Midnight Sea Society now on Facebook

My friend, Avatar Michael Nelson, is working on a community focused on the ideas behind lucid dreaming and self improvement. He’s calling it the Midnight Sea Society and they’ve already published one book, The Tower and the Sea.

Being that it’s generally my job to be social for all my friends, I’ve set up a Facebook page dedicated to his operation and the book.

From the web page,

You see, I believe a few things. Maybe you believe in something similar. If so, I invite you to explore our teachings, especially the lucid dreaming guide.

I believe that we are all connected. In some small way, what happens to one of us, happens to all. We share the same loves, the same joys, the same pains. We have the same needs, desires, and fears. When we are at our best, we move together. When we are at our worst, we move together. We are connected.

If this is your kind of thing, go check it out.

If not, I’m sure we can find something for you to chew on.

Link, via Facebook.

“I like it” Facebook status meme goes viral

Looks like people have struck upon a particularly hilarious viral meme that has a very risqué connotation. Facebook statuses have been popping up all day displaying interesting variations of “I like it…”

I like it on the table.

I like it on the floor.

I like it on the closet.

What does it mean? It’s a reference to where women like to keep their purses. It is part of a breast cancer awareness promotion. According to The Washington Post the “I like it” status has some sort of stupid gender-mystique attached to it in that it’s supposed to be mysterious to menfolk—and this is why its stupid. Really? As if (1) men cannot get breast cancer and (2) as if they shouldn’t also be part of breast cancer awareness and research.

It’s curious, fun, and inventive—just get rid of the vapid nonsense about the boys. Breast cancer affects the entire human race.

Link, via TIME Magazine.

Facebook Denial of Service Attack

Update: Okay, this was a little stupid: the apparent DDoS against Facebook today, the Wired article that I found is from 2009 and I misread the date (thought 09 meant September.) Looks like what happened was an internal database snafu. Here’s a CNET article on the subject.

Looks like Facebook is currently down due to a denial of service attack. While it’s been marked as “they were the victim of an attack [this] Thursday morning,” it’s still ongoing and it’s almost 1pm now.

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” responded Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin via e-mail.

We’ve seen this happen before with Twitter—and if it’s the same people who did that, someone wants Facebook offline today. I don’t know yet if Twitter is getting hit with the same DDOS at the same time or if this is simply targeted at Facebook without mangling Twitter.

If anything, it’s a pretty powerful DDOS to wipe out something like Facebook as they already absorb a lot of traffic; then again, that might make them more vulnerable. In the future of cyberwarfare, taking out distributed media-discussion on the Internet will be a useful component when governments and countries want to do things under cover of darkness. Of course, they’ll have to take out more than just Facebook and Twitter to actually make a dent.

Here’s looking forward to it reappearing later today after they get themselves sorted out. I will link the postmortem.

Link, via Wired.