Careless Facebook profiling can lead to Identity Theft!

I just got in contact with a old friend from High school and another friend of mine suggest the new friend. I was looking at her profile and couldn't believe what I saw:

As you can see this is not good I was amazed at how many people are giving out there birthdays and who they are married to to friends and family. So we heard about how people are claiming they need help or are in need of desperate money. This is nothing new, as you know people are having hard economy times and people are using the social engineering to scam people out of money.

I feel that I should warn people the important necessity.   You shouldn't be broadcasting your DOB and who your married to to your friends, just in case they get hacked.

Recent activity indicates that identity thieves are hacking into trustworthy profiles before selling on the login details to interested parties. This information is used by spammers to target legitimate users, posting misleading links on their "walls" – personalized message boards.

[Via Computing.Co.UK]

This deservese a little mind and a lot of understanding.   By the spammers hacking into facebook accounts they have the chance to scam or spam people with links to possibly have a virus or trojan installer.

[ad#ad2-right]For example This one blog talks about the Virus:

Symantec's Norton Antivirus software has flagged this as a "high risk" Infostealer.Gampass virus. More info on this particular Trojan vius is here. (Note: Symantec warns the risk level is "low," since it originated in 2006, but this new Facebook email is a new iteration of the same virus.)

You might be inclined to click on this link because it's from a friend, but they did not intentionally send it to you -- and yes, their Facebook photo is attached, too.

[Via Sync-blog]

Now I went searching through my friends list and also found this little bit of information.  As you can see this one is asking for people to use there account to scam people out of money.  They could use this to find out even more information of the Other partner and make you believe your talking to the real deal.   Saying they need money because they are stuck over seas or something like that.   I've seen this on other blogs where people have sent money to "friends" but are actually people who are the scammers.  Then if you send the money you are out of luck with your money and possibly your friends to.  I am sure there are more but this is prime examples of what you shouldn't do and why.

So what can you do to prevent Identity Theft and/or being scammed?

[ad#cricket-right-ez]

• Roboform Review — A Password Manager that will help protect your passwords from key loggers and other such phishing sites.    I strongly recommend it to to all who are security minded. (Never use the same password for all your accounts)


• Are you worried about your identity? -- This is good information in checking out sites that might be questionable.  You can find out what type of site it by using your brains.


• Old Phish Become New again -- This is blog post about twitter and what may happen if you did give out your password.   This is a good example of why you never should give out your password to third party websites.


• Twitter Spammers a getting more smarter -- This is also good example of what happens when you see become friends with someone who isn't real.   You could be the next to be spammed and/or impersonated.

If you follow some common steps you to could prevent from being the victim or getting your Identitiy stolen.   Some things to remember is Never tell anyone your Birthday the whole date like someone did on twitter a few days ago.  It's nice that they are growing older but that gives people that much more information to use to steal your money or your idenitiy.   Think before you give out any personal information like Age, Married, who your married to and anything that might be used to be able to access your account or your impersonate you.  Remember only you can prevent from being scammed or lossing your identity, you wouldn't want to have to pay for your mistakes.

Google SearchWiki dies after two days!!

According to Techcrunch Google Pulls the Google SearchWiki.  Unsure as to way  but here's what they said:

Users are reporting that the recent changes to Google’s search engine, called SearchWiki, have simply disappeared from the site. It’s certainly gone from my account.

[ad#ad2-right]User reactions were mixed but weighted heavily towards “this is lame,” and there was no way to turn off the features other than to conduct Google searches without being logged in. Another way to turn it off was to switch search engines.

[via TechCrunch]

I've got my theory on this, and it's quite a good theory.   I think it was a making search results come up wrong or not at all.   The last two days they've had that going my page views have drop BIG time.    According to my Stats I've had 236 Unique Visits for Thursday, and 232 Wednesday.   My Friday stats show that I only got 185 Unique Visits, dropping 40 to 50 people.  My stats for today which is incomplete shows that I've only gotten 136 unique visits.  Although that is complete you can see where I dropped drastically.   I think Google was getting yelled at by websites due to the stats dropping.   I am guessing people could tell if they wanted to go to a site just by reading the comments.  This will hurt every site, including TechCrunch.   I will say this is only a theory and this might or might not be the case.

This however is the best possible explanation that I could come up with.  Do you know why they did that?  I don't know?

Living the Life of a Blogger 101

Having been blogging for the last few months and years. I've learned so much from blogger the platform. I thought I would talk about that in this post. To give those who want to use Googles Blogger platform to there fullest. It is inconsequential to the grand scheme of blogging. It is not enough to just blog it has to be some kind of meaning in it. You have to think of how best can I help people out. It is legal to use fair use. That is why congress has put it into congress.

Fair Use comes from the idea of using something that is 'Copyrighted' and use some portion of it to talk about or as a demonstration. Most people don't understand that, you can use anything on the web as long as you don't publish there material fully. I like to us hulu for example. I've embedded there videos on my site, and talked about Hulu from time. This last few weeks they had clues out on there site. I started trying to solve the clues they Published to better help figuring out there clues. Although they might consider there promotion as being copyrighted. I used there clues to publish what I considered was fair use. They couldn't do much other than smile that some one started blogging about there clues weekly because once they published there clues. I had the right to try to figure the clues out. I actually loved doing it.

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So why do we blog if we can have it protected?

In truthfulness, anything I publish will inevitable be published somewhere else on some one elses blog. Now they have the right to publish small clips of my stuff or even to link to my site. That comes from understanding my community and relationship with others. I have to let them do what they want with my blog post to an extent because I can't make the readers mad by sending out the old fashioned "Cease and Desist" orders. That would make my readers mad. I know how important it is to make my readers becoming my FAN.

How do you make your readers a Fan?

I identify with my readers because I know how I once was a reader myself. I have certain blogs that I like to read from time to time. I've got my blogs I like to read and comment on and I hope you do too. It's something that comes from years of reading and having a passion for telling people my point. I know people are uncomfortable making comments on blogs. They think the writer will not see or read it. Some also think the owner of the blog will delete the comment. That comes with understanding that we have to prune the comments because sometimes we have those annoying spam comments and others that will try to start a flame comment war. Those aren't needed in blogs we either like it or make a comment how the writer could of made it better. I am constantly thinking about how I can make my published work better and having more content. This is how I do it, I think about what I like to talk about and I make it more real. I then make it more reader friendly so that, I get the readers involved and let them choice what they want to read. People are always going to be picky they will always want a choice that is always going to happen.

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How do we get readers involved in a blog?

Little things can get readers to become involved in a blog. I remember a time on how I talked a little about Hulu the first time. I got a comment from the creator of Hulu to leave a comment. That was Awesome and Softened me to see just how many people read my blog and comment about my blog. I've learned during a regular blogging session, I need to keep commenting on the blogs because it makes people want to get involved in my blog and will greatly increase my blog community.

Can I start my own blog?

You can start a free blog just as I did. You would only need to sign up to Blogger and start blogging. Giving people the ability to start blogging is essential to making a difference in my writing ability because of the possible comments people will make on my blog. That is what I want to see more of is comments because people will always want to read the comments on a blog. Just like TechCrunch people love to go to that site to read or hear comments. I've done it, and I am sure others do to. That is a community and I like that type of community.

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In response to Jason Calacanis!!!

Jason Calacanis' First New Email Post.

He retires from blogging and begins bulk emailing?  Is fark?  I think not, in his first email.  He talks about how bloggers over reacts with blogs.

Most of the time you get the people who really love to blog, and those who try to make money.  It comes with the territories, but it isn't something that we do for ourselves. It's something that we do for our readers.  So let's get down to the business at hand.

[ad]

Is blogging dead?
————————-
Yes, it is. Officially.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about this question and while blogging is
clearly booming, there has been a deep qualitative change in the
nature of the ’sphere. There are so many folks involved in blogging to
today, and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social
accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so
desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we
blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual
hearing.

[Via TechCruch]

Thanks to all the help from the social media group! I think we are more able to find more than Two years ago, finding a blog would of been, just luck! If not, by chance, we would of had to really search until we found that blog we liked and wanted to keep reading.

Others think blogging is a skill, I on the other hand think it's something that comes with the territories. If you want to blog, you have to make yourself available to talk about anything that you're passionate about.

Does that mean we need more readers? I say NO!  We have plenty of readers. They are just looking the blog that connects them to there ways of thinking. It isn't the writer that determines this but by the readers. Who wants to be a better person by making contributions to their favorite blogs.

[ad]

Excelling in blogging today is about link-baiting, the act of writing
something inflammatory in order to get a link. Many folks say I’m
responsible for link-baiting–these people are absolute idiots. I’ve
never tried to get any of these insecure, lonely freaks to link to
something I’ve said.

[Via TechCrunch again]

Jason if you read this, I don't want any link love from you.  I say that truthfully, I am not insecure or Lonely that needs link love from anyone who has quite a few followers.  I really don't care who likes me or hates me, I do this because I love to blog.  Jason just because of a few bad apples in the group doesn't mean all of the blogsphere is that way.

I could care less about getting link love.  I admit, I would like to have some but that is beside the point.  My integrity is nothing to laugh at.  My philosophy is that I'll get my followers because of my principles. It just burns my biscuits that you have the tenacity to make a comment about bloggers like that.

[ad]

I personally think,  you're not doing this to get some attention!  I know better.  You are doing this because the blogosphere has mistreated you.  I understand it, I realize that you are tired of the blogosphere trying to do all this stuff to you.  So with that I'll end it, saying this:

"Those who do nothing, have nothing to complain about.  Those who are great have great complaints thrown at them!"

Hulu Discusses Private Beta, Suggests Public Launch Time Frame

I had the chance yesterday to sit down with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu, to discuss how things have gone during its private beta and where the service is heading in 2008. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Hulu currently has “several hundred thousand users” who have submitted “tens of thousands” of feedback messages.
• The public launch should come in the next couple of months, probably around the end of March.
• High definition video will be rolled out gradually over the coming year with more and more content; the company believes that 2008 will be a year when online video companies start focusing less on convenience and more on quality.
• Hulu has tripled its amount of content since private beta launch, with many episodes of shows going back to the first seasons, not just the last five that have aired on TV.
• Downloads might come in the long term, but they are not something that Hulu is focusing on currently.
• RSS feeds have been added so users can keep track of new content added to the site.

[Via TechCrunch]

I didn't copy everything just the points that I thought were most important for people to to find out about what Hulu is going to do in the coming months.

Blogger as an OpenId provider

Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year.
[Via TechCrunch]

I'm testing out the comment system with openID. I'd like to know what people think about it and should it stay or go? These are the questions that I've got, let me know what you think.

Microsoft Using YouTube To Promote Vista & Live, Leaves Comments Open

Microsoft has taken its marketing push for Windows Vista and Windows Live into enemy territory by offering demonstration videos on YouTube (example above). The new channel (link) was launched December 21.

The content itself isn’t all that exciting, but they do demonstrate various positive aspects of Vista and Live that viewers may not be aware of. The more interesting aspect is that Microsoft would use the Google owned YouTube for such as promotion; it certainly demonstrates just how powerful the market position of YouTube has become over the last 2 years that Microsoft would use it to promote their products.

[Via TechCrunch]

As you can see Microsoft is trying a new avenue of promoting Vista. I am also going to start Blogging again after being off for a week and Will start blogging from time to time, until some juicy stuff comes my way!! ;) Sorry had to take a week off for my Sanctity!!

Mahalo get's social

New wiki-based search engine Mahalo is launching social networking features today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris.

Mahalo is a search engine that focuses on user link submissions and an editorial process to theoretically produce better search results than algorithm-only engines like Google. It first launched in May 2007.

The company already pays users for quality submissions. Today, they are adding user profiles and other social networking features to further incentivize users to submit quality content.

[Via Techcrunch]

man I thought this was coming. Go check out the full article at Techcrunch. I think it's a good idea but I am unsure as to how well it will do!!

Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions

Last March NBC Universal and News Corporation announced a joint venture that we initially thought would result in a direct competitor to YouTube. As details emerged, it became clear that the two media conglomerates were not planning a video sharing website for user generated content but rather an online distribution channel for premium video content, including TV shows, movies, and short clips.

In the months following the companies’ initial press release, we gave the joint venture a lot of grief for failing to pick a name for the project, eventually settling on a name - Hulu - that meant “cease” and “desist” in Swahili, copying Google’s mission statement, and receiving not the greatest vote of confidence from NBC Universal’s own chief digital officer.

Behind all of this criticism was a high degree of doubt that NBC and News Corp. were ever going to get Hulu out the door before the joint venture became irrelevant. In September, NBC had even announced a video downloading service that appeared to cannibalize its own joint venture with News Corp. However, this past week Hulu confirmed that it would indeed hit its self-imposed October deadline by launching in private beta on Monday, October 29th. And this past Friday, CEO Jason Kilar and other Hulu representatives demonstrated the new service to us.

While we have not been able to try out the private beta ourselves yet, I was very impressed by the preview of Hulu’s interface and the bulk of its features. Before going into my thoughts about the website, however, I should get some of the many details about Hulu on the table, especially since it’s been months since the original announcement.

Hulu is still a joint venture exclusively between NBC Universal and News Corporation. It exists as a website through which users can stream a collection of TV shows, movies, and short clips on-demand for free without any limits on how many times you can view each video. Hulu also exists as a distribution network of premium content for several partner websites - AOL, MSN, MySpace, Comcast, and Yahoo - that will display Hulu’s videos for free but in their own branded players. In addition to these partnerships, users themselves form a viral distribution network of sorts since Hulu allows its videos to be embedded in any website and shared via email. Hulu makes money in all cases from advertising, which it displays in and around the videos it serves. I’ll go more into the details of embedding and advertising later on.

The only problem that I see is that you can't expand the picture it's in a window with other stuff!!

Google And Nielsen Link Up To Measure TV Ads

Google is putting its chocolate into Nielsen Media Research’s peanut butter. The two companies have signed a pact to cooperate on measuring the effectiveness of TV advertising. Currently, companies can buy Google TV Ads only on the Dish satellite network.

Google is bringing second-by-second analytics and feedback to the TV advertising world, but all it can do right now is measure what’s happening inside the set-top box. The deal with Nielsen will allow Google to add a crucial layer of demographic data. The combination of Google’s second-by-second reporting of which ads are being watched with Nielsen’s panel-based demographics should prove delicious to advertisers. Now all Google has to do is gain a foothold in other cable and satellite TV networks besides Dish.

I bet this will be the beginning on Ads in video.

Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms

A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.

There is some suggestion that the changes may be related to the sale of text link ads, but at this stage this is not backed by evidence, and a range of sites I checked that are selling text link ads were showing no change in page rank.

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Blogs in the TechCrunch network (we don’t link heavily on each page..nor do we have a particularly large network) and the Gawker Media network (who like us don’t go nuts with links) maintained their page rank whilst blogs across a range of other networks saw big decreases. The AOL owned Weblogs Inc was not immune, with leading Gadget blog Engadget dropping from PR 7 to PR5, Autoblog (6 to 4) and DownloadSquad (5 to 4).

The move by Google could well cause many smaller blog networks, including a number with funding, to close given their heavy reliance on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks for each site. Although traffic alone can and does sell ads on bigger sites, a drop from say PR7 to PR4 in one example makes the ad sell that much more difficult, particularly on blogs with little traffic. I’d suggest that the Deadpool will soon see a number of new entrants.

I guess that means I've got to watch what I link to!!

Hulu Set to Launch on Monday

After gearing up all summer, Hulu (the NBC-Fox joint venture that is going up against YouTube) was supposed to launch in private beta yesterday, says a source. That is why NBC pulled its videos from YouTube last week. (This, after NBC abandoned iTunes for Amazon, and already started offering free downloads of its shows on the Web).

But launching a video Website can be hard—even if it is just a private beta. Now, says our source, Hulu is gunning for a private beta launch next Monday, so that it can still meet CEO Jason Kilar’s self-imposed October deadline. That date could slip until the following Wednesday and technically be considered on-time, of course, but Kilar probably wants to avoid the trick-or-treat jokes. We’re still waiting for our invites.

I thought it would launch soon. I've been getting hints that they started dropping other services. I figure Techcrunch is right!!

Chinese Redirect Google, Yahoo Traffic to Baidu

Wow. After getting Google and Yahoo to sell their souls for cash, the Chinese government is now thanking them for their shameful sellout by REDIRECTING ALL CHINESE TRAFFIC from Google Blog Search, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and YouTube.com to the heavily censored Chinese search engine, Baidu. TechCrunch links to speculation that the moves is a reaction to president Bush's meeting with the Dalai Lama, but I think it's party of the nationwide general crack down on everything during the Chinese Communist Party Congress.

It is a shame they are doing this, I wonder what the US is going to do to fix the problem!!