Tuesday, March 15, 2011

InstaNews - I'm Torn

I watch these tragic events unfold in Japan, I can't help wondering if this nanosecond news reporting is a good thing - or a bad thing.  Probably as with the case with so much technology, it's a little bit of both.  As I said in my post refuting Jon Bon Jovi's comments, there is no black and white. Technology like anything else has it's good and it's bad, and that mix will be like pendulum depending on so many factors.

On the good side, we have virtually instantaneous access to information.  Especially for those in the danger zones, it can help them assess what their next course of action should be.  It also helps then stay in touch with their loved ones and I have to believe that this into itself is something that can be very beneficial.

On the bad, we have the same problem - instaneous access to information.  What we find is that the media can over-report - can report inaccurately and sensationalize and this can sometimes make the situation even worse. 

Like I said, there's good and the bad, every coin has it's two sides and it's impossible to know for certain which way the flip will go at any given point in time.

Welcome - China-Bot

Oddly today, I got 15 hits from China.  15 hits in one day is a large number, but 15 from a country that rarely visits my blog, is unheard of (there had only been 6 hits from China in the last year and a half).

I have a suspicion that this is closely related to my little experiment and it was some individual in China would had scraped my test email address and is now foraging through TecHumanity looking for more email addresses - sadly, none to be found.

Welcome aboard ChinaSpyder or ChinaBot - enjoy your crawling at TecHumanity.

Monday, March 14, 2011

The Fat Lady Has Sung...

...and Microsoft has officially pronounced the Zune to be dead.  Farewell Zune, you really never had a chance.  To the heap of discarded technology goes thou - to your brethren of useless electronic artifacts.

The Day that the Music Died?

Bon Jovi has stated his opinion that Steve Jobs aka Apple aka iTunes has killed the music industry.  To give him his fair due, I've copied what I'd assume to be a direct quote that states his position.

"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time."
There is an awful lot of truth in what Bon Jovi claims.  It's not unlike a conversation that I had with a friend at lunch the other day where the assertion is that book-reading has likewise been affected.  For a true book-reader - or for some of them, there is nothing like the hard-cover book in hand, the sounds of the pages being flipped instead of the buttons being clicked to go from page to page.

That having been said, I would contend that in a lot of ways, the ability to publish and purchase music in a lot of ways has revolutionized the art.  My argument being that it is given independant artists a whole new avenue to get their work out there - that the artists that can't afford the big studio time...well, let's just say that it has evened the playing field a bit.

I don't really mean to contradict Bon Jovi - after all, he is much more qualified than I to speak on the impact of technology on music, but I can't help thinking that his opinion is totall one-sided.  Sure, there are probably areas where music has been hurt, but like so much else, there is good and bad - it's usually a matter of finding that balance - or if seeing which is greater.

I know that personally, I am nuts for discovering new artists on iTunes, without having this immediacy of being able to listen, ponder and purchase, I would have not bought half of my library and I have a big library of music (9,000+ songs at present).

On a side-note, I'm going to cajole my nephew to see if he can offer his professional opinion on this matter.  As he is a lawyer in the music industry, and a musician, I'd love to hear his comments.  However, given that his wife will be having their first child anyday now...this can - and will wait.

Apple iPhone - Daylight Savings Time Bass Ackwards

Oh come on, Apple.  You didn't have enough problems in the past with the clocks on the iPhone? 

November, 2010 was the first bug reported when clocks were supposed to go back.

Then - in the New Year, there were reports of timers not going off, so the few unfortunate souls who depended on their iPod/iPhone to go off so they wouldn't miss the New Year's celebration - and the alarm didn't go off?

Despite these two problems in the last 4 months, now when we run into DST and some models are setting the clocks back an hour instead of forward? That's just nuts.  I'm sorry, maybe there's an explanation, a reason, yada yada yada.  The long and the short of it - that's inexcusable.

Me thinks this doesn't reflect well on Apple at all.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

"The Experiment" - The Only Downfall

Already received my first SPAM, I was interested to see which disposable address it was sent to, but the problem is (and I didn't consider this) is that if the sender uses BCC instead of CC or TO then I don't think that I can see the email address they used for me.

Still - I'm pretty sure I know how they got it.  First of all, I've created a brand new Hotmail account and I've made sure that I don't post the email address anywhere, so I know it's not that email.  That having been said, I've only created two disposable email addresses and used them as a test.  The first was signing up with Apple Support, so I doubt that it came via that route.  The second test was the disposable email address that I posted here, knowing that bots can visit sites and harvest email addresses.  By the process of elimination, this must have been the source.

On a somewhat interesting side-note, today, I've found that all of a sudden, I have 23 hits, all from the same O/S, country and browser, which leads me to believe that it's somewhat likely the same source.  Perhaps this bot is checking other pages on the site for other email addressed, but I don't think so.  Just from the posts that were viewed and the fact that they are older, I suspect that this is an individual how has stumbled upon TecHumanity.  I can't be sure, but that's what I think.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

TecHumanity - The Global Force!

Said totally tongue in cheek, of course.  I'm pretty aware that a lot of hits that my posts get are probably nothing more than spiders and bots trolling and indexing the web for content.  Still, it's interesting to view the statistics sometimes.

No big surprise to me, but Windows is the predominant operating system with 89% of the hits being from a Windows based computer.

Similarly, the typical browser is either Internet Explorer (65%) or Firefox (18%) accounting for 83% of the traffic.

The posts with the most hits are as follows:

1. Yahoo! And OtherInbox...to Borrow from Monty Python "NOSPAM...NOSPAM...NOSPAM..."
112 hits. No surprise here.  This one was noticed and tweeted about from a company in the US.  All of the hits on this article came within a 24h period - the vast majority within an hour or so of it being tweeted about.

2. Social Networking
60 hits.  This is the one that I can't figure out.  This one page consistently gets a couple of hits a week, for no apparent reason.  It's not like it's recent, so I can't figure out why it's active.  It's not like there are click-throughs to it, that - I would be able to tell, but somehow this page is just navigated to.  It might very well be that the title of it "Social Networking" might be the key for a spider or bot to index it, I really don't know.


3. Ho-Ho-Wholly Straddling the Hi Tech World

43 hits.  I must say, this is probably my all time favourite article.  It was a lot of fun to write and was totally different from anything else that I had written.  I suppose that the part of me that loves to write fiction enjoyed creating a Santa Claus based article.  On a side-note, this article was also tweeted about, but definitely didn't result in the same traffic as my NOSPAM one.


4. Multiple Locks -- One Key
24 hits.  This is my most recent article and I think one of the more important ones that I've written about.  I've received a lot of positive feedback that it is given people cause to stop and think about how they use their passwords, and this is precisely why I wrote this article.

5. Blessing of The High Tech Tools
22 hits.  This one was an interesting article.  Well - to be honest, it was more of a short blog than an article.  I think that this one received a few hits as it was noticed and posted on some other blogs.

and finally, here's an extra tidbit about the importance of never trusting an appearance of a URL:
The Old Bait and Switch

Anyways, those are the top five.  Clearly, I'm never going to make a lot of money from all this traffic, but all is good.  So if you got rick-rolled - drop a comment and let me know!

Here's the current breakdown of hits by country:
United States
     692
Canada
            394
Ukraine          
  48
Russia
             37
United Kingdom  
   25
Brazil
             17
Poland
             17
Germany
            14
Malta
              12
Romania            11


Experimental PS - Ducks Away!

I was just folding laundry and I had a Eureka moment (well - I'm not suggesting that it was so much of a Eureka moment that I was running around in my birthday suit - much too chilly for that!).

I was thinking to myself why all of a sudden I had this gust of inspiration and then it came to me - clear as day. 

As per my Saturday morning routine, I was having my coffee and reading the Saturday paper.  There was an article that I read and I can't believe that it is a coincidence.  I didn't consciously base my experiment on this article, but it just had to be the subconscious root of it.

The article was about a book that was written on an experiment that was conducted.  The name of the book is "Moby Duck".  The experiment is that scientists went out into the middle of the ocean with thousands of specially coded little yellow rubber bath ducks.  They had a "duck overboard" moment and dumped them all into the Atlantic.  The premise of this experiment was to use the coding on the ducks to track their movements through the ocean in order to study the currents.

I thought to myself, wow - this is EXACTLY what I am doing - it's just an electronic version, but the premise is exactly the same.  I'm tracking the ebbs and flows of the Internet.

Ducks away! Here's duck #1 to test for harvesting of email addresses on websites:
full_throttle_t01@hotmail.com

An interesting side note that I've noticed.  I've often wondered about some of these foreign hits that I get.  What I have noticed is that very often, I'll get a hit from UAE or some other location immediately upon posting.  Obviously this means that this site is being automatically monitored somehow.  Who knows why - it's a piddly little technology blog, but I'm going to check to see how quickly I get a hit on this blog entry and where it comes from.

Spam and Mailing Lists - An Experiment Starts

One thing that I've often wondered is how easily our email addresses proliferate as they get sold to marketers.  I'm going to try an experiment.  I'm going to create some Hotmail disposable email addresses and I will put out each email address to one specific location to see how quickly it gets harvested or sold/shared to other sites.  Part of this will be for me to identify some of these culprits of this mass marketing.  By only using this email address in one website, it will be very easy to determine how the address is used across sites/marketing partners.

This would clearly be a long term project.  I don't expect to get inundated with spam right away, but I am betting that I can find some sites/portals whose sole existence is to collect email addresses to sell them, so I just might stumble upon it.

Step #1 is to define my strategy - this could be interesting to see exactly how my email address is being shared.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

iPod vs Crackberry - Part Deux

I was perusing my blog statistics and noticing something that I didn't quite expect.  Not that my blog gets a whole lot of traffic, but of the operating systems/devices, I have close to 30 page views from iPod and equivalent devices and only 1 page view off of a BlackBerry.  This leads me to one of three explanations:

1. By nature, iPod users are much more intelligent and discriminating than a BlackBerry user and recognize outstanding content.
2. The lone BlackBerry user just didn't like what he saw or
3. The BlackBerry inadvertently clicked on a link leading to my site and skedaddled away.

I think that I will go with option #1 - it's much better for my ego.  That is my story and I am duly sticking to it!

Sunday, March 6, 2011

I Had Thought That is Just Common Sense - I'm Guessing I Was Wrong

There's an article on PC World today that states that more often than not, law enforcement are first turning to Facebook/Twitter when they have suspects for a specific crime.  I find this hard to fathom, but it's not all that unusual for the perps to boast or talk about it online.  Umm - okay, these people who would boast of their criminal exploits...well, let's just say that they're not likely to be spreading their DNA while in custody.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Multiple Locks -- One Key

I’m going to start off this article with some great news for everyone! I find it much too difficult to remember all the PINs for my banking cards and credit cards so I’ve decided to with one PIN number. I also don’t have a very good memory, so I tucked a note in my wallet with a sheet of paper that reads “Mr. PIN: (905) 555-1204”. That way, all that I have to do is pull out the handy piece of paper if I can’t remember my PIN. What a great idea!

Hopefully, people will realize that I’m not so foolish as to have done the above. I certainly wouldn’t set all my cards to one PIN and then put that PIN number in my wallet, so that someone who has my wallet could have the key to all of my accounts.

However, what this does illustrate is how lax and lazy we can be with regards to our online passwords. As wonderful as this technology is, one of the biggest problems is that there are just too many passwords for us to remember. Without some mechanism to keep track of them, it’s inevitable that we have our “standard” passwords. Unless you have a photograph memory, it’s next to impossible to keep track of all of the sites that you login to.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been as guilty about this as anyone else in the past and I had used the same password for many sites. Sometimes, I would have a site where the password that I used didn’t conform to their standards, so I had a second version which was more compliant.

There’s an old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and this is very much in evidence with security on the Internet.

Intellectually, I’ve always known that this common approach to passwords is a problem, but it took a recent, real-life example to give me a wake-up call.

A few months ago, a popular dating website was hacked. That in itself is bad enough, but the problem is that this dating website did not (and I believe still does not) encrypt their member’s passwords. This gave the hackers immediate access to the login passwords for a certain subset of members. Someone’s initial reaction to this might be, “Not such a big deal, the worst thing that could happen is that they could mess with someone’s profile or send nasty messages to another user.”

Stop and think.

Imagine that some website was hacked and that your password was exposed. Perhaps it’s a message board and that you think that the impact and risk are inconsequential. However, think about if you’ve used the same password or maybe a version of it with some numbers at the end on some other site – and possibly you’ve used the same user id and the same password on other sites

Multiple locks – one key.

Let me give another analogy. Say that you are in the parking lot of the local mall and you’re going back to your car. You reach into your pocket for the key fob and when you press the button, not only does your car honk, flash it’s lights and unlock it’s door, but every car of the same model in the proximity did the same thing. Imagine for a moment that Honda had one key fob/code for all Honda Civics. How concerned would be that anyone can unlock your car?

Multiple locks – one key.

The “easy” solution is to have a different login ID and a different password on each site that you frequent. This brings us back to the original problem that most humans don’t have an easy way to remember all of these credentials and simply writing them down – anywhere (without it being secured) – is just as bad.

What is the solution? There are a number of them and it depends on your own circumstances (refer to disclaimer). I have stumbled across a website called PassPack (www.passpack.com) which for most users is a free online password manager. I’ve started to use PassPack and I’m encouraged by the security that they’ve built in, but I’ve come to realize that even with a website like PassPack, that there is still an inherent problem.

The problem is this – if I store ALL of my user IDs and passwords online, then I am right back to the same conundrum – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. What if the security there was breached? In this case, it’s even worse as my entire login credentials are in one location. It wouldn’t matter if I used the password of gr81for#9930 on one site and yy3-9##9! on another, everything is fully exposed.

What’s the solution? Well – I think this whole issue of security will evolve and it will continue to be fluid as the nefarious hackers try at anything to login to our accounts, so keep in mind that how we handle our identities in the electronic age will need to become more sophisticated.

One possibility would be to maintain a separate login for each site, but have one or two standard prefixes or suffixes that only you know – one that someone would not be able to guess, perhaps something as random such as 2#pff. Don’t write this prefix or suffix down anywhere. Even if your login credentials are exposed, they won’t have your full password.

There may be some of you who don’t do any financial transactions online and as a result, perhaps this isn’t as much of an issue for you. Don’t make this mistake. The more personal information of yours that is available online makes identity theft easier. Having your name, address, perhaps phone numbers or date of birth that you had entered on a “safe” website when you registered, might be all the information that an individual needs to take out a loan or mortgage in your name.

When it comes to security, privacy in the electronic age, it pays to be skeptical and to assume that nothing is secure – there’s too much at risk.

Disclaimer: The author of this article does not recommend any websites, methodologies or practices within this article. The intent of the article is to give the reader cause for thought to examine their own practices, the risks and the best way to address this issue.