Tech Stuff

SEND: Don’t Be Dumb

Please, please!

Don’t Be Dumb!

Cell phone or email or blog or Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or whatever: Beware the Send Button!

“The moment you push ‘send,’
the damage is done.”

The link will take you to the tragic story about Jessica Logan, who took a non-clothes cell photo of herself and sent it to her boyfriend. In a terrible cascade of forwards and resends, hundreds (if not thousands) of people received it. And Jessica was verbally pummeled face-to-face as well as via phone, text, email, Facebook, MySpace, and who knows what other medium.

Things like this make me mad. And sad.

Our technology allows us to do so much dumb (and worse) stuff on a whim. And regret later.

She did something very foolish in taking that photo of herself. She compounded her error by texting that photo to someone else. At that point, a character flaw or a bad attitude or a wrongly-entered recipient or a wrong key pressed or another foolish choice — and the original recipient sent it on.

And the process was repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Have you learned the lesson now?

Message to Albert and Cynthia Logan: May you find comforting grace in Jesus Christ. As a dad, father-in-law, and grandpa, my heart aches for your daughter…and for you. I’m sorry. 😥

Two Traveler Tips

Global (SIM Card) Cell Provider

Here’s a great service for anyone wanting to keep in touch while traveling abroad. They provide a Global SIM card that can be used with any GSM Tri or Quad band phone to travel just about anywhere in the world. You will save as much as 90% or more on cellular calls while traveling abroad. Best of all they will assign you a local U.S. number to take with you so that friends and family here in the U.S. can easily keep in touch with you without making an International Long Distance call.

Safe water for Pennies

Here’s absolute bacteria and virus protection in a light weight water purifier-filter. This product reportedly provides 5 gallons of safe water from any source in 42 minutes. Using new technology developed for kidney dialysis, these new .02 micron hollow fiber membrane purifiers give 100% protection against bacteria and viruses and they never need replacement! These inexpensive and lightweight water purifiers-filters will revolutionize safe water procurement for anyone traveling overseas. You can also give the lifesaving gift of safe water for an entire village by leaving one after your missions trip.

Transparency

Google software bug shared private online documents

Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant’s online Docs application service.

The problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only .05 percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.

But a bunch of you wouldn’t listen to my earlier warnings (here and here), would you?!

Oh well. 🙄

Ah, yes. Transparency and openness — they’re the new wave. Well, you can surf it all you want. 😆

Oh, sorry me — I forgot — you know it won’t happen to you. Great. I will grant you that the .05% cited above gives you good odds. Still, what about the security lapses they haven’t even discovered yet? 😀

And how much comfort do the owners of the .05% derive from those “long” odds? 😯

Anyway, I’ll continue to store my stuff on CDs and DVDs and secondary PCs and external (almost always disconnected) hard drives.

Ooma & Clark Howard

Lifetime home phone service for $200?

Want free home phone service for life? Clark has a $200 device to tell you about that promises just that — with no monthly fees ever!

[…]

The Ooma device looks like a house intercom. You plug a cable for your Internet into it; you plug your traditional landline phone into it; and suddenly you have phone service! Ooma also has a built-in processor that supposedly makes the sound quality comparable to monopoly phone service.

Other Clark Howard gleanings:

(Thankfully, KeyCorp is among those Top Thirteen banks said to be healthy at this time.)

Warning: Google Warming

Disclaimer: Despite the title above, I don’t know of any relationship between these two stories.

California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, US energy secretary warns

California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama’s cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration’s plans to combat it.

Whoa! And woe! This is coming from a physicist. And one that won a Nobel Prize at that. Pretty impressive.

Five paragraphs later, though, this: “Chu is not a climate scientist. He won his Nobel for work trapping atoms with laser light.”

Oh.

So what about Google? Well, this:

Google Offers “Latitude” to Track People

Google is releasing free software Wednesday that enables people to keep track of each other using their cell phones.

CNET got a sneak peek at it, and CNET-TV Senior Editor and The Early ShowNatali Del Conte explained how it works on the show Tuesday.

She says “Latitude” uses GPS systems and what’s called cell tower triangulation to do the job. The software seeks the closest three cell towers and, with GPS, combines the data to show where someone is.

It is designed to work on any phone with Internet capabilities, except the iPhone.

“Latitude” is being marketed as a tool that could help parents keep tabs on their children’s locations, but it can be used for anyone to find anyone else, assuming permission is given.

What’s the history and rationale behind their name choice for this new “tool”?

Your Stuff on Facebook

So you have a Facebook account.

What rights do you have regarding what you post (comments, photos, and such)?

I don’t know.

But according to what this fellow found in their terms of use…

…putting any of your work up on Facebook you are giving them carte blanche to use your photos, artwork or writings for anything they want including, advertising, promotion etc…

So they’re excluded from any copyright protections, eh?

In my view, chalk up another negative in the Facebook column.

HT: Dunker Journal

Above all, love God!