Rants

I hereby proclaim that I now officially hate Twitter. The usability of that microblogging "service" is absurd to put it mildly. It's beyond me, why people would even want to use it, let alone, feel the need to tell the world about when they get up, eat dinner, and go to bed again. Making heads or tail out of individual tweets, without knowing their context, is a horse of a different color altogether. But does that mean that Drupal's twitter module (v6x-3.0-beta3) has to be equally braindead in design!?

Recently, I have been thinking about security systems in general. My bank counselor tried to sell me online banking. Something, I have been reluctant to use for years since I have a deep mistrust in internet security. As far as this blog post is concerned, the counseling interview produced two interesting points:

I recently had this brief and very frustrating discussion about whether or not you should advice prospective webmasters to go with a shared hosting plan instead of a virtual private server in order to host their Drupal website. The main argument against a VPS was that a server in untrained hands is an easy target for hackers, whereas a shared hosting plan comes with a system administrator who takes care of things like security patches.

Dear internet,
I need to vent my anger about Drupal's organic group Module. It all started relatively harmless by noticing, that I am dealing with group owners of low discipline and little technical understanding. You know, that kind of people, who is just not aware of there being a need to do something, if the thing in question does not draw attention to itself by any other means, but showing a big red box on top of the screen, stating: "Take care of me! Yes, it is urgent and yes, you have to click here..."

My fax machine, a T-Fax 361, needs a new ink cartridge. Why does it need a new ink cartridge? Well, because the old one is empty. Why is the old one empty? You guessed it, after receiving lot's of fax spam, when forgetting to unplug the device again after using it.
Thanks, German Telekom for making the registration of fax devices/fax numbers mandatory a thing a few years back! Who could have known, that public records could ever be abused.

I find it annoying, if not fraudulent. Whenever the economy slows down or even crashes, some people start suggesting to buy gold as crisis-proof investments and of course, there are other people, following this ill advice, loosing money even more.

I seriously suspect that there is a method behind this. A game, played by financial jugglers that revolves around scaring people, looking for security, into buying their reserves at inflated prices, by trumpeting around that the global market will collapse soon.