52861207
submission
rueger writes:
Adulterous dating site AshleyMadison.com is being sued by a former employee to the tune of $20 million. Doriana Silva is seeking $20-million from Ashley Madison for what she calls the company’s “unjust enrichment” at her expense, plus another $1-million in punitive and general damages. Her job was to "create 1,000 “fake female profiles” meant to lure men to the new Brazilian Ashley Madison site – and given only three weeks to complete the work, the document alleges." The result was an RSI injury that has left her disabled.
52218443
submission
rueger writes:
I can remember trading up from a daisy-wheel printer to dot matrix, and can remember when Jerry Pournelle used to say "Buy the most expensive HP printer you can afford." Mine was a 4P. Times have changed though, and I'm looking for trustworthy advice before buying a couple of new printers.
Specifically, a B&W Laser with sheet feed scanner, and a color inkjet with a solid flatbed scanner for copying music. We want solid, reliable machines that will give a few years of small office service, that have reasonably cheap consumables, and that will "just work" with Windows and Linux. Network ready of course.
Let me expand. These days there seems to be no market leader in printers — they tend to be cheap disposable items. Part of the reason is that it is hard to find any real user reviews of these machines — most of the comments on Best Buy or other sites are full of fanboy enthusiasm, or extreme negativity — nothing that can be relied on. Between those, and the sock puppets, and the astroturfing, there's nothing I'd trust.
I do trust Slashdot though for things like this. People here are able to offer realistic advice and experience that can usually tell the story.
So I ask: who's making good printers these days?
51833567
submission
rueger writes:
The NSA ( or your local variant) can capture or watch everything that you do on-line. Hacker/hacktivist/script kiddie groups shut down or deface large websites on a regular basis. Large companies attain market dominance then arbitrarily change terms and conditions, eliminate features and tools that millions of people use, and then sell your private information to the highest bidder. Companies as big as Adobe and as small as the town that I live next to get hacked, with customer data disappearing into places unknown. And we, the end users, are forced into computational gymnastics trying to satisfy password, user ID, captcha, and multi level authentication requirements that offer more of an obstacle than a protection.
There are now web sites that I don't use because of pop-ups; because I can never manage to actually remember the obscure password that I had to create, because they're paywalled, or because they've totally ruined their interface in the name of progress. Or that haven't bothered to update their code so that it functions on a mobile device. Or that bury real content under a deluge of advertising.
And of course there's The Cloud, a non-existent place where data floats around under the control of some other corporation, and where there's always a more than minimal chance that one morning the company, or just your data, will disappear. As in, what happens when the imps that hacked Adobe, or a government web site, manage to get into Amazon or Microsoft's cloud operations?
So, I ask. just how broken is the Internet today? And what can be done to fix it?
51606205
submission
rueger writes:
The author of the very excellent Social Fixer browser plug in is bowing to legal threats from Facebook and removing the core functionality that made his tool so great. I like Social Fixer a lot. It makes Facebook at least three or four times more usable.
The author Matt Cruze says "Any threat of legal action is a big deal. I am a one-man operation. If I were sued for whatever reason, I would find it very difficult to defend myself, even if it was without merit. I would be risking my personal life to maintain a tabbed news feed for users. As much as I’d like to be your Robin Hood, I just can’t do that to my family."
Bizarrely, when he asked Facebook why they don't also threaten Ad-Block, the Facebook rep claimed to have never heard of it.
50674123
submission
rueger writes:
The last time that I used a dial-up modem was:
x Right this minute!
x More than a month ago
x More than a year ago
x More than five years ago
x A dial-up what?
x ATDT8003182265
x I leech off of Cowboy Neal's Wifi
50326481
submission
rueger writes:
It's a small thing maybe, but speaks volumes. One of the apps on my Android phone that I really used was AKNotepad, from catch.com. It was small, and simple, and just worked.
Last week I had to reinstall the Android OS on my phone. When I went to sync AKNotepad to download my notes it just hung and never finished. I find today that the company behind it shut down their servers last week. If they e-mailed to warn users I can't find it in my Gmail archive. Their page on the Play site STILL lists the app and the cloud back-up features.
Time to start moving my e-mail, calendars, and whatever else out of the cloud and back onto my own machine.... in the meantime, is it reasonable to expect that companies will maintain servers like this for a decent amount of time instead of dropping users with little or no notice?
49528543
submission
rueger writes:
My trusty Nexus S is getting pretty battered up, so I'm phone shopping. It still does everything that I need — Gmail, Calendar, GPS, and some pictures, just showing signs of age. My evil cel provider wants $400 to $700 for a new phone, so I'm looking at some of the cheaper than cheap Chinese smart phones. Obviously the build quality might suffer, but for $75-100 I can use it for six months and replace it and still come in cheaper — a LOT cheaper. I'm wondering what cheapo phones people have bought and liked.
48845313
submission
rueger writes:
If, as many suggest, Facebook has peaked, and is due to be replaced by the next, newest social media thing, it's reasonable to assume that the New Thing is already here.
Where will all of the Facebook users move to? So far it doesn't look like Google+ or any of the Open Source social media platforms have attracted the large numbers of the Mom and Pop users that Facebook enjoys.
Is there a new commerical social media service around that will be the next Facebook?
48054953
submission
rueger writes:
Reading about the end of AltaVista, I was more interested in the number of comments suggesting that Google just isn't delivering the way it used to.
My own experience suggests that it's increasingly less likely that a Google search will generate a page of results that's immediately useful. At least if "useful" excludes ask.com, bad computer "experts", and shopping sites.
So, hard core search engine users: what's out there that matches the Google of five years ago, or which could be the next big thing?
45444185
submission
rueger writes:
It's BarBQue Season (most places) and I'm getting ready to fire up:
x Charcoal Briquettes
x Gourmet Charcoal
x Mesquite Chips
x Propane
x My Microwave
x I'm vegan you insensitive clod!
44001297
submission
rueger writes:
One of Canada's biggest cable/Internet providers has their customers in an outrage. "...after an interruption of Shaw’s email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted. ... About 70 per cent of Shaw’s email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted ... Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers."
To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread.
Read more:
43967619
submission
rueger writes:
Facebook is about to foist another redesign on its users, and like most I expect that it will be annoying and unwelcome. The problem of course is that everyone (more or less*) is on Facebook, and that makes it a must have tool.
My question is: Why is that Facebook seems to suck so badly, and manages to consistently make things worse with every change, while other companies (like Google) manage to get incrementally better, and manage to not irritate every user they have? Or, why is that most people will trust Google, but not Facebook, and why hasn't Facebook managed to fix this?
It's not a question of resources — both companies have enough money and expertise to do things right. So what is it about Facebook's corporate culture that seems destined to cripple it?
(*Yes, I know that you aren't on Facebook, and hate it, and will never darken its door, but you are still in the very small minority.)
43793955
submission
rueger writes:
Right now there's an election happening in British Columbia. A desperate government is flooding Facebook with "Sponsored Post" spam extolling the wonderful things that they plan to do if re-elected. There's one problem though. Every one of these posts is followed by hundreds of extremely negative comments added by people who either dislike the party in question, or Facebook spam in general.
Desperate moderators are trying to control the "discussion," but seem to have no hope of doing so. What was thought to be a cool marketing tool has turned into a public relations disaster. Is this the worst use of social media in an election?
43131221
submission
rueger writes:
At various times during the day I need a quick break from serious work. Browsing the 'net is not a good choice because it invariably winds up consuming an hour on places like Slashdot, so right now that means that my break is a game of Solitaire. Loads in seconds, takes maybe a minute to play, then back to stuff that matters.
I'm wondering what other goodies could fill that role — maybe games, maybe something that actually leads to knowledge, skills, or a measurable output? Think of it as on on-screen micro-hobby. Ideas?
41337499
submission
rueger writes:
With a few free days coming up over the holidays, I'm ready to play with a new distro. By way of history, I've tried at least a dozen over the years, but Ubuntu was the one that stayed on my PC, and Mint Cinnamon is what I use today.
I'm looking for suggestions for a less mainstream, but still painless distro to try out. I'll take Gnome over Unity any day, and I do need to run VirtualBox for Windows. If it'll make a nice media server to feed our Sony BluRay, all the better.
I don't mind mucking about in the guts of things, but any problem that eats up more than two hours without a solution will likely not be fixed — I'll try a different software rather than spend that much time.
