How to prevent your Facebook profile from being "hacked"

I’d like to ask you a ques­tion. It’s a lit­tle per­son­al, but in this day and age of social net­works and online exhi­bi­tion­ism who really cares about pri­vacy and per­sonal space? Any­way, here goes: when was the last time you got your Face­book account bro­ken into by a hack­er? Nev­er? Good, you’re either lucky or you know how to defend your­self against online attacks. How­ev­er, far too often I find myself up against spam and van­dal­ism being sent to me via Face­book, email, etc. from peo­ple who are osten­si­bly my friends and would­n’t be send­ing me adverts for “V14­gra” if they could help it. Real­ly, con­sid­er­ing that defend­ing one’s online accounts from attack isn’t that com­plex, and how dam­ag­ing these attacks can be,(They’re bad enough when you know about them, but iden­tity theft can take years to be dis­cov­ered and by then you’ll be out thou­sands of dollars.) There’s really no excuse for not doing so. In that spirit I’m writ­ing this as a prac­ti­cal guide to defend­ing one­self from online attack­s.... Read More

Blackout Day, The Public Consciousness, and a general defense of Slacktivism.

Yes­ter­day, hun­dreds of websites(Including such nota­bles as Wikipedia, Red­dit, and even my rather unim­por­tant cor­ner of the web.) were “blacked out” in protest against two pieces of par­tic­u­larly oner­ous leg­is­la­tion, SOPA and PIPA.((For those whe don’t know, these are anti-piracy bills (in the sense of copy­right infringers, not open seas maraud­ers) which threaten to emplace dra­conian mea­sures which will affect thou­sands of per­fectly legal and inno­cent web­sites and busi­nesses along with the crim­i­nals. Google has more info. )) In addi­tion to the black­outs, many other web­sites posted infor­ma­tion about these two bills on their web­sites along with rea­sons to oppose them. As a result 18 senators, some of who had pre­vi­ously been cospon­sors, have newly announced their oppo­si­tion to these bills. In addi­tion, the sub­ject has broached the national con­scious­ness and now main­stream new orga­ni­za­tions across the coun­try are report­ing on the debate. With all ker­fluffle, one would think that the black­out has served it’s pri­mary pur­pose in spread­ing aware­ness and dealt a pow­er­ful blow to forces attempt­ing to push these bills through Con­gress.

There are, how­ev­er, dis­sent­ing voic­es. Maddox an indi­vid­ual known for his con­tro­ver­sial enter­tain­ment web­site has made the claim that “Black­out Day” is just another exam­ple of Inter­net “Slack­tivis­m,” which will ulti­mately go nowhere and is a symp­tom of the gen­eral malaise and of todays gen­er­a­tion of protesters: peo­ple who will protest any­thing so long as they can do so from the safety and com­fort of their own com­puter screen­s... Read More

Fruitcake

The Masons and the Pow­ells have fin­ished with their lat­est film endeavor: Fruitcake. This is the first time to my knowl­edge that they’ve attempted to make a com­edy of some sort that was­n’t a spoof and I guess it’s an inter­est­ing pro­ject. The premise is that a drunken young man hides an engage­ment ring meant for his girl­friend in a fruit­cake and mails it to her fam­i­ly. After sober­ing up and real­iz­ing just how stupid that was, he trav­els across coun­try attempt­ing to chase it down as it gets re-gifted time and again.

The show is fun­ny, in spurt­s... Read More