celebrities

This week’s photo leak is a reminder of the need for good passwords

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , ,

This week, numerous celebrities, mostly female, had their Apple accounts hacked and intimate photos stolen and leaked. There are several things we all need to learn from this.

We don’t know yet exactly what happened, though I’ve heard several theories. One possibility is that the celebrities’ accounts were hacked recently. Another is that someone who’s been collecting these photos through various means was hacked.

The incident probably was inevitable, but it’s also entirely preventable. I can think of three things that led to it. While this discussion may seem purely academic, there are misconceptions many people, famous and not, have and need to get rid of.

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Exploiting Twitter

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , ,

It’s interesting that I read two things about buying Twitter publicity today: John C Dvorak’s experiment for PC Magazine and an interview with my classmate and friend Ken. The idea is that people buy Twitter followers to make themselves look bigger than they are, whether they’re celebrities trying to make themselves look like they’re on their way up rather than down, or, like the scam my friend discovered, indie book authors trying to build a following.

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Remembering Rossino’s

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , , , , ,
Remembering Rossino’s

I thought of Rossino’s, a hideaway Italian restaurant in St. Louis’ Central West End the other day. And then today, I saw the obituary for Nina Lee Russo, one of the owners of the secluded yet popular restaurant.

The obituary mentioned the restaurant closed in 2006, when the second generation wanted to retire. But the obituary mentioned some other facts that explained a few things. Read more

Do I believe the Enquirer story about Steve Jobs?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , ,

I don’t like gossip, and normally I wouldn’t stoop to the level of commenting on the National Enquirer’s claims that Steve Jobs has six weeks to live.

But it seems to me that a legitimate journalist’s opinion might interest someone. As someone who worked for a daily newspaper in 1996-97, I have a little bit of perspective on that.
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The death of Lyman Bostock

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , , ,
The death of Lyman Bostock

In September 1978, the death of Lyman Bostock rattled the California Angels’ heated division title race with the Kansas City Royals. The Angels’ star outfielder was murdered in Gary, Indiana at the age of 27.

ESPN has a tribute.

He’s the best baseball player you’ve never heard of, and quite possibly also the greatest human being you never heard of.

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This author says used book sales don\’t hurt authors or publishers

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , ,

In case you didn’t know it, Amazon.com sells used books as well as new books. This New York Times story (via News.com) says authors and publishers still don’t like used book sales because they say it hurts new book sales.

I happen to be a published author. I say they need to quit whining.In case you didn’t know it, here’s how authors are generally paid. Authors get a royalty on each copy of the book sold. The royalty varies. On a typical Dummies book, the royalty is about 25 cents. Other publishers pay closer to 10 percent of the cover price. When you buy a book for $25, the author will probably see $1.50-$3 of it.

When the publisher agrees to take the book, the author gets an advance, usually of a few thousand dollars. Celebrities might get half a million or more. A first-time author might get less than $10,000. Generally the advance is determined based on expected sales. So I’ll always get a fraction of what a marketing machine like Phil McGraw gets, since he can essentially turn his daily TV show into an hour-long commercial for his book until he’s happy with the sales.

The advance is paid back by withholding royalties. So, if I were to get a $6,000 advance to write a book and got a royalty of $1 per copy, I would start seeing royalties after 6,000 books were sold.

Some people say used book sales hurt authors and publishers because these books exist and are bought and sold outside of this royalty structure. If you buy a used copy of Optimizing Windows, I don’t see a penny of it. Unfair, right?

Wrong. I got my royalty on that copy when the copy sold the first time.

The only time that a used book sale truly hurts the author or the publisher is when a copy that was sent to a reviewer or an otherwise free copy ends up on the used book market. This happens, even when the free copy is stamped “Not for resale” or something similar. But even then, the harm is minimal. Optimizing Windows got a huge burst in sales when Sandy McMurray reviewed it. Thanks to him, the book made Amazon’s Top 10 in Canada and even hit #1 a couple of times. He made me thousands sales. I don’t give a rip if he resold his review copy–it’s still a huge gain for me. As far as I’m concerned, if a review results in two book sales–which it inevitably will–that free copy did its job.

And, sadly, books go out of print. Once that happens, the only way to get a copy is to buy a used one.

I have no problem at all with used books. It keeps books circulating, and I believe that people who buy used books also buy new books. They’re also more likely to talk about books, which will result in more sales of both used and new books.

Besides, if you buy a book and you don’t think enough of it to keep it, shouldn’t you be able to get some of your money back out of it?

The RIAA owes you $20

Dave Farquhar Music , ,

In case you haven’t read about this elsewhere, be sure to file your claim if you purchased a CD, tape, or record at retail between the dates of Jan. 1, 1995 and Dec. 22, 2000.
This is the RIAA’s slap-on-the-wrist punishment for price fixing. If too many people file, the money goes to charity. And I’m curious what this will do to CD prices.

On an only semi-related topic, the RIAA asks for the last four digits of your social security number. I don’t know why they need that. You can find social security numbers of several of your favorite dead celebrities, including Richard Nixon, Dr. Seuss, and Kurt Cobain, here. (If the link goes dead, plug the URL into the Wayback Machine.

History, from the R.P. perspective.

Dave Farquhar General ,

Back in j-school, news directors and editors and professors extolled the virtues of the R.P. That’s journo-lingo for “Real person.” Not celebrities. Not network talking heads. Not news anchors. Not beat writers with agendas. Real people. People like you. And your next door neighbor.
The reason for that is pretty simple. Journalists don’t trust R.P.s, at least not in my experience, but the masses do. At least they trust R.P.s more than they trust slimy journalists. Not all R.P.s are trustworthy, but if you have to take odds, a higher percentage of R.P.s are trustworthy than journalists. So it goes. As a former journalist, I will have to say one thing about the almighty R.P.: Frequently the R.P. has seen or considered things that talking heads haven’t. Plus R.P.s tend to be more honest, because they don’t feel as much need to protect a public image. So they’re more likely to shoot straight with you.

And that’s why I think this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a really long time. Google somehow got its mitts on some 20 years’ worth of Usenet messages. None of the news stories I saw on it said how they got this stuff, which is what I want to know. I’d love to know how complete it is.

But you’d probably love to know what Usenet is. Usenet is the ultimate public bulletin board system. Yes, most of its bandwidth is dedicated to the swapping of illegal copies of software and porn, but there’s a lot of chatter going on too, about every subject imaginable, plus all manner of subjects you never dared imagine.

The signal-to-noise ratio is really low. But that’s where Google comes in. You can search on a subject with a few keywords, sort by date, and find out what people were saying about an event when it happened.

You can’t find out what real people were saying about the Challenger explosion in 1986. Well, you can ask people who were alive in 1986, but memories fade over time. You’ll find information at the library, but it’s filtered. But you can search Usenet and read people’s emotion dumps, raw, unedited, unfiltered, and uncensored. Granted, the Usenet community was limited in 1986, but any subset of the population is better than what you’ll find at the library.

For kicks, I did a search on Yuri Andropov, sorted by date, and then punched through to the end. What I found at the end were references to the Soviets downing a Korean airliner in 1983. I remember my dad talking about it at the dinner table, flaunting it as just one more example of Soviet evil. I found a long-forgotten joke (“Why did Yuri Andropov shoot down a Korean Airliner? To impress Jodi Foster.” Ten points if you get that.) and emotions running high. Really high. Yeah, the Cold War was nearly over, but no one would have guessed it then. We’ve forgotten that at one time, Yuri Andropov was the most hated man in America.

Where’d I get the name Yuri Andropov? No, my memory’s not that good. I did a vague search, found clues, and then got specific. That’s how.

Maybe I’m the only one who’s excited about this, because I love history and I know a lot of people don’t.

Television, the drug of the nation

Dave Farquhar General

I successfully edited DVD-quality video, pulled straight off a DVD, in Premeire last night. And I think I can do it again. I’ll share the secret if I succeed a second time.
I got tired of listening to my neighbors screaming–my former neighbors screamed at each other; my new neighbors, well, uh… never mind–so I went over to a friend’s house and watched the pilot episode of Quantum Leap, the last TV show I really liked. I loved the episode. He lept into a test pilot, then into a baseball player. Airplanes, baseball, and dated bad computer jokes. How could it be any better? Too bad they decided to ruin the show by trying to make it better–they tried to give it mass appeal by making him leap into lives close to celebrities. Didn’t work.

But I know I’ve been doing too much video editing. A few parts of that pilot episode were computer-rendered, and you could tell. Available technology in 1989 paled compared to today. In 1989, you couldn’t do a compelling render of a B-29 dropping an X-2 rocket, escorted by an F-86. And using the real thing was out of the question. There are a few flyable F-86s still around, but there’s only one flyable B-29 left (and they had to cobble it together from parts in the late ’60s) and the only X-2s left are in museums. And good luck finding someone who can fly an X-2.

So they used stock footage. And the stock footage didn’t go together–you could tell from the differing colors of the sky that the B-29/X-2 footage wasn’t even shot in the same part of the country as the F-86 footage they used. Well, I could tell. To an eye not looking for that kind of stuff, it’ll just look kind of wrong.

Today you could do some color correction on the video clips you used to make them match up more closely. Or you could just render the planes.

But Quantum Leap wasn’t about special effects. It was about emotion and nostalgia.

I’d say they don’t make TV shows like that anymore, but I can’t really say that. I honestly don’t know if they do or not. And I’m not sure that I want to know. It’s just a whole lot more fun for me these days to make the stuff appear on the tube than it is to watch someone else’s stuff on it.