books – Page 139 – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 4 Tevet 5777 (Monday 2 January 2017) · 1 minute to read

I’m starting a new book challenge for this year. I think they’re a nice diversion and they allow for a little friendly competition. This year I’ve set it to fifty-two books so I average about one book a week. I’d also like to write more reviews, except I likely won’t do it on Goodreads. I’d like to have the book covers as the featured image (thumbnail) for each book so that when I syndicate things to Twitter and Facebook there are pictures to go with the content. I’ll do this manually for now until I find out how much of a nightmare Goodreads API permissions are. You apparently can’t scrape their feeds, although they exist. I was highly disappointed when I found this out, because it would have been the easiest way to retrieve data. Oh well.

Update: You can, apparently, scrape the feed, but only sort of, because you don’t get complete control of the data that comes across.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 20 Kislev 5777 (Tuesday 20 December 2016) · 1 minute to read

So I’m reading the 13th Scott Harvath book, and I’ve gotten to a point where Scott Harvath is able to tell whether or not the terrorists are logging into Facebook, and what their visiting on Facebook. Come on! Facebook even when this book was written was using SSL. The entire point of SSL is to protect data while it’s in transit. That includes usernames and passwords, and it also includes what URLs (or pages in Facebook’s case), people are visiting. There’s absolutely no way this character would be able to tell whether or not some terrorists were visiting Facebook and even if you could there’s no way for him to be able to tell what Pages they are visiting, and what they’re doing on Facebook. Christ on crutches, I know research is hard and everything but this is pretty simple to find out. Google is amaze! It can help with all kinds of things! Including researching how technology works and how Facebook works. Not that Facebook is terribly awesome about privacy, but even they don’t screw up this badly.