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'You get burned out on Facebook after a while'

Plus: 'The only risk is the power of the Force'

Quotw This was the week when Americans came right out and told Pew Research Center what we've all been thinking about Facebook: that sh*t gets old.

Pew found that 61 per cent of current US users felt they needed a break from the social network, voluntarily abstaining from baby milestone status updates, pictures of breakfast and videos of kittens for several weeks or more.

And the main reason Facebookers stopped logging on wasn't because they were worried about their privacy or anything like that. Half of them either didn't have time for it, weren't interested anymore, thought it was a waste of time or felt that there was too much drama and negativity on the social network.

A sample of the users' comments on quitting eternal contact with everyone they've ever known, even those people they don't remember from school, included:

I was tired of stupid comments.

[I had] crazy friends. I did not want to be contacted.

I took a break when it got boring.

You get burned out on it after a while.

People were [posting] what they had for dinner.

And, in what is probably a different story altogether:

It caused problems in my [romantic] relationship.

Over in penguin city, that pesky problem of innocent Linux-lovers bricking their Samsung laptops when they try to boot the OS on them has been solved by penguin-in-chief Linus Torvalds with the simple and expedient instruction to disable the dodgy driver in question.

Fellow Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman was somewhat puzzled as to how a driver he'd actually had a hand in could have been so technologically lethal:

Who would have thought that just randomly poking memory of a laptop would brick it. Long ago Samsung told me that it was just fine to be doing this, and that there would not be any problems (I based the Samsung-laptop driver on code that Samsung themselves gave me.)

If you have this hardware, just blacklist the Samsung-laptop driver and all should be fine.

And the GNOME desktop for Linux has decided that JavaScript is the only "first class" language it's going to be recommending to app builders. Sick and tired of warring GNOMEs using eight different languages, developer Travis Reitter cut through the battles to ensure that GNOMEs aren't ignored by app developers.

Now that finally there is some consensus, we can all move forward and GNOME can concentrate on making a kick ass development platform that can focus on the little things like great docs, best practices and tight language integration.

They can do all this without the distraction of “but that isn’t how it is done in <insert your favorite language here>”. Seriously, if someone brings that up in a discussion they can now be thoroughly ignored.

Meanwhile, Twitter was hacked this week and up to 250,000 users' data was slurped, albeit in a "limited" form. The microblogging site immediately shut down and scrabbled to shunt the hackers off the site once their "unusual patterns" were noticed, but didn't manage it until after they'd made off with some data.

Bob Lord, Twitter's director of information security, said the site felt it needed to make the breach public to warn folks that their password may have to be changed due to the attack:

This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.

For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.

In Blighty, a man has been jailed for eight months for a campaign of revenge involving household cleaner Cillit Bang. The employee of market research firm Frost and Sullivan felt aggrieved that he hadn't received a pay rise, so he repeatedly sprayed the stuff into the firm's servers for three years, causing £32,000 of damage.

The prosecutor said:

On Saturday, June 30 2012, Mr Sobolewski was seen on the CCTV camera in the main server room at a time he should not have been in there at all.

He entered into the room with a distinctive purple bottle of Cillit Bang and the following day he was seen spraying it into the computer grills and then wiping the excess fluid away with a cloth.

He is then seen pouring a container of liquid into one of the machines.

Sobolewski tried to get away with claiming he'd just been trying to clean the servers, but the CCTV footage was apparently damning enough for him to admit his guilt.

And finally, while the White House may have crapped all over Star Wars fans' dreams of a real Death Star, that hasn't deterred one plucky entrepreneur from going to Kickstarter to try to fund the 850 quadrillion-dollar monstrosity.

While the anonymous visionary is cleverly disguising his true - possibly Dark Side - intentions by pretending the whole thing is a "joke", he is quietly amassing the cash needed to protect/destroy our planet. The initial funding is set at £20m for "more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports".

The stretch goal for full construction is obviously the necessary £543qn ($850qn). However, the anonymous designer might score some savings from using open-source hardware and software.

Our unnamed (at least on the Kickstarter page anyway) Jedi/Sith remains frustratingly opaque in his Force affiliation when he says:

The only risk is the power of the Force.

Clearly the only way to find out for sure must be to fund the Death Star and then see which way he points it... ®

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