Yearly Archives: 2012

Stick that in your “cloud” and smoke it II

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Now that the cloud services are hitting the market more and more, the more bullshit things that the corporate droids are saying what it can do.  Honestly, the state of the cloud is something closer to smog.  You don’t see the problems with the cloud till you are totally engulfed in the cloud of smog, and through the “information superhighway” your creamed by some asshole in a mack truck and get your car stolen with your wallet and by the time you come out of the cloud you’re naked and asking your self “WTF JUST HAPPENED?!”

Matt Honan learned this the hard way. He got hit in by the mack truck of social engineering when someone retrieved his password than went on a rampage of deleting his accounts and spamming with other accounts.  One of the biggest problems with the cloud is there is only a single point of access, Once that’s broken it becomes fuck all and pretty much if you don’t have it backed up to solid media such as a DVD or a backup drive , you might as well just light your computer on fire in the end.  Even if you do have your media backed up on the computer that you’ve connected to the stink cloud, in all chances you may end up with your device wiped due to that single point of access and accounts attached to it.

Also with the perceived “Security” that the cloud has its really just unicorn farts and rainbows due to in part the end user.  How many people will just log into there cloud putting in the password every time or will they hit save password and screw themselves in the fact that its just “easier”, Not to mention a lost device could doom all of your information  since there is interconnectability in the toxic waste cloud.

It just makes me wonder about the security of the cloud thing.  If someone can call and pretend to be you, how many other ways is your account on the exhaust cloud vulnerable. If media is able to execute in the cloud is there any stops to malware infecting your account and possibly everyone else with an account on the server or node your clouded information is on .  Likely your information is stored like a cesspool everyone else’s shit is in the tank with yours.  If someone finds a way to gain root access, Than pretty much rather than one account being hit thousands or more could be affected in the process.  Since the security in the cloud is based on black magic , someone named tom and  a cookie with m&m’s next to the keyboard to hopefully distract the person or persons trying to gain access to the information.

Websites, portals, and social media platforms have been dealing with these problems and can be directly relatable to the possibilities of problems that are ahead. Blizzard being the most recent, Linkedin , Amazon all being hacked  With the biggest problem of you’re taking someones word for if your information is safe or not.  Sony being hacked last year left customers in the dark for days with the hacking of their servers .  So it only leaves you guessing if the “cloud” goes down for an extended time.

Also, some people are taking a liking to the cloud for other reasons security aside.  At kotaku Patricia Hernandez likens the point of the portability of the “cloud” and how her information is accessible everywhere.  Try saying that when the internet goes down , or the authentication server shit itself and you have lost complete access to the game since you cant grab an internet connection. She goes on to say…

But overall? The benefits of the cloud outweigh the drawbacks for me. Everything feels more convenient with the cloud. I can buy the games from my home, without having to go anywhere. I don’t have to worry about space, which tends to be sparse for me. And even if it wasn’t, if you’ve played games as long as I have, then you’ve accrued a sizable collection.

Having something being easy is not worth it when it comes with eroded customer rights, lack of ownership , Security issues, Likely needing to be bound to an internet connection. sure the cloud has some good things with it but, over all its just like a cloud left from a stinkbomb, It can be fun, have long lasting implication and at the same time can be your worse nightmare as Matt Honan learned. On another end is since all your information is bound to one point, if you get banned from said cloud, Your information and possibly your money with it due to any expenditures you have bought and is bound to said cloud.  Sure you don’t have to worry about scratched disks , or loosing the books with the game . but, in all its not worth loosing everything because someone decided to make a stupid decision and leave your whole account open due to a hole somewhere and everything is gone.  Also worth mentioning is if a company goes out of business with your cloud, than your cloud becomes a fart in the wind and is gone. Since you have no control of how stupid a company can be or have any control when some company decides to end its science project with a cloud saying its too expensive to maintain.  you could loose everything in a moments notice including material stuff that matters such as credit cards, memories of events due to you only having your pictures in one place or other important work when your device suddenly clears itself due to someone hacking into your cloud and hitting wipe devices.

If the cloud is to succeed, there has to be allowed user changes and changes in the accessibility of the cloud, the future of cloud gaming may kill off any user modding and free creativity.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud has its uses. but, what is trying to be done with the cloud is building a bank with a glass vault. One rock and its all over.

Dunkin Gonuts advertising gone wild.

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Apparently dunkin donuts is trying smell based ads , I guess we can be thankful that its not taco bell .. Though i could imagine that ad as cheech marin and Tommy Chong shitting their brains out and going “duuuude yo quiero taco bell”.  I’m just not sure on this one but, since it’s based in another country perhaps they have a better smell than most dunkin donuts i’ve gone to around here. I’ve come to a bit of a truce with dunkin donuts and they have seemed to have learned there lesson from serving boiled cat vomit.  Since a few year back when bluesteel and I were getting consistent bad coffee(read: bad milk, watercoffee etc) we swore off dunkin for quite the few years.

Its just weird to try to use advertising by smell, and the jingle don’t they do enough already? They would likely tattoo the back of eyeballs and forehead if they thought it would sell more coffee with the logic of getting more impressions.  Seriously instead of coming up with random shit like this , improve the coffee and the people will come, otherwise you will just piss people off on there way to work with this and they will just wait till they can get to the coffee at work.

Rather than put your ads everywhere and go into visual overload or just plain lying,  improve the product. In burger king the other they removed the wall painting to add vinyl pictures of people having a meal on the wall and the first thing I thought about them is “what the fuck fast food joint has this kind of service” since the pictures on the wall were a large salad in a metal mesh bowl, people with smiles drinking out of glasses, and burgers that had no bearing on burgerking it self, it was more to remind you, If you spent this money at a real restaurant this is what you could of had for $8.

Maybe in europe they have that kind of service, but not here. As i’ve said – Improve your service and product, and not try to play the follow the leader or someone on acid thought of a really cool idea for advertising stoned off there ass. Divert 10% of your ad budget to the people and the products and you will create a better impression than trying to give the image of a good impression on TV that you know was thought up while people laughed and say  we don’t do this shit.

Wells Fartgo and the idoits who run it and shake down old people.

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It’s been awhile since i have typed up something on here and I’ve made it a point to catch up and get something on here.  I’ve been dealing with a mortgage company from hell or pretty close to it and, it does take a lot of time.   I’ve tried to reason with this company , I’ve tried pleading , I’ve even tried to get them to realize this mortgage was flawed from the inception. It’s gone to the point of throwing lawyers at the bank and seeing if they will listen, Ironically they are trying to play deaf, dumb and, blind to said lawyers.  Rather than replying to any request the lawyer sends out they in turn reply to us and try to scare the hell out of the people in this house by sending people to “check if the property is occupied” it is alright.

The first instance of these so called inspectors ended up with a man trespassing on to the property and recanting on how he “beat his son and went to jail for breaking his arm”.  he’d also went on about responsibilities and such to my mother, I was not home at the time and It only was made known a few days later to me.  Now fuckstick stuff like that and being a representative of a large company hiring thugs sounds like something out of a movie plot that Brian De Palma would direct. That said alone it is a threatening posture to take . he Was told to leave the property and while being told he continued to keep taking pictures of the yard inside the yard and inside the garage. Now I don’t take nicely to people trespassing on my property nor masked threats, You don’t treat people like they are shit nor to you recant your life as a criminal when you’re representing a company. Calls to wells fargo went unanswered or passed off to different departments, and treated as if it did not happen.

The Second incident took place Not more than a month later. Again a person trespassed into the yard and was either looking around or otherwise , When confronted he went to his car and sat in the car with the windows up, when confronted the person would not identify who they are and what they were doing. After a momment that person put down there window and said “HI” and than pulled out almost hitting the person trying to get some identification from this person to who and what they were doing, since all they leave on the house is an envelope with a phone number in it. unknown to asshat whom almost hit someone he has been caught on camera and pictures exist of the incident.

I was livid and called the number in the envelope and asked when since wells fargo was trying to corner the market on murder, to which the person said sorry and said there was nothing that could be done since it was a third party , My ass…. They are hired by wells fargo and they control what these little droids do.  Its nothing short of bullying and scare tactics in order to scare the people whom have mortgages with the company, I’ve fought my way through this and if i even started on the fraud that wells fargo has done I’d have to rename this site Wellfargofraud.net.

It has got to the point where if i call my own mortgage company they will not talk to me in ANY details about anything other than pay us money , if you want information from us its Subpoena only.  I was forced on to the mortgage, I was defrauded on the Initial application and since 2008 I’ve been trying to confront this issue to which wells fargo(wacovia) has categorically ignored any and all communication from me and will only talk to my mother.  to this end I’ve sacrificed almost any credit i have in order to keep this house due to this scam of a loan.  Wells Fargo/Wachovia/World Financial has got away with defrauding almost every American out there and with the foreclosure fraud settlement they have basically got away with murder without as much as a slap on the wrist.  36 billion is a drop in a bucket the size of china when it comes to how much they have invested into derivatives / oil / securities and everything else.

I could write all the issues i’ve been having in this post but I think I’d overrun the internets bandwidth in doing so with this company and how they treat people. So I will save it for another couple of posts….