Archive for the ‘ESC: Eat, Sleep, Click’ Category

Failedbook

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

2008 – Remember when MTV was music television?
2010 – Remember when you could control what Facebook showed as public?

It all started so well.

Thumbs up They had the audience: Facebook had that demographic that just seemed to span everyone from those old enough to push keys on a keyboard to the insomniac old age pensioners looking to liven up their bleak later years in life.

Thumbs up They had the features: What started to most people as a way to either vent publicly or just share media online evolved into a complete social experience, one that we often felt (and still do) obliged to keep up to date constantly, lest we miss out on the next big thing. You could tag pictures, see pictures of yourself taken by others, comment on status, vent about your work, share your likes and dislikes with others – and more.

Thumbs up They added value: What started out as just indicating hobbies, grew into fan-clubs and groups you could participate into. They added the logic to the server backend that detected trends such as large numbers of people registering the same interests and then auto-creating groups with those names into which you could participate and contribute

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How important is it to Obfuscate your Data?

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Obfuscate: the concealment of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, intentionally ambiguous, and more difficult to interpret.

Or to us normal people: Hide, and in this context: Hiding Data I really can’t stress enough how important this is. For any web-based service that allows the storage or presentation of information that could be misused – that web-service should be obfuscating it’s data.

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News-Flash! License to Kill

Monday, January 4th, 2010

If you’re reading this in the comfort of your infinitely superior Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari browser, warming at the thought of all those out there running Internet Explorer getting hit by all the malicious hacks, while you surf in comfortable bliss – think again. You might very well be one of them. You might very well be the reason your PC is the only one not constantly crashing in your office. You could very well be the assassin in your office, quietly killing off all those other clients on the network…

I’d like you to meet Adobe Flash. Innocent, helpful, flexible, runs-on-every-browser Flash. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you when Kevin, the quiet youtube-a-holic in your office causes everyone’s PC to crash when he watches his favourite video…

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How Social is your Network?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

It’s fairly common today to hear of PCs getting hacked, getting attacked by viruses, controlled by trojans, monitored by spyware – and yet much of it is preventable. You don’t need fancy software or hardware (although it does help) to protect yourself better – you just need to look around your computer and spot the door that most people leave wide open; The Network.

You can call it the Internet, Intranet, WiFi, Broadband, Dialup – whatever you wish – is essence though you are connecting your PC to a network of some sort – and chances are these days that you’re not the only person connected to it. The more ‘social’ you make your network to other people the more likely you’ll have visitors – and chances are they’re not the kind you’d welcome…

The Goal

The ideal is to allow your PC all the access to the network that it needs but to restrict the access that the network has back to your PC. In this way you can prevent many of the common attacks on the network that people expose themselves to without even realising it.

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