is that the machine can also see the shape, location and worst of all the dimensions of their willies. …
So much for the reassurances of the Transport Safety Administration.
But the TSA said the X-rays will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture.
In addition, the system will be configured so that the X-ray will be deleted as soon as the individual steps away from the machine. It will not be stored or available for printing or transmitting, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said.
Ceiling Cat Knows Where You Live, Lady
And his revenge is cruel yet just.
From The Metro:
Woman sentenced over goth kittens
A woman has been sentenced to six months house arrest for trying to sell ‘gothic kittens’ with piercings on the internet.
35-year-old Holly Crawford, of Pennsylvania, was also ordered to shut her dog grooming business for more than two years after being convicted of animal cruelty in February.
Prosecutors said that Crawford gave the three black kittens ear and neck piercings because ‘she thought it was neat’ to sell goth kittens on the web.
Crawford insisted that she used sterilised equipment and checked carefully on the kittens’ health. She said she had started piercing kittens on a whim, when she first decided to pierce the ears and neck of a stray kitten she took in last autumn and named Snarley Monster.
She was offering her pierced kittens for sale online for hundreds of dollars when authorities were tipped off by charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. More….
Hey You, Get Off Of My Cloud
Why I don’t do Facebook, reason No. umpty-three…
When it comes to personal data security I’ve always been paranoid, and with good reason. From Techcrunch:
You’ve got to hand it to Facebook. They certainly know how to do security — not.
Today I was tipped off that there is a major security flaw in the social networking site that, with just a few mouse clicks, enables any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends’ latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common. That’s a lot of potentially sensitive information.
Unbelievable I thought, until I just tested the exploit for myself.
And guess what? It works.
The irony is that the exploit is enabled by they way that Facebook lets you preview your own privacy settings. In other words, a privacy feature contains a flaw that lets others view private information if they are aware of the exploit.
I know Facebook wants us to share more information and open up, but I’m not sure that this is quite what they had in mind.
Oooh, I dunno, I wouldn’t put it past them, especially with the current requirements placed ISP’s and social networking companies to provide information to security organisations – how better to datamine friends and associates of someone under suspicion, no warrant required?
, “…in future finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules”.
Sir David Omand, former Whitehall intelligence and security co-ordinator February 2009
I was having this very conversation with my son yesterday, apropos of Charlie Stross’ article on cloud computing and Steve Jobs’ long term strategy for the development of Apple as a data handler.
My son and his iPhone-toting friends may consider me an old fart for being firmly in the open-source using, roll your own cloud tendency, but being what might be considered a political dissident in a vicious neoliberal society I’ve got good reason to be paranoid. And this from someone who read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson as a teenager and loved it. Now he’s happy just to hand over his data to any old Tomasina, Dick or Harret. Feh, where did I go wrong as a parent?
This latest piece of Facebookery just goes to prove me right and him wrong. Let some corporation have control over my personal details? Not a hope in hell.