The recent twitter phishing scam had non twitter users scratching their heads on why this service would be targeted for a phishing scam at all.. Most people view little or no monetary value to twitter accounts. For most people this may actually be true. For people like Scoble or companies that promote themselves over twitter, well the brand name damage caused by a hijacked twitter account could be quite costly.

One of my friends on twitter had a reply about this issue (I’m assuming the other person didn’t realize the long tail potential impact (yes I used the term long tail – get over it)). What I saw was this:

@jeremyasmus could be any number of reasons, spread malware, spam, get passwords, us humans tend to use the same password over and over.

This is the crux of the issue isn’t it? The problem isn’t average user with nine friends directly, it’s the large power users and the passwords for other services. Let’s look at each of these.

Let’s say you are Scoble and your account get’s hijacked. Scoble has a level of trust built from himself, he is known to get the inside scoop on information, people click his links. Scoble has over 47,000 followers. If his account was hijacked and ten percent clicked a link that was really a malware installer – that would be 4,700 people infected within a matter of minutes. I think however the number of Scoble followers would be much larger probable in the 50-60% range. For a malware distribution this is a great return for the time frame, with the added benefit that you may get some other high profile names in the attack.

The cost to deploy such an attack is extremely low – under ten dollars, while the net return would be a few thousand, potentially more. Since there is little risk to getting caught if you know what you are doing, you could make some decent money by exploiting this chain of trust that exists and is protected by a mere password.

Let’s look at the side of this coin, the normal user.  Adam Baldwin nailed it right on the head when he stated “us humans tend to use the same password over and over”. I know I do, though different level of things have different passwords – my banking account does not use the same username/password combination as my twitter account – neener/neener. It is however shared with some other web 2.0 services. Some other people may not be so diligent. This once again is a chain of trust issue. You are trusting the companies that you give your passwords to are truly them, so once your password is in the wild it’s exposed and all of your accounts are open to attack.

Let’s look at the information an attacker can get from you if they have your twitter password:

User Name – while by itself it’s exposing a little bit about your account and your password – the problem lies in having both bits of this information. That part should be blatantly obvious. The issue lies in the fact that most of us use the same username or “handle” across many sites on the web. Doing a Google search for “Creeva” yields over 46,000 hits. A lot of these hits are different services that I play with and over 90% of the hits link back directly to me in some fashion. Since most sites use you username as your login name, if I used the same password every single one of these services would be exposed if I fell for the twitter phising scam.

E-Mail Address – Yes though it maybe only a small amount these days, your e-mail address is still worth a few percentages of a penny to the spammer. This would get you on more mailing lists, and ones that would be quite hard to get off of. It is also normally used as a login name for service that do not use your handle. More accounts have now been exposed because of this. If your e-mail account passwords is the same as your twitter account (dumb mistake) everything about your online life, accounts, and transactions can now be exposed and utilized against you. Would you notice a gmail filter that someone setup to clone every incoming e-mail?

The other issue is even you do not have accounts that show up in a Google search they could use a service search engine such as Spokeo to find accounts even you may have forgotten about.

Mobile Phone Number – This probably would be one of the most annoying things, that your phone number has been exposed to the internet underground. Phone spam, call back charges; there are a few things they can do with this number. I do think this is small annoyance compared to loosing your email account.

Being a good security professional my recommendation is to use strong passwords that are unique to each service and are rotated regularly. I am also a realist and know that you won’t. This may be the time to start doing segmentation where different accounts do get different levels of passwords. This is what I do so if my twitter account was compromised only the services that I consider on par with Twitter security-wise was at risk. Lower level accounts would be safe and higher level accounts would be safe. I also think with the range of accounts, I could move faster then the phishers going through and knowing what to change faster then they could try all 46,000 sites. It’s a thought – now what are yours?

Two years of doing National Novel Writing Month and two years of failure for myself.  This year however it should be cake.  Chocolate cake, not white cake – I dislike white cake it’s like the step-father that no one likes of the cake world.   Now I’m sure one of the first things going through your mind is “How is this slack ass that hasn’t written an orginal article in two weeks going to write a novel”.   Well I’ve been busy what can I say?   I think I can do the novel this year.   It’s only 50k words and I can pop out 5k words in an hour when i put my mind to it.

However when I actually bother to write, I never want my blog(s) to suffer.  What I’m going to attempt ot do this weekend is future write for the whole month of October.  I’m hoping if I sit down and crunch through writing before November hits that most of my writing can be focused on that.   So between my different blogs that means doing about 100 articles in the next 7 days.   Can I do it?  I think I can.  I’ll throw in some slack ass reviews to get through a cheater post here or there.   None of us are super-human, and if I was actually getting paid to do this it would be something completely different.

I also have to start looking at adding a blog section to the VCMA web site.   It seems that we are to be featured in the Sunday edition of the Lorain Morning Journal.   I’m going ot have to get someone to snag me an extra paper of that.   So I thought it would be nice to have a regulary updated news section of the blog.   I’ve many times showed my distaste for doing static pages, a blog format would do wonders for releasing updates on a regular basis.  This reminds me though that I also need to get a new design theme for the VCMA website.

There was an article on mashable today questioning if ping.fm and hellotxt were helping the web world or hurting it.  I understand the authors point that if you are using these services that you are not taking an interest and active use in the social community that you are using these services to post to.   I can say from hits for ping.fm beta code requests on my blog, that lots of people are interested in getting access to ping.fm.   Now that it’s out of private beta I’m sure I’ll lose my number one spot in google for the term “ping.fm beta code”.  

If people want this what does this say?  It really means that we have diverse friendships.  We have communities that we want to share information with.   We don’t have time to manually copy or paste, nor do we have the time to try convince everyone we know to use a single service.   Since we can’t bring our friends to the service (much to the dismay of the social network providers), we take our information to them. 

We want to share our information, we don’t want to hoard.  I for example do all my writing on my main blog, twitter, and handful of other services.   Yet I have friends on almost every little social network out there.   Why should I be forced to chose between friends and the information I share with them.   Yes I’m sure some actual readers that are not into crossposting get annoyed over the repeated information on multiple services.   What about my friends though?   Where does the line of a healthy blogging business end and friendship cross?  My friends are the ones that inspire, the will always have the information directed towards them.    I am more then willing to take my information to them.   At what cost, a minor annoyance to literally a handful?

No one is forced to read my messages.   No one is forced to follow me.   No one is forced to my site.  If the author doesn’t follow ping.fm links, so be it.   I’m not losing what I truly care about.   Maybe when the a single network has all the features I want and 99.9% market dominance – then I’ll stop cross posting.   Until that time I’m proud to be a crossposter.

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Between setting up the blogs, playing the Myspace game Heroes, and tracking down alumni for band on Facebook and Myspace, I’ve spent a huge chunk of time on the social networking sites of the top tier.   (If there are any alumni on secondary tiered social networks I will find you eventually.)  Traditionally I have always held a strong hatred towards Myspace particularly.   My most commented line about the site has been “Myspace, making the Web 2.0 looklike the web from 1996).   Myspace has gotten better, but it is still downright ugly, clunky, and mostly a walled garden.   I don’t like – and no recent usage hasn’t endeared me to it.

I now have about 8 pages of email communication in Myspace (2 pages in Facebook) – that I have no method of saving, archiving, and retaining.   Do you know how much I hate that?  I’m someone who wants to save all his data forever, and thanks to the walled garden scenario it’s trapped.   Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will eventually be freed.

On the plus side my blog has been getting more hits, so I can’t complain about that.  Exposure the whole yadda yadda about getting yourself out there, I’m doing it.   I have been doing it for awhile but lately actually actively doing it.

We’ll see, maybe Myspace will still self impload and take out the west coast.  If it takes out the whole west coast we will know never to make such a monstrosity again.

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Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid right here

I’ve noticed an interesting trend lately.  It seems while I get 80-90% of my hits during the average work day time, almost all of my Adsense clicks I receive are clicked in the evening hours.   I had written early about studies that show only 1% of the people that read web page click ads, the question I have now is do they all click them at night and refrain during the daylight hours?

What type of ads are my sites showing that might be considered not safe for work?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid right here

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Myspace.

Myspace.

OK, I’ve repeated it a couple times I think I’m ready to actually talk about it.  Unlike some other services where I explain the community and the functions, I’m going to refrain from doing that for Myspace.  While I do have a myspace account, I won’t say that I truly like Myspace.   I haven’t even bothered to give myself the uber l33t cool profile page.   It’s a thing, not a good thing, not really a cool thing, just a thing.

So if I’m so “meh” towards Myspace why do I post there?  Because unfortunately some of my friends haven’t seen the light and still utilize the server.   I keep in touch with old gaming friends there especially, so I feel I want to broadcast my information there as much as I do anywhere else.   I’ll tell you what though, it isn’t easy.   Myspace may proclaim new found openness, yet getting information into Myspace without using their tools is a pain in the butt.

There are three things you can do remotely to update Myspace and keep your friends up to date on you.

• RSS Widget
• Status Updates
• Blog Posts

RSS Widgets:

For any site that allows you to place a widget into your profile, and does not allow you any remote options to any other functions, RSS widgets allow you to bypass the whole “you can’t put our data in our service unless you use our tools” wall.   While Myspace is getting better, it still wants you to play with it’s tools.

If you do a search for RSS widget “Service Name” in Google you shuold be able to pick and choose the one that is right for you.   By editing your Myspace profile and putting your embed code into your profile, you should be able to display the news feed you want right there on your profile page.

While this is all fine and dandy it doesn’t really cover what a crossposting god wants to accomplish, so let’s move onto some of the other options.

Status Updates:

Your status updates, the “I’m in my room crying cause Kurt Cobain is still dead” status updates that you use on Myspace if your an aging emo kid, these can be done remotely.   By utilizing service such as Ping.fm and Hellotxt you can update this via instant messenger or my choice, my Twitter account, without ever logging in.

You can do this by creating an account on Hellotxt or Ping.fm and they will give you an email address in which you can notify them of your current status.   We’ve discussed on ways to utilize e-mail notifications for use with other services, now you know the gateway to updating your Myspace status message.

Blog Posts:

Blog posts are the final achievement of the crossposting god when it comes to Myspace, unfortunately I only have a solution for WordPress users.  There is a plugin called MySpace Crossposter that will send your post over to your Myspace blog when it receives a publish event notification.  To get some of the information in configuring this plugin (it’s one of the most pain in the butt) you will have to open up your wp-config.php file to get the accurate information.

The options to program this plugin are as follows:

Database Settings:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin. Most of the data is available in your wp-config.php file if you need to reference it.

• DATABASE HOSTNAME: URL of your database host. NOTE: there is no “http://” before this server name
• DATABASE NAME: Name of your WordPress database
• “POST” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_posts table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• “META” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_postmeta table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• DB USERNAME: Username for the database
• DB PASSWORD:Password for the database

Blog Information:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin.

• BLOG URL:URL for your blog, complete with http://
• BLOG NAME: Name of your blog, as you’d like it to appear on your MySpace post.  Please note that it seems to have a problem with non alphanumeric characters, using them can cause some strange results.  I had to configure it to be “Creevas World” instead of “Creeva’s World 2.0″, your mileage may vary.

Myspace Login Credentials:

Without these, you won’t be able to crosspost.

• MYSPACE USERNAME:Your MySpace username – usually your email address.
• MYSPACE PASSWORD:Your MySpace password.

Post style:

Choose “notification” or “full story”.

• POST STYLE: n = Notification Style *recommended* (will drive traffic to your external blog) w = Whole Blog Entry (formatting may be lost in translation)

Because of longer posts like this one won’t show up in the myspace blog I just have it setup to post a notification of a new blog post, this also allows me to see how often I get hits from my Myspace blog (not often I’ve either unloved or uninteresting).

If you have further questions on making this all work together, please drop a comment below.  The next chapter in the crossposting god series is going to be on RSS feeds and making them work for you in broadcasting your information across the blogosphere in a controlled manner.

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Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

When I was living in Oregon my great grandmother passed away, unfortunately my wife never had a chance to meet her.   She was considered the “not completely normal” one of the family.   From my perspective, especially now, I can say that she was probably one fo the most normal one of the family.   She was also one of the ones most like me.   She had a voracious appetite for reading and absorbing knowledge.  She didn’t also believe in popular opinion and would find things in her own way.   I think part of her problem was she was born in the wrong era.  I think she would have been absorbed and delighted in the Internet and the way things are today.

The dream mostly consisted of a normal visit where she was staying at my grandparents.   There was just normal talking and I was my current age for whatever reason.  There was nothing contextually strange or out of place and no significant incidents occured.  When she did leave I was crying and my grandparents were questioning why I was upset.   I was going on how she had gotten her doctorate (she hadn’t IRL) and how she was a great woman.   How her views and ideas mattered.   In the dream I had almost worked myself up to a frenzy.    Then I woke up.

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was my face was soaked and covered in tears.   This was one of those dreams that bled over from the dream world to the real world.   I can say I truly miss her, but I don’t think of her that often, and definitely not as often as I should.   I have a few pictures of her and they stand around being a testament of where I’ve come from.   My grandmother used to save up books and give them to me.   I still have quite a few of those books she has given me over the years.  She was a strong lady and I think that life moves on in a strange way.

Why am I writing this?  I think i just want a testament to know that I’m still not in a dream.  That this is what is real.   Grief is a hard thing to deal with and sometimes it hits you at the strangest of times.

One thing I’ve been working on for awhile is and Internet Deadman’s Switch.  With all of my crossposting and media re-usage activities in the grand scheme this should be fairly trivial.   I am sure however that some things will slip me up.   We’ll start in this section of identifying the goals I wish to acomplish and work through some of the stages in part two.

What do I mean by Deadman’s Switch?

A deadman’s switch is something that is triggered normally to keep you alive.   A quick example is the pressure plate on a riding lawn mower.   The pressure plate must have weight on it or the lawn more will not start and if the weight is removed the lawn mower will shut off.  So essentially one action cause another action to occur when certain variables are met.   My trigger would be my death.  If I didn’t verify if I was alive after a certain period of time to a program/website/etc.  the a serious of scripts and actions would trigger leaving behind all the information I wish to impart on those behind me.

Why do I want a Deadman’s Switch?

This idea started in my head about 7-8 years.   There used to be a website that had you check in once a month and if you didn’t log in it will send off emails to the ones you care about (or the ones you don’t).   This gives you the final word and allows you to send of those things that might be important.   I can leave my wife information about all my accounts and password, any relevant information that she may need and won’t be able to gather up, parting words to friends and families.   I would also thanks to my current setup be able to post to all my social networks and make an announcement of my death.   This I find intriguing and I’ll at least go through all the steps of implementing this (whether I actually use it and maintain it will remain to be seen).

What would I send?

I’ve broken down what I would want to send into four sections:

• My wife – I can deliver my final message, copies of important documents, access to all of my accounts and any other relevant information she needs
• My family – I would send each family member a personal message from the beyond – I also would send them a follow up to do with my wife in case something happened to her at the same time, that way there would still be someone i could trust that would have access to the information they may need to clean up my estate.
• Friends – I would send each of my “high level” friends an individual message – if somehow my whole family is taken out in one full attack – I don’t think I’m passing any of my personal information off to them.
• Public Internet at Large – this is broken into a few more sections, but essentially I’ll be leaving a video, audio postings, status updates to my social networks (“I’m dead thanks for all the fish”)), and a few final blog postings.

The trick to all of this is of course is reliant on a few things.   The first and foremost being that I can send email after I’m dead.   It also can not be reliant on my home PC (if a housefire hits or a tornado takes me out I don’t want my home to be the weakest link).   Finally whatever script I use must be able to pull from an FTP site (for the audio and video).    Once those can be accompished I’m fairly sure I can get everything else done.

When would I send it?

This is the other conundrum isn’t it?  How do you net tell everyone you have passed on while you are still alive (that could be embarrassing).    You need to pick a time period that seems suitable to you (every 12 hours is not suitable).  I’m thinking either every two weeks or every month I would have to login and verify that yes I am still alive and kicking.  The only problem this would really cause is if I’m kidnapped or held hostage.   The chances of those being so minimal that it is unlikely so I won’t really take those into account.   So to be safe I’ll set it for somewhere between 14 and 31 days.

Another thing I would like to do is configure it to be staggered.  That way I’ll be able to send a message to my wife warning her about the upcoming announcement of what is going to occur before it actually does.  Then to family, then to friends, and finally to the Internet as a whole.   This would keep it from being one big whirlwind hitting everyone at once like a ton of bricks.   I don’t want someone completely freaked out when they see a new youtube movie of my me uploaded.    So a staggered release would be the best scenario (if it’s possible).

How am I going to do this?

You’ll just have to wait for part 2.

Do you like bleu cheese?
Nope

Do you own a knife?
Nothing that I carry around with me at all, I’m not one of those guys

What flavor do you add to your drink at sonic?
Closest one is hours away and have never been to one.

Do you get nervous before doctor appointments?
Not really.

What do you think of hot dogs?
I like them

Favorite Christmas movie?
National Lampoon’s X-Mas Vacation

What do you prefer to drink in the morning?
Coca Cola

Can you do push ups?
Can?  Yes.  Willing? No.

What kind of car do you drive?
Geo, Miata, Camaro, Taurus

Whats your favorite piece of jewelry?
Wedding Ring

Favorite hobby?
Blogging, Web 2.0 Activities, Reading, Video Games

Whats your favorite store to shop at?
Amazon

Do you have ADD?
Of course, wait what were we talking about?

What’s one trait you hate about yourself?
Not aggressive enough in life.

Middle name?
Matthew

Name 4 thoughts at this exact moment..
Wondering why I’m doing this, This is going to get absolutely no hits, why is my cat chewing so loudy, am I still answering this

Name 3 things you bought yesterday?
Q-tips, toothbrush, coca cola

Name 3 drinks you regularly drink?
Coke, Water, Milk

Current worry?
Sick Cats

Current hate right now?
Broken Camaro

Favorite place to be?
Home

How did you bring in the New Year?
At home with my wife

Where would you like to go?
Rome

Name three people who will complete this
No one, I’m alone in this struggle and don’t ask anyone to go through this pain.

Do you own slippers?
Nope

What shirt are you wearing?
Smokey and the Bandit T-Shirt

What year would you go back in time to and why???
1985 and watch Back to the Future on opening night and ponder the paradoxical and ironic nature of the event.

Can you whistle?
Kinda

Favorite color?
Black

Would you be a pirate?
Rather be a ninja, but yes.

What songs do you sing in the shower?
Sing, in the shower?

Favorite girls name?
Xie ‘lanthia

Favorite boys name?
Creeva

Last thing that made you laugh?
Episode of 6 feet under

Best Halloween costume as a child?
Ricky Raccoon

Worst injury you’ve ever had?
Falling 6 feet down face first into a plywood construction

Do you love where you live?
Ehhh

How many TVs do you have in your house?
2

Who is your loudest friend?
Ghoulishcharm

How many dogs do you have?
Two

Does someone have a crush on you?
I feel sorry for them if they do

Do you have kids?
Nope

What is your favorite candy?
Spree

Favorite Sports Team?
Cleveland Browns

What song do you want played at your funeral?
Starwars1 on slitherhorn with no flourishing (only SWG players will get that) then everyone can know true pain

What were you doing 12 AM last night?
Watching 6 Feet Under

What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up?
Must Go Back To Sleep

Tevy’s my setup is kind of unique but I’ll give you the run down.

I post to my blog at creeva.com – when I make a post my blog crossposts to myspace, vox, livejournal, dandelife, blogger, msn spaces, xanga, and multiply.

My website also has an outbound feed – this is filtered to certain topics and posts notifications to twitter, tumblr, jaiku, facebook, and suprglu.

At then end of the day all the web services that I use (flickr, allconsuming, 43things, 43 places, cocomment, digg, del.icio.us, google reader shared items, youtube favorites, youtube uploads, picasa, photobucket, stumbleupon, newsvine, pownce, and any other blogs I use) are each wrapped up with whatever I’ve done on any of those respectice services through out the day and done as a single post (per service) on my blog.

Of course once a post is made on my blog it gets cross posted to myspace etc, with the exception of twitter (since I use it for notifications AND personal use) nothing really hits my blog twice since I’ve been very careful of any redundant data processing.

We’ll just say I love wordpress plugins

A few article I’ve written on this:

http://creeva.com/2008/01/11/life-caching-is-better-then-life-streams/
http://creeva.com/2008/01/23/brand-management-branding-yourself/

I’m sure what I’ve written above is missing some services and such but that’s about 90% of what is going on.

Now I know that this leads to alot of updates on myspace, but I’m sure this seems unnatural to some since most the people I know post next to nothing.  99% of the updates I see are XXXX updated profile information.  I look at the profile and it looks the same to me.   Very few people actually constantly upload pictures (I’m looking at an automated way to do this from my flickr account) or write blog posts.   So sometimes I need to go to other services to find the people like me that update their profile information and create content.

I truly want to read content from people I know, look at their pictures, or watch their videos it’s just that there seems to be so little, while I of course go through my cross posting glut.   My friends don’t like switching services and that’s fine, I’ll just bring all my glut of information and data to them.

Yesterday on my main blog I wrote a quip on my battle for the search term “creeva” in google and how many hits it brings back.  It flucuates up and down and was more of a joke then anything.   However I started thinking about it a little more deeply last night.

I’m a huge crossposter, I don’t deny it.  My friends can track me down and find me whereever.   I manage to get new readers by utilizing diffferent sources to store my data.   When I wrote a blog post on my main blog, it gets copied or notification goes to many other sites.   The path it takes is that I write an article when I click publish it sends out the article to my myspace, my live spaces account, my vox account, my tumblr account, my suprglu account, my facebook news, my old blogger page, my xanga account, my livejournal page, my multiply account, and a google group for back up (that one is private though).   On top of that livejournal also sends it on it’s way over to my dandelife account.  I’m also copying things over to www.creeva.net which is my by beta testing blog.

If I listen to a song that get’s scrobbled to my last.fm account, upload a picture to my flickr account, digg a story, favorite a video, share an RSS news item, write an article on a blog other then my main (like this article) or mark something down in all consuming; these all get pulled into my main blog, which at that point goes through the data dissemination process all over again.

This is data portability at it’s finast (at least for the content side of the equation) and I work it well.   Some people prefer to go to a single location and that’s fine, that is what I have a main blog for.   Get everything from everywhere all in one location.   Google loves the idea of everything in one place, it’s their whole mantra.   However you will get penalized in Google for having duplicate content.   So my google score will drop theoretically the more places I cross post to that it indexes.

So by disseminating my content to everywhere in the world Google will penalize me in it’s search ratings.   It seems my main blog still gets the most traffic and it’s hits don’t suffer.   So all and all I don’t truly mind.   However I’m sure that sometimes I do suffer when my vox account for example rises to the top instead of my main account.

How can Google truly and actively support data portability when it’s anti ethical to it’s search rankings?  I can understand that it’s an attempt to fight spammers and such, but we all end up hitting pure spam BS blogs all the time.  The crap floats and rises to the top while the rest of things drown in the data deluge.   I don’t think that google necessarily needs to adjust it’s algorithm but in the coming months or years it will need to take it into account.

Original From: Does Data Portability Hurt You in Google?

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 4/10/2008 06:29:00 AM

For those that play the OMG why is this post in my database 300 times game, you know my pain.   The only thing I can say is it would be great if someone made a plugin with the same functionality as feedwordpress, until then I deal with my workarounds.

I think I may have angered the google gods.   There truly is only one way to solve this mortal combat.

Unfortunately I think with all the information in it’s databases it know infinitely more ways to kill me then I could come up with to kill it.

Thinking about that though – if Google decided to become a serial killer it would know more ways of killing people then that guy from Saw could ever come up with.

If the idiots truly will inherit the earth does that mean that those with intelligence should give up?   At what point will the tipping point be reached that the idiots outnumber the rest of us?