Thirteen years on social media is enough

May 15, 2017 By in Commentary, Social media, Society Tags: 9 Comments

In the beginning there was Flickr. The year was 2004, and there weren’t too many people online, and Flickr would crash daily around 5pm Pacific, and it was an intimate and beautiful experience.

Then came the trolls, and the marketers, and Yahoo! came knocking, and Yahoo! bought Flickr, and ruined it. And I moved on.

On to Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Google+, and Instagram, and Reddit, and Ello, and Mastodon…

Enough.

Social media has given me countless hours of enjoyment, broadened my horizons, helped me make many new friends. For all this I am grateful. Yet, after thirteen years of very active (excessive, according to family and friends) participation, I am ready to scale back. I am ready to reenter the analog world, eager to rediscover its beauty.

I am not unplugging; email still works on all my devices. But I look forward to spending a lot less time online.

See you IRL.

On the Staten Island Ferry

On the Staten Island Ferry

I was phished

April 2, 2017 By in Hacking, Security Tags: , , , Leave a comment

[UPDATE April 9, 2017] No response from Google, so I will provide a general description of what happened and close this incident in my book.

Someone was able to post a fake job opening for my company on two of the major job sites. Unclear to what end. I realized what was happening when I began receiving hundreds of job applications. I saw the posting — it was very well, professionally written. I reached out to both job sites. One responded immediately, took the posting down, and helped mitigate the impact. The other gave me a canned response two days later, saying they are investigating.

For this posting to have happened someone must have gained control of my company’s general email account. I suspect that this may have happened via a feature in Gmail, which is why I reached out to Google.

Case closed as unresolved.

***

I was phished, successfully, even though I thought I was impervious to such things. In my defense I will say that I didn’t do anything wrong (I think), and I followed all the rules (I think). It appears that my attackers’ deed was facilitated (unintentionally and unknowingly, I’m sure) by Google.

I have alerted Google to the incident. I will post further details if and when Google assures me that it is safe to do so.

Soviet KGB joke

March 28, 2017 By in Commentary, Society Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I remember my father telling this joke in the late 1970s. It is currently on Wikipedia (not my contribution).

***

A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing, and telling political jokes. The fourth man desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, in frustration he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 67 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party. Five minutes later, he bends to a power outlet: “Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please.” In a few minutes, there’s a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the prankster finally gets to sleep. The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge what happened to his companions. “You don’t need to know!” she answers. “B-but… but what about me?” asks the terrified fellow. “Oh, you… well… Comrade Major liked your tea gag a lot.”

Ask a totalitarian survivor

March 5, 2017 By in Commentary, Society Tags: , , ,

Q: Hey, how was growing up in Bulgaria in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Was totalitarianism good?

A: It was survivable.

Q: But did some people think it was actually good?

A: Yes. A few honest, simple-minded people thought it was great. They didn’t know what “totalitarian” meant or was. They just liked the simplicity of everything.

Q: I thought totalitarianism enjoyed wide popular support.

A: Many more people pretended to believe it was good; this was a common survival strategy, and a career booster for many.

Q: But once the wheels fell off, everything collapsed pretty quickly, right?

A: Like a house of cards.

Q: Were the “believers” first to abandon ship?

A: Aren’t they always?

Q: But this was in another place, another time, right? Nothing like that is happening now anywhere, right? Right???

A: Of course. Everything is great.

Q: …

A: …

Q: …

A: …

Q: Will there be another installment of “Ask a totalitarian survivor”?

A: Stay tuned.