Month: December 2011

And is promptly told she is the most evil person ever.

I have to admit that I’ve never understood the whole “Santa” thing.  I’m sure part of that is the fact that my parents never “did”  Santa.  Infact I think it was kindergarten, when I came home one day and wanted to know who this “Santa” person was that everyone was talking about.  My mother told me he was made up and not real.  I promptly returned to school and proceeded to tell everyone Santa was a lie and they shouldn’t believe in him.  Something tells me I wasn’t very popular with the other kids’ parents that year….

But really, I don’t get Santa.  A large majority of the people I know who DID believe in Santa when they were little, say they were very upset when they realized there wasn’t any Santa.  That their parents had lied to them.  And yet, they proceed to tell their children that its Santa who’s bringing the gifts.  My inlaws do this, their eldest grand-child is 8yrs old, and still believes in Santa, because the whole family is expected to go out of their way to assist in the foolery (I have so far avoided having to be involved, without having to argue the fact).  Having gotten to know the child over the last few years I can firmly state that she is going to be PISSED once she finally figures out that they were lying to her.  Screaming temper-tantrum mad.

I don’t get it.

And if thats news to you have a bridge to sell you…..

Seriously, I got a smart phone with every expectation that Verizon was going to go to the legal limit (and possibly push that limit as hard as possible) to get information on what I do with it and when.  That doesn’t make it RIGHT, but I KNEW that it would happen.  Therefor when the recent announcement hit that many phones, sold by many carriers, contain software that can keylog and send back that information I wasn’t surprised.  Now according to the linked article my phone, sold by my carrier, does not contain this particular piece of software.  However I fully expect it contains something very similar that no-one’s found yet.  That concept will eventually piss me off to the point of rooting the phone and fixing the issue, till then I understand that everything I do on that phone is potentially being sent off to someone.  After all, this is Verizon we’re talking about.

Seriously.  When I first got my Droid2 I was rather disgusted by the amount of bloatware that came pre-installed, and even more so when I discovered that the only way to get rid of it was to root the phone.  But I was outright PISSED when, a week after getting the phone, I discovered that one of those pieces of bloatware was an app (*cough* City ID *cough*) that was sending all my incoming call information off to a 3rd party, without my permission, no way to opt out, and no way to turn it off till the “FREE NO COMMITMENT TRIAL!!!!111!!!!” ended and I could finally tell them to go to hell.  It wasn’t even a useful piece of software, it was supposed to tell you the city and state that the person was calling from, in reality all it did was ID the city/state where the PHONE NUMBER originated from, so if you got your cell phone in NY state, and kept your number when you moved out of state, City ID would still ID the call as from AnyCity NY.  I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one complaining since when Husband upgraded his Droid to a Droid3 City ID didn’t come preinstalled.

So yah, if you were really under the illusion that everything you did on your smart phone was private you need to get a life…….

Edited to add: this doesn’t mean that I think we SHOULDN’T take apart any company who breaks the law in this manor, just that I’m totally unsurprised that it happened.

……arg…….