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I’m the crossposting whore – I write once and I have everything designed to publish everywhere (well at least when things aren’t broken like Ping.fm to Myspace blogs).   This however is not syncing, it’s distribution and publishing.     A true sync across all platforms would be amazing.

The example I would love is I make an edit to a blog post, then every place and profile that I’ve published that post on would update with no manual intervention.   Since I can’t do that, Creeva.com is considered my authorative location for all blog posts.  If I wanted to edit those other sites I would have to do each one manually.  Granted I’m sure without using syncing it saves on bandwidth.

Things that I can sync?   Well my contacts and calendars with Plaxo, but that kind of is just the tip of the iceberg.   My biggest issue write now is syncing Flickr photos to Facebook.  I am aware of Flickurbook, but this still uses your local machine – there is no reason this can’t be done “in the cloud”.    It’s all soooo sloooooow.   Seriously at the speed it moves I could just reupload all the pictures to Facebook faster then this thing goes.  It’s free, it’s the developers fault, it’s great what he did; but it’s not the solution I’m looking for.

Finally using my distribution chain I chase all over the web to answer comments.  I don’t mind doing that.   However, wouldn’t it be better if across all platforms and services these comments were kept in sync?   Then I could use the spam filters I wanted to from a central location.  I could reply to comments from a central location.

I’m just pipedreaming again…..

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?

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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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So I’ve taken over the position of webmaster for the VCMA (Vermilion Community Music Association).  This is going to start a new series as I’m going to use them as guinea pig’s for what I’ve felt non-profits need to do to survive and thrive in the web 2.0 world.   They are not a big organization, and I’m sure I received this position for my background and not my witty personality.

I’ve been working on the site for a couple of weeks and here is what I’ve found so far.   They had a private member’s section on the old site to share files and personal data.  This section was password protected, but the username field was just a front, as long as you nkew the password anything you put in the username field was accepted.  Since I’m a security engineer, this just wasn’t going to work for me.  I’ve ranted before the illusion of security and how illusionary security wasn’t worthwhile at all anyways.  The other problem was that their member page “password protected” section was just a javascript that rewrote the “HTTP GET” to a file named a combination of the requested page plus the password.   So if the page was index.tml and the password was “password” the ending HTTP in the “HTTP GET” command would be indexpassword.html.   Since it was still a plain text file without any encryption on it, in theory it could still be spidered and stored by google, thereby completely undermining any security it was giving them.

I’m working on a better and more secure solution while maintaining the balance of ease of use.   I don’t want to burden them too much on the security side.  I’m sure some of the older members would blink at me with a blank stare if I handed them secureID tokens to access their newsletters.

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The next thing I discovered is that code each web page by hand, ugh.  There was no way I was going to maintain each HTML manually and hope for any semblance of style and continuity between pages (an issue they had in the past).   They had been using FrontPage and offered to buy me a copy.  First no, no and no – currently I’m using Linux on my main computer (Ok I dual boot into XP and between WoW and Netflix streaming I don’t get into Ubuntu as much as I should), so Frontpage was out.  They were insistent at first that this is how it was done, I however readjusted things.  I moved them to WordPress which I’m not using as a blog but rather as a CMS (Content Management System).

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I manually migrated the data from the old HTML files, I spent hours converting the front page data to be “clean” data that i can migrate and copy paste anywhere.   I was a dumbass though, I should have just copy and pasted the text into notepad or a generic text editor, then I wouldn’t have had all the background crap.  This is my nore to myself to now be stupid next time.  I added images and a javascript navigation menu, but essentially the page was just a cleaned up (easy to maintain now) version of what they already had.

Now the next step is to migrate them to Google Apps for their member related information……

Somehow I always end up volunteering for Vermilion non-profits, now if only I could get one of them to pay me……

In the picture above is my maternal grandfather and my great grandfather, it seems I am going to be joining on them on the ability to reproduce and pass down genetic material to the next generation.  Yes I am going to be a father, Xie want and annouced the pregnancy on Twitter just a few hours ago with the following message:

As of yesterday I am 7 weeks pregnant – coming from the person who would never in a million years want kids, I am very excited & happy :D

I sent the follow up:

@xielanthia congratulations who is the father……nm :P

Then I sent this:

As of yesterday @xielanthia is 7 weeks pregnant and I’m going to be a father – wish us luck – we’ll need it.

So we have announced to the Web 2.0 World (WTW? W2W?) that we are having a baby and doing it in true web fashion.  We have known for about 3 weeks and over that time eeked the information out to family and friends.  The first person I told was the IPS guys I played SWG with that I have constant e-mail communication with.  The first family that knew was my in-laws and followed by Xie’s grandmother (I wish she had a blog i could link to).   Then it was ghoulishcharm.  From there I told my father and my brother who was also there.  I went and told my grandparents last Sunday and drove over to tell my sister, but she already knew it seems that she found out from my father who knew the week before.

I did find out from my sisters that my grandparents had already known about the pregnancy (having heard it through her) but yet they acted like they didn’t know anything.   Welcome to my family, we can act surprise even if we have known something for months.   I know I used to unwrap my Christmas presents before hand and rewrap them – I got that trick from my godmother.

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A few weeks ago I started receive strange notifications on Myspace stating “Click Here To See How Much I’m Worth” and “RANDOMUSER just bought you – click here to see how much I think your worth”.   I was puzzled.  I was confused.  I ignored it for a few weeks.   Eventually I clicked and found the “Own Your Friends” application.

From the help information:

Welcome to Own Your Friends![click here to show help]

Using Own Your Friends, you can:

• Buy and sell your friends as ‘pets’.
• Make your ‘pets’ hug, punch, and poke each other!
• Change your pets’ status messages to whatever you want!

Make Money by:

• Being bought! You earn half the profit everytime you are bought. If you’re a hot commodity, you’ll be rich! ;-)
• Having your pets bought. You earn half the profit when someone else buys one of your pets. Choose pets wisely and make money as an investor!
• Logging in every 8 hours. You earn $1,000 for logging in, but only once every 8 hours.
• Give a Human Gift to a Friend. Earn $1,250 by giving a friend one of your pets as a human gift. Just go to the ‘Buy Friends’ tab and choose a friend to give a gift to!

Hint: Use our new My Bargains feature. Find hot deals on cheap friends, then gift them away or sell them to profit!

The key feature is to buy people you know and sell them later for a profit.   I play this game, I enjoy this game, and I don’t really plan on stopping, however……

One of my friends the other day was talking with me.  I told him I owned him.   He didn’t understand.  He didn’t consent to play the game, nor was he even aware of it.  I was able to purchase him and pull him into my world with out consent.  I can also make him hug, poke, punch, etc. other people I know.   All without his consent, and specifically he wants nothing to do with this and isn’t too happy about it.

I can even change his status message (within the application not on his actual profile) with this i can make him “say things” or express view points that he would never do in normal context if he was in control.   Other friends of his could see him saying that he is going to go off ot India to eat a cow or that he just got a job at a college teaching molecular biology.   Whether he was or wasn’t isn’t the fact, other less savy users may actually believe he is doing/saying this.

Now the initial knee jerk reaction is what does it matter it’s just a stupid game between stupid people.   Well let’s put it in another perspective.  Say you purchase Obama and give him a status that is against his own platform, or McCain.   Say you own coca-cola’s profile and change the status to “I prefer pepsi”.   Now this starts to harm brand image and the reflection on the public that reads this.   It can cause irreparable harm to the right people with the wrong message.

This is why it really needs to turn into an opt in environment, or at least changes to something where you can block your user profile from being used in these sort of application that goes against brand management.   It needs to be simple and it needs to be able to be done within two clicks.   It should also default to being “do not use my profile for these applications”.

We can say this is the Web 2.0 world and brand management has changed greatly from where it was just a few years ago.  I don’t believe in companies removing blog posts and I don’t believe in DMCA takedowns from stories that aren’t up to the approval of the companies.  I do believe I own the lists of my friends, but I don’t believe I should be able to make changes to their status in any context nor do I believe I should be able to make them perform virtual actions without their consent.

That being said yes I enjoy the game and I’m going to keep playing, but i think it’s in a different context.  I’m going to be targetting celebrities and brands in myspace to change the message to something unsuitable (but within Myspace’s TOS) to help raise awareness on this issue.   Brand management is very important to companies and yet they have allowed these applications to yank quite a bit of control from them.  I can make Pepsi my pet (slave) and have it pimp products for a competitor.   If it’s right or wrong is for you to decide, but I’m sure Pepsi won’t be to happy about it.

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Introduction

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E-mail in the clouds.   Essentially back in 1996 when Hotmail was first released (in the pre-purchased by Microsoft era) the dawn of popular cloud computing for e-mail began.   The main issue was storage space.  I believe that Hotmail launched with 5 megs of storage space for all of your e-mail.   It is frustrating to know all the e-mail that’s been lost over the years due to inadequate storage space.   I now have single pictures in my email archive that are larger then 5 megs.   Times change and space get’s cheap.

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When Google released Gmail into the wild it was a game changer.  By offering 1GB of storage space it made it seem that you literally could keep your e-mail forever.   Other providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo were maxing out at 25 MB at the time, this seemed ridiculous in comparison.

Currently Gmail supports almost 7 GB of storage space and Hotmail and Yahoo went to “unlimited”.  I consolidate almost all of my e-mail to Gmail.

Data Types

To utilize e-mail storage you can attach any (supported) file and keep it in your mailbox.

Data Security

While you have to rely on a username and password to access your e-mail as the security barrier entry, if you want true protection from snooping it is suggested that you either get a web plugin that allows you to do encryption with Gmail, or keep your private messages encrypted and use them with an offline client.

Data Redundancy

Since you can forward e-mail from Gmail, I have it configured to forward all incoming mail to both my Yahoo Mail account and my Hotmail account.  If for some reason GMail loses my data or in the unlikely event Google goes out of business I’ll still be able to access my e-mail messages.

It is recommended that you keep an offline backup of your mail messages so they can be accessible while being off the grid.

Data Accessibility

With Gmail offering accessing via a rich web interface, a basic web interface, a mobile web interface, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP; it seems unlikely that you are going to find an Internet device that can not access it in some way or fashion.

Conclusion

This is the e-mail scenario that works for me.  Since encryption really isn’t ubiquitous across the board I don’t use it like I should.   Beyond that this scenario is highly redundant and should allow you operate from anywhere with a network connection without worrying about losing your data.

Previous entries in the Living in the Clouds Series:

Living In The Clouds Part 1 – Introduction To Cloud Computing

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/living-in-the-clouds-part-2-e-mail/feed/ 0 http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/the-crossposting-god-series-part-7-where-can-you-post-by-e-mail/ http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/the-crossposting-god-series-part-7-where-can-you-post-by-e-mail/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:48:07 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=2831

Image from here

Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  WordPress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from WordPress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

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

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

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

Granted I can go back and flower the site and think it’s the greatest thing since sliced french bread, but normally I do not.   When I started this post months ago I was in a different place and mindset.   I got distracted and never dug into it much.  I don’t like letting drafts lie for too long, write or delete them.   So I had to scrap everything I had written, but recent news this week brought this idea up again.

When I go through my online sites I return a massive amount of hits in Google.  Could luck perspective employers doing research on me, I’m everywhere.   My transparency gives me a cloak in the Google Data Cloud.   Sometimes though, as I said, I have profiles the succumb to digital rot.   What do we do with rot when we come across it?  Normally we prune it out or toss it away.   Going through my online profiles I rarely delete anything since I can have some use for it at a later time.   Social network that supports blogs – cross post to it from creeva.com.  Items that delivers an RSS feed, well I may use it so let’s throw it in feedburner so I’m reminded it exists and I can repurpose it later.   This happens again and again, but some sites after initial testing really have nothing I can repurpose or reuse to any extent.

The sites I can’t use become eventually pruned, when I remember I go back and delete the account or profile I created.   The problem more and more we are seeing in the Web 2.0 world is that web application providers are making it harder and harder to delete your account.  Sometimes they don’t allow you to delete it at all.   This came to the forefront recently when it was discovered that Facebook never really deleted your account when you unsubscribed.  Pieces of you were left in the system like the Reese’s variety was left in the woods for E.T.   A  few days after this was big news Facebook finally relented and now allow users to delete their profiles.

I can understand the user retention stand point these companies are attempting to make.   I also can understand the ease of use that it is to user to have this happen.  What I don’t understand is why these companies can’t see the rot that is nipping at the branches of their web tree.   Now a company can say it has 20 million subscribers, but if you browse the profiles on their site and see 19.5 million haven’t logged in for 6 months to a year, that is rot.   It makes the companies look bad as well as shows how poorly they are doing.   Some users will help prune that rot away from you and leave no hard feelings.   You do cause emotions to rise by not allowing you users to delete their own data off of your service.    Please for all you users out there and companies, work together to get the rot out of the forest.   A lot will always remain but we can all work to clean it up a little at a time.

Spokeo is one of the latest Web 2.0 services I have tried here is how it works:

First you sign up and it asks if you want to look for friends from your address book (gmail, yahoo, AOL, etc,) it then spends time going through all the addresses and see which services they belong (Amazon, Myspace, Last.fm, Digg, Twitter, Etc.) – at this point it shows you all of their public activity on these services.

You also have the option of linking your myspace, linkedin, or other accounts where it doe the same searching as before. This is interesting since it allows you to track your friends without hunting them all down and searching them out. You know what they are up to without actively going to all these different sites online for hours at a time. You may never log into your normal sites to keep up with your friends, it all coming to you.

Now the scary – you can put in any e-mail address and look up someone the same way. You also receive hits from your address book of someone you may have had one quick e-mail exchange with but no relationship. Because of this you are infringing on their privacy.

More people need to be aware of Spokeo so they understand the implications of their online activities and how easy they are to track and monitor. I’m well aware and have been for awhile, I use teh internet and post information knowing this and expecting it. Other people I know are not nearly as aware.

I would recommend trying it out just to see what you can find. If your worried about your e-mail address becoming part of the beast i would advise to sign up with a throw away e-mail address.

From a side note while we are waiting for this to start Palantir, according to wikipedia, is an artifact from the Tolkien mythos. specifically: A palantír (sometimes translated as Seeing Stone but actually meaning “Farsighted” or “One that Sees from Afar”) is a stone that functions somewhat like a crystal ball.

Webinar started

They start with the standard thank you to their host carahsoft.

Palantir was started in 2004 by Alexander Carr (sp) and the paypal team. They pointed out that the main part of Paypal was anti fraud and that’s how they relate to the intelligence community. They spent sometime discussing Paypal and their competitors. The reason paypal succeeded compared to their competitors was that they had analysts to sort the data compared to using pure computer work. The analyst then built tools to work with the data at the conceptual level compared to the data level. This allowed the analysts to help fight fraud better then the competition which allowed them to succeed.

Paypal then looked at what areas they could fit these types of tools. They recognized that they would fit best in the high finance and the intelligence community. They worked and created tools and today’s webcast was about the intelligence community tools. Planatir is a front end and backend tool

Data Integration – takes all your records and puts them into one unified view that allows an analyst to have an easy view of unified data.

Search and Discovery – see who the user communicated with – persistent search which alerts the analyst when new information becomes available.

Link Analysis- the database includes historical and auditible revision analysis – I assume this is it help ensure the integrity of the database. Includes meta data for source, who added it, and where it came from, who updated it, essentially every step of change and data you could want. This also allows the revisioning database to look quickly at the data history. They then go on to show different views and history tracking they can utilize.

He shows how you could do different information extractions to track terrorist activities (once again using the terrorist threat to try to drive the point home /rolleyes). While this would be a great tool in general I think this could have been done another way instead of driving the terrorist angle. The data set that it can pull from is quite large and very interesting.

Very interesting drag and drop interface for entity resolution and analysis. Very Web 2.0ish but yet seems they put too much emphasis on the fisher price like interface. It’s not a bad thing just overly rounded – but I assume this may help things work faster – I have nothing to compare it to though. They are offering a video at the end so I’m not going to describe all of the interface and his interaction with it.

This does make Jim Cropcho’s discovery of a flaw in the ohio voting records a very trivial discovery for this software and makes how we maintain our records especially our voting and documents that should be private (no your phone is not really considered private sorry) otherwise data discovery with tools like this is trivial.

The platform does support plug-ins.

When asked how many entities they can handle they stated over 100 million entities – they have pulled in all of IMDB, Wikipedia – and NETFLIX!!!! – so this company is looking at user checkouts and ratings on netflix – I’m going to follow up with netflix and find out what of my private data is available to these other companies.

More links

here
here
Flash Demo

For more carahsoft webinar’s go here for sign up.

Part of the issue lies within the audience. People going to the movies is down. People going ot amusement parks is down. These type of attractions do not hold the same pull to crowds as they did a decade ago. Part of this of course is the current generation of kids are different in the previous ones. They utilize the social networks online and use those to find friends to do things. Of course big companies are realizing this and marketing right along. What does a small business like the haunted house industry have to do to pull in these wayward souls back into the flock and increase ticket sales.

I pondered this for awhile and came up with some interesting marketing concepts that would take time but little or no money to implement.

1. Podcasts- Video podcasts utilizing the skills of the actors that the haunted house employs would be a cheap easy syndication and marketing method. This would also attract those people outside of the normal regional market that the houses could appeal to. Beyond the standard acting podcast where the actors were in character they could also do a horror story reading/discussion podcast, or a special effect how to do stuff like they do on your own podcast.

2. Utilizing social networks – Businesses such as this should not limit themselves to one or two social networks they should be going anywhere and everywhere to spread there message. People that are friended to an organization have a stronger psychological pull and therefore attract more visitors.

3. A Daily/Weekly blog this should be enough for the creative members of their staff.

4. Utilizing sites like meetup.com to invite others in the area to come show up.

5. Doing announcements on sites like craigslist.

6. Creating t-shirt and such merchandise through a site like cafe press.

The main problem is places like this rely on newspaper advertising and word of mouth. Word of mouth however travels best through the Internet. Newspaper ads are going up in price while readership is dropping.

With the steps above and adding in some advertising to increase revenue they could actually turn a profit in the off season. Also it gives the workers something to da and look forward to weekly. In the end it’s free advertising that works for them instead of costing them with a much larger audience.

The company putting on this seminar is Carahsoft. The presenter is Monica Girolami Senior Product Marketing Manager from Symantec.

When I dialed in I was the 26th caller – so take that for whatever level of review that you want.

The speaker started only 3 minutes late.

Valued of Backup Exec 11d Agents and Options:

Agenda:
Windows Recovery Challenge
Backup Exec 11d for windows servers
Current Upgrade promotions
Questions and Answers

This is about keeping your data secure and available against malicious threats, infrastructure failures, natural disasters, and etc.

It’s about your ability for recovery not about backup *I feel I’m’ getting brainwashed

More press notes self promoting

Advantages:
Continuous Protection for exchange
Recover Critical Data in seconds
Enhanced Data Security – Encryption – 128/256 AES encryption
New Platform Support (x64 bit) -
and more….. * did they really need to add this?????

Exchange Backup old way – daily (weekly full backup) daily second backup of the mailboxes – so it’s taking twice the time. With 11d eliminates the mailbox backups – still having the ability to recover individual emails or accounts. They do this through granular recovery technology. With the continuous data protection you can continuously protect and granularly recover the data. * Roll eyes

Granular recovery requires you to have a backup up to disc – full backup would go to tape or disc.

current method of backup – sample customer – 7 hour exchange database job – mailbox backup – 23 hours – total of 30 hours. With 11d it took a total of 3 hour for everything – moving the database to tape it took a total of 5 hours. 80% reduction of time with up to the minute restoration available.

Continuous protection is now available for exchange – previously it was available for file servers. You can setup the recovery points – you can set this up down to every 15 minutes – default is 8 hours. So you could recover your system up to the last time point (down to 15 minutes ago). You can do recovery to this.

This product seems to be missing the new standard Symantec Web Interface

Active Directory Agent:

Recovery individual users, attributes, computers without reboots. Much easier then the MS method – just run a full backup job – from there you can recover the individual objects from that.
Recovers Share point databases and documents with the GRT previously mentioned

MS SQL now has continuous protection also – the agent can backup locally instead of over the network for the best continuous backup in the fastest method. 11d secures the restore selection to make sure the recovery job runs successfully.

Central Admin Server Option (CASO)- Simple Three Tier Management:

You can protect your entire environment from one location – the central admin server allows you to manage your protected servers, computers, and media servers from one location. This includes defining and distributing backup jobs, monitoring and reporting on job activity. This option was first introduced in Backup Exec 10.0

Does not require persistent architecture for remote offices
Distributed catalog architecture
simple monitoring of remote managed media server jobs

Desktop and Laptop Option – Protecting Critical work stations

5 free license with BE 11d
Continuous Protection
DLO (desktop laptop option)is ideal for a mobile work force
synchronization of users work stations
end user file retrieval
easy to manage and deploy
Licenses are available in 10 packs

Backup exec system recovery options – Do you have a disaster recovery strategy?

Formally livestate recovery – the old system recovery method was manual and was long and tedious – repair – reinstall OS – reinstall drivers – reinstall apps – re configure settings – apply journal changes – test – go live. With new method select recovery point and it can recover the entire system – only taking minutes and is more reliable with the disk based backup. Disimilar hardware recovery in minutes – enhanced P2V/V2P virtual conversion capabilities – streamlined lower priced offering of Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0.

More press quotes

Dissimilar system recovery – allows you to recover to different hardware configuration with the same data – it can even restore to a virtual machine. Backup Exec for Windows Server System Recovery Option – lower cost then the full solution – it’s a stand alone unintegrated solution – which you could run backup exec 11d on mission critical servers that would allow you to recover in just a few minutes.

Extended platform support
X64 windows media server support
Vista Support
Centralized management
NDMP support
Oracle
Linux/UNIX
DB2
Mac OSX – PPC/Intel

Free 60 day trial from www.backupexec.com
* there are even forums there WOWWEE /sarcasm off

For Exchange 2007 and Vista you need the latest Backup Exec 11d patches.

Questions and Answers:

Symantec: Please type your questions for the speaker into this chat pod.

Guest: can we ask tech questions?

Symantec: Liza, you are welcome to ask any questions. We’ll do our best to answer them. If we can’t answer them, we’ll make sure to follow up with you off line.

Guest: my back up wld not restore even if I applied sp5

Guest: with the new version does it come with tech support?

Guest: VMWARE consolidated backup support on 11d

Guest: Does the Sharepoint Agent give posting item level recovery?

Symantec: BE11d includes support if u purchased it w/ support

Guest: Running BE 11d and had need for Exchange restore of databases. I had been running D2D2T and the restore could not be done with tape. We were able to restore from disk. Could you provide best practice set up D2D2T with Exchange agent?

Guest: compare cps with cdp for exchangebackup

guest: We have had some serious issues with Lotus Notes 7.0.2 mail client and the Backup Exec remote agent, has anyone else had issues with this? The agent prevents Lotus from opening.

Guest: will cps on exchange replace brcik level backup

Rod Sellers: cps itself is very nice

Guest: We always have files being skipped in the back log in ver. 9.1. How do we prevent that? Thanks

Guest: I’m running 11d remote agents to backup my NEtware servers. I use Pre/Post options – but the Post doesn’t run. Are there any known issues around this?

Symantec: Recommend reading Exchange Best Practices wp on www.backupexec.com/save

Guest: HI, we have 400/800G tapes for our backup. Weekly we have a full backup. It is about 399G. What is the best praktice to do a full backup and do not need to use a secound tape? (incremental Backup?)

Guest: Thanks

Guest: Backup Exec 11d has been release since 11/06. How come there have been no live updates for this program?

Guest: On the topic of encryption, can Backup Exec backup laptops protected with PGP Whole Disk Encryption?

Guest: Why do they not have updated native support for NetWare and GroupWise? Not everyone runs Exchange

Symantec: Apologies everyone, slight technical problems.

Guest: On the subject of Lotus Domino, we are also having problems using the Domino option. It skips too many files.

Guest: We are using tapes. we want to convert to disk and do a virtual bkup

Symantec: Backup Exec 11d launched in Nov06 and build 11d.7170 launched March07 with support for MS Exchange 2007, MS Vista, EMC Celerra devices etc

Guest: we need to talk to u abt the conversion

Guest: is this all about MS?

Guest: AD meaning backing up individual users’ files in pcs?

guest: We have also had issues with 11d and the backup jobs not completing/failing when not being able to connect to machines assigned in the backup job. The Symantec techs also said there is a limit to the amount of machines you can have in one job, what is the limit?

Guest: We are currently using 10D, and would like to upgrade to 11D, however we are still running Exchange 5.5, with a plan to upgrade Exchange to 2003 this year.. Its my understanding that 11D does NOT support less than Exchange 2000. Am I correct here?

Guest: We have been getting weekly updates by liveupdate including SP1. Automatic doesn’t seem to work though. Try from the tools menu.

Guest: How will the desktop & laptop options work with Windows Vista? Windows Vista already has a built in snapshot for machines?

Guest: Is the automatic feature being looked at as to why is doesn’t work? Is that a feature they may take out in the next verison?

Guest: Is System Recovery like System Restore in Windows?

Guest: When is the next verison coming out?

Guest: scott, I’m just another customer. I have other priorities at my site. I just assumed it was because we were using central admin console. I do all the servers manually.

Guest: is this the IDR?

Guest: We have just upgraded to 11d. I am getting the following error message on the sever Backup Exec is running on. Backup- THC1 V-79-57344-3844 – The media server was unable to connect to the Remote Agent on machine THC1. The media server will use the local agent to try to complete the operation.Remote Agent not detected on \\THC1. The folder it is trying to backup is the Utility Partition. The rest of the server backup up fine without asking for the remote agent.

Guest: is this included in 11d?

Symantec: To get current 11d updates go to: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/289968.htm

Guest: Does Symantec have an Archiving solution that works w/ Backup Exec? We have about 1 TB of data that needs to be archived off in a near line device that can be accessed when necessary.

Symantec: Yes, BE11d for Exchage w/ CPS eliminates Brick Level Backup

Symantec: Ceballos – Enterprise Vault http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/overview.jsp?pcid=2244&pvid=322_1

Guest: Is the Advanced File Open option free with 11D?

Guest: migration from 9.1 to 11d is free?

Guest: I need help in migration after the 11d comes.

Guest: Is the Advanced Open File option free with 11d?

Symantec: Frandin – Yes BE11d only supports Exchange 2K, 2K3, 2k7

Guest: how to get the ppt presentation

Guest: ok ty!

Guest: give an over view os sss

Symantec: MClark – AOFO is a purchased addonn

Guest: Is it per server?

Guest: I understand that I need a VIP Update for 11.0. Where can I get this?

Guest: please review share storage option

Symantec: live update http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/289968.htm

Guest: Could you do an overview on the Backup to Disk to Tape technologies?

Guest: Do you have a whitepaper that compares your product to others? Specifically we are using Syncsort and I want to convert but will have to do justification and any help would be appreciated.

Symantec: Agents /Options: http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/agents_options.jsp?pcid=2244&pvid=57_1
Symantec: Nick, today’s webcast is being recorded. A link to this recording will be available shortly on http://www.carahsoft.com/events/index.php. It will also be sent to you in a follow-up email.

Guest: how can we tell if we are current on maintenance?

Guest: can you give us teh link to the upgrade

Symantec: www.backupexec.com/save

Guest: 9.1 version support has expired. I just ordered 11d does this mean I have to order support separately?

Symantec: You can order 11d with or without support

Guest: if we have IDR in 10d, does it get upgraded to live state?

Guest: vmware review

Guest: Does BackUp Exec cover laptops encrypted with PGP Whole Disk Encryption?

Guest: presentation ppt file

Symantec: http://www.carahsoft.com/events/index.php

Guest: system recovery has to be ordered separate?

As you can see some questions went unanswered

This seminar used Adobe Acrobat Connect – this is the first time I’ve run across this remote seminar solution. I’m not too impressed with the look and feel being a spectator – maybe it is more powerful on the moderator side. Though it did have that new web 2.0 technology where you enter in your phone number and it calls you – so it has that going for it.

I use sites like mashable or lifehacker and get ideas from there, but some sites I just run across. But every time a new buzz starts happening I seem to be the one they all turn to. So who is your go to person?

I played around with findmeon earlier today actually before seeing this article – and while it has a point – part of that can be substantiated through common identities – my problem I’m running into is how to archive all the data and RSS feeds properly in a usable format for the future – all of this data in so many place – in a world where sites can vanish in a blink is not good.

I do use suprglu – but yet I want more and most RSS feed readers or stream creators only go so far back so I can’t archive older data. In short I’m screwed.

There is a place for findmeon – but once they get past beta and make it easier to use such as adding all the big social sites in the list form the beginning and doing support for each that way instead of you coming up with all the information yourself.

For the die hard web 2.0 person this isn’t too difficult – but if my mom doesn’t have a chance forget it – it needs more polish