Girl Geekette dotNet

For those of you who like social networking, Facebook (originally intended for College kids) is a much milder, stripped down Social Networking as compared to Yahoo 360 and MySpace. Although there are 3rd party Applications you can add… it has a much cleaner / less cluttered look you can add.

A few days ago, a 3rd party application called "Pets" was released for Facebook. To me, it reminds me of a cross between Tamagotchi and with a hint of World of Warcraft in it. The idea is to start out with a level 0 pet - a bunny (or a colorbit). You can pet it, feed it or poke it from your Facebook profile (as can others) to gain XP and health. (Poke seems to give higher XP than Pet from what I have seen).

You can check mine out at Erica’s Facebook Profile

Inside the game, you "fight monsters" to gain XP, health and Gold. You can then use the Gold to buy items of armor and clothing to increase you hit points, damage and health.  Pet me and Scavenging has been disabled from inside the game at this time. (Sorry! Scavenging (or petting) has been temporarily disabled due to high server load. We’re currently fixing this. Thanks for your patience!) The higher your XP, the tougher the monsters (Scorpian, Mantis, Spider, and an Ant) are to kill.

After you kill the monster, you loot the body for Gold and/or Equipment (weapons, armor, etc). You can sell the equipment for gold, carry it or equip it.

While playing it (mine has been alive for 10 hours - with a couple of hours of sleep being in the 10) I have noticed a few things.

From my certifications, one of the by products I have gotten is receiving Certification Magazine in the (snail) mail. (On their site, you can register for a free subscription). Normally, when the magazine comes in, I will read through it and put it aside in a pile. In the May, 2007 issue, something stuck in my brain though. I have gone back, picked it up, read it again and again. In one article - Spam Patterns in 2006 and predictions for ‘07 - there are a few paragraphs I cannot seem to get out of my head.

The five paragraphs that are in this article that deal with VOIP basically describe two ways which VOIP can be used to infect computers with malware and to initiate scams. I found this very intriguing. So much so.. I keep reading it over and over.

It seems to be common knowledge to many that VOIP software on a computer can be used to "Spoof" the caller’s origin number. For instance, on my cell phone, I received a call from a friend. I missed the call, so I called my friend back. My friend told me that he had not called me earlier. I found that very strange, so I double checked the number that the call was made from on caller ID. Sure enough, it was his number. Later that day, he received another call from me. He called me back to ask why I had hung up when he called. Strangely enough, I had not called him - even though his caller ID showed my number.

Later, it turns out, a mutual friend was playing around with VOIP software and "Spoofed" our numbers to call each other. A trick, but a well played one!. Our friend could even set the software to dial "from" 911, the Whitehouse, or any other number he chose to use - even a fictitious number.