It’s not really called a “penis facial”. On the company website, it goes by a far more palatable name: the Hollywood EGF facial. It involves a cleanse, an intensive TCA peel, micro-needling, an electrifying mask, and, finally, FDA-approved Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF) serum.
“EGF is derived from the progenitor cells of the human fibroblast taken from Korean newborn baby foreskin – which helps to generate collagen and elastin,” Louise explains [georgialouise.com]. So the EGF used in the treatment comes from skin cells produced in a lab.
This time it was my Netflix account. My daughter messaged me: “Papa my Netflix became Spanish!!!!!!!! Help me.”
Turns out someone got into the account, deleted all my secondary users — including my daughter — and then changed everything to Spanish and renamed my main user. Whoever it is has a liking for teen horror shows:
Not my families taste… Vampire Diaries, ugh!
So I changed the password… I was way to simple because when I have to login on my Daughters or wife’s devices or the AppleTV I am lazy and don’t want to type 30 or 60 random characters. Lesson learned again. Silly random 30+ character password created. Unfortunately Netflix cannot recover the history for the deleted profiles so everyone but me started from scratch. Relatively minor I guess.
As for the lesson learned. I have already learned it and should know better. That password is know to be associated with my email account (I verified this again for the post on Have I been pwned [haveibeenpwned.com]). If you have never checked if your password, or email address or personal info is for sale on the Dark web [wikipedia.org] you should head over to Have I been pwned [haveibeenpwned.com] and check for yourself. ASAP. I’ll wait.
Done? Scared? I have been pawned a few times:
I’ve been using the same email address since the ’90s and have signed up to a ton of online services over the years so maybe it should not be a surprise.
If you want to know how leaked passwords are cracked or just how easy it is to crack passwords most people think are “secure” watch this video:
Crazy how easy it is.
So, like I said it was a lesson I should have learned. In January 2017 my Apple account was hacked. Long story short, someone got in, changed the Credit Card on file to someone else’s — I assume stolen —l; card and proceeded to purchase US$200 worth of in-game credits and gift cards. I noticed when I got three receipts from Apple in my email in rapid succession over night and couldn’t think why. Had it only been one I would most likely have ignored it as a delayed receipt for something. So I had to go through the trouble or resetting my account, not once but twice because I got locked out again at the end of the month, best I can figure the second issue was the stolen credit card owner reporting it stolen when they got their bill so my account got locked. The second time I had to reset all my Apple devices – 2 iPads, my iPhone and AppleTV I set up family accounts for my kids and then I went out and purchased a 1password [1password.com] family account.
It was painful to go through and reset and store all my passwords for all the hundreds of services I use. But I highly recommend you go out and get a professional password manager and get on with it. Things will only get worse and you will get pwned. So I’ve been pwned twice and luckily I have not lost any money or had any other serious issues. Knock on wood, the internet is scary place full of bad people.
The Economist cover story this week is on Taming the Titans, by which they mean the new titans of Google, Facebook and Amazon. They talk about how these players could be regulated to avoid the abuse of monopolies and they make a nice comparison between how we deal with Intellectual Property and how we could deal with Personal Data:
Just as America drew up sophisticated rules about intellectual property in the 19th century, so it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals.
Another case of IP law needing to be updated for the computer age…
Someone is suing movie studios over the copyright to characters which were created using facial contour mapping of actors onto CGI faces. the defence is arguing that this would be equivalent to Microsoft owning the copyright text written in Word or Adobe owning images made with Photoshop. of course the plaintiff disagrees:
“Generally, an author writes a book by typing every word into a Word document, and an artist creates a work of art by deciding on specific treatment of every pixel in a Photoshop file,” continues the brief. “But in neither case does their work provide input to software that synthesizes an original expression that is distinct from the author’s or artist’s input. … The core distinction between defendants’ analogies and the MOVA Contour program is the degree to which the output is the product of the effort of the program’s user versus the program itself. Where the program does the ‘lion’s share of the work’ in creating the output — as the complaint alleges the MOVA Contour program does here — the copyright in the output belongs to the programmer, not the end-user or the director.”
I don’t buy the argument on grounds of common sense. The idea that the computer does the “lion’s share of the work” in that it crunches the numbers implies that the mathematical operations done by the CPU, as instructed, is more valuable than all the other work done to produce a blockbuster film, or the work of the actor behind the CGI, seems absurd. Without the users the computer would sit idle Computer programs do the “lion’s share” of the work in so many aspects of the modern world.
Programers make programs to do things, people use the programs to do those things. If he wins then programers will own the world, or whoever the programmers work for.
