Moments In Digital Life

Hey! Just where exactly have you been??

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:25:00 +0000

Whew, well I've been busy lately....sorry. I've been debating whether or not I should move to a "real" host or not. And this week I found the need. The fact I need a commercial web service to test web applications and such has prompted me to turn to godaddy.com. They do have some pretty decent packages and hosting has come down a lot since I last looked. I was going to just run a server from home but knowing our connection well.... let's no go there.

The new address for the blog and other projects is http://momentsindigitallife.com, no major drama hey? Like always, I have a lot of plans on what I want to do with the site but we will have to see if they can be achieved. I think for the blogging side of things I will just be running WordPress but the problem is that all of the themes that I have found look bloody horrid and the same. Hmmm I'm not sure I can be bothered dicking about with a CMS these days, so I might see about a custom theme.

So I'm sorry if you just started reading this blog and are pissed that everything on here is changing but believe me, it's for the better! Hopefully the new site will have a clearer direction and it will be a little more on topic and informative, rather than pointless ranting and raving. And so, I bid thee farewell and hope to see you soon at the new site. Thanks for reading.
http://momentsindigitallife.com
See you there soon :)

phpitter, a Twitter app for linux.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:51:00 +0000

Okay so there is only going to be few people as excited about this as I am but you can probably skip this post if you aren't interested in Twitter or Linux for that matter. I received a tweet last night (actually it was early this morning...) about a Twitter app for linux. I thought it would be some buggy AIR alpha release or a hobbled together resized window web interface. Fortunately it's not and it is awesome. It's built with php and gtk, runs standalone and it doesn't need a standard web browser window to do its job.

The application is called phpitter. At the moment it is still under heavy development, the developer Ryan Hadley has only been working on it for about five days (on the bus ride mind you). The interface is clean simple and easy to use. What's more, for the true geek in us, it spits most of the information out to the terminal, if you don't want to run it as a background process that is.

A few features that stand out are:
* A pop-up or splash screen that appears when you hover over an avatar, you get the username, their Twitter nick, location, bio, website link and follower count. I was glad this feature was available because the main application window only returns the users full name rather than the nick which is helpful for @ replies.
* If you have the libnotify-bin package installed, tweets that come in are put into notification windows so you don't have to have the whole phpitter window open all of the time.
* On the lower left there is combo box that let's you display all of the tweets or just the @ replies. Handy for when you were asleep or out and missed something that was directed towards you.
* Links are clickable. No big issue here but I'm glad it's there as twitter can turn into a link fest, great for disrupting study or going off in tangents.
* The ability to send direct messages and retweet. No real need for an explanation there.

Overall phpitter is a great application, there are a few bugs but only minor ones. For such a young app it is pretty encouraging that it hasn't fallen over yet or spat out any error messages, or showed any signs that it might. Actually it did give me one error message but that was before I installed the libnotify package which can be remedied in Ubuntu with a simple:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

It will be interesting to see what happens when Scobleizer and Co. get chatty again.

If you are interested you can get phpitter here (screenshots as well):
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/

You probably will need to install a few dependencies, Ryan documents the install process (Ubuntu) here:
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/wiki/UbuntuHowto

Enjoy.

Marketing Turnaround.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:58:00 +0000

I used to hate online advertising. I blame it on the so called Web 1.0. In the earlier days of the internet. I didn't mind the occasional ad splashed onto a web page here and there, they started of plainly with a nice and quiet static advertising space. But as soon as someone found and used the blink tag, things definitely came to grow ugly. Add to that if you will, a scrolling marquee and a host of flashing and annoying fit inducing animated gifs not to mention absolutely horrid abuses of gaudy fonts and colours then you have what I remember online advertising Web 1.0 style to be.

As the face of online marketing began to change the bigger companies seem to realise that there was actual revenue to be gained by allowing part of their marketing division to investigate the possibilities of actually making a return on this new form of media. The bigger companies quickly seemed to realise that hideously annoying flashy-blinky-bleeping things were not the way to go.

Everything was going good for a while..... and then along came flash. Awesome a new way to deliver flashy-blinky-bleeping things that can contain a longer more repetitive message and that can also implement real time human interaction. I don't have a problem with flash mind you, I have a problem with the trend that it brought with it. Flash based sites, bandwidth boggers (yes by the way, I am making some of these terms up as I go...) all started appearing. Who really wants to sit around waiting for something to render on a page only to be greeted with a shitty flash ad that bears little resemblance to the site theme (content or appearance wise).

And then came the spam, spyware, malware, badware etc. In my opinion all of these problems rose because of the sheer value and profit that could be attained from using the internet as an advertising platform. From that first bit of spam that hit usenet to companies doing shady deals with spam creators and software developers, these are the reasons I detested online advertising. For further detestation (yeah that's my word.... leave it alone) companies started tracking users all over the net with data mining and recording user habits.

When all of this began there weren't any of the current privacy laws or safe guards in place. This led to some of the more questionable marketing entrepreneurs capitalising on this and they started trading personal information as a commodity amongst partners or to the highest bidder. What concerned me is what did the companies actually do with all of this information? Why would want them to have my information to trade with other parties that I haven't even heard of let alone read their privacy policy? I kept hearing cries of targeted marketing but I can't say that I once ever saw it implemented well without it turning into spam or off the mark affiliate adverts. But hey, what I consider spam you could very well called thoughtfully placed advertising and vice versa no doubt.

So that brings me to current day. There was a fair gap I just brushed off then but there is not much to be said other than there was more of the same. It is now in this so called Web 2.0, that things seemed to have worked themselves out. We now have an emphasis on privacy policies, end user license agreements, terms of service agreements, terms of service etc. Unfortunately though It must be said that there is only a small percentage of users that actually endeavor to read them. All of these binding and non-binding agreements together with a legal system that has had to think on its feet while this still young form of media evolves has resulted in a remarkable turnaround in the quality and content of online marketing.

One of the main defining turns it seems for online marketing was the increasing popularity of social networks. Ads on social networks seem to scale fairly well and most of them aren't annoying or distracting. While the spam level has not subsided it has become somewhat manageable (just). But the actual on site advertising has become refined, defined and well targeted. I no longer mind opening a page up and seeing a few ads unobtrusively placed about the page. I no longer want to pull my eyes out with a fork because the page is full of flashy-blinky-bleeping things. It seems that online advertising has caught up, nice to see. I even take adblock plus off half the time now, yay for me.

Net Neutrality.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:22:00 +0000

I was just listening to the latest Security Now netcast (139), and I was surprised to hear them talking about Network Neutrality. I was just recently clearing crap off of my hard drive and came across one of the best Net Neutrality videos that I have seen. Needless to say that this stayed on my drive and after that I got side tracked and started researching the current state of the argument. Unfortunately or well I couldn't dig up much recent information so I'll just put up the video. Grab yourself a chair, a coffee or a beer and enjoy... well maybe enjoy is a poor choice of word....
This video is pretty old now so some of you have probably seen it before, but I think everyone should see it and question what it means to them (if anything...). I understand and respect the fact that whatever the outcome it will make no difference to everyone. But to those of you that feel strongly about this, help spread the word and make people aware of the situation.

Runtime is approx. 10 mins.

Security: Educate The Uneducated.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:59:00 +0000

I posted this earlier today as a comment to an article I found here: [nobosh.com]
"No matter what network restrictions you put in place or what security policy you try to implement you can never protect the user against themselves. With social networks growing there is a rise in link sharing and email forwarding, not to mention drive by downloads and iframe trickery and the like that sit quietly on infected web pages. You can lock a whole network down as tight as you can, but you can never protect yourself fully from an uneducated user. Social engineering is still the biggest risk (in my opinion) to most networks, the more users the more risk. I guess my point here is that an educated user that can be trusted not to abuse policies and privileges is the best security tool."
Another user asked "How do we educate users?".
Good question.
My reply was in reference to a business environment setting where you would have departmental policies as access control restriction set. It was only after I wrote another response I realised that he might be talking about users in general.
There is such a broad scope of people that use the internet these days that it would be impossible to educate everyone and just plain stupid to try. The thing is that, most of those people don't want to be bothered hovering over a link and seeing where it goes, they definitely won't be bothered using something like noscript to block scripts from being run or executed.
I think the general public want the one app that does everything.... which is unfortunate because all of the ones that claim to do everything.... well, sure they can do everything, but there is nothing that they can do well. So for now we are going to have to stick to auto updating and integrity checking, but that's not so hard is it? Just click an allow button once in a while if you are pedantic like me and liked to be notified of all network activity.
That brings me to another point, which is how users cope with "learning" firewalls. I've seen a lot of people with the best intentions of reading the alerts constantly only to get sick of it after a couple of days and absent mindedly clicking "Allow" as soon as it pops up. To this I don't think there will ever be a remedy, especially if all of the users of that computer aren't aware of what do. You all know the sound, "Hey (insert name here), there's this thing on the screen that says blah blah. Should I click allow or deny? (insert name here)?". I'm not saying that everybody should be a geek and know exactly what they are doing, but rather every user should have at least some idea what the protection software wants them do do.
You could stand on a hill and yell "Free beer for everyone that keeps their software patched and up to date!" and still not everyone would do it, granted some may prefer wine or spirits but that's hardly the case. The truth is... most people don't care. They just want to use their computer and get on with their lives. I have nothing against that and to a large degree think that's how it should be. All I ask is that if you are knowledgeable about this pass this knowledge on to your freinds and co-workers. Set up their firewalls / IDS/ AV software / malware / spyware / detection / registry backup / patch schedule / OS updates / and whatever else they need (whew, just kidding).
When it comes down to it, help them once to avoid having to help them many times... if you get my drift.

Old friends, ridiculously good looking people and the long road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:43:00 +0000

Ok, so I was just about to start this entry but someone just called who had been infected with a new type of malware variant. So I am off to go and see if I can grab a sample and send it off to http://offensivecomputing.net.
I am also using a new blogspot plugin called Zemanta so I want to have a bit of a play with that before I post again. I am also thinking of removing outbrain that was more of just a play around anyway. Let me know what you think either way if you feel it necessary.
So for the moment I would just like to thank everyone that I caught up with for a great time and I hope you all woke up better than I did on Sunday...... definitely NOT really, really, really ridiculously good looking. As I mentioned in my status updates, I had a hangover that would have brought down an elephant.

Word For The Day

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:00:00 +0000

Today I'm starting a new blog section, word for the day. It's just an entry containing a word, a definition and how it should be used for that particular day or days thereafter. Most of these definitions will be taken from here [Merriam-Webster Online].

And so to get started, here is the first Word For Today:

Vehement

vehement

Main Entry:
ve·he·ment Listen to the pronunciation of vehement
Pronunciation:
\ˈvē-ə-mənt\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin vehement-, vehemens, vement-, vemens
Date:
15th century

: marked by forceful energy : powerful as a: intensely emotional : impassioned, fervid b (1): deeply felt (2): forcibly expressed c: bitterly antagonistic
— ve·he·ment·ly adverb

Usage for today:
I vehemently despise facebook application request spam.

Well, that's it for today. I'm sure there will be many more. If you have any ideas let me know and I will be glad to include them. Have a nice day.

Twitter madness...

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:37:00 +0000

Yesterday I decided to start doing something with twitter, all it took was replying to a pownce post from four20 all then the madness ensued. I don't quite know how to explain it but as a somewhat unknown person on the internet to get a heap of followers one after the other, most of whom I regularly frequent their blogs is quite a humbling experience.
So this short entry is just to thank four20 for finally showing me the value and usefulness of Twitter. There is a LOT of tech news that gets broadcast on Twitter that doesn't make it into the headlines of the sites I usually browse and also a lot of ideas that get floated about. It's also a great place to find interesting and informative links. I think it's fair to say that I'm blown away by it, however I think it could get a little addictive as it's kind of like a big IRC chat room. And as some of you know I am a huge fan of IRC.
Yes I think Twitter is amazing and, yes I admit I was slow on getting into it, but I'm damn glad I finally got around to paying it some attention. Oh and by the way, @JasaonCalacanis wants the world to see his dogs... and I have to admit they are pretty cute.
So have a look here: Flickr.com

The quote of the day surely has to belong to MikeonTV with this gem:
"IM IN UR TWITZ, FOLLOWING UR DOINGS"

Digg, it's all about the comments.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 02:23:00 +0000

More often than not, when I am browsing through Digg I usually read the comments before the article and mostly find the user comments far more entertaining and sometimes more informative than the actual article. Today is no exception.
In an article that hit the front page today called, “If Microsoft invented Linux...” - Submitted by sourceholder.
I was highly amused by a retort to this comment by daxsymbiont:

there's no bloat in windows.
windows is where linux wants to be.
when linux does something that windows did in 1995 "OMG LOOK AT THIS MASTERPIECE OF TECHNOLOGY!".
when windows does something new "again bloat".
bury it, cause it's true.

And before you ask, yes I did bury that comment not because it's true but because I believe it is false....bullshit actually.... But that would be a whole other blog post.

dcollins replied with:

If what you are saying is true, I better call google and alert them they are running their servers on 10yo technology.

Which in turn led to my favorite comment of the day by Nicksname1:

dcollins> Yeah Google are you there?
GOOG411> Yes how may I help you
dcollins> Hey daxsymbiont says you guys are running on old 10 yo technology and you should get Windows because it's bloated with features
GOOG411> You tell daxsymbiont to go fuck himself!

Maybe it's my warped sense of humour or the fact that I had didn't get much sleep last night but this comment wins the gold for today. Also at the top of the comments is the biggest list of spoiler comments I have seen. This story was yet another one that I, and probably many others have dugg for the comments rather than the article.
Oh by the way, what would it look like if Microsoft invented linux??

I encourage you to have a read of the digg page and comments here: http://digg.com/linux_unix/If_Microsoft_Invented_Linux

I should point out that I did not submit this article, nor do I know the submitter. I am not asking for diggs on this story either, although not that it matters, it seems to have done pretty well for itself.

Yer Old

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:45:00 +0000

I've never really thought seriously about getting old. I have always thought of myself as getting older but not once had I sat back and thought, "Shite, your getting old....". Well now I have, albeit a rather drunken thought but still, it remained with me throughout one of my all day hangovers.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but as I was being driven around town by some girl I hadn't met before and unlikely to meet ever again (my friend was in the front passenger seat) something in my head clicked over. It also should be noted that my friend and the two girls in the car were a few years younger than me, I'm guessing early twenties?? I didn't have a clue what the girl sitting next to me in the back seat was babbling about, nor the one in the front. Something about somebody's boyfriend being a prick, someone's boyfriends mother being a cow and something else about another one of their friends being a bitch... heh... I'm just guessing there on the last one... but it's a pretty safe bet. Now it should be said that I had no real interest in getting to know either of these two, I am sure they are great people and I wish them all the best. It's just that everyone at my friend's house had fallen asleep and me being a geek and not used to going to sleep before 2:00-3:30am was wide awake... and not nearly drunk enough to call it a night.

We pulled up out the front some seemingly random house but unfortunately the alcohol had ran out and the party had drifted on to the pub. Which was a pity because I was just about to have a good drunken discussion with one of the dudes out the front. Ahhh... not to be, "Hey man, we're going!" came a yell from the car. So we then drove around some more bitching about this and that, I contributed as best I could trying to find some common ground. This continued until quite late.... I think it was half five by the time I shut my eyes. I remember watching a skate video and seeing light creep through the window but there are a couple of lost hours in there.

I have to say that it's not that I didn't enjoy the night, I had a ball. It's just that it reminded me of what me and friends used to do...."Back in the day".
....WAIT....
There it is. That's what made me feel old. Back in the day.
Back in the day to me was doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. No thinking about consequences or responsibilities, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't.

These days I have to make time for myself to go out and do random things and see if my mates can get a "night" pass to do the same. Everyone is having kids and starting to get there family life in order or established. I congratulate them and respect them highly for that and it has brought out a side in some of them that I have rarely seen in them and I like it.

I guess stepping out of a long relationship has left me with something I'm not used to.... freedom. The freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't. All with a few more restrictions than "Back in the day" of course...

Which finally brings me to my point, I'm pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway so I'm not sorry at all for the length of my posts. And if somebody does read this, please leave a comment about when you have felt "old".

The whole point of this post is that on the 9th of March it's "Get over it day". Damn good timing if I do say. Get over it you cynical old bastard, live it up.

Get Over It Day [mahalo.com]

Bigpond Wireless Broadband - It's what you use when you have to.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:23:00 +0000

First off, Bigpond: You give me the shits.
I don't have a problem with their services at all. I love the fact that they appear to like open source software and provide unmetered downloads that are based on user requests. I mean hell, I can request a full linux distro dvd download and a day later I get a nice email stating that it is available for download in the unmetered File Download section. They also allow TWIT netcasts, all of the Revision3 IPTV releases basically anything that falls under the Creative Commons or open source category.

Recently Bigpond even decided to add a Ubuntu repository into the unmetered category as well (no multiverse repository but I can live without that), in fact that is one of the main reasons I have moved from other distro's to Ubuntu. Bigpond Office is also worth a mention here also.... although I have never used it. I'm guessing it's a little like the online Google office services with word processing, spreadsheet and presentaition applications and a whopping 250MB storage. I'm not taking the piss here 250MB should be enough for most casual users to store their online generated material.

I also don't really mind waiting a couple of hours for their customer service phone representatives to take me off of hold and actually address my internet connection problems. I usually have it sorted out by the time they get to me anyway, it must the hold music that kicks my brain into gear. When I do finally get to talk to someone there is always something else I want to ask about them anyway so it's never a wasted call.

My biggest gripe with Bigpond is their Wireless Broadband service. Until recently we were paying around $160 for a 550kbps to a "supposed" 1.5Mbps connection with a 3GB data cap with excess usage charged at $0.15 per MB. The speed has since been bumped up to 550kbps - 3.0Mbps and the price dropped to $114 with a 3GB data cap with excess usage RAISED to $0.30 per MB. WTF??

!STOP THE FREAKING BUS!

Hmm.... let's think about this for a second. They increase the speed, increase the excess usage charge, drop the price and leave the data cap the same?? I couldn't give a crap how much faster the connection is if we can still only get the same amount of content. Sure the monthly price drop was nice but why the hell wouldn't they increase the data cap? Why the hell did they double the excess usage charge?? An why the hell is the highest data cap plan at 3 gig?? Why all of this when they have inevitably halved the time we can reach our data cap and then double the penalty for exceeding it? I can only think of one reason.... $$$.

As the internet is growing up, the data requirement to browse different sites is increasing. Flash videos for example are everywhere and some sites still insist on making their whole site to run off of flash. I don't have a problem with flash I think it's a great delivery medium for static audio and video streaming. Web 2.0 has brought a lot of cool technologies to how we view the net and the integration of mixed media draws a lot of bandwidth. For a perfect example bigpond should look at their own site, it's big, bloated and uses a fair amount of bandwidth to render itself into a browser. Thankfully the bigpond site is unmetered for bigpond users or it would be easy enough to blow the data cap by just trying to go through the site to look at my mail through the webmail client.

And so to Bigpond I say this:
At the very least jst give us 5 gig for the same price and keep your lousy $0.30 per MB excess usage going and I'll be happy.... Oh and you can even drop our maximum speed back to 550kbps - 1.5Mbps.
Thanks.

Oh and as a side note to the last Bigpond customer service representative I spoke to:
No, I do not believe you are Australian or in Australia even though you swore black and blue that you were. Melbourne is NOT the capital city of New South Wales and New South Wales is nowhere near my hometown you friggin' douchebag! And no, I do not live closer than 7 k's from a telephone exchange.... I think I would know as I happen to live here. Do some research before you get all frothy at the mouth and listen to someone who knows where they live instead of using your fingers trying to count. Christ, I'll even send you a goddamn map if you like....

*EDIT*
Okay, so my research was flawed. I was Informed that the excess data charge has not gone up to $0.30, it remains at $0.15 per MB. For some reason (thankfully) our plan has kept the excess data charge locked in at the original rate.
Oh, I decided to tone this post down a bit.... I'm not so annoyed now I've had a chance to vent.

A lazy man's promise.

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:56:00 +0000

Hmm... I haven't been here in a while. A lot has happened since I lasted posted something here and I've been too lazy to express my opinion on it and basically I forgot about it. For those of you that know me, you know that I usually don't have a terrible lot to say.... well unless I've had a couple of beers. I guess it's not that I don't have much to say it's just that I probably think too much. Lately though there has been a lot of interesting things happening in the world and especially on the net. And since most of my time these days is spent staring at a blinking cursor of scrounging the net for news, I could probably afford to put a bit more effort into this blog. One day soon I'll move my rants from my home server over to here but I think it best to remove some of the profanity and bring a little order to them first. So that is a lazy man's promise.... I'll do something soon :)
Until then, I found this Techdirt article about a possible merger between Yahoo! and AOL highly amusing (If not only for the feces comparison):
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080211/015628216.shtml

Oh I came across this as well, it's probably as old as the internet itself but I found it funny.

Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 03:36:00 +0000

First off, I should say that it took me a long time to use Ubuntu, I was already running couple of Debian servers and was quite happy with my OpenSUSE and Fedora Core development boxes. Why would I want to run another Debian based distro? The answer is clear now as Ubuntu has become so popular, there are a lot more people running it which means that there are a lot more people putting time into developing apps and libraries for it. Also there is a lot less "dependancy hell" going on these days, as package manager developers (in my opinion) have been pushed into making sure that most packages are installed with all of their dependencies without having to spend half an hour tracking down different libraries. I think that that software developers have begun treating the typical new linux user with kid gloves so as not to deter them from giving up and going back to Windows or whatever operating system they were using before. Although none of the above is Ubuntu specific it just seems that the Ubuntu developers have got it right.

For a long time I was a Gnome fan, I disliked KDE's silly little dragon and overstuffed application tree. These days though both of the desktop environments applications work to play relatively nicely with each other. But I thought I would have a look at Kubuntu just to see how KDE would go instead of Gnome. I had initially thought that it would be a little slower but I was quite surprised to find that the KDE desktop loaded a lot quicker than Gnome.

After going through the usual pains setting up my nvidia card for dual screen display, I have an older 17 inch monitor that only works properly when the driver is set for the same model but using the 15 inch driver (Philips 107s is actually my monitor, but using the 105s driver). I wanted to see if I could set up X without editing the xorg.conf file manually and I was surprised that I was able to do it without a hitch. It did need a bit of editing but that was just me being pedantic and could have been used perfectly without me fiddling with it.

The second thing that I noticed is that dolphin is the default file manager, what??? I was a little disgruntled by this but I thought that I would persevere with it to see how it went. It took a bit of getting used to and I went through a lot of, "Why they did the do that for?" and "Where the hell is ....". But after my initial "It's different, I don't like it" phase I settled down to customise it and I'm quite happy with it. However I still wish it had a terminal integrated into it somehow.

I started installing a few apps via a terminal and then I though I should really try out adept and see how that goes. It looked pretty decent and functioned well, was easy to use and hard to stuff anything up, but i still prefer to work in a terminal and wasn't in the mood to search around a gui when sudo apt-get install is so much easier especially because of tab completion at the command line. The good thing is that adept is simple and easy to use, so newcomers to linux shoudn't feel too much discomfort poking around and having a look at what software is available. It is no better nor worse than synaptic in my opinion.

And so, After installing all of my usual apps and development libraries I've come to the conclusion that as far as usability goes, for me they are both at the same level now. I have started to pay a lot more interest in KDE now, I'm looking forward to the final release of KDE 4. All of that aside i'm still most productive using fluxbox and vim or jed.

Social Networking

noreply@blogger.com (Kaph) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 07:06:00 +0000

Social Networking

I originally joined facebook because I was concerned about the public availability of personal information. It is a bit disconcerting to see your name up there for everybody to see and find out personal information with just a few mouse clicks. How far does this information travel and who looks at it?
A couple of weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and see who uses facebook, and what information people were willing to put out about themselves. At this point in time I should explain that I am studying in information security and my intentions were to see how social networking sites such as facebook dealt with the mass of personal information stored about its users. Unfortunately my research was put to an halt when I started having a look around at a few of the profiles, people I know, people I used to know, and sadly people I had neglected to continue to know. People do tend to drift apart and communication wanes after a time I guess but it good to see what they are doing with themselves after all of these years.
But anyway back on topic.... ID thieves and spammers can have a field day on facebook, well actually they probably have been ever since it's release. When one considers what an ID fraudster requires to build character profile on a potential victim, for example your full name, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses and photos. Everything they need or could ask for is right there in front of them in your profile. Add all of that together along with the fact that you can let people know what your physical movements are (travel, attending events, meeting places with friends etc.) and what you actually look like..... well I'll leave that up to your level of paranoia.
Fortunately facebook is particularly good when it comes to protecting private information but unfortunately it is up to the user to enable a few of the features and to be aware of what personal information they are posting. Common sense will hardly prevail here as you view your friends profiles and feel obliged to enter as much information about yourself as you can. What makes it harder is the fact that the friend search feature encourages you to search for old school friends, people from the same hometown as you and so on. Not that there should be anything wrong with revealing this information it's just there are people (scammers, spammers, ID thieves) searching through social network sites for easily obtainable information to harvest.
Stay safe and think about what information you choose to make public, if you wouldn't walk up to a stranger on the street and tell them something about yourself then don't post it on the internet.

…in this brave new world where tons of people are looking to mine our information and monetize whatever they can get their hands on, we stand to become nothing more than “contact information” rather than good business connections or friends.

-Tish Grier http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/2007/09/perils-of-social-networking-pt-2.html