| Yo, Twitter! Get Your Password Act Together. |
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Last Friday visitors attempting to connect to Twitter were instead greeted by this page from the Iranian Cyber Army containing the Farsi equivalent of All your base are belong to us. What happened? According to Computerworld, someone got ahold of the Twitter email address used to communicate with the company that managed Twitter’s Domain Name Servers. Once they controlled the account, they changed the DNS records for Twitter so that they connected to a different IP address, the one operated by the Iranian Cyber Army. This is the second password oopsie for Twitter this year. You may remember back in the summer someone compromised a Twitter staffer’s email account and managed to abscond with a bunch of confidential company documents. Those docs eventually made it onto the Web. Time to grow up, Twitter. Otherwise nobody’s going to take you seriously. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)December 15, 2009
| More On Facebook And Your Privacy |
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Last week Facebook enacted changes to the privacy controls on the site. Needless to say, they were not universally well-received: “As an online marketer, I know that Facebook is a thriving, important venue. So I kind of have to keep an account. But I’m also giving up in some ways. This isn’t the place I’m planning to social network, because I just can’t expend the time to decide what I might be sharing, might not be sharing, what my friends might share, what friends of friends might share and then recheck all those settings every six months when Facebook does something different.” Thank you, Danny, for that. It has instantly become my favorite Facebook sound bite. To their credit and, as in the past, Facebook responded to some of the criticism. Now you can hide your friend list: “In response to your feedback, we’ve improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the ‘Show my friends on my profile’ option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications.” Got that? Good. But in case you want more advice, the NY Times has a how-to for the new Facebook privacy settings. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Why, Oh Why? |
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“Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying. Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more.” That is from the homepage of Blippy, which just launched as an invite-only beta service. My only comment/question is “Why?” Why would you willingly participate in something like this? This is simply a repackaged version of Facebook’s Beacon. And we all know how that turned out. Enough with the self-absorption. Link via TechCrunch. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 10, 2009
| Making Sense of the New Facebook Privacy Controls |
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As promised, Facebook implemented its new privacy controls yesterday. I know they’re supposed to be simpler, but imho they’re just as confusing. I still feel like I’m missing something. Oh, well … Anyhoo, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent commentary on the changes: “Being a free speech organization, EFF is supportive of internet users who consciously choose to share more on Facebook after weighing the privacy risks; more online speech is a good thing. But to ensure that users don’t accidentally share more than they intend to, we do not recommend Facebook’s ‘recommended’ settings. Facebook will justify the new push for more sharing with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options — if you don’t want to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue, then just set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. But we think the much safer option is to do the reverse: set your general privacy default to a more restrictive level, like ‘Only Friends,’ and then set the per-post privacy to ‘Everyone’ for those particular things that you’re sure you want to share with the world.” I’m not comfortable with the new concept of “publicly available information” that Facebook says I cannot block. This bothers the EFF as well: “The creation of this new category of “publicly available information” is made all the more ugly by Facebook’s failure to properly disclose it until today — the very day it is forcing the new change on users — when it added a new bullet point at the top of its privacy policy specifying this new category of public information that will not have any privacy settings. The previous versions of the policy, however, either didn’t disclose this fact at all, or buried it deep in the text surrounded by broad assurances of privacy.” Here’s the bullet point to which the EFF refers: “Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.” I’ve never liked Facebook. I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about — hey, if I want to know that you just came in from walking the dog, I’ll call you — in return for personal data that they’re soooo hot to monetize. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Aol’s First Day |
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The NY Times reports on Aol’s first day as a separate, public company. (Apparently the Times missed the press release that said AOL was rebranding itself as Aol. Sigh … One more reminder of the decline of professional journalism.) At the end of the day (literally), Aol was trading at 23.67 and valued at $2.55 billion. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 8, 2009
| Google Real-Time Search |
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Yesterday Google announced real-time search. Your results page will now contain Tweets, plus posts from sites such as FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and (real soon now) updates from public MySpace and Facebook pages. Here’s an example I stumbled onto today. Apparently Bryant Gumbel revealed on the Regis & Kelly show this morning that he recently had surgery for lung cancer. My search results for bryant gumbel cancer features a constantly-updating stream of Tweets near the top of the page. If I want to view only the real-time results, I can click on Show Options in the blue stripe at the top of the results page, then click on the Latest link. This will also include stories from other sources that have just been indexed. (In my case, I see Star Magazine and the BBC, among others.) Real-time search is being rolled-out gradually, so if you can’t see it now, you will soon. One more thing: Google Trends, which has now graduated from Google Labs, now shows you trending topics, similar, but not identical to, Twitter’s. (That’s how I found out about Mr. Gumbel’s condition.) Last week the WSJ Digit’s blog had an interesting story about the differences between trending topics on Bing Twitter and Twitter itself. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 2, 2009
| Facebook’s Gonna Simplify the Privacy Process (Real Soon Now) |
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As I reported back in July, Facebook’s going to simplify its privacy controls. Real Soon Now. The changes are: No more regional networks. “As Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy … The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.” Granular access control for your info. “We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload.” When these changes finally become live, you’ll get a heads-up from Facebook to review your privacy settings. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 23, 2009
| Wiki-fatigue |
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The WSJ has an article today (sub required) discussing a new endangered species: the Wikipedia editor. Apparently 49,000 of them disappeared during the first 3 months of 2009 alone. One of the reasons the Journal cites is the Wikipedia’s “plethora of rules” about the editing process, which has led to infighting among editors: “‘People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,’ says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. ‘Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.’” I have 3 comments about this: (1) Mr. Kittur appears to be channeling Fred Brooks. (Coincidentally I ordered a copy of the Mythical Man-Month on Saturday.) (2) “Too many cooks spoil the broth” was yet another of my mom’s pithy phrases. (3) I’m not thinking the Wikipedia’s going away any time soon, despite the dire warnings we read from time to time. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| AOL is now Aol. That’ll Help a Lot. |
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Their press release claims: “The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal.” I’m sure that’ll be a comfort to the 2,500 sacrificial lambs. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| It’s All About Appearances |
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When I was a young person, my mom used to lecture me about the “appearance of evil”. She was trying to tell me that if I was seen in a suspicious situation, people would jump to conclusions, even if I was innocent. (Like this guy, for example.) The CBC has a story that would make my mom say, “Uh-huh … told you so.” A young woman from Montreal is out on disability from her job at IBM, suffering from depression. Her benefits have been cut off by her insurance company because they say she’s well enough to go back to work. The insurer based its decision, in part, on photos posted to the woman’s Facebook page showing her, for example, in a bikini on a beach. (There’s also a video attached to the story, in which the woman was interviewed about her plight. Ironically, the first time I viewed it, it was preceded by a 15-second IBM ad.) Sounds suspicious, huh? She’s gaming the system, right? I can’t say. But I’m sympathetic, especially since I got rear-ended by a distracted driver on Saturday. There was no damage to either car. But I woke up on Sunday with stiffness in my neck and shoulders and 2 days later it persists. Who would believe me if I tried to say I was suffering from whiplash? Anyway, I *am* going to judge the young woman for one thing: she made it too easy for the insurance company. If you’re depending on disability payments in order to survive economically, then you have to look at everything you post on social networking sites — even if you’ve locked down your profile — and ask yourself, does this qualify as the “appearance of evil”? My mom had another pity phrase: “If it’s doubtful, it’s dirty.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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