Ah, I see someone reminded Cory he promised to misspell company names on purpose!
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Not using Facebook is one thing (I never have,) but if someone is not checking their email they are fully responsible for missing a communication. Thatās like sending someone certified mail and the recipient ignoring it with the excuse āI donāt look in my mailbox any more.ā
These kids arenāt going to submit rĆ©sumĆ©s or college applications via Snapchat, and they sure as hell arenāt going to get a response via SMS or Instagram.
Itās a good thing the headline includes the word funny, to prompt us all to laugh.
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Really? You donāt know?! And yet youāre in marketing? You donāt know anything about social media, but youāre in marketing? Even I know why this is so and ā¦ I just. Sigh. REALLY!!!
Itās because they have a Google account tied to a Google+ account and they left a comment on a YouTube comment thread with their Google account which is tied to a Google+ account.
Itās not rocket science!
Google and YouTube are connected. This is important. And well known. Also, your run-on sentences are really annoying.
Twenty years ago, the voicemail system at the company I worked for was hacked by a bunch of teenagers, who were using it for their own personal long-distance, toll-free answering serviceā¦ Our 800 number voicemail boxes filled up with messages like āYoā¦Iām still at the mall with Daria, when are you guys going to pick us up?ā They figured out the system was configured with a 1234 password or the like, Pretty smart, considering how dumb most of their messages soundedā¦
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well, they need only one really smart member at most. the rest is route learning.
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Maybe not this year, but the software they will be using probably hasnāt been written or repurposed yet 
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Iām not ragging on it but this is how all of the interesting conversations were held back in the day on Reality Sandwich.
Might I add, I love this!
You donāt perhaps mean rote? 
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Damn you, autocorrect.
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All you youngsters out there, sit down while I tell you a story. Back in the days of rotary-dial phones (Wikipedia - do I have to do everything?), if you dialed a number in use, you got a busy signal - a series of long beeps. Some genius teenage hacker figured out that everyone getting a busy signal was being connected to the same source, and you could hear other people in the spaces between the beeps. You could trigger a busy signal by dialing your own number, then hear a jumble of random strangers yelling. (Plus ca changeā¦)
A typical scenario went like this: beepā¦beepā¦beep hello? beep hello? beep (female voice)hello? beep hi! beep hi!beep whatsyournumber? beep 5 beep 4 beep 2 beep 1 beep 9 beep 7 beep 6 beep callme beep ok beep hang up beepā¦ click
Inevitably, there were the pranksters, like the one who gave out my number to the girl who called me. She sounded cute, but we never got together. I often wonder where she is now. Cindy, are you reading this?
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@dan_tobias , Iām not sure we understand each othersā comments and Iām also sorry that there is some misunderstanding. I suppose that the fault is mine for not being clear. I guess that is the part of discussion that can be educational. My point is that Facebook and almost every social network company is an advertising company that is selling peoplesā information to advertisers.
I think that everyone should understand how their online behavior is tracked in order to make informed decisions on how they interact online. Iām not the one tracking people, Iām just experimenting with analytics in order to get a better understanding of what can be tracked by companies like Facebook.
It may help you to understand where Iām coming from if you understand that most of my analytics come from educational videos for children. Iām worried about a lack of awareness of what can be tracked. Also, I donāt make any money off of this. This is not the type of business Iām in. I am teaching kids about technology and creativity as a hobby, not for money.
Feeling uncomfortable online may help people to be more aware of what can be tracked, which I think it is crucial in helping people make better decisions.
I enjoy this type of humor and discussion because I think it raises awareness.
I hope that I am able to discuss this more in the future. Right now, I need to eat lunch.
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Nice to see some arms that havenāt been drawn all over.
Thatās a good point. I guess I was trying to make people feel a bit uneasy in order to raise awareness, but I feel that I failed.
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Do you remember the guessing game (I watched with amusement but was never good enough to participate) that got played on the moribund ends of BoingBoing comment threads?
This was the genesis but it evolved as it jumped around threads. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (moderator at the time) got clued-in after a while & offered to create a dedicated thread but was turned down; more fun sneaking around old comments threads. Good times.
ETA: The current system & posting guidelines appear to explicitly forbid this sort of game.
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Have you ever noticed how easy it is to confound autocorrect with perfectly cromulent words?
(red underlined words above: autocorrect and cromulentā¦but hey, confound passed!)
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And the fact that they wear jeans to school means theyāll never wear business attire for job interviews.
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SOME INSIGHT FROM A TEENAGER:
Look, some things change, but most never really will. Teenagers have strived for independence for thousands of years. When our teachers started making us use Twitter for school projects and our parents demanded our Facebook passwords (or at least to see everything that we and our friends post) these things start to seem like a detriment to that end (Itās even worse for those of us that have seen the leaked PDFs that explain how PRISM works). So, we find something else. Once a noose tightens around that, we move again and so on.
Take me for example: Iām 16 years old. I havenāt used a cell phone since I was 13 because owning a cell phone was just a way for my mom to track me with services like mologogo and for both of my parents to more easily control me. I got in the habit of leaving things like that places where they might easily be lost or stolen.
When my school blocked Facebook, I didnāt even notice it. When they blocked youtube, I started teaching my peers ways around it. They tried blocking our proxies but so many new ones come out every day that the IT folks at the district office canāt keep up.
Personally, Iām quite fond of TOR. One day, after a very thorough search by a staff member of the sex opposite of my own, they confiscated the MP3 player I had it on because they thought I wasy putting spyware on their computers. They sent it to the district office to be examined (because they had no clue what they were doing), found out I had TOR and threw a big collective temper tantrum. I never got my MP3 player back. They couldnāt do anything to stop us when we used TOR except confiscate devices that they suspected had it. If we didnāt have anything against the rules, we got our stuff back 75% of the time, but if we didā¦
I decided it was time to try for something less conventional. My approach to security has always been that one can only prepare for a finite number of threats. As such, it would be foolish to do something obvious like use a proxy to access facebook to communicate because theyād see that coming. What you need to do is think of something TOTALLY out there; something that it hadnāt even occured to them to try to control.
So, I established a system of dead letter boxes based on some instructional material freely distributed by the south african communist party. They caught on to that pretty quickly. Looking back, it was just a really complicated way of passing notes. It was simple enough to catch on quickly, but I made it so simple that even the staff figured out about it rather shortly. Looking back, it really wasnāt my best work.
That was fine though. Iād anticipated this. After all, you can only keep adults with delusions of grandure (namely that they think they have actual authority over a large population that never consented to āauthorityā being exercised over them) in dark about something so simple for so long. However, if it isnāt simple enough, itāll never catch on.
So, we fell back on some good old technology with a built in alibi: The Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS, DSI and related devices all have a feature called āpicto-chatā. It essentially uses the device to transmit a message to all nintendos within 65 feet that are also logged in to the chat. Itās nice because we donāt have to rely on the schoolās heavily restricted and 100% monitored wifi in hopes that if we disguise our traffic we could just blend in enough that no real human would have a chance to look at our traffic and see that we were up to something. We also didnāt have to rely on technologies that our adversaries understood.
Itās only a matter of time before they figure it out again. They always do. So, Iāve been working out a solution in my head. Itās a raspberry pi based device I kind of want to call the ābottle-rocket boyā. The nameās kind of an inside joke. Basically, itās a compact device that runs BackTrack5 based on some plans I found on element 4. Put TOR on it and youāre golden. It may not stop the NSA but itāll sure as hell stop some middle aged men that havenāt even heard of trucrypt.
You see, Iāve learned a lot about smuggling small devices since last time. I have the daily searches from the men and women of my school district to thank for that. After all, a theoretical understaning is nice, but five dry runs a week to see if you can slip something through security is far better.
I get an average of five dollars worth of rolling rock cans every week and sometimes Iām fortunate enough to find some odd jobs. If I save up, it shouldnāt take me too long to get the parts I need for one of these. So, those of us whoāve been able to find real jobs should be able to do it rather quickly.
And when they start looking for miniature home-brew comuters weāll start using lasers aimed at windows and things with similar vibrational properties to transmit audio over light to be recieved by an optical sensor and translated back into sound or use that blacklight ink they sell at the dolar store to write hidden messages in library books and just tell our friends āYou should read that biography of Nikola Tesla. Itās got some interesting stuff in it.ā or just communicate over free online games like gaia and TF2.
Wherever the adults go, we will go somewhere else. Then, they well follow us and once again druve us from what we have created. Inexorably, I will grow old and then either become a force for something that I currently hate or die a truly beautiful death as Tommy Cooper didā¦ doing something I love and that makes other people happy. After all, itās dangerous to be right when the people with guns (such as various government agencies) are wrong.
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