Geek News Roundup for 10/25/09 - (Mostly) Death and Misery on Halloween

Facebook has announced that they're going to preserve the inactive accounts of dead members and protect against further changes and updates.  In an Internet where inactivity is generally regarded as an excuse for deleting someone's stuff (Geocities, I'm looking at you), Facebook clued in that if someone's dead, there isn't anything the person can do anymore to maintain their space, and their passwords have most likely died with them.  They also finally acknowledged that if someone's dead, they shouldn't be able to post any more updates.  This comes a couple weeks after a girl in Nova Scotia brought the issue to media attention.  A spammer had cracked into her dead mother's page, posted some spam, and Facebook did next to nothing about it.  Until now.

But speaking of them, the biggest news of the week was probably the death of Geocities.  To anyone who remembers when the news broke back in April, this doesn't come as a surprise.  Its death was imminent, and it was only a matter of time before the site that was originally "free, forever" was shut down.  Forever.  Even xkcd did something special to commemorate the event (which is no longer available on the website, but is mirrored here).  But after Monday, everyone stopped caring.  It's kind of like the final game of a season for a losing team.  Once it's over, you don't have to pay attention to it anymore.

Instead, why don't we look ahead to the future?  It's almost NaNoWriMo time again!  Participants in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia have already started, and it's close to starting time for North and South Americans.  The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words within 30 days, local time.  The key words there are "local" and "time".  Those who live in an area still affected by Daylight Saving Time (those who haven't already changed back to Standard) get an extra hour advantage over those who don't, since clocks in the affected regions get set back an hour at 2am on November 1st.  So if you're participating in NaNoWriMo like I am, don't let anyone else in your house set the clocks back until well after the event starts.

Just make sure you don't leave your P2P software open, or if you do, make sure to save your novel to a folder that the software doesn't share from.  Admittedly, it isn't really earth shattering if your first draft of NaNo Novel '09 is broadcast to the world, but it would probably be just as embarrassing for you as it was for the person who accidentally shared a confidential government report over a P2P network and then got fired for it.  He probably did it while downloading music or video games or something.  It goes to show you just how many people do that these days.

He probably wasn't pirating games for the N-Gage, though, which by the way has been given its own death date, a vague 2010 prediction.  Just like Geocities, few people have even bothered to mention this or even care about it.  Nintendo never seemed to view Nokia as much of a threat in the handheld gaming industry, but the presence of Sony's PSP must make them feel somewhat nervous, since they've suddenly redesigned their brand new DSi just shy of a year after its debut on the market and are pushing it out onto store shelves in time for the holidays.  The DSi LL/XL is the fourth version of the DS to be released since 2004, which is ridiculous if you ask me.  It makes you think twice before buying any more of the system, since you just know Nintendo will announce another version in 2010.

Hulu staff apparently stay up and cry all night at the thought of international users (like me and all the other damn dirty Canadians out there) accessing their site.  There are ways around their US only restrictions, but now Hulu's managed to block another way to access their content.  I hope this helps them sleep better, but everyone'll just use other methods to view their site.  Sorry, Hulu, but you fail.  Unless you take all your toys and go home, you can't keep others from playing with your content.  It doesn't help that American television is a lot better than Canadian television, but at least we have shows like Canada's Worst Driver, which are interesting to watch.  It's just too bad that bad driving may not be entirely the fault of the driver, according to a recent study.  Of course, what this means for drivers is that they can now claim the gene as an excuse for getting pulled over for speeding ten times in a month.  It's bad enough that we have a lot of bad drivers where I live.  If you ever receive news that I've committed suicide, it's not suicide.  I've most likely been struck and killed by a bad driver on the corner of 1st and Connaught.

Apparently, the United States needs fewer science students, not more.  That's bad news for geeks everywhere, because this means we'll need to actually develop muscles to do other, more physical pursuits.  And finally, if you think your laptop takes too long to boot up, you're probably right.