Sullivan's Island moves to ban singing, whistling, and the like on public streets

I'm pretty sure these laws are not written by someone who is from around here. There's no way. 

From the Digitel:

Sullivan's Island moves to ban singing, whistling, and the like on public streets (update: CNN picks up): "Update, June 23: What was that? The sound of a national network picking up the local News 2 report? Yes, it is. Check out the video on CNN.First reporting: Yes, it seems very silly, but they're copying the wording of a North Charleston ordinance already..."

I wrote about this some time ago, when Charleston approved an anti-smoking law (modeled after similar ones in New York City and the People's Republic of California):

... the smoking law came from elsewhere ... like it or not, Charleston is a town of transplants. A destination town. A lot of expatriate New Yorkers, people from Ohio looking for a warm place to sit, and a bunch of escapees from Atlanta's rat race. Mostly east coast people, though. I was once considered an oddity because of my California roots (although that's considered to be plenty odd anywhere). Now, there's a bunch more like me. Maybe I should apologize for kicking that door open; everybody wants to be the last person to move to a new area ... write this down. People who move to another area tend to want a couple of things: First, they're seeking a new life. And, once that's achieved (or not), they seek to make that new town Just Like Home ...  

Rick Huff, the late Bard of Folly Beach, wrote a song called "Come On Down," an open invitation for anyone to visit this area just so long as they remember to pack their manners. In his song he decried those folks who move in, feel the need to change things, and "get themselves appointed to Decidedly Ridiculous Boards:" 

Come on down.

You can tell us how to run our little town;

Yeah, come on down. 

Don't know how we made it this far without you around ...

Couldn't say that much better myself.

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Facebook handing advertisers names, hometowns

Might this be another reason to ditch Facebook? 

From Newser:

Facebook Handing Advertisers Names, Hometowns: "Despite promises to the contrary, Facebook and MySpace are supplying information to advertisers that can be used to find an individual's name, age, hometown and occupation, reports the Wall Street Journal . Typically on the Web, advertisers receive nothing more than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers 'identifying' an Internet...

The full article can be read in the Wall Street Journal:

Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent ... the practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code ... advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation ... several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media ...

OK. Have you dumped your Facebook account yet? While I do miss the networking with friends, I'm surviving pretty well without it. I sure don't miss the malware. Or the privacy settings that require a degree in nuclear physics to figure out. Or the random people I really don't want to hear from. Or all this Farmville and FishyWorld or whatever-it-is crap that's cluttering up my computer.

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Why I'm dumping Facebook like a bad habit

I never could get into the online games and other trappings, but Facebook was still one of my guilty online pleasures. Well, not exactly guilty; many of my friends are on it and that's how we correspond.

Put all that in the past tense. By the end of this week, I will shut my Facebook account down. It's not so much that it's a waste of time -- though in many respects it is -- but the Facebook interface has gone from bad to worse.

Like it or not, Facebook is a big phenomenon in the online world. It started some years ago as an interactive message board, and from there it grew legs. By itself it made that other groundbreaking social media site, MySpace, into an irrelevancy. OK, MySpace helped Facebook along by being the overloaded piece of junk that it is. For a long time, Facebook's big appeal in the social media world was that it wasn't MySpace.

I'd written extensively about Facebook's problems, mostly in the privacy realm. But many of these privacy issues in the past could be chased down to that great void that sits between chair and keyboard. If the computer operator is brain dead, then all sorts of weird things will happen with the computer.

I've noticed recently, though, that Facebook is playing it fast and loose with user privacy. Several new settings were implemented over the past few months, and all of these -- though billed as something that would enrich your Facebook experience -- tend to "share" your personal settings with everybody.

As I write this, I have a modest 104 friends on Facebook. Unlike many social media users, these are people I actually know. I've met nearly all of them, and the few I haven't met I've corresponded with enough to call them friends.

A Facebook employee, in an off-the-record chat with New York Times reporter Nick Bilton said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really doesn't give a rip about your privacy:  

@nickbilton: Off record chat w/ Facebook employee. Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn't believe in it.

Bilton's original tweet, and it sure triggered a firestorm online. OK, you can debate this point here from a journalistic standpoint and from a factual one, but this statement certainly lines up with many of the changes I've seen on Facebook.

The final straw came Saturday night, when I got a video from a friend of mine. The still-shot preview showed a nearly-naked young woman, viewed from the hip. Now, I'm scratching my head. This friend of mine is a family man, one of the most honorable people I know, a good Southern Baptist, and just what is this all about? What didn't help is that the caption called this an "optical illusion."

OK. I'll bite.

While I bit, I was told my video viewer was out of date. I was asked if I wanted to download a new viewer. Now, I'm thinking. I use Opera 10.50, which for Linux is still in alpha. I mean, my software is bleeding-edge stuff; why should my viewer be out of date? Like an idiot I clicked on it.

A couple of things then happened:

1) The video was automatically sent to many people on my friends' list.

2) The .exe file to the viewer sat in my /home/download file. I noted the name and ran a Google search. The program in question, flvdirect.exe, is billed as something that would help download torrents but is actually spyware. It'll do all sorts of nefarious things on your hard drive and it monitors your surfing habits.

For the next hour or so, I heated up my high-speed Internet line. Running Google searches on the offending software. Firing instant messages back and forth with a Facebook (actually a real) friend who also got the video -- from me. Posting my findings on Facebook. I finally got to bed at 2 a.m., exhausted. Spreading malware sure is hard work.

The flvdirect.exe file did not affect my computer. I use a Linux system, which is immune to junk like that. The friend I exchanged messages with runs a Mac, which like Linux is also built off the lock-tight UNIX operating system. If I was using a Windows box it might be a different story.

All this episode did was spread on my Facebook account, and perhaps made my friends wonder if I'd flipped out. It robbed me of some valued sleep, and when you look like me you need all the beauty sleep you can get.

And it ticked me off. Completely. Enough to convince me to shut down Facebook.

OK, folks. Here's how this works. I still have two active email addresses; you can catch me at either one. I have two phone numbers; if you have one of those numbers you can give me a holler if you need to (those who don't have the number, well, there's a reason for that). I have my blog; those who read my posts on Facebook can read the exact same stuff there or even grab the RSS feed for your news raleader. For social media I have Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you're at least 50 years old you can catch my old folks' social media page at Eons. So it's not like I'm disappearing off the face of the earth, or even off the Web. Shoot, I make my living on the Internet; I'm not about to shut that down.

But Facebook? That's a whole 'nother matter.

If you use Facebook and have a Windows system, keep your virus checker and spyware screening system up to date. Seriously. AVG makes an excellent virus checker, it's free, and I understand it does check for spyware.

Don't click on weird-looking stuff, EVEN IF A FRIEND SENDS IT.

Got all that? Good.

In the next few days I'll be checking on other social-media options, and reporting on them. All of these, by the way, will feed directly into my Facebook page so they can be read there. If you access my material from there, you'd better read it fast before I shut the whole thing down.

Here's the upshot: If you're comfortable with the direction Facebook is going, by all means use it and enjoy it. But since I'm not comfortable with any of that, you can deal me out.

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Whether we like it or not, Obama shows his hand

Another Obama-ism, at a recent Nuclear Security Summit:

That key sentence again:

"Whether we like it or not, we remain a military superpower."

Whether we like it or not? Pray tell, what does our alleged president mean here?

Personal footnote: I used to think he was just overmatched, in over his head, just a community organizer thrown into a job he is not qualified for. But with statements like this, it looks more and more like he has an agenda. A plan. And it's one that turns us into one of those European nations that's going down the drain. The more I think about it, the more it looks like he wants to castrate America.

Enough of that. With that off my chest, here's the deal:

If you happen to be one of those folks who doesn't like it, I just have one thing to say:

"Delta is ready when you are."

Please. Go away. Get your slack butt out of this country and quit bugging me. OK?

(Gee, what's so hard about that?)

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