I’m a bit more pragmatic than some of my co-panelists on what privacy we can actually have in this day and age. After all, if you own a home it’s likely anyone who wants to can search online tax records and find your address and more personal information. If you carry a cell phone you can be located by anybody who can triangulate the signal. I’ve been an active user online for many years so I’m pretty easy to find. I’ve always stuck to the "if you don’t want it public don’t put it online" philosophy. This is especially true when you are on multiple networks. Think of your online conversations as an aggregate whole and not just one network at a time.
Unfortunately you don’t always control what’s online about you so I’m a big advocate of setting up alerts in Google and Social Mention among others to get a heads up when someone posts something about you online. New York, Philadelphia and several other city police departments are monitoring Twitter to watch for trouble before it starts. There are stories of activists using Twitter to tramsit summaries from police scanners to let protesters know what actions police are taking too.
I’m trying to keep my focus in this case on activists and their issues with privacy online. You can’t mention activism and Twitter without James Karl Buck coming up. As an activist and a blogger he’s very visible online and his one word Tweet "Arrested" made headlines around the world. His tweet activated his social network and word spread quickly. Buck was released, but it was quite some time before his translator was also released–due in part at least–to Buck’s nonstop reporting on Twitter about his friend’s plight.
This is one example of social media being used to secure the privacy of an individual. Blogging and frequent updates on social networks can at least let people know where you are and if the communications stop or radically change, your friends will be paying attention.
Being visibility can keep you from "disappearing" in remote locations. On the other hand it can make you an easily visible target too. Social media can be used against you personally or against the cause you are fighting for. Telegraphing the location of a protest can increase the opposition at the same location.
So, how can an activist use social media to promote their cause and stay safe at the same time?
Set up those alerts for your name, the organization you’re working with and the opposition as well and monitor them frequently.
Get a P.O. box and use it for all of your online accounts (not just social media).
Set up an email account just for social media and don’t use it for anything private
Get a Google number that forwards to your cell phone for any time you have to put a phone number in a form online
Create an active social voice so you can transmit your ideas and keep in touch wherever you are
Make sure that network is active long before you need it and identify who is going to speak for you on your behalf if something happens
When using a public computer at a cafe etc, be sure to log off and clear the cache and delete cookies of the browser.
When you join a social network you don’t have to use your real birthday. Change the date across all your networks.
Use a service like Hushmail for secure email that is encrypted and virus scanned
Use a USB device like StealthSurfer so data is stored on your USB instead of the computer
Bottom line? If you understand the internet and the privacy issues we face it’s your responsibility to help others see the issues too, advicate for privacy rightsand then self police yourself.If you don’t know about these issues start educating yourself. Start with CFP and some of the videos of sessions at this conference. Don’t put it out there if you’re not willing to stand behind it and watch what you say in aggregate form about yourself AND other people. Responsible use of social media is up to all of us.
Several clients have recently reported their emails being added to blacklists and blocked from the major servers and other events that severely hamper their ability to do business. One client had her IP address blocked by 6 different blacklists and was unable to send email through any of her accounts.
So what do you do? First find out if you are on any of the black lists. You’ll need to know what your IP address is. Go to MXToolbox.com and find the IP for your MX record. Then use their tool to quickly search and see if you are coming up on any of the blacklists or use BlacklistCheck.
If you are on a Blacklist from ATT, Earthlink or Netcom you can send an email to one of their users and you’ll get a "bounceback" message. Simply follow instructions in the email to get added to the whitelist and removed from the blacklist.
Other services like AOL and Cox are tougher and you may have to work with your hosting provider to get the situation resolved. If you’re on Lunarpages (as I am) you can email support and ask them to intervene for you. Lunarpages has been great about this for me. Often times it’s not your actual account that is the problem but another user on the same server and your hosting company may have to deal with that individual to stop whatever they are doing that got you blacklisted in the first place!
Be patient and persistent. Some services can take weeks to take you off the blacklist and there’s not much you can do about it but wait and keep bugging them. It’s a good idea to have a back up email on another server just in case you need it.
If none of the above works, here’s a good list of things you can do to get off blacklists with specific information on each of the major blacklists.
MXToolbox also has a free monitoring service that will alert you if your server goes down, you get blacklisted and to generally monitor server performance.It’s worth it to at least know why your emails aren’t being answered!
All these years of creating curved corners with fancy CSS or images (!!?) could soon come to an end. Well, that is is soon as Internet Exploder catches up with the rest of the world. Moz-border-radius is a tiny bit of CSS3 that allows us to do all kinds of curvy corner goodness with one tiny line of code. Isn’t it about time too? It’s supported by Firefox and Safari, but IE? Well, maybe in 2020 or something…. Trust me if you use Firefox instead your world will suddenly be much more stylin’.
Some people get excited about the next new greatest ever you gotta have these features release of Adobe’s latest software. I used to be one of those people. In fact, I bought Photoshop when it was one of the first apps to run on a Power PC in ’93, and again when the jaw-dropping layers feature came out in ’94. I was very excited when Adobe incorporated all the Macromedia products I love with the Adobe products into one big X-mas package.
Over time I’ve become a tad bit jaded. I dropped a load of change on the last round of creative suite so I could get the apps I use on a daily basis and ended up with some I have hardly opened. (I’m a PSD gurl, Illustrator makes me itch). I’m in a rut, sure, but I know my tools and I’m comfortable with ‘em.
So you can imagine I’m not doing cartwheels about the new release of Adobe CS4. I breathe a huge sigh of relief as I write this after having read this review from OnWired. From now on I’m with that “every other release” crowd. If my designers want upgrades great, but for me, I think I’ll wait.
A few ex-Google employees just launched a new search engine called CUIL (pronounced cool). The UI is sexy, black with white text and laid out in three columns, allowing you to quickly scan the results. It’s got some nifty AJAX sliding menus on the searches that allows you to view sub categories in your search.
According to their website, CUIL “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”
CUIL ranks pages based on relevancy of the content so I did a search for my own name and got links to content I’d written or mentions of me or the company, but several of the images that came up with the search were totally unrelated to the content on the page or my name. (There’s no mention of the potomac on the page and we’re in California.)
I did another search for the Exploratorium and discovered some nice features. A box pops up with related searches such as location, other museums in the area, local information and maps. Sweet!
They may need more time to index as fully as they intend to. A search for Twitter on Google yielded 73,400,000 results and on CUIL 800,000. I didn’t go through them all to see if the 72,600,000 missing links were irrelevant. Maybe I’ll try a smaller search.
All in all I think CUIL needs more time to develop, but I like the direction. For the moment I prefer Chunkit which returns more digestible chunks of information, let’s you email the “Chunk” to a friend, and shows you an indexed version of any site you visit. More on that one later.
Pretty much everybody who knows me has heard I’m walking 40 miles in July in the Avon Foundation’s walk for breast cancer research and treatment. (Have I asked you to donate yet?)
Anyway, the biggest challenge has been wedging training time into my schedule. We bought a treadmill so we didn’t have to go to the gym, but still, not enough time in a day.
A friend sent me a link to this site and it was an easy jump to see how we could be using our multi-tasking skills. After a lot of insanely complex design concepts, in the long run we ended up with a shelf across the arms of the treadmill with some 2 inch pvc piping to secure the shelf in place, a $50 wall mount for a monitor, and it was all set. We can switch out laptops when we want to work on specific projects, or just leave the “spare” plugged in for whoever wants to walk-n-surf.
Beyond the obvious gains in weight loss and fitness, this has turned out to be a block of time that I use to catch up on social networks, read rss feeds, do research for clients or upcoming personal projects and catch up on the latest in coding. I’ve added a couple of new tools to my browser to make life a little easier. Diigo is a bookmarking service that allows me to bookmark, highlight or share content online, and I can access and search these items from any computer or on my iphone.
Twhirl lets me keep up on what my friends and colleagues are up to while I’m working, but doesn’t take up too much space on the monitor. Stumble is for just surfing for inspiration, art or tools.
Intrigued? Do it yourself, and take your inspiration from some more examples. or spend the 4K for a Steelcase Treadmill Workstation…
It seems that the Cambridge University Light Blue Touchpaper blog got hacked not so long ago. The security team repaired the damage but the hacker had assigned himself as an admin and they wanted to find out his password. All they had to go on was the data in the MySQL dbase which was encoded using the MD5 hash.
That’s fairly good encryption unless you have banks of computers at your disposal to de-crypt it. Who has that kind of resource? Well Google actually. The security team took the stored hash from the database and entered it in Google. Google handed him back the password pretty as you please. The password turned out to be “anthony”. Go figure. A hacker using such an insecure password?? Appalling.
Want to try this for yourself? Go here and enter your favorite password. Click MD5 to see the encoded password. Then paste the password into Google and see what you get.
If your pass comes back at you, get a new one, preferably something more secure. If it doesn’t show up then BRAVO! Your password may be more secure than Anthony’s. Not that that takes much.
Another interesting find was this site that shows commonly used passwords as MD5.
Having a hard time coming up with a password you can remember that is also secure?
If you’re on a Mac you can use 1 password to create strong passwords and remember them for you. It can also stop keyloggers and phishing sites from saving your passwords, and it works with your OSX keychain.
Well worth checking out.
This is just too cool. For those of you who bought Painter years back and played for hours with the cloning brushes, here’s a new twist. I.O Brush - Click here for more blooper videos
OK, you built a beautiful website, it’s filled to the brim with tons of useful content. Initially your stats are through the roof and requests for information are pouring in.
Then you get a call from someone who says they are a client, have sent you a check, and they want to know where their product is.
Strange, you never heard of this person, didn’t get a check and don’t know what they’re talking about.
After a little investigation you may find that your site has been hi-jacked, and somebody else is benefiting from all your work.
This actually happened to Tatu Digital not so long ago. Someone had copied the entire site, not changed a thing except some of the contact info and was using our portfolio to get themselves work.
Then we got a call from a very angry executive wanting to know where his website was!
Enter Copyscape. Click on the link and enter your url and they will show you if your site is being copied. It will also show you if your site is being archived on a proxy server somewhere.
They also offer a guide to plagiarism that helps you figure out what to do when your site is copied.
Everybody’s talking about it, and since I am a self-professed Mac addict how could I miss the opportunity? It seems Steve Jobs himself shook hands with the faithful in line at a Palo Alto Apple Store and “The Woz” himself showed up on a Segway and handed out t-shirts at a differnt mall, then stood in line to get his own iPhone. There I said it. IPhone. The newest gotta have it just so I can drool on it toy from Apple.
It’s absolutley beautiful. The interface could only come from Apple. Sexy? Absolutely. The quality of the screen the audio, the navigation? Gorgeous. Gotta have it, gottahaveit now. Now now now.
But.
I didn’t get one yet. I think I’ll wait for the hoopla to die down a bit and then maybe I won’t be able to resist. I’m still not sure I want to watch movies on a small screen, and I KNOW I don’t want to pay for the family data transfer bill. I also don’t use my phone for email, and I rarely use the feature to listen to music either. But still, it such eye candy I know my left brain will insist eventually. (My preciousssssssss).
In the meantime here’s somebody else’s impressions as a real first adopters.
