Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Twitterank, a social engineering phishing nightmare

Its been highly talked about. Is Twitterank out to steal your password or not? There is a disclaimer saying there not out to steal your twitterz. But I got to say Brianoberkirch has this right.

Twitterrank is a vast conspiracy I created
to steal all of your passwords and shame Twitter into OAuthing. And to
make you look vain – Brianoberkirch

We laugh but who knows one day it will happen. Then how foolish will you feel as you put your vanity before privacy

I keed. But you really shouldn't hand out your password to some fly-by-night site.
– Brianoberkirch

And he's very right. We're far to ready to plunge our details into a site which has no history, feels dodgy and doesn't use any certificates of any kind. I know the author of the site has gone out of his/her way to alert people to the validity of the site but mistakes can be made too. Such things as poorly configured databases and applications leak user data. Also note, this ticks all the boxes for a scam. Type in your username and password and you will get to see what your ranking is. Social enginnering at its best. Hell send your friend your rating and ask them to join too.

Update Mashable is covering the story and Rainycat pretty much says the same. OAuth makes all this go away, this is why I'm a big believer in the open social stack.

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USBCell sort out your PR campaign

I've been clearing out my junk box recently and found a number of things. One of them was a email from Diana from Moixaenergy aka USBcell.com.

Good afternoon,

Please find our press release today outlining Moixa Energy’s new Alkaline Awareness Campaign and ‘CO2 Saver’ USB rechargeable battery solutions.

Regards,

Diana

Then there's a few photos and there press release titled Award-winning British company seeks to educate consumers on the dangers of the disposable battery attached.

I'm sorry this is so lame and lazy on so many levels. Its basically spam and its frustrating because usbcell is actually a good product. Hell I actually own 8 of the AA type. If they spent 1min and typed in a query like this. They would see I'm actually a fan of USBcell, and they could have sent me some batteries. I most likely would have been more likely to check out the campaign and in the end blog about it. I'm going to write back to Diana and suggest she reads the Cluetrain and this blog entry. If Sarah was still blogging, I would suggest Diana look at her blog too.

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I may just have the next werewolf

I have playing with playing cards most of the night. Seems while I was sleeping that I came up with a card game which seems to be like werewolf/mafia but very different. I was reading up about game theory to see if it fit in one of the categories and it seems to fit into reciprocal altruism which is nicely exemplified with file sharing.

Another potential example would be the Internet file sharing communities. The ability to download (receive) a given file (an economic good) directly depends on other people who already possess the same file and share it through allowing uploading it to those who want it (a process which is also called seeding). Those who receive the file and later refuse to share it with others (through seeding) are known as leeches. However, there are methods to ban leechers, ie to deny them further participation in the file sharing network.

I don't want to come across like its totally tied down but the game seems pretty fun and could work with groups as big as 40 or as small as 12. Some other people have spoke to in the past have talked about the notion of a 3rd entity like the vampires. Well although we've not tried it out, I do worry it will just be chaos and there not enough to go on to make it worth doing. Plus vampires would be like a 2nd team of werewolves.

So forgetting vampires, my game is like werewolf as in there is a night and day phase but its more like a change of location with certain characters not being able to see or hear. The moderator/god/voice of the game is required to do a lot more in this game in regards to whos who. It may even require two or a piece of paper. The social notion of cheating and saying whatever you like is still there and is a major part of the game but now there's more emphases on altruism. You also don't need special cards for this game, a standard pack of 52 will scale up to 44 players I worked out. The suits, numbers and royality cards are very important for the game. And I did consider upping the numbers using the joker cards but it got very constrictive. Of course the game works well with drink too. The closes game I can find to the core idea of the game is this invented game called anandis.

I tried to do some probability calculations on who would win depending on how many of each character but it was beyond me. No what I really need is a Card game simulator. Maybe once I get a feel for the maths behind the game, I will write up a complete set of rules and release it to the world under a creative commons attribution licence or something.

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Community Management

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Read Write Web, community management jobs are hot.

What kinds of jobs are companies hiring for right now? In the move towards a social media world, we've seen a series of hires in the past week for variations on the theme “community manager.” Companies are hiring, candidates are hunting and competition for the best people and positions is heating up.

What's even more interesting is the debate we got into at the Web 2.0 Expo about jobs for woman. Some people were suggesting community management is something woman are dawn too. Although I have to say my job boils down to community management too, which is a term I really hate.

So if you combine the two, what do you get? Maybe a more balanced workforce in the future?

Who knows… But I do agree with the first comment – Seems like a risky job to be in when it comes to a rough economy

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Web of Flow

I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.

A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.

Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.

He shows his desktop: Snackr,
Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all
flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots
more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social
interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of
implementations.

This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually
broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers.
People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your
life because of life streaming.

If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.

In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.

Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.

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Torrent Freak TV starts slowly

‘TorrentFreak TV’ is a biweekly recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent. Its quite a basic show but what got me blogging was the Torrent ratings vs TV Ratings. Its at the end of each episode and shows whats the most popular TV shows are based on torrents and the other based on Neilson's rating. There not even close, which shows once again the change of behaviour people have once they have access to anything and everything. I mean why would you settle for crap like Dancing with the Stars when you could watch Heroes or catch up on Dexter? I do wonder if any British shows will break into the chart? Subscribe to this feed for updates.

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…

Oh lovely another screenshot and example for my presentation about data portability in cloud computing.

Yes Yammer went down yesterday and worst still seemed to be throwing out data all over the place. A work mate of mine reported getting some email from Yammer when he's not even registered with the system. I assume the email address came from when someone else request you join Yammer.

The cloud is great, but examples like this are really worrying!

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Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, thumbs up

I upgraded on my laptop with no problem using the network update. Since the upgrade I've noticed a couple of things. One the memory usage is much lower, things seem to be hovering around 1.2gig and I have Firefox 3.03 (28tabs), Evolution, Hamachi, Gossip, Specto, RSSOwl (400+ feeds), Gwibber, dropbox, rescuetime, etc all open and active.

Secondly 3g and phone support is much better. I plugged in the Nokia N80 today on the train and it picked it up and suggested using it as a 3g modem. The windows mobile phone is once again simply plug in and go. No settings needed. I've tried to do both over bluetooth but the Nokia ran out of battery (tipical) and Ubuntu for some reason does not see my Windows mobile phone.

Thridly things seem just faster and smoother. I'm using compiz-fusion and the community have added some nice effects which flow along smoothly using Open GL 2.0. But everything seems more responsive that before.

Its not only the upgrade which has made my laptop happy recently. I found a really good twitter client called Gwibber. It works with almost everything including Twitter, Jaiku, Indent.ca, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, etc. No Plurk, friendfeed or Ping.fm support however. But I was thinking if I look into it, I might be able to alter the flickr or digg option to support RSS feeds generally. Or alter one of the others to match the friendfeed api.

Glyn, sent me a email to finally solve my problem with there being no RSS screensaver. This Ubuntu forum has everything you need to get going, but basiclly you install xscreensaver then configure it for fliptext with the url option enable a rss feed. Its like the Tiger screensaver but with less style.

I've also just discovered Pidgin has tons of plugins including a Skype and Facebook one. The skype one only works if skype is also running and the facebook one does odd things to your contact list. For example if you have requests to be a friend it will throw up a alert for each one for you to accept or deny. This is painful when you  Its a nice idea but very buggy in practice.

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