Baruch Dyan HaEmes

My grandmother, Goldie Levine (Golda bas Avram A"H) just passed away. Baruch Dyan HaEmes. She was like a third parent to me. When I was in the hospital, she constantly asked about my well being, and when I failed out of college, she told my parents that they must give me a second chance and convinced them to do so. (I failed again, but it wasn't at all her fault.) Also, when I was a child, I spent a few summers with her in South Carolina, where she passed away at the age of 92 just a few days short of her husband's (A"H) yahrtzeit.

Sony Security: Victim and Perpetrator.

I just got a message saying "A child of yours has created an account for Clone Wars". Apparently someone harvested my email address and is doing who knows what on a multiplayer game MMORPG game for children. (A lot of this sort of thing is scam artists and gold sellers on an MMORPG.)

I called up Sony, concerned that someone might be using my email as their identity to do illegal/immoral acts on it, or even something like a child predator who I could get in trouble for, and they at first told me "don't worry, someone probably misspelled their email address (even though their "handle" looked suspiciously random, lots of numbers) . After some firmness on the phone with them, they said they'd cancel the account, and even sent me an email message confirming that the account was canceled.

Today, several days later, after being informed the account was closed by them, I just got another message from that game, saying "your child has selected the nickname "Anakain Lightsayber" Apparently Sony Online, so recently the victim of a security break-in, doesn't mind if their free2play MMO game for children is used by scammers / child predators / whatever using other people's email addresses. I wish I had a lawyer on-call so I could make it stop. I always suspected that all many MMO game companies cared about were subscriptions, and that's why gold sellers, botting, and scammers thrived on all but a few of them, This confirms that. Unfortunately, this means that Sony Online is being a party to identity theft, and other criminal activity perpetrated against children as well, instead of just a victim of it as the well-publicized break-in of Sony's lax security demonstrated recently.

HTC HD2 Mango Beta 1

I installed a more recent version of this, and didn't choose the white wallpaper, but anyway... I figured this video was a lot more interesting than looking at my phone display a bunch of rectangles in a photo, and a lot less trouble than pulling out my own video camera. ;-)

Sardonic Salad: Anger Management

Sardonic Salad: Anger Management

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Vi...

I'm in!

I just got accepted to Google+, in spite of my first reaction (Google has jumped the shark) I hope they eat Facebook's lunch, it's much more privacy friendly and absent a lot of Facebook annoyances.)

The Rabbi and the Paratroopers

The Lubavitcher Rebbe On Faith, Part 1

iCloud and Google Music Beta

Music re-downloaded via iCloud to your iTunes library doesn't get detected by Google Music beta as it should and uploaded automatically, you have to go to the advanced menu and upload it manually. Coincidence?

WP7 NoDo

No, its not really a HD7. :)

Voila!

Mod USB install from Linux

"We Hacked it :)"

Triple boot on PC

Windows Phone 7 NoDo ROM on the HTC HD2 Walkthrough

A new hack for the HD2! You know what this means, I'm probably going to try it out. (Although I love Android and will probably switch back, I'm running unofficial CyanogenMod7 nightlies (Gingerbread) now.)

New Ubuntu! Improved? I don't know, but here's Unity!

I'm a Nanach (Soul Rebel) אני נ נח

Burning the chametz

Before Passover we burn the chametz.

Scripting News: Mel Gibson's career should be over

Scripting News: Mel Gibson's career should be over

CyanogenMod 7 released

The most popular open-source (and developed in an open fashion) version of Android had a major release recently, CyanogenMod 7, which is Gingerbread (Android 2.3). It should be noted that very few devices have been upgraded to Gingerbread so-far, so for some people this is the only way to run it. (The HTC HD2 of course doesn't run *any* version of Android officially, but it can run an unofficial version of CyanogenMod 7.)

Google Exodus

Samsung does keylogging, but not on PCs, on smartphones.

Samsung/Sprint Android phones have keylogger/screenlogger malware

A false story was circulating about PCs made by Samsung having keyloggers built-in, this story was false, but someone left a link to this XDA Developer's Forum post on one such article leading to this information about Samsung and Sprint putting "Carrier IQ" malware on their smartphones which shorten battery life and take away all your privacy.