A Rant? Surely you Jest!

STOP CALLING ME SHIRLEY!


I like to think of myself as a helpful fellow. I like to think that most of my fellow students, teachers compatriots, coworkers, bosses, underlings, think of me that way too. '

Every little place I find myself seems to have the token genius who seems to know everything about the topic at hand, but never shares their information. Now, like a white haired man once told me, there is a huge difference between being and seeming, and that is precisely why these types never share their knowledge.

Most people who know me will probably roll their eyes and say "Oh that fat Tony, he's such a know-it-all." But if you ask them, they'll also tell you that I gladly and enthusiastically share whatever information I have, humbly reminding everyone that I could most definitely be wrong - not because I doubt myself, but because I'm one of those pilots who's smart enough to know how dumb he is. (Did I mention I'm a pilot? It's hardly relevant, I think. I also knowingly use the word 'dumb' incorrectly)

So many years ago I came to a point in a journey where I had only slightly more information than those around me, but I shared it as much as I could. The others shared their information with me too, except for the token genius. He hoarded information like some sort of knowledge miser. And we all believed him to be a legitimate genius. He'd make outlandish claims, and they seemingly became true. I never did find out just how much he knew, or how much more than me he knew, and by the end of that part of the journey, when I knew I'd be starting another around that time, I was hardly the guru I was when I had started.

A decade later I find myself starting out on the same journey, with the advantage of being some one who had walked that path - and a few others - before. I knew what to expect. I'd already seen some of those twists and turns, and climbed a few of those mountains and crossed some of those streams, while still other streams that I had become very intimately familiar with had dried up to little creeks or nothing more than a depression in the ground.

ARE THESE DAMNED METAPHORS WORKING FOR YOU?!

Again, I emphatically share the knowledge I have with others, and when I hit a snag, those people reciprocate. It's not why I share knowledge, but it's a nice little bonus. Some of the people may have called me a smarty-smarty type guy, but that's only because I have had more time to learn what they're just now starting to learn. Or, maybe that's partly it, and partly because a smart person knows that feeding my crippled ego goes a long way with me, I hate to admit.

In any case, if I have even one iota more information than the others, i like to share it, because, after all, information wants to be free. And if I'm going to be labeled, I prefer the term guru to that of genius, because a guru teaches, a genius is just a certifiable smart-ass. 

Of course using the words guru and genius, I'm going way out on a limb, and feeding my own ego. But whatever, you get the picture. Now instead of imagining that I'm way better at whatever it is that I do than the people around me, imagine that the gurus and geniuses (myself included) are only slightly better than everyone around us, and that's only because we're all students, but some of us have been studying the subject matter longer than others, and that's the only difference.

So, of course, on this journey, there is a token genius. We had a difficult task one night, and I, as usual, collaborated with my peers. It was regular old team-work. I will point out that most of the flow of information was out of me, and in to everyone else. I point that out to draw contrast between myself (the self proclaimed guru) and the token (and not so humble) genius.

Stay tuned for my blog that
explains why you're using the
word "meme" incorrectly.

At the half way point of this task, the token genius claimed that she had discovered the hidden information that we were all seeking. This is the same person that I had helped many many times with very simple tasks for the sheer joy of sharing knowledge. Why then, when I asked her not what the information was, but where I should look for it, she said 'Oops, I can't remember. Guess you'll have to find out where to look for it on your own." She snubbed me, and without realizing it, snubbed the entire group as well, since we all  wanted to know where to look.

I've since given up trying to understand the why of these people. After coming to some conjectured conclusions of their motives that satisfied my curiosity, I've since moved on to the question of how to deal with these people. The first time around, my conflict with the token genius escalated over two years to fisticuffs. (If your wondering, I broke his face, then he tried to run me over, and I called him.... a cat, and people laughed at him. I shouldn't have let it get that far, but at the same time, I don't care, really)

But what am I going to do now? Nowadays, I'm too smart to get into a physical altercation with anyone. The last time, before fighting the token genius, I first tried sharing the knowledge I had with him in hopes that he would share his knowledge with everyone else. When that didn't work, I tried to expose him as the phony I thought he was. That didn't work because either he A) really was as smart as he lead us to believe, or B) was just that good at bullshitting us. Or, maybe it was C) mommy had a shit ton of cash laying around and a very guilty conscious, so she bought her troubled teen's affection, which led to him getting into the right typed of trouble, just enough to get noticed, and that's how he got that job at the local ISP. And finally, I resigned myself to that fact that I wasn't going to win this battle, and tried to keep out of his way (which he misinterpreted as weakness, and his move to 'up the ante', which led to his impromptu facial recognition, as young men are prone to do when full of hormones.)

Now, as I said, I'm far removed from that youthful version of myself. I'm not going to fight anybody. I'm too old and too smart for that. But the question remains, what do I do about this current 'genius'? Befriending, confronting, and ignoring have all failed in the past.  I could hypothesize that ignoring failed because I had first tried befriending, and then confronting. It is possible that if I chose to ignore her now, there won't be any conflict later. This is important, since I will undoubtedly have to work with her in the future, and in any business, I need as many friends as possible.

My fear is that we'll get along just fine, but when it comes down to the wire, she's going to be the one to get that fancy high paying job, while I'm left behind, once again. Sure, in the past, I left IT to pursue a career in aviation, and have returned to computers when the wallets shrank (It's money that keeps an airplane in the air, not this 'lift' bullshit nerds keep talking about), but I had tried to get an IT job in the interim, and that failed. My grades and internships were amazing, and my teachers and bosses loved me, and knew that I was the 'go-to' guy with just about every problem, but that dumb-ass genius would just drop some LSD, talk about suicide, have mommy buy him a better car stereo, and then get a swank IT job. So I've got to do something differently.

What I'd really like to do is, the next time she asks  me for some information, remind her that her time was too precious for her to share info with me when I really needed it, and then tell her to go fuck off, but I don't think that will garner the results I'm after. For now, I'm going to wing it. I'm going to play it by ear, be as nice to everyone as I always am, and just very carefully test the waters and see what I should do.

Maybe I'll ask for some advice in real life too. Writing about it here helps me clear my head after two very terrible weeks for me. I keep telling myself that these two weeks weren't really that bad - no one died or got sick or injured, we're not homeless, no one's in jail - but it seems worse. Whatever. I'm over it.

Epilogue. 

(not really an epilogue. A footnote, perhaps?)

One would think that after dry-humping a thesaurus as much as I have, I wouldn't need to resort to foul language to get a point across. 

One would think. 

Writer's Block.

Writer's block. So I got this idea for this great cyber punk pic (you'd hate it unless you're into cyberpunk) of this guy in like something douchey or hipsterey or a combination, and he's climbing out of some kind of rubble with half his robotic guts hanging out and there's just a crap ton of blood and dirt and hydraulic fluid all over and half of his face is missing - but it's not that bad, cuz, you know, dude's mostly robot anyway, and I've got Metallic playing in the background (the Black Album) and all the lights are off and it's after one in the morning because I'm really trying to get into a macabre kind of mood to put this crap together, but when I go to DeviantART's resource and stock image section to find some one that would make a suitable half-destroyed cyborg, I'm just bombarded with all these "artistic" pictures of fat and or ugly women who think that if they have a picture taken of them with rope around their wrists in a contorted pose while looking away from the camera it's some how art and like thirty different angels of the same three scrotums - seriously, that's the kind of shit people think are going to be useful to some one - half assed bondage and fatty's nut-sack. WTF is wrong with people? I've been in kind of a funk since those last couple of anime-ish Panty&Stocking drawings, and this was gonna get me out of it - so if you're one of the few Facebook fans of my 'art', and were looking forward to the kind of dystopian, post-apocalyptic, flesh-over-metal-endoskeleton kind of roboto pwnage that would give even the CyberDyne Systems 850 Series Model T-101 Terminator a raging cybernerdoboner - well, forget it, because some aesthetically challenged people with cameras, nut-sacks, and random bed sheets tacked up on the wall ruined the small splash of creativity I had tonight.

You know that annoying auto-correct feature that changes all of your swear words into more benign language? Well my new(ish) Android phone didn't really come with one. I mean, it did, but it only had a dictionary containing proper nouns from my address book. Great when I'm trying to spell names like Galifinakis, not so great when I'm trying to spell  deoxyribonucleic-acid, since my own spelling skills have been crippled by years and years of using word processing programs with spell check.

DISCLAIMER: Truth be told, I was never really good at spelling. Derp.

DISCLAIMER TWO: Oddly enough, deoxyribonucleic is one of the few words that I can spell, but the spell-checker built into Google Chrome is telling me it's not even a real word. Thanks a lot, Google.


But this post isn't just me complaining about my phone. No, not at all. You see, it got me wondering, why would the Motorola Triumph, a "budget" phone by today's standards which ships with Android 2.2.2, but still way beyond the power of my previous Android's, would ship with an integral feature crippled - a feature that has been a mainstay of "smart phones" before "smart phones" even existed? (I'm thinking about some of my "flip phones" circa 2004 - 2005 which had a wonderful text predictions / spell check system called T9)


Now for a stretch...


Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. which you know as Foxconn, is a Taiwanese manufacturing company with their most famous factories manufacturing iPads and iPhones in China. One of their facilities in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, manufactures Motorola's handsets. The conspiracy is that Foxconn deliberately installed firmware on the Triumph that had a crippled spell check to 1) Make their big bank roller Apple look better, and 2) get some revenge on Motorola, since they dropped Foxconn.

In any case, Foxconn doesn't build Motorola phones anymore, and Google now owns Motorola, taking out one more step between Google and Android consumers - which means one less middle man to fill your phone with bloatware and spyware. (Please note it's less spy and bloat-ware, not zero spy and bloat-ware)

In bigger news, I have an upcoming blog post about smart homes, and their features that you can expect to be in every home in a few decades time, a trio of noodle recipes (as soon as Brandi gets around to collaborating with me on the third one) and possible a way long over due post to my cybernetics blog. God, I'd really like to work on that blog, but I won't allow myself to post to it will-nilly, like I do this one, and I need time and quiet to do it properly - things that I don't really get. I'm okay with that though. I really can hardly stand to spend time away from my wife and daughter even if it's just to do homework in the other room, so serious blogging is on the back burner.

Parallel Universe Twitter

So by accident I seem to have found a website running a parallel Twitter. I think it's a phishing scam - they want you to log into it so they can hijack your account.

See, the thing of it is, I'm logged into Twitter, so if this parallel website were legit, I'm pretty sure my login token would carry over, like when I log into Twitter, it carries over to Twitpic.

Anyway, here's the address: http://199.59.148.20/ NSLookup says it's domain name is r-199-59-148-20.twttr.com, and twttr.com redirects to www.twitter.com, but the source is the same, so it's a decent copy, unlike the Facebook clone I blogged about recently that was clearly a product of Metasploit.

Anyway, don't log into it.

People Are Still Falling For This Crap?!

I saw a comment on a photo on Facebook that read something like "I saw you in this photo your buddy showed me. (link to what looks like a Facebook webpage) That's pretty jacked up, lol. Did you see it yet?" When you click the link, you're presented with the Facebook log-in page. Okay, you think, no big deal. I'll just enter my username and password, and I'll be logged back in and looking at this 'jacked up' picture in no time!

People are still falling for this crap?

Wait a minute, you didn't actually log out, did you? Well, no matter, you say to yourself. Sometimes that just happens. Okay, take a closer look at that link. It doesn't really look right, does it?


I'm going to put an actual link to a Facebook BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT GO TO THE WEBSITE! AND IF YOU DO, DON'T ENTER ANY LOG IN INFORMATION!

Look at that link. The facebook.com part look normal enough, but what's that at the end? justsomefuns.com... Well, it turns out that when you clicked that link, you were taken to a website called http://justsomejuns.com. The facebook.com part is a sub-domain of justsomefuns.com.


So what is this justsomefuns.com bologna? Well, if you don't know, you certainly don't want to give them your username and password to the world's most prolific social-network, do you?


It turns out that, at the very least, justsomefuns takes your log-in credentials, and then *gasp* logs in to your account, and makes status updates and comments that contain links to - you guessed it - justsomefuns.com, thus continuing the cycle.


That is, I guess, somewhat benign, but what else can they do with those login credentials? Well for starters, they can sell it. Or, since you were already stupid enough to hand over your log-in info to them, you'll probably fall for some other tricks. They'll convince you that you're allowing some app access to your account (like Farmville or something) or maybe (and this is a bit of a throwback to the 90's) installing a codec or driver to watch a video of a celebrity semi-nude dancing on a table at Starbucks; when in reality, you're voluntarily installing a rootkit that will give them access to your computer. So, whatever is stored on your computer, they can now access. Think embarrassing files and log-in credentials to your bank or credit cards.


Hello virus, goodbye money.

Taking a look at the attack vector website.

It looks a lot like Facebook.com, doesn't it? 

A cursory glance at the source code reveals some tell-tale signs that this is a duplicate website.


What?


Okay, sorry if that was too technical. Right-click somewhere on the page, and select view page source. (It may be different in different browsers, but if you see an option that says "source", it's probably the one you need to click on)


Here's what I found:

See that red arrow?

It says that this webpage was saved from Facebook's log-in page. If it was saved from the log-in page, then logically, it cannot be the log-in page. Think of it this way: If you make a copy of a key, you are copying the original key, or copying a copy of the original key, but the copy has to come from somewhere. The original key is not a copy. So, by this same line of reasoning, if what you're looking at is a copy, or "saved from" the original, or a copy of the original, or, anything, for that matter, then it is not the original!


How about a less technical way to verify that you're logging into Facebook? Okay, well, if you're logged-in to Facebook, browsing around, making comments, looking at pictures of cats, and telling Chuck Norris jokes, and then, out of nowhere, you're asked to log in again, DON'T!


Instead, do the following:  In the very same window (or tab) that is displaying the log-in screen, type in this address: https://www.facebook.com/ That is Facebook's secure log-in page. You can dissect the URL if you want some reassurance. https stands for hyper-text transfer protocal - secure. That's the de facto protocol for delivering secure content on the internet. The :// denotes that the text to the left indicates what protocol is being used. www stands for World Wide Web, and in many cases is superflous, but type it in to be 100% sure you get to Facebook. facebook is the domain name for Facebook, and .com is the top-level domain in facebook.com. There's nothing extra in there.


Now that you've logged-in to the real Facebook, hit the back button until you find the page that wanted you to log in again, and refresh (press the F5 key) the page. If, after refreshing, it still wants you to log-in, chances are it's not really Facebook at all!

Epilogue

So what about this justsomefuns website? I did a little snooping, and I found that it is a webpage hosted by Russian internet service provider CityTelecom.ru which claims to have "Serious solutions for serious people." (citytelecom.ru). Now I'm sure our friends over at CityTelecom.ru have nothing to do with the scam, but we know that Facebook is not based in Mother Russia, nor does it use CityTelecom.ru to connect its massive server farms to the glorious intertubes. 

The new Blogger Interface

The new Blogger interface is a fucking joke.

Total Recall Remake

Are they doing this? Is this really happening? You know, the trailer looks great. It's got some of my favorite actors in it (Jessica Beil, John Cho), the special effects look outstanding, it's got an even more dystopian flavor, and, just from this trailer, I see that there are a lot of cyberpunk themes in there too. (Pay attention, Steven Spielberg, because if you screw up Ghost in The Shell, so help me God, I will find you...)

But FUCK YOU Hollywood! There is nothing wrong with Total Recall! Arnold pulled that Christmas tree light out of his nose and there was a chick with a third breast made out of Papier-mâché and it was perfect!

You know what? It looks like it's gonna be good, so you know what I'm gonna do? You know what I'm gonna do, Hollywood? I'M GONNA DOWNLOAD IT! I'M GONNA WATCH IT FOR FREE AT A FRIEND'S HOUSE! I'M GONNA WAIT 'TILL IT COMES OUT ON TELEVISION!

Did that writer's strike really screw you so badly that you can't write a new movie? Not one?

Suck my balls, Hollywood. And while you're at it, suck Arnold's too.

Looks like a sweet movie, though. It's gonna be pretty good.