It’s getting exciting in the world of cross-network authentication. Let’s review. I can now: sign into Digg using Facebook sign into DISQUS using Facebook or Twitter sign into Facebook automatically using OpenID (with two-factor authentication) or Google sign into FriendFeed using Google, Twitter, or Facebook We’re quickly approaching the point where we’re going to be able to log…
Standards For Addition to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and LinkedIn
Here’s an interesting question: what is your standard for deciding when to add a given person to these various services? Twitter Facebook Friendfeed LinkedIn Here are mine (I think). Twitter Anyone that seems interesting. I treat this as a content discovery method in addition to a personal communication system. I differentiate this by only doing SMS updates to…
LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com
The ultimate way to demonstrate (in a semi-rude fashion) that when people ask you questions they’re just outsourcing work to you, and that they should do it themselves. Example: How many feet in a mile? Answer: [ How Many Feet in a Mile | letmegooglethatforyou.com ]
My Idea For A True Content Aggregation Service
I’ve been struggling with a problem for a while now. The problem is how to properly display on my site everything online that I create vs. everything online that I find and enjoy. The issue is that these two types of content need to be differentiated to provide maximum value to readers. So here are my requirements. I…
The Simple, Effective Way to Track What’s Said About You on the Internet
You don’t have to be an ego-freak to wonder if others are talking about you online. Egosurfing, i.e. the act of looking yourself up in search engines, is something most regular Internet users have done at least once. It’s very human to want to know if we’re affecting the world we live in. So the old way to…
Lifecasting: What It Is and How It Will Change Society
[ Published: May 12, 2002 ] Our society is about to change drastically, and not in 20 or 50 years, and not because of cybernetics or nanotechnology. It’s about to change due to lifecasting. Lifecasting in its current form is where people broadcast, usually via a mounted camera at home, a significant portion of their lives. Justin.tv is…
Internet Security Love
The information security community is a relatively small one, and it remains so even on the Internet. It feels good to get noticed by your fellow infosec enthusiasts — especially when they’re known for being sharp themselves. Some kind words recently came my way from Mike Rothman, of Security Incite. Speaking about my recent post on OS X…
Saying No To “www”: A Fortune 50 Company Analysis
I recently wrote a piece about why we need to abandon the use of “www” both in speech and in technical implementation. The overwhelming response led me to wonder how the business world was handling the issue. How do the “serious” companies deal with requests that don’t include the “www” prefix? I started with the 2007 Fortune 500…
Digg and Reddit: It’s Not Wrong to Create and Submit Your Own Content. In Fact, it’s Necessary.
I wrote recently about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content on meritocracy-based sites like Digg and Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have towards reading self-submitted material. I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it…
It’s Time to Drop the “www”
[ NOTE: My position on this is now different, but I kept the post for historical purposes. I still do agree with parts of it as well. ] It’s no longer necessary to use “www” when referring to websites. It’s a waste of storage, a waste of ink, and it takes 2-5 times as long to pronounce as…
The List Of Shame: Websites That Don’t Allow Special Characters In Their Passwords
It’s 2007. There’s absolutely no excuse for websites today to not allow special characters in their passwords. Whether you use a memory scheme or an encrypted database application for generating and storing your passwords, it’s highly annoying when you come across a site that requires you to lower your password security standards based on character length or complexity.…
Security: Implementing A Secure And Usable Internet Password Scheme
Being an information security consultant I am often asked how to balance the need for online passwords that are both hard to guess and easy to remember. There are a number of solutions out there for dealing with the problem, but the system that I’m about to outline below is an elegant hybrid of simplicity and security. It…
The Whitehouse.gov Website’s Robots.txt File Has 1839 Lines In It
1839? I’m sure they’re not trying to hide anything, as doing so with a robots.txt file would be asinine, but 1839 entries is just insane. At some point you have to start wondering whether the content should be online at all if you don’t want it indexed. I wonder if they’re using any of the directories as honeydirs…
What Mail Server Do The Fortune 100 Companies Use?
Ever wonder what mail servers the top U.S. companies run? I found myself wondering what the top universities used a while back, and I just recently got curious as to what the Fortune 100 companies used as well. The results were quite interesting; it’s always fun to see what some of these admins put in their mail banners:…