Guardians of the Galaxy

Un amigo mío recently hypothesised that 'Guadians is definitely up [my] Straße', and he was right. I saw it, and it is deep within my Straße. It has taken up residence in a neat little half-timbered restoration that they got for a song. Well, songs.

When I say something like, 'Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be', I am telling you the truth.

I saw it, and it is.

It's part of that Marvel Cinematic Universe that's been going around, but it's not so much a superhero movie as it is space opera. It's got more in common with Star Wars, Firefly, and Flash Gordon than it does with The Avengers, Iron Man, or Green Lantern.

This, in and of itself, is a good way to win points with me. I'm down with the spandex, but you throw in the ray-guns, and I am yours.

I've expressed on occasion an appreciation for the space hero flavour of things (Panda and I both), but I don't want you to think that that is going to colour my opinion of this movie.

I don't stand up for any pan-galactic spandex-monkey. I'm a discerning space hero enthusiast. And this, my friends, is where it's at. Cosmically speaking.

The characters are adhesive. The kind of folks you're likely to carry around back there somewhere for long a time to come. They definitely shine through the spectacle, and there is a lot of spectacle to shine through.

You get the very real impression that self proclaimed outlaw of galactic renown, Peter Quill, is just an Earth boy doing the best he can in a big scary galaxy with a verbally abusive racoon and a verbally limited 'house plant'.

I'm not going to lie; I am likely to lead you astray if it suits me, and have done so in the past.

Actually, maybe I haven't. I'm not checking.

I've definitely mislead you to get your attention, but then I admit to it straight away.

Pretty much straight away.

Regardless: This is not one of those situations.

I like this movie a lot, and I've already started making arrangements to see it again, and I've been listening to the soundtrack since I got home the other night. On repeat.

Look, this film may not cuddle your happiness, and let it ride shotgun for some cosmic mayhem the way it did with me, but there is a very solid chance that you are going to enjoy this movie.

There's a good chance.

A very good chance.

Do you need Mail Chimp?

I fell in love with Mail Chimp back in the '09. So many years ago now. It was a beautiful moment for me. It was one of those rare moments in life when you look deep into the eyes of a corporate mascot, and you realise that even deeper down inside yourself you are a sucker for a chimp with a little hat and satchel.

We've all been there.

Mail Chimp is pretty straight forward. It is everything that the name implies that it is.

Imagine, if you will, a digital chimp who lives not in the wild reaches of Africa, but dwells deep in the darkest heart of the internet. A digital chimp that delivers your e-mails for you. A chimp that also manages your mailing lists. A chimp that even alsoer helps you with your templates. A chimp that even alsoest does analytics for you that look super pretty.

Pretty standard chimp stuff really.

That's what it is. It does other stuff too, but it's this thing that I have described. In a hat and satchel.

Also, if you have 2000 subscribers, and are sending less than 12,000 e-mails a month, the chimp in the natty hat will do you for free. That's good for small businesses and people who are just starting out, and the prices stay pretty reasonable after that. He keeps costs down by only wearing a hat.

That IS pretty cool, but the thing I think I like most about Mail Chimp is that it will punish you if you are greedy, stupid, and have an actual human bum for a face. Mail Chimp is totally prejudice against bum-faces.

Let me explain.

There are lots of bad things that you can do that will pretty much ruin your correspondence, your mailing lists, and your relationship with your customers. What the chimp does is go, 'bad human!' and smacks you. He smacks you digitally. Then you learn not to do it again. If you are a bad learner he just refuses to deliver your mail for you.

This incredible chimp will settle so many arguments about things that should never be argued about in the first place.

Chimp knows best, and chimp says, 'No!'

End of chimp story.

He is kind of protecting you from yourself.

Like a chimp-run nanny-state.

The chimp will provide you with all of this information first if you want it. Which you should. He will teach you about mails and how they can best work for you, and he will make sure everything is awesome for you.

I enjoy the Mail Chimp so much that I often try to find excuses to use it, but usually fail at that and just convince other people to get into it. Then I 'provide support', and ask them to tell me what they're doing.

Step by step.

It isn't weird.

His name is Freddie.

Train-Loads of Spandex

It may or may not surprise you to know that I spent a fair portion of this weekend cruising around the back end of Lego Batman 2: DC Heroes, and that my copy of the game not only has a Martian Manhunter that can turn invisible (as he should), but it also has fifteen brand new characters, and some alternate versions of existing characters.

They were just sitting back there. Completely unattended. They looked so lonely. You should've seen the looks on their little, digital, plastic faces. There are other things back there too. Other things that I am still in the process of fetching out.

There can never really be enough characters in a DC game. I mean, Scribblenauts Unmasked, with its 2000 some characters, might suggest a limit to that statement, but for the most part you can just sort of keep piling people in.

This sort of superhero clown-car approach is the scene these days. Everyone who has a roster to milk is growing extra hands to fully exploit the udder.

This exploitation is kind of at odds with the contents of these udders.

DC can see what Marvel is doing with The Avengers, and they want that too. They want you to buy all of their Justice Leagues, and they want you to buy them now. This is why they've decided on the express route, and they're not really winning hearts and minds.

The last three DC films have been terrible (Green Lantern), boring (The Dark Knight Rises), and among the most tedious cinematic experiences in recent history (Man of Steel). Even the animated DC udder to which I usually turn for sustenance at times like these has begun to sour.

This is DC's scene. This is what they do best. There has been a lot of trend whoring, and DC have gone to great lengths to reassure the public that they will do pretty much anything going. Villains become interchangeable, Green Arrow becomes Batman (Arrow), and Batman wears any dress that Warner Bros. thinks might appeal to the customer. Camp in the sixties, grit in the naughties, and nipples in the nineties.

It all just starts to become meaningless.

What I'm suggesting is a sort of franchise fatigue.

Look, I love the DC Universe, but I get more excited at the prospect of re-reading their encyclopaedia, than I do at the prospect of watching any of their new films.

The problem being that the DC Universe is a finely balanced cluster-fuck of nonsense in which awesome stories of diverse scope are told. There is a lot of room in there for a lot of different things. Imagine a giant train, but it's like that song.

It's a crazy train.

Then you start selling tickets to interplanetary holy wars, a racially diverse Atlantis, Egyptian god-kings who turn out to be alien police officers who are stranded on Earth in an endless cycle of reincarnation, other space police with magic rings that were susceptible to the colour yellow, mood based power rangers, heaps of orphans, so many orphans, like every second person, and a beret wearing gorilla who's in love with a villainous brain in a jar.

And that's just the first couple of rows. By the end of it there is an immense amount of incredibly wild shit going down in every carriage of the DC crazy train. But it's balanced. It all makes its own sort of sense.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you make a Batman movie, and you at some stage want it to be more than just a one horse show, you are going to need to make sure that the world your Batman lives in has room for everyone else on the train. Who are made of milk if we go back to what I was saying earlier.

I guess it's an udder train of sorts.

In the meantime, if you have Lego Batman 2, and you want more guys in your game, let me know.

Are you being hacked?

The word 'hack', and derivatives thereof, get thrown around a lot these days.

It's a popular word that is becoming increasingly meaningless.

People use it to cover a lot of different behaviors and activities. It seems to be most commonly used these days to refer to finding an account open. It's kind of like claiming that someone broke into your house when you left the front door open.

People also use it to describe scam accounts, 'parody' accounts, and other doppelgänger (I love that word) accounts on social media sites. This isn't really hacking either. It's more of an old school con with new toys, and is pretty easy to do even if you turn your security settings up. If this does happen to you, I recommend following this link. More often than not they're used for marketing scams, but are occasionally used for more malicious activities.

As a result of all of this, the term 'hacking' is wearing a little thin. I'm all for the evolution of language (and 'hack' has done its fair share), but at some point we should restrict the number of definitions we offer up for a single word within a single arena.

I'm more on board with the 'life hack' use of the word, as it is more in line with the usage that led to the definition that I'm complaining is currently in the process of being bastardised.

There is a great history of the term in one of the books I have floating around. I did spend some time looking for it before I started writing this, but I was unfortunately unable to find it. If I find it. I will share the title of the book with you.

Hacking Facebook is very difficult, and something that Mark Zuckerberg has been known to take very seriously, but 'hacking' Facebook is very easy, and is something that is more often than not wholly reliant on somebody leaving their account open.

Look, those are the two far extreme ends of the 'unwanted access' spectrum, and there are a variety of 'hackings' that can go on in between the two. Some of these aren't really hacking, and some kind of are. For the most part we, as individual users, are only really capable of protecting ourselves from the one end of the 'hacking' spectrum, and the rest is up to the people that provide the service.

In the Facebook case, their end of the spectrum is relatively tight. They appear to be pretty good at it. I'm not privy to what's actually going on over there, which is fair, but they look like they know what they're doing.

Your end is probably another scene entirely. Maybe not yours specifically, but yours generally.

There are a few things that you should be doing, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. This is just a good place to start.

Always log out properly

Whenever you use a computer that other people might be able to access, log out of Facebook (or other service) properly. Once you have logged out, delete the history, and close the browser. Then reopen the browser, and go back to Facebook (or the other service) to make sure the password hasn't been 'remembered'.

This isn't fool proof. Actually, far from it. It is better than not doing it though.

Don't use public computers

Don't log-in to anything on a public computer. Don't check your e-mail. Don't check your Facebook. Don't check on your World of Warcraft anything. Absolutely never do online banking on a public computer. Even if you are in the habit of logging out properly, there isn't much of a guarantee that there aren't key loggers on the machine, or something else with a similar purpose.

If it is an absolute emergency, and you really need to check one of these things (not your bank account) you should change your password on a trusted computer as soon as possible afterwards.

You shouldn't be doing it in the first place though.

Don't reuse passwords across services

This is a really big problem. I'm not gong to explain it. I'm going to let xkcd explain it for you

http://xkcd.com/792/

Funny comic. Serious problem.

Even if a site isn't out to get you, you have no idea how good/bad their security is. It's that weak link in a chain metaphor that people are prone to harp on about. This same metaphor is good for talking about the one person on your network/system who has atrocious password practices. 

Don't write down your password

I wouldn't have even mentioned this one, except that it came up recently when I found out that it is being taught at my brother's expensive high school as a way of remembering passwords. No!! Bad expensive high school. Very bad! 

This is ridiculous. Don't ever do this.

This is an absurd habit to get into, and is an incredibly irresponsible thing to encourage others to do.

I could tell you stories. Crazy stories. Instead, I am going to tell you about a very dumb thing that I did.

Some years ago when I started a new job, and I was inundated with nine logins with random string passwords in two days, I wrote down three that were behind other logins. That is just an excuse, and it was still a super stupid thing to do.

Well before the end of that week I had changed the passwords to something else, and left the note in my top drawer as a reminder that I am very often prone to doing incredibly stupid things, where it was found at a later date by the data manager in our office. How embarrassment!

Remembering a multitude of passwords is a good skill to cultivate, and is something that will become even more relevant in the future.

It is better to be inconvenienced by forgetting a password than to make it accessible to others. Especially in a professional scenario where there is an IT department who can reset it for you. They do have better things to do than reset your password, but I promise you that they'll be far more annoyed if they ever have a serious breech.

There is this whole problem with this too, in that I would frequently argue that the security checks used to reset a password are far too often incredibly insecure. That is a story for another time though.

There is this whole misconception about password strength anyway, which is covered pretty clearly by this xkcd comic on password strength.

http://xkcd.com/936/

I guess the real takeaway from all of this is that you should be reading xkcd. It/he is the business. You will be totally emsmartulised. Also, it is funny.

Cleverness is the wombat's cummerbund. It increases one's nattiness.

Are you rubbing your computer on complete strangers?

I am occasionally reminded that I have spent most of my professional life as some breed of 'IT guy'.

I guess, in my own head I have always imagined myself as one of the 'wise-cracking iconoclasts built for grander things' subspecies. I also sometimes like to pretend that I am a bear, but that doesn't make it so.

As one of those 'IT guy' things who isn't a bear I am acutely aware of the effects of poor computer hygiene. People just sort of switch off, and cruise around rubbing their computer on every strange thing they can find. Digitally speaking.

It's bizarre.

To me, it's pretty weird that people don't seem to pay attention to the URLs when they get search results. This really is Not Rubbing Your Computer on Strangers: 1001. When I find out about this I tend to worry about them visiting places like Tijuana, or Bangkok.

Here are the first three results I got when I Googled 'mozilla firefox'.

Clearly the first one is an ad for a Mozilla Firefox download, and then the next two are not ads, with one going to the firefox download page, and the the third going to the Mozilla homepage.

It is not uncommon for companies to advertise with the same search criteria that their sites would be SEOed towards, so the fact that it is paid isn't necessarily a give away, but the URL for the first result  is mozilla-firefox.ez-download.com/

The postcode for this address is in Scam City. You will be getting malware.

Following this link will lead you to a page that looks like this, which to most people looks pretty legitimate.

It even has a disclaimer that you won't read, just like all the safe sites.

A disclaimer that contains this little chestnut.

This sort of statement is surprisingly common. You might not expect it, but it is. Hence the surprise.

I think it comes down to them not getting in trouble with Google for duping rubes, so that they can keep their sweet advertising spot.

The fact that they've said it doesn't really matter though, because most people don't read disclaimers, and most people don't pay attention when they are installing things. It's actually a fairly standard method for getting malware and poorly designed and coded toolbars onto people's computers.

It's really common. So common in fact that the first page of results for my Google search had five opportunities to experience the thrill of installing malware:

Firefox download with bundled malware (Ad)
Firefox download
Mozilla homepage
News about Mozilla Firefox
Firefox download with bundled malware
Firefox download with bundled malware
Firefox Wikipedia entry
Firefox download for Android through Google Play
Firefox download with bundled malware
Firefox download with bundled malware
Firefox download with bundled software (I haven't looked into whether or not it is malware)
'In-depth Articles' results

This isn't unique to Google searches, or Firefox distributions. I have come across examples on most search engines that I have used. Honestly, it is probably all search engines, but I filter it out these days, and tend not to take note of them.

I know a lot of you are probably thinking that you would never be caught out by something like this, but I see the evidence of it on a lot of computers. I've seen it on the computers of IT professionals, and ICT students, and programmers, and high school computing teachers, and a lot of the more tech savvy people that I know.

It is ridiculously common.

Even if you think you are absolutely super awesome with computers, and you never use them to Google Pandas or kittens or some such, and you've got a dozen top tier raid toons, and you've finished the internet, and totally pwned the boss fight with Mark Zuckerberg's left testicle, and you don't use aim assist when CoDing n00bz on your XBone, you should heed these words.

Especially if you are any of those things.