Well maybe it isn’t so childishly dramatic, but coming from parts of the world where high speed internet is never taken for granted, the thought of using your cloud as dependency rather than a backup is constant thorn in the side at best, a nightmare at worst.

Yes, some security concerns can be addressed by encrypting your data with your own user stored password. However, current technologies doesn’t allow for ready access of your data if you do such a thing. For instance, if I encrypt my Dropbox folder, I would not have access to my own data if I wanted to access it on my phone over mobile broadband.

The Gizmodo hack saga reminds us that the less your password is known by people the better because no matter how complex you try create it, it will always be the weakest link to your entire security setup.

For that matter, if you use LastPass, try Keepass and carry your encrypted passwords on you rather than storing it in the cloud. If your browser gives you a choice like Chrome and FireFox, don’t let it sync your passwords everywhere, even if it is behind a master password lock.

Until weak links like passwords or cloud accessibility to your data can be resolved, it’s always best to depend on having on site physical backups. Leave the cloud as a secondary or even tertiary choice if you can.

It’s time we grew a little common sense about how we want to deal with the security of our redundant data. Even if we don’t want to leave it in the hands of others, at the very least, we should understand how and when can we afford to do such a thing.

Just remember, technology doesn’t always wait for you to catch up and neither do people who would be willing to use technology for their own nefarious means.

Why The Cloud Sucks

I’ve had too many personal experiences get messed up just because companies change things on the cloud. I’ve come to a depressed state of feeling that I own nothing on the cloud and have no ability to keep things working the way they do.

So basically if someone publishes a defamatory comment on your blog or your client’s Facebook account, you are responsible for it, even though it is not you who posted it. The onus is on the owner of the account to moderate and remove content that is deemed to be defamatory, racist, etc etc etc. All of which are things most Social Media people and blog admins have been doing throughout all our careers.

So what makes this piece of legislation chilling?

The 114A presumes you are guilty until proven innocent.

If someone leaves a comment on your blog saying, for instance, that a certain politician is an idiot or that a certain race is lazy and worthless, you will be held responsible for that comment. In order to prove that you are NOT the person who posted such a comment, you’ll need to prove that you were nowhere near a device that could post such a comment.

The Centre for Independent Journalism has a fantastic FAQ about why stopping 114A matters.

The Stop 114A blog has awesome resources on how you can get involved.

And now, for my 50 cents opinion (if you’ve made it this far, congratulations!).

Marina Mahathir points out that the Government is hoping that this new law will curb postings by anonymous bloggers and commentators who are critical of the Government. However, considering that we are going to be held by everything that happens on our sites and digital properties, this law actually punishes us for not spending 24 hours, 7 days a week watching our digital properties like a hawk to prevent such comments from happening.

So I have a different theory as to whom the law is meant to protect. It’s meant to protect cybertroopers. Those “anonymous” people who go onto news sites and bash people for not believing in the “OMG THIS POLITICAL PARTY WAS SENT FROM HEAVEN TO GUIDE US ALL INTO HEAVEN” propaganda (and sidenote: I’m talking about cybertroopers on BOTH sides, not just BN OR PR).

With this law, they will be given free reign to impersonate any politician they want, any person they want, and the onus will be on the person they impersonated to prove that it was not them.

The people most disadvantaged by this nonsensical amendment, of course, would be those who spent actual time, and in some cases, money to build up a credible identity online. In the digital world, your currency is trust, and by extension, your identity. With the 114A, anyone can take your identity and smear you not just to cause trouble online, but offline as well.

Some may say “Well, just enable moderation on your blogs and your sites la! Duh!”

Not so fast! What if the site is Facebook.com, where there is no such thing as pre-moderation? The moment you press enter, that is the same moment that the comment appears, unless you get disconnected from the Internet at the same time. How then, do you moderate the comments before they appear? Because this law requires you to stop them from appearing, if at all.

So yes, this law is specifically aimed at providing protection for cybertroopers.

How do you stop this? Go and find out here. More importantly, go and make noise at whoever your representative is and tell them that you want them to get this amendment OFF the books!

For example, a global brand like Coke may prefer to merge all their current international Coca-cola country brand pages into one overaching “Coca-Cola Inc.” Usually this means that users who then land on the Coca-Cola FB page will see the cover photo and apps that everyone else in the world sees, though the status updates and posts may be hidden based on the country selection.

The new update they will be rolling out in a few months (sources say in as little as 3 months) will allow the admins to control who sees what, depending on their country, so users from the US, even though they are visiting the same URL and Facebook page, will see a different timeline cover photo and apps compared to visitors from Germany.

So if you’re a Facebook page admin for the same brand in multiple countries, you can now merge all your pages and yet ensure only your country’s audience will see what you want them to see.

Which brings me to my commentary…

Am I the only one who thinks that Facebook is becoming more like a normal blog site and website with this new wave of changes? It really feels like going in a complete circle. If the page admins are allowed to limit what appears to their users based on country and location, then how is this different from a website or a microsite?

I’m also surprised that brands would be willing to hand so much power to a third party service provider, one who seems to have no reservations in announcing and forcing users to change their entire platform with no prior warning. I understand that if you use a certain platform that there are expectations, but I can’t help but feel that in a lot of ways, Facebook is becoming the new Newspaper; people spend too much time looking up interesting things and advertisers get to place lots of eyeballs.

Is it sustainable? We shall see.

If like me, you’re one of the last bastions of people who still own a gaming rig or workstation, you know as well as I do that it’s quite often heavy enough that we don’t really bother to move it. However, circumstances like the lack of optimal space or trying to make your workspace as neat as possible would force you to place your rig in places that make it hard to reach like under the desk or in my case, behind the desk. This of course would make it a pain when you want to access cables located at the back of the rig.

There are of course PC castors that you’re able to purchase. These small wheels transform your PC into a mobile unit, allowing you to move your rig in and out of areas that are hard to reach. Unfortunately given that they are speciality items for PC modders, they don’t often come cheap and unless you buy it for a specific case model, you’ll often need to drill through your casing to attach these castors.

Skateboards on the other hand aren’t speciality items and quite often come cheap. Chances are, you may already have an old one already lying around, and if not, it’s a quick trip to the shops to buy one. You don’t really need an expensive one at that, just as long as the base of the board fits the width of your tower, and you’ve made sure that the skateboard trucks are tightened enough that the board doesn’t wobble when you place the heavy rig on, you’re pretty much set.

Personally I like the idea of my rig being on top of a skateboard as opposed to having castors attached to the bottom, simply because having a carpeted floor and a rig that sucks air from the bottom of the case, I would like to minimise the amount of dust being sucked from the ground. Having it on a raised platform reduces the amount of dust being pulled from the bottom.

Take note though, more often than not, the length of the skateboard is longer than your PC, so make sure where you place the board has enough room to pull the board and the rig in and out. Also make sure that your cables have enough slack when pulling the rig out from its hiding spot. Otherwise it’ll defeat the purpose of having to pull the PC out when you want to.

Aside from these issues to look out for, it’s an idea worth looking at if you would want to keep your rig out of sight but still don’t want to break your back trying to lift it out of an inaccessible area or break your wallet by buying something that seems exorbitant. The best thing about it too is if you secure your PC properly, you might just be able to wheel it over to a nearby friend’s place pretty easily for that next LAN game.

This morning Microsoft announced the launch of their own tablet, the Microsoft Surface. In terms of specs I’ll let Edrei talk to you about it (Update by Edrei: Didn’t talk about the specs, but I did talk about something Surface related), but I just wanted to latch onto one line pointed out by Mashable:

The first of its kind, Surface is designed to work as both tablet and PC and comes in a version running Windows RT as well as a version running Windows 8 Pro.

My initial reaction?

NO NO NO NO NO MICROSOFT DON’T DO THIS!

Hysterics aside, I really think this is one of the fastest ways to kill a tablet. One of the reasons why the iPad and the Kindle and other tablets have succeeded is because they divorced user expectations about what tablets are; aka not a laptop replacement. Tablets have been turned into a media consumption device, and the UIs have been created to match that.

I believe that it will be the UI that will be the killer on the Surface. Also I apologise for that pun, it was completely unintended. That said, the PC and the tablet are two completely devices with two completely different user interface. You can’t expect a tablet to behave the same way a PC does; it’s not a screen which uses a finger instead of a mouse to navigate, unless Microsoft intends to make the tablet a reiteration of the very first few Mac computers which did not have right click.

I can understand that perhaps Microsoft wants to push the limits of the hardware, as they say in the article, but I can’t help thinking that this is perhaps the most wrong way to go. Microsoft may be right in wanting to push the limits of hardware and software, but honestly speaking? I expect the Surface to go the way of many an Android tablet that’s not a Galaxy: Niche.

So the biggest news today was the fact, Microsoft’s big mysterious reveal turned out to be a tablet that everyone has been whispering rumours about for the past week. While it may not have been the answer to the question about life, the universe and everything, The Microsoft Surface is still a pretty neat looking tablet.

I won’t go through all the details of it here because practically all the major tech blogs have pretty described it to the best of its abilities. However, I will give you this, the Surface is as Microsoft always was in the tech world, a blend between the best of both worlds. Whereas, I’ve always described Windows as a middle ground between Apple’s walled garden OS and Linux’s open source systems. Microsoft’s own tablet offering is a blend between the A tablet’s consumption simplicity and a laptop’s practical functionality.

However, whether or not this blend of both worlds works depends not on the hardware specs or Microsoft’s ability to create a flawless product, but on whether or not people will get past Microsoft’s age old stigma of being an old school evil corporation.

Truth be told, Microsoft generally makes good products. Ignoring the fact that it’s operating system seems to revolve around a good/bad cycle every release. It’s hardware is pretty decent. The Zune HD was one of the best MP3 players I have ever own. It’s mice served me well past being clicked into oblivion. The problem has always been that the company seems to make the worst marketing decisions in how they want to sell their products.

Aside from the Xbox which is a runaway success, they hardly popularise their peripherals, especially to the gaming community which serve a significant niche of die hard Windows users. The Zune was significantly tied to their Zune Marketplace, which for some inexplicable reason was only in the US, making it hard to obtain music as easily as iTunes. Plus, it wasn’t sold locally in stores either making importing the Zune much more expensive than the competitors, despite the fact that it was really good to use.

Then there is of course, Microsoft’s image as a company that was involve in antitrust suits because they tried to strongarm the competition. For a world that moves on so quickly in its innovations, this stigma just seems to stick in the minds of people for a very long time. Still, it’s long enough for Apple to show up and take the stage as the darling company that isn’t an evil corporation. An image that has lingered today not just in the fans of Apple and the haters of Microsoft, but in the casual users that just want to look use tech in their daily livess.

For the future of Microsoft’s products to really succeed, they need to do more than just look like an old man trying to dance with the latest hip-hop beat. They need to completely rewire people’s perception that the company isn’t staffed with old codgers. That despite their past, their innovations do have a point. Microsoft needs to show the world that they and not just their products are in fact, quite cool.

So while the Surface looks to be one hell of a product, one that I am willing to shelve out money for if their marketing doesn’t completely ruin it for us all, as long as they don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again like a high price point or limited localised availability; it is easy for Microsoft to create non-paid word of mouth kudos from its users, something they seem to struggle with very much with their Windows Phone.

Time will tell on how well Microsoft changes its image. I for one will a least still buy their products for as long as I have a reason to keep buying them, since as a geek, I’m more interested in practicality of the offering and the principles of tech and that a company upholds at present rather than something that happened before I hit puberty. To think that some people still call Microsoft a company run by old men not with the times.

This is a image of the older Facebook News Feed/Homepage (got it off a colleague):

This is the old layout, where you can see everything is neatly segregated. It also takes up quite a bit of space.

This seems to be the new Facebook sidebar layout:

It’s much more shorter and economical compared to the older version, and shows just your most commonly-used apps. You can, of course, expand the list with the More button, but for now, it looks like Facebook is going for a sleeker look.

Anyone else noticed the new changes?

If society today seems all gung-ho about the level of privacy in the digital world, how is it that crazy bad shit keeps happening as a result popular apps that show the world who, what or where you are?

The way things are going, it’s not surprising that Facebook has become one of the top reasons for divorce. Yet while governments throughout the world keep trying to force companies like Facebook and Google to deal with supposed privacy breaches in their product terms and conditions, issues like this still plague it’s users. Why?

I can only conclude that while governments are out to ensure that companies are made as accountable as legally possible so that they (as corporations) don’t misuse the data that they gather from their users, people seem to forget that problems that stem from a lack of privacy often goes back to the users, or at least the user’s inability to understand how the digital world works. I know how that sounds, but before you accuse me of being one of those people who blames rapes on the victim, hear me out.

Geeks of my generation, those that grew up listening to the sounds of a dial up modem in an era where blowing dust out from a cartridge fixed a console game. We grew up at about the same time the internet took off to the normal consumers. Personally, I didn’t start using the internet until I was 14, on a screaming 28.8 kbps modem. Privacy was not an issue back then and I was honest with the people I met, sharing with them details of my life that at the time, seemed safe to share. As I grew older, so too did the things I did around internet. We started static websites and later blogs. We joined forums and chatrooms to which we could meet anyone, any time of the day.

Most importantly, we made mistakes. I know I did. I got into trouble for oversharing things that weren’t meant to be said. I also met people that I probably shouldn’t have met because I was being honest with myself. In retrospect, with the internet being more integrated into our everyday life, doing what I did then now, would be akin to walking out my front door without wearing clothes. Yet because I grew up in a time where the internet was still on training wheels, I grew up learning to be responsible for my digital actions. It is a kind of street wise common sense that applies to the digital life. The same kind that tells you not to turn a corner into an alleyway on a dark night.

At the risk of sounding like an old man, kids these days (as well as older adults who thought the internet was a passing fad), don’t have that safety net we had when we used the internet then. The internet didn’t just lose its training wheels over the years, it also added itself a souped up engine while wearing a leather jacket and faded denim jeans. You can no longer have the excuse of of being ignorant, devoid of common sense when traversing the internet because you’re going to wind up in some dark alley somewhere and get mugged…or worse.

So how does that help protect those that aren’t in the know, and in this case our kids? Well for one, as netizens who should have some sense in us over the years of using the internet, it is our responsibility to educate those that don’t know. If they are our children, set limits and tell them what to watch out for. Seriously, if you’re one of the parents that let your kids use Facebook when they are under the age of 13, you better damn good reason for doing so, much less be able to monitor what your kid is doing. As your child grows up surrounded by the transparency of information, so too should they learn to understand the power and the dangers that come with it. By ignoring this aspect of your child’s education, you in in effect risking their safety as badly as leaving them unattended at a shopping mall. That’s just asking for trouble.

That’s not including our parents who may not understand that there are unscrupulous people out there who can scam them out of their money even if they thought they are clicking an innocent link. It may overly dramatic to say that things like that can happen, but it’s only because we’re experienced enough to spot a scam, that we are able to shrug if off as part and parcel of the internet. Even if your parents have lived for decades, having “street smarts” is not the same as “digital smarts”. So again, it is up to you to to drawn upon experience to educate them in the same way you would your own child.

Before I started writing this commentary, I wanted to do so expressing my outrage towards the fact that stupid shit like this can happen, but the more I thought about it, the more I realise that if someone had taught the kids to recognise and be wary the dangers talking to stranger online, or if someone warned the parents to at least pay attention to what their kids are doing, then perhaps it would never have happened. Yet the truth is, until people learn, until they develop that “digital smarts”, the problem never really goes away. Even if you take the easy route and ban things like location tracking apps, there will always be new ways to screw up a digital life so bad it bleeds into the real world. There is no real way to enforce a ban on human stupidity.

So take to heart, as a geek, your responsibility as a bearer of knowledge in the light of digital ignorance. Only you can stop bad shit on the internet from happening, or at least stem the tide, even if it is one person at a time.

After Rapes Involving Children, Skout, a Flirting App, Bans Minors

In the latest cautionary tale of the risks of using social networks to connect with strangers, three men have been accused of raping children they met using a mobile app designed for flirting between adults.

Just what in the world is a geek?

Now there are many definitions of what a geek is. A quick look at the dictionary will pull out two main things. One is that a geek is a socially inept person. The other is a person with an eccentric obsession for a particular subject or matter. I’m inclined to accept them both with the former definition being a more archaic form that has since been apparently relegated to “Being a Nerd”.

Though more accurately, I consider geeks as people with a passion for the things that they do, so much so that they are able to use their unique knowledge and skills as a socialising asset rather than a hindrance. This is why despite the stereotype that geeks only seem to concentrate on tech alone, you can have geeks in all areas and expertise.

Do you love watching movies? Are you able to correlate the inspiration that old genres give to their new counterparts? Do you finish watching a movie and feel like discussing with someone about the varying depths (or lack of) of emotion in it? You just might be a movie geek.

Do you happen to love working in a science related field? Do you get excited every time there is a new breakthrough discovery that’s published before the media gets wind of it? Do you enjoy forecasting the possible future endeavours that a certain discovery might bring for its field? Then you might just be a science geek.

Is your job just a stepping stone to you owning more gadgets? Are you regularly disappointed when that breathtakingly awesome concept gadget at an expo doesn’t make it to the market? Are you able to form intelligent opinions on why the tech industry should play a greater role in political lawmaking? Then congratulations you just might be a tech geek.

So you see, all these are just examples how a geek might appear to be. They love what they do and do it very well, regardless of whether or not they code, take photos, involve themselves in music and so on. Yet, despite all this, there is still one defining factor that makes a geek. Something that unites every one of us eccentrically passionate individuals of our fields.

A true geek never stops exploring, learning and most importantly creating.

While it may be limited to our particular expertise, it should not be said that we don’t have an immense yearning for what we like. That is part and parcel of the passion and love we have for what we do. Sure, it may seem unnaturally unhealthy to people who don’t share the same passion, but how often do we find ourselves forgiving towards people who do the things we don’t understand or pay any interest to?

Regardless of which, a geek should be able to (or at least learn to) understand how one can dedicate themselves to something so immensely. It is that ability to take what we know and push the boundaries of what we excel in that makes us who we are as geeks. Love movies or music? Why not experiment with making one of your own? Love science? Why not build your own basement lab for you to conduct experiments in? Love tech? Why not build a smart house from leftover gadgets and cheaply sourced electronics?

The key in all this is about taking a more constructive role in our passions. If the geek will inherit the Earth, then by all means let’s start making the inheritance a worthwhile feat. Forget all the superficial images that anyone who plays consoles or watches “geek” shows are geeks. It is in the action of using our knowledge for a greater purpose that defines us geeks.

So while the world may judge us differently, just remember, there is no shame in having passion for the things you do, but with greater knowledge comes to responsibility to use it. Make sure that it’s for a worthwhile purpose and everything should fall into place.

So what do you do?

If their Facebook profile photo is of themselves, chances are they are using it elsewhere. Here’s how you can find their other social media properties without revealing yourself:

1. Right click on the profile picture and select “Copy Image Location” (this may be browser dependent but the command is similar).
2. Hit up Google Image Search. Click on the Camera image you see and a pop-up will appear.
3. Paste the image link into the window and click Search.
4. ???
5. PROFIT! You should be able to see their other social media properties.

Now how to get in touch with them? That I leave it to you. Chances are you’ll get their blog, so you can just leave a comment there and wait for them to get back to you. I recommend doing this only once to get in touch with a customer. Any more and it’ll be really creepy and stepping over the line.