Sunday, August 30th, 2009
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain
I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day and after some dramatic buildup, he told me he read my blog. He read this one, but was referring to a few blog posts on MySpace. I had been waiting for this moment for a while now. I have Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace accounts and update the first two on a regular basis. The MySpace account is a holdover from when it was the preferred way to connect with your friends online. Now, it seems, MySpace is used only by bands and creepers. I haven’t deleted my account because it gives me another presence on the web and another link in Google when you search for “Zach Firestone.”
It didn’t bother me at all knowing my dad was checking out these pages, because I thought about it at length in the past and came to the conclusion that even though there was some slightly risque pictures and posts, there was nothing I was embarrassed about. Dad was concerned with one blog post in particular at the top of the page that used an expletive in the title. I hadn’t thought much of it in the past, but after hearing his concern I agreed that it was unnecessary and changed it while we continued our talk. He went on to tell me some of the comments on my wall and pictures may not be in my best interest as a young professional trying to make a name for himself. He went on to tell me about when he was just starting as a salesman in the billboard industry, one employee recommended that everyone shave their beards and mustaches. His reasoning was that the facial hair wasn’t worth losing out on a piece of business from a client that may be scared off by a well kept fu manchu.
At first, I resisted vehemently. I told him that none of the posts were portraying me in a negative light and, as a matter of fact, I didn’t care if I lost a client based on a stupid comment. We went back and forth and ended the call with an understanding that even though we disagreed, his intentions were in my best interest, as always. That night I went through my MySpace page and started to understand where he was coming from. Then, I started to think about the fact that if these networks weren’t important to me, like I said, why was I making such a big deal about making some changes. I decided to make some tweaks to the MySpace page and if you look now you won’t see any comments or blog posts.
This whole ordeal got me thinking about the way I use social networks. I know I haven’t always had the most useful tweets or posts. In fact, some of them have been downright pointless. I found a great article that talks about how social networks have become the equivalent of brain farts for most people. Posting pictures of food, random useless thoughts, and borderline inappropriate videos are all things I’m guilty of. We post what we think without thinking about it and have been overloaded with TMI. The reason most people migrated over from MySpace to Facebook is because it was more of a sophisticated network free of the cheesy profiles and animated .gifs. But slowly it has become a haven for top 5 lists and movie quizzes.
Social networks can be amazing tools for spreading information. One reason they have become so popular is because the feeds are like the front page of CNN.com, but with news from and about your friends and family. Rather than going to RottenTomatoes.com to get a review from someone you don’t even know, you can just read tweets from your friends that have commented on the movie. Social networks could be used to display potentially life saving information, such as the spread of a dangerous virus like H1N1. The key to developing this technology is posting useful information.
The question becomes, how do you want your friends to view you? Would you say out loud what you are posting from the privacy of your house? Personally, I am going to make a more conscious effort to post quality over quantity…with a few movie quotes thrown in for good measure.
Useful Links:
How to Ruin Facebook Friendships
How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
There are so many people out there trying to do malicious things on the web that you need to protect yourself as much as possible. With all the personal information on social networking websites, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest techniques being used to exploit users. The scenario that scares me the most is someone getting my login information to my online banking websites. Imagine waking up one day and all your money has been transferred to a Swedish bank account. The worst thing is…it looks like you made the transfer. Below are a few tips for staying protected on the web.
Make sure you have up to date virus protection on your home and business computers.
Norton or AVG. McAfee sucks. You get what you pay for with free programs.
Use different passwords for all you important accounts.
Try and use a combination of numerals and characters when creating a password. Keep a list online using an online document program such as Google Docs. That way you can check your password from any computer that is connected the the Internet.
Make sure you fully understand what links you are clicking on.
Look at the link URL in the browser when you hover over it. Make sure the website name matches the context the link is presented in. If you aren’t sure, avoid clicking. If anything pops up when you do click over to the web page, make sure to close the window by clicking the corner right x or from the task bar. Never click on a “Close” button in the window. This could be a way to trick you into forcing a download of a malicious virus on your computer.
Don’t disclose any sensitive information in emails or chat programs.
Emails can get intercepted and online chat programs can get spied on. You should never email anyone your social security number.
Log out after you’re done
If you are in your banking website or on a social network, make sure to click the “Log Out” link once you are finished. This will kill the session so someone can’t hit the back button or click on a link in your history and access personal information.
Here is a great article that talks about real world hacking scenarios: Weaponizing Web 2.0
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Thursday, August 6th, 2009
I was wondering why I couldn’t login to make my daily tweets! It looks like hackers targeted Twitter today and took the popular social networking site down for a few hours. I’ve had experience with similar attacks that targeted our web hosting company at work. Let me tell you this is a huge inconvenience and headache for the technicians at Twitter. I don’t know if they have a customer support line, but if so they were probably going crazy taking the same calls over and over. I feel for any web based employee that has to deal with upset clients. All you can do is try to be proactive in alerting users of the issue, let them know that you understand the inconvenience, and give them good solid information about how you are fixing the problem. There is nothing worse than when you know something is wrong, but the supposed “technical expert” tells you that you are the problem. Honesty is always the best policy no matter what line of work you are in.
Twitter hit by denial-of-service attack
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