Not sure what’s scarier, the fact these messages exist for me to get sent in the first place, or that people who know me (or have at least added me on Facebook) think I’d be receptive to them.
Tuesday 02nd March 2010
Saturday 21st November 2009
Hot on the heels of my comment on someone’s tweet about Facebook (wow, wasn’t that an internet sentence) one of my friend CalgaryGuru’s tweets got me thinking about FriendFeed.
Just pulled Facebook out of my FriendFeed… Stuff I post on FB doesn’t always make sense as a twitter tweet. Besides, FF is depricated.
(emphasis added)
Friday 20th November 2009
@jowyang commenting on #smba:
Many attendees say they don’t trust Facebook. Concerned about how their data is used, permissions, and connecting personal with work
Tuesday 03rd November 2009
It seems Mark Zuckerberg has started poking fun at the folks who adamantly hate the latest in a string of new Facebook changes.
Tuesday 27th October 2009
So Facebook has made a bunch of changes, presumably as a result of buying out and killing FriendFeed, which has resulted in trillions of users forming a group demanding they change back, which has made headlines in traditional media outlets, and that Facebook management will ignore. People will learn to live with the downgraded site, and will continue to use it because it’s where all their friends are, and Facebook management will continue to give out data to third parties to perform data mining without assurances of privacy while cackling "fools!" all the way to the bank.
In other news, grilled cheese sandwiches are best made with bread instead of soggy cardboard, an ejector seat works best when there’s an opening in the cockpit roof, and The Bird is The Word!
At this point the only reason I keep my Facebook account open is for people to contact me who still use it. Despite Facebook’s envy of the service the two are not broadly equivalent, but most of the people I care about are on Twitter now anyway.
Tuesday 29th September 2009
The more I learn about Facebook, the more I’ve decided I don’t want anything to do with them. Privacy is dead online, but actively recruiting third parties to gather further information on you and other such archaic TOS gems creep me out even more than most sites. It seems while Google is at least tacitly going forward with their Data Liberation Front, Facebook is going backwards.
Sunday 13th September 2009
Having been better for a couple of years compared to their less than stellar record in 2007, recent stability problems with Twitter have highlighted its vulnerability from a technical standpoint, though it’s not the problem I wanted to talk sweepingly about here.
Tuesday 11th August 2009
A lot can happen when you’re asleep! If you’re on Twitter this is already ancient history because it happened hours ago, but Facebook came completely out of left field and bought FriendFeed. I agree with what Dave Winer said about it, that the deal can only be bad news for current FriendFeed users.
To use the technical social science language I have acquired from being a super 1337 online citizen for a while now, I have a Facebook account but they still kinda creep me out and this deal rubs me the wrong way. I hate the idea of general purpose gated communities where you have to log in to access material, and while there’s no evidence Facebook will simply swallow FriendFeed into people’s profile page news feeds to be never seen on the public internet again, it is a possibility. Even if they don’t do that, I’m sure we can look forward to some new archaic and scary terms of service.
While I had most of the feeds for my online activities connected to it, I never really used FriendFeed itself for anything except for one time quite recently. I’m thinking I’ll move all my feeds onto my neglected Tumblr account and ditch FriendFeed.
One of the people commenting on the FriendFeed blog about the decision said part of the reason he liked FriendFeed was that it was a social network that wasn’t Facebook! Oh well, back to Twitter for short messages which fortunately was spared.
Such rich world problems we worry ourselves with.
Friday 12th June 2009
Murphy’s law has been striking me with a vengence today, with three unrelated online events that will be taking place while I’m in the sky between Adelaide and Singapore or shuffling through airport Xray machines.
Firstly, one of my favourite Whole Wheat Radio artists Steve Durr is performing live at 20:00 Alaskan time. Last time I heard Steve live at Whole Wheat I managed to buy a CD to share with my dad and we even got a signed poster! When I found out about the time I promptly kicked the table and stubbed my big toe. As my mum used to say about herself and eye shadow, I never looked good in purple.
The second is of course the epic Facebook landgrab where you’ll be able to register for a username to finally rid ourselves of those narly user ID numbers. The username registration will be going live at 13:00 US Pacific time. Granted I have a fairly unusual name combination, in fact searches online have only ever returned one other Ruben Schade who happened to be a part of the Roswell investigation of all things. Still, it’d be nice to be sure.
The third is grilled cheese sandwiches.
Saturday 09th May 2009
It seems the quantity of spam isn’t the problem anymore!
When it comes to computer security, with the exception of certain operating systems produced by an obscure software company in Redmond, the weakest link in computer security is… us.
For the longest time I haven’t worried about security when it comes to email, and I suspect most of us haven’t. We don’t open email attachments, we don’t click on links embedded in spam messages; web email systems like Gmail even disable images unless we explicitly declare we want to see them. These systems work on a system of trust; if we trust where the messages come from, we eschew these precautions.
What’s disconcerting is the rise in socially engineered attacks. These are emails (or instant messages, or Tweets, and so on) that instead of being sent in bulk are tailored to the person they’re being sent to. In a similar manner to Trojan Horses these emails are written disguised as a message from a loved one, colleague or grilled cheese sandwich and are designed to pray on our trusting nature of said parties to deliver their malicious payloads, whether they be attachments or links to websites with malicious code or downloads.
ASIDE: To be fair this isn’t the only attack that leverage trust. Many email worms propagate by sending copies of themselves to people in the address books of a host’s infected machine. This is still on the surface an indiscriminate blanket attack though not real social engineering.
As of this afternoon I’ve now had three such emails sent to me: one person had the gall to masquerade as my dead mother. I’ve decided to assume this person saw my mum’s name written here several times and thought they’d use it not realising she died young from a terminal condition.
But we’re getting sidetracked. The point is these attacks are real and are happening. This turns the trust model we’ve been taught on it’s head; indeed we should now suspect every message we receive. Verify the person sending it is who they claim to be by checking the email address and if necessary the entire header of the email itself given email addresses can be spoofed. Our language is like a finger print: if they’re writing doesn’t sound like them it may be cause for concern.
My Facebook inbox… another thing to check!
Is it any wonder people are giving up on email and are flocking to services like Facebook or Twitter? These platforms have their own risks too, but at least 95% of Facebook or Twitter accounts aren’t spam!
ASIDE: Pre-empting any comments that statement may generate along the lines of "but Ruben, 95% of Twitter tweets ARE spam, or at least silly nonsense" I counter with: "be careful with that joke, it’s an antique!".
I guess the honeymoon period with email is long over, time to move on. Whatever happened to the idea that everyone has their own certificate they digitally sign messages with?
