Surprisingly, your personal data isn’t safe with Facebook
Facebook has been in the news recently having large numbers of public profiles harvested by marketing conglomerates. Estimates from this incident alone range from 50 to 90 million users and there may be a lot more. The “more” part comes from the user search and account recovery features that may have been abused to scrape up to 2 billion or more accounts. In other words, if you are on Facebook and have any kind of public profile someone has more info on you than you might like. The feature has since been turned off but not before a lot of information went to the marketers.
Mark Zuckerberg took the low road and noted that the scraped information was limited to the publicly viewable portions so that it was there because Facebook users chose to share it anyway. He was also quick to dismiss suggestions that collecting data to provide targeted advertising was in any way a bad thing. He said that “people tell us if they are going to see ads, they want the ads to be good”. He also suggested that Facebook would not be able to “go out and find every single bad use of data”. Or to put it another way, your personal data is not safe with Facebook.
We’ve all heard the word, but do you know where it originated? Anyone on social media would have seen a meme. The word itself comes from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He called it a Mimeme from the Greek “that which is imitated”. Later it was shrunk to meme which sounds like gene. The word was used in an attempt to work out if there was any unit that could measure how fast an idea is propagated throughout generations. What a gene is for physical attributes, a meme is for ideas.
The original memes date back to ancient times like the Sator Square found in Pompeii. People wore “Frodo Lives” badges to represent being held down by “The Man”. Godwin’s Law is a meme from the early 1990s. The first internet graphic meme was the famous dancing baby. The modern meme is typically a well-known picture of someone, usually with a particular facial expression, overlaid with a comment. A good meme will go viral overnight and be seen by millions. Language is no barrier as memes appear in most nations. A meme is designed to get a laugh, usually by making fun of someone or a topical event. World leaders are often the target, which is probably why they are being banned in places like Europe, where the elite don’t like being made fun of.
Memes used to last longer but in the modern world of social media they usually only last a few days and the topics now include pop-culture and sarcastic observations on life like that one with the kitten hanging from a branch. In a world where live comedy is gradually being suppressed, the meme has stepped in to fill the gap.
Earlier this month marked when the first Android phones were launched, 10 years ago, starting with HTC G1. Yes, Android itself was announced nearly 11 years ago. Today it has 90% of the market share, because “Google gave it away for free”. That is “free” after the royalties and the cost of making and distributing a phone to run it on. In reality, after exposing all the hidden costs Windows Mobile was actually cheaper than Android. Free rarely means free. While there were alternatives like Symbian, when the iPhone came out it was Google that switched over to the full touch experience the fastest.
Apple never grabbed the market, because it kept a phone in each country tied to a single carrier and was very restrictive with what could be run on their platforms. The first Samsung Galaxy hit the market in late 2009 and it all took off from there. Steve Jobs recognised that this was a serious competitor and declared that he would “spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong”. He considered Android a copy of his designs. It didn’t work.
Updated your Adobe PDF reader lately? If not it’s probably time. The latest update has solutions to 85 CVE-Listed security vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader for both Windows and macOS. Most flaws allow for remote code execution attacks, but Adobe claims that none of them have been seen in the wild, as yet. Just do it.
Anew Oppo phone has 10GB of RAM. Android is Linux based so it doesn’t suffer the same memory problems as on say a Windows OS. Too little is not good. A modern laptop typically ships with 8GB of RAM, so do you need 10GB in your phone? Short answer, no. Will you need more in the future? Probably. Will manufacturers keep squeezing more in to promote sales? Of course they will.