I believe that around this time last year I was blogging about how I was trying to persuade my parents to allow me to go to Oxegen, the largest music festival in Ireland. Unfortunately it didn’t really pan out for me last year because when decision time was looming I realised that I had a total of about 4c saved up!

This year I swear it’s going to be different! I have enough money for tickets and ever since the initial announcements regarding the lineup, I’ve been putting together a suitable plan of attack which is currently consisting of a bus full of friends, some oversized tents and of course, drink!

This years lineup is by far and large the best lineup yet although I’ve been saying that since Oxegen was actually known as “Witness” but that was way back when Guiness were sponsoringit all! But I really mean it this time with bands such as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Strokes, Kaiser Chiefs, Placebo taking centre stage throughout what hopefully promises to be an excellent 2 days!

Tickets are quite steep at €160 but the promoters obviously reckon they can get away with it with them predicting the concert to sell out in a matter of days as opposed to weeks!

[tags]oxegen, concert[/tags]

Only a week a go, I didn’t care much for Bebo. I wasn’t even that active a member. Yet on the rare occassion that I found myself looking through my ‘friends’ profiles, I caught sight of someone Home Address. That person was almost unknown to me and was only in my friends list because I had previously imported my contact list from MSN.

From that moment on I wanted to try and make a difference, so I set about trying to make it happen. At first I didn’t know how but soon I had a few ideas floating around in my head which began to materialise in the form of Tracy – a totally ficticious girl that I created coupled with a photo of a hot babe. I then set about adding “friends” by using a quick work around I found (joining one of the many colleges). Once I had some friends added I was able to view their profiles which included their contact details. Out of the initial 6 friends that I added, I managed to obtain 1 home address and 4 phone numbers.

At this stage I wanted my findings to get some well deserved publicity as initial comments from my friends were quite positive. I added the article to www.digg.com and www.scooop.net with the result being a massive influx of curious visitors from around the net. The article had also been linked to from various forums and was quickly indexed on google.com meaning that my article was ranked highly when anyone searched for “Bebo”. While all this publicity was welcomed, it still didn’t take of the minor detail that the people who are unknowingly making their personal information available to the public didn’t know the dangers about doing it. That was where my next challenge lied.

I figured that sending messages to the 10 people that I had fooled wouldn’t cause any shockwaves that would reverberate through the Bebo community so I decided to think on a more epic scale. If this was going to work then I was going to have to add more people in order to let Tracy go out with a BANG! After individually clicking 93 boxes belonging to my “mutual friends” I had finally reached a point where enough was enough! Within minutes people started to accept my invitations. Now because I added so many people that don’t know me, people were bound to ask questions and I did get a lot of comments asking who I was, but because they left comments it meant that they had already accepted the invitation rendering their suspicions useless because I had access to their personal details. I reckon if they truly were suspicious then they would have sent me a message beforehand. With Tracy being ever so popular by having close to 100 friends, I realised that the potential for adding literally thousands more “mutual friends” to the list was massive. I was dissapointed to see that I was now unable to access the “Friends Friends” panel because I had more than 30 friends and I was greeted to a message stating that after 30 friends, the list would just be stupidly long and almost never ending! Fair Enough. This meant that I was no longer was able to quickly add numerous amounts of people so at this point I decided that what friends I had would do.

So I added up my friends and discovered that 75 had accepted my invitation. I then added up the amount of invitations that were sent out and ended up with 147 which means that 51% of invitations were accepted. However that can’t be a conclusive figure because some people may still have to check their email and see the invitation so I’m going to place the figure at around 60% of sucessfully accepted invitations!

I then added up the sexes of each of my “friends” and found that 39 were female and 36 were male. So it can be said that 52% were female and 48% were male which is a figure I was quite surprised at because I was expecting guys to be more inclined to accept an invitation from a sexy girl like Tracy. However those figures could just be down to me sending more invites to females but unfortunately this can’t be accurately tracked OR maybe the figures are correct and therefore may potentially backup the idea that girls are more desperate than guys for popularity when it comes to these social networking sites.

Now to the part that I think everyone is keen to find out about; How many people were “conned” into sharing their personal details with me?” Lets start with phone numbers;

I counted up how many people were showing a phone number (either mobile or work) and ended up with 35 which can be expressed as 46.67% this can be further broken down into male and female sexes. So off I went counting how many guys had their phone number displayed and finally I got 13 (37%) which means that out of the 35 people displaying their phone numbers a whopping 22 (63%) are female!

Now I can understand why people might be desperate and add complete strangers as friends but choosing to display a phone number to them makes me think that they either don’t know their number is visible or are simply not aware of the dangers of having their personal info on the net!

My second last task was to suss out how many addresses. I suspected (and hoped) that not as many people would be stupid enough to put up their address on because when you think about it, if you know a person directly, chances are they know where you live so there shouldn’t be any reason to have your address online. So once again I did my duty and counted out how many addresses were displayed. 21 was the result (or 28%). Once again more girls than boys had their addresses displayed but this time it was a lot closer with 12 girls (57%) and 9 guys (43%) having visible addresses.

The last thing for me to do was inform everyone that Tracy wasn’t a real person. I did this using the mail system on bebo.com. Sending a message to 75 won’t have any remifications on the rest of the bebo.com community so I also created a message on my real account and forwarded it to all my friends in the hope that it will continue to be forwarded. Lastly I contacted the Bebo.com owners in the hope that they will take on board some suggestions that I made to them.

I think that pretty much brings this report to an end. I suppose I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who felt deceived but at the end of the days thats exactly what happened – you were deceived! I’ll leave you with a summary of I learned:

Total Amount of Friends: 75
Amount of Friend Inivitations Sent out: 147
Percentage of Invites accepted: 60%
Number of Female Friends: 39 Percentage: 52%
Number of Male Friends: 36 Percentage: 48%

People Displaying Phone Numbers: 35 Percentage: 46.67%
Males displaying phone numbers: 13 Percentage: 37%
Females displaying phone numbers: 22 Percentage: 63%

People Displaying Addresses: 21 Percentage: 28%
Males displaying addresses: 9 Percentage: 43%
Females displaying addresses: 12 Percentage: 57%

[tags]bebo, myspace, danger, bebo danger, myspace danger, identidy theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment[/tags]

Recently McDonalds shuffled around their “Eurosaver” menu to include a rather handsome offer of a cheeseburger for a mere €1. To some McD die-hards that mightn’t seem all that attractive because they have had better offers in the past, however up until recently I never went into McD’s a lot in part due to the shocking findings of the documentary “Super Size Me” (which incidently is one of the DVD’s that I’m currently selling in my DVD Clearout) but that all changed once I saw the Mega Mac!

It was the talk of the town and you couldn’t walk from A to B without hearing the words “4 burgers?!?!?! You must be joking!” and people making signs with their hands trying to tell friends just how big it really was but of course their hands weren’t long enough to be up to such a mammoth task!

Keen to see what all the fuss was about, I marched into the nearest McD’s and ordered the MegaMac Meal which came with Large Fries and a Large Drink for €6.90. I was mesmerised by the gigantic poster advertising the Mega Mac and when I was told to sit down while I waited for it to be prepared I was nearly expecting sirens to be going off as the recently harvested Lithuanian burger preparer was subjected to pressure never experienced before! There were no sirens though. Instead the “waitress” brought over a rather bland burger box. “Sorry” I said, “I ordered a Mega Mac” being sure to make the hand signs as I said the word “Mega”. “This is the mega” she responded in her foreign voice.

Dejected. It’s the only word except for angry, betrayed and embarrased that could be used to describe how I felt a that moment! But I wasn’t going to leave dodgy advertising spoil my already spoiled meal! I picked up the burger still dissapointed that it could fit into my hand and took took a bite. All my reservations were quickly vaporised by the fat and grease that was surging through my vein’s. I was in Burger Heaven! The Lettuce was crisp and still cold while the cheese was just beginning to melt on each of the 4 burgers! It was comparable to the Burger King baguette’s that I was praising on the site (now lost) about 6 months a go!

The next day when I was in town, I passed McD’s and realised that I had €6.90 to spare. So in I went in search of burger heaven once again only to be greeted by the new price of €7.30 for the meal. Crazy, an increase of 40c overnight! I never realised that the price of cow entrails was that tempremental! Now with me being unable to afford the Mega Mac meal, I decided to borrow 10c off my friend and buy 6 Cheeseburgers and a Medium drink which came to €7. That’s where it all began!

For the next week I continued to go in to McD’s everyday whilst in town and everyday I continued buy as many cheeseburgers as I could afford and I could justify buying all these cheeseburgers with my hatred towards loose change. I notched up about 18 cheeseburgers in a week. That trend continued for the next few days aswell and I even started to buy a McDonalds after school as well as lunchtime. At this rate, my “nutritional” intake was far exceeding that of Stanley who took part in Super Size Me because the Cheeseburger I learned, has one of the highest fat content of any item on the McD menu!

Yesterday on my (rather long) trip back from mountaineering we stopped off at McDonalds where once again I emptied my wallet of coinage and devoured my 2 cheeseburgers! Those 2 cheeseburgers brought the amount of cheese burgers consumed by me in the past 2 weeks up to 30! I’m also starting to notice the difference it’s making to my body. Walking up stairs now makes me breathless and occassionally dizzy while my skin (if it could make sounds) is crying out for me to stop abusing myself like this because it can’t cope with all the grease being thrown at it! I’m also getting a sharp pain in my chest every now and again which is worryingly close to my heart!

A study a few years a go PROVED that Fast Food is addictive. I think I’d be inclined to agree as I struggle to break free of this obsession!

[tags]McDonalds, Cheeseburger, Mega Mac, Super Size Me, Fast Food[/tags]

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART I

24 hours have passed since I underwent the transformation into a woman. To those who are unfamiliar with my aim, I decided to sign up to Bebo.com posing as a girl in order to coax total strangers into sharing their contact details with me. I am now in the rather smug position of being able to tell you I managed to acquire mobile numbers and HOME ADDRESSES of the majority of those who accepted my invitation for friendship. So how did I manage to find friends?So that’s where we pick up the story. After creating a false email address, finding a suitable pic of a babe and signing up to Bebo.com I set about searching for friends because after all I’m a lonely New Yorker who moved to Meath because my Dad got a job there so I’m desperate for friends. I was semi-pleased to discover that adding friends on Bebo isn’t all that easy because you actually have to know their email address to be able to add them. I should have been thrilled after finding this out but because I was desperate to find some friends, it made the job in hand slightly more difficult because now it meant I had to find a work around.

So I paused for a few moments before noticing the “School” and “College” tab which I clicked because it would only seem logical to be able to add yourself to a school and be able to see everyone else who signed up to the college. Upon clicking on “College” I was asked to select a Country and then a state (having selected the USA) and then finally I could browse through all the colleges registered on the site. My first attempt at enrolling myself as a student was foiled because I was asked to enter my student email which must be verified. I couldn’t have been bothered to verify another email address so I went back over the procedure only this time I said I was Alumni and didn’t have to verify an email address (presumably because few graduates would remember their college email).

I was in! I was now brought to a page listing everyone from the college, past and present. Now I was free to look at people’s public profiles and request to add them as a friend. For the next 10 minutes I added about 6 friends in between many sips of coffee, all male and between the ages of 17 and 21. Once I did that it was simply a matter of playing the waiting game.

A few hours later I received an email saying that “XXXX” had connected with me on Bebo. I then had to log out of my genuine account (that is my account) and log in as Tracy so I could view this persons profile. Now at this point I’d like to point out that I won’t at any stage reveal the names of those who were duped. Nevertheless “XXXX’s” profile tested positive for the following banned substances… Mobile phone number and home address. I could do nothing but smile as I realised that unbeknownst to XXXX, I was in a very powerful position. Granted they were based in New York and here I am in Ireland but there are tonnes of US-based sites that are crying out for numbers to send junk txt’s to and likewise I could have done the same with their home address!

As I was reading that profile, I received another email saying that another person had added me. This time around the person was only choosing to display their phone number. Smart choice – Dumbass! Over the next few hours everyone that I had sent a friend request out to had accepted it and it turned out that that first person was the only one who entered in their home address while everyone else was showing their phone number.

I could have gone further and at this stage it would actually be easier to find friends because I would only have to click on “Friends Friends” and be given the option to add all my mutual friends with only one click. It would have beat having to add each person individually but I feel that I have already proven my point and that is the simple fact that Bebo has the potential to wreak havok on people’s lives while that person is left wondering just why €5 is going missing from their phone credit each day and why they are all of a sudden receiving 17 catalogues daily. Of course the danger doesn’t end there and armed with a home address there is the potential for some serious physical harm being done to the victim.

Before I started this experiment, I was under the impression that Bebo was a free for all where anybody could simply search for someone and add them, instead the other way for someone to get in contact with strangers is to join a college or a school. Once you do add someone, that person is advised to only accept you if they actually know you. However because people added me, the beautiful stranger, it’s proof that people aren’t following the advise but even though the onus is on the people to make sure they are responsible in choosing who to add, I feel that Bebo should tighten up it’s security further to make it harder for people to do exactly as I did.

To conclude this report I’d like to emphasise that I did this because I believe services like Bebo.com, Myspace.com and other community sites aimed at progressively younger users are dangerous and hopefully by doing this I can help spread awareness of this very real danger.

Thanks for taking the time out to read this and please feel free to link to this article and/or leave a comment telling me what you think!

[tags]bebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment[/tags]

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART II
Over the past 6 or so months, online “friend” sites such as www.myspace.com and www.bebo.com have taken the world by storm with MySpace.com recently notching up it’s 47th million user which is one of the reasons why it grew by 609% within in the last year! The service that the majority of them offer is the ability to upload pictures to your very own profile page where you can also add your own biography and list the things that you are interested in. People access your profile by adding you as a friend. Friends can leave comments about each other in what has recently become an over-glorified popularity contest.

With many people desperate for all the friends they can get, they will accept invitations from complete strangers just so their friend count will increase by one. This is where alarm bells start going off in my mind! Yesterday I signed up to bebo.com and imported all my contacts from my Hotmail.com account, the vast majority of whom I’ve never met and many being people I haven’t spoken to in years. This morning, a mere 24 hours later, I checked the site and saw that many people had accepted my invitation for “friendship”. I was looking through everyone’s profiles and noticed that about 60% of people had entered in their Mobile phone number and their full address! Oh dear!

Now try and remember that I don’t know a lot of these people and they don’t know me either yet all of a sudden I had access to their mobile phone number, full address and their pictures! This really is a disaster waiting to happen! If I wanted, I could cause havok! I could innocently sign them up to receive spam by mail or register them on ringtone sites resulting in them wasting credit. They’re just innocent ideas, if I were a paedophile or a pervert then I could use their address for a lot more malicious purposes. I really hope that that won’t be the case but I can’t help but feel that in this day and age, my fears could become a reality!

I really don’t want that to happen so I’ve embarked on a mission to expose these dangers. I thought about it for a while and I decided that the best way to do this would be to actually pose as a 19 year old stunner from the USA who now lives in Ireland

First I created a new email address: tracy.xox@gmail.com. I’ve already cut a corner because gmail.com isn’t yet open to the public so some guys might be a bit suspicious over how i managed to get a gmail.com address. At the end of the day though, I was just too damn lazy to go through hotmail’s longwinded signup system! Once I created the email address I had to search for a picture so I typed in “prom” into google images and picked the photo of the most beautiful girl on the page. I chose to use a prom photo because the story goes that I was a prom queen last year in New York (my hometown naturally) and this way if someone asks me about New York I can make up some bullshit answer and they’ll be none the wiser. After signing up I made up a half believable story about my life thusfar and entered in a few things that I like and dislike.

This is the stage that I’m at at the moment. Just to let everyone know that my goal isn’t to deceive people, instead it’s to make people aware of the potential danger. It’s the prove that people throw all sense of judgement out the window when they are desperate for friends and I reckon that in the next few days I will be well on the way to proving it because “Tracy’s” story isn’t solid. It’s full of holes that will become blatantly obvious to everyone once they find out that Tracy isn’t real. However if someone wanted to, they could pay a lot of attention to detail and make sure their story is rock solid!

I’ll let everyone know how this experiment turns out and if you want to check out my progress, check out Tracy’s Bebo page @ http://Tracyxox.bebo.com

YOU CAN SEE PART II of this report Here

[tags]bebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment[/tags]

People do the strangest of things when they’re bored. Last Sunday for example I covered my hand in an industrial strength gap filler going by the name of “No More Gaps”. Trying to get that off kept me occupied for about 4 hours but after much scraping with a stanely knife I had suceeded in removing the majority of the substance which “if comes into contact with skin, seek immediate medical attention!”

 Yesterday in English however I was trapped! There were no industrial strength glues in sight so I had to endure the class of reading Macbeth. It was there that for some strange reason I decided to test my eyesight and was astonished to find that whenever I was looking at my book out of only my left eye, the colours appeared to be washed out (i.e a red suddenly became pink) whereas everything I saw out of my right eye was vibrant and colourful. I then looked up and tried to read the chart about the great Irish writers from across the room. With both eyes open I struggled to read it but with only my left eye open it was a piece of cake! When I attempted to read it with my right eye, everything was just one big vibrant blur!

 It begs the question, which eye is better? Is a left eye which washes out colours like a 100oC wash with the ability to read things in the distance better than a sharp right eye that decides to implement drunk vision to anything more than a few metres away?

 I think I have to get an eye test… more money

[tags]eyesight, vision, eye test[/tags]

Back in 2004 on an incredibly cold December’s morning, I made the decision to join the local boat club. In my books, it was a brave decision considering I could barely swim and had some reservations about rowing on the most contaminated river in Ireland. It may have been a brave decision, but it was pretty much forced upon me by a mother who was convinced that I was spending far too much time on the computer!

Initially we trained 3 days a week; Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday. The training wasn’t that intensive to begin with, a few laps of the park on a Tuesday and rowing on the water to improve out technique on Saturday and Sunday. I actually quite liked it and soon we found ourselves taking part in time trials around the country and the results (while not being good) were very promising! So it was decided that we should train more and attempt to catch up with the other crews around the country who had been rowing for 3+ years. We added an extra day to the regime and reshuffled the contents of the training around a bit. Tuesday became hill running night, Thursday was our park sprint night and Friday and Saturday were totally dedicated to improving our technique out on the water. Sunday was by far the most intensive day of the week as it saw us row in the morning and then do circuit training which our trainer confessed had made grown men cry in the past! I wasn’t crying but I sure was hurting!

As you can imagine, training intensively 5 days a week was bound to make an impact on my fitness. The rowing motion itself put great pressure on your stomach, thigh’s and of course your biceps. The hill running strengthened our hearts and after a few months we were able to run up and down the Rockshire Road 5 times in a row. For anyone not familiar with Waterford, the Rockshire Road is a prolonged hill which seems to go on forever with the added bonus of being very very steep.

Within about 6 month’s I was incredibly fit. I had bulging muscles all over my body, in the most obscure of places as well (but no, not there )! I was able to row 1000m’s on a rowing machine in about 3 minutes which is good going and the one thing I loved about rowing was that you kept having to push yourself. There was no level you should aim to reach as the sky was the limit. You could do a rowing test one week and row 1000m’s in 3:30 and fall off the machine totally out of breath and do the exact same the next week but after shaving 2 seconds off your time. It was this everlasting progression that kept me hooked!

However, my new hobby took a life-threatening blow to the head in May 2005 when I managed to get a job in the Tower Hotel. At first I wasn’t getting many hours but whenever I worked, I benefitted greatly from my physical condition which was good at this point. No stack of plates was too great for me, no amount of suitcases couldn’t be lifted up the stairs and of course, no amount of work was too much. I worked plenty of 18 hour shifts and it was all possible because of my fitness and to a lesser degree knowing that I was going to be paid for my services.

August was to be our month long break from rowing. Our season was a sucess and while we didn’t pick up any event victories, we had improved to the point that we were now beating a crew that only months beforehand were finishing a few minutes before us! In the weeks before August I had been getting more hours in the Tower and wasn’t training 5 days a week like everyone else! During the month long break the others were training while I was working.

When training began again in the beginning of September, we were asked to go on a light run. It was assumed that we had kept up our fitness levels so a light run was considered to be a run out to Orpens pub, up through ballygunner and back down Grange Hill towards the boat club which is situated on Canada St, just off Park Road. It was a 7 mile run and I had given up after about 5 miles. It was on my long and humiliating walk back to the boat house that I gave up all hope of rowing again. I just wasn’t prepared to put in the effort that was now required of me in order to catch up with everyone else! So after 10 months of rowing, I gave up. Just like that. Whenever I look back at the one hobby (apart from my PC) that engulfed my life for almost a year I sometimes wish I didn’t just give up, especiall when I compare what I was like then to what I’m like now…

5 month’s down the road and that pityful attempt at a 7 mile run back in September is the last time I have broken a sweat! I’m eating more and more of all the wrong food and the most disheartening thing about it all is that I can now grab a large chunk of skin on my stomach, something which I’ve NEVER been able to do! My muscles have become a lethargic mess and I always struggle when clearing trays into wash up in work. It’s sad to think that only 6 months a go, I could endure almost any physical challenge thrown at me! Sometimes I think I should join rowing again, but that idea is quickly discarded whenever I do P.E in school and am out of breath after a mere 5 minutes of doing laps!

Unfortunately I can’t see this situation changing. Any traces of healthy living will be wiped from my brain in the next few months and all I can say is thank god for my efficent metabolism and if it ever becomes as lazy as me, then God help me!

[tags]fitness, rowing, running, work, exercise[/tags]