Shadows In Motion

LinkedIn, the “professional” social networking site, has been cracked.  The passwords of 6.5 million accounts have been obtained and released to the public.

Apparently, LinkedIn has been very slow in responding to the situation, and in reading their response it appears that they’re still trying to distance themselves from responsibility.

Anyway, just a PSA.

edit: Forgot the link: http://gizmodo.com/5916332/bigpenis-and-65-million-other-sad-stupid-leaked-linkedin-passwords

We had no beginners at the dojo this evening, so we had a 2+ hour intermediate class.  Much of the class was focused on conditioning, which I certainly need, as well as application practice.

A lot of time was also spent using Pinan Godan in various ways.  From blocking shinai, to repeating each move four times in some application, it was a good combination of conditioning and practice.

I am of course skipping a lot of detail, since I want to get out of the habit of writing small books as my posts.  I’m not sure if anyone read those to begin with. :)  Suffice to say, though, that I think that we all enjoyed this evening at the dojo.

Well, I certainly did anyway.

Oh, there’s one unrelated note to mention.  I discovered that a Facebook account is no longer deleted via emailing them.  Rather, it’s done from inside of the FB account, so I needed to sign in one last time.  That makes it another 2 weeks that the old account will be sitting around in a deactivated state.

I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile.  Now I’ll wait a couple of weeks before I email them and request “permanent” deletion.  If I read correctly, it takes 14 days for the deactivation process to be “official”, or whatever, then it’ll take another couple of weeks after emailing them for the “deletion” to take effect.

So, I’m probably looking at a month and some change before my facebook account is gone permanently.  They sure like to hold on tight.

Facebook is tracking people even after they sign out of Facebook.  The person chooses the option to sign out, but it just keeps on tracking every website that you visit.  It’s disgusting (a reference: http://img.ibtimes.com/www/articles/20110929/222069_facebook-tracking-investigation-cookies.htm).

I’m so completely sick of Facebook.  In the past they’ve added people’s photos to advertisements and suggested that those people endorsed the product or service being advertised.  Facebook automatically added everyone to that program, so people had to “opt out” of it.  They got caught, and they had to change that system, but the setting may still be present somewhere in Facebook’s “privacy” settings.  I don’t even know if it’s still there or not, their settings are such a mess.

Then they began to automatically tag names to people’s faces in photos, causing people’s photos and their names to pop up in streams of data that they would rather not have been seen in publicly, but they had no choice in the matter.  Note that this was not a situation where they took photos and uploaded those photos themselves.  No.  People on their friends list took those photos, and uploaded the photos to their own accounts, but Facebook went about automatically tagging names to those photos.

Now this, where they’re tracking every site that you visit that has a “like” button.  You don’t need to click “like”, the button simply needs to exist on the page.

I am so sick to death of Facebook.  Now that Google Plus is open to the public (it’s no longer invitation only) I am trying my best to get everyone on my FB list to switch, but it’s a monumental task.  You can’t just convince a few people to switch, because those few people know other people, and those other people still know another group of people, and so on down the chain.

You’re not simply trying to convince your friends to leave.  It’s essentially like trying to convince a small town to collectively change the service that they’re using, due to all of the spiderwebs that are connecting people to other people.  It’s a mess, and it’s the ONLY reason that Facebook continues to get away with this kind of BS.  You can’t simply pack up and leave without losing contact with a plethora of people, groups, and classmates.

I’m raging a bit.  I know.  I’m just sick to death of Facebook, and in spite of the fact that I would lose contact with some International friends and perhaps a few other people, I am on the edge of deleting my Facebook account.

….. You know what, I just may do that.  I’m going to have to think about this.