Today I tried out a new service by one of the smartest guys I know, Michael Geist. It’s called iOptOut and it’s a gateway for Canadians to voluntarily put themselves on do-not-call lists *before* the company contacts you, as well as giving you a legal recourse for when they call you anyways (those bastards). Within hours of signing up for the service I got 8 calls from 1-480-543-1171. Spooky coincidence.
Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.
Microsoft’s live.com is offering email addresses, and the usual land grab rush is on to “secure” your identity on the service. What most people don’t realize is that securing a “prime real estate” email address is probably the LAST thing you want to do.
An obvious email address suffers from an insidious kind of spam you’ll never be able to properly filter or get rid of: I’m talking about wrongly addressed email.
Have you ever wanted to send a gift certificate to someone anonymously? One of the problem with electronic transactions is that quite often they tell the recipient exactly who you are. This isn’t a problem when it comes to gifts for your family or friends, but it can be more tricky if you are running an online contest for your blog.
Social network site fatigue is when you’re sick and tired of trying to find your friends when everyone jumps ship to the Next Big Thing. The biggest problem with the web 2.0 revolution of “social network apps” is that there is no universal identifier. In real life, governments use social insurance numbers to tell the different between two people with the same name. One the web there is no universal way to tie your various profiles and data sources together.
Several sites are trying to position themselves as the purveyors of your online identity and social group connections. But don’t we already have a solution for that?
One of my friends wanted to secure the profile for her 17 year old daughter and she was asking me what the heck all the application privacy settings mean on Facebook. I didn’t have a good answer for her. If I’m asking myself “wtf does that application setting mean?” I figure there’s more than one other person in the crowd with a dim light bulb over their head. Here’s what I could figure out to the best of my knowledge.
Now you too can become one of the 1% of the people on Facebook who understand how their Facebook apps (widgets) are configured.
Twitter has it’s dark side as Steve Rubel of Edelman recently found out.
This is a guest post by Tim Nash of Venture Skills
There a three basic areas to reputation management:
But why is this important to us?
Recruiters use web anonymity to find more information out about job applicants. Is your web identity a help or a hindrance to your employability? Thoughts on web identity and job search from a pseudo-anonymous blogger
The potential downside a lot of my friends and acquaintances don’t realize is that Facebook is more like LinkedIn than MySpace and it is “on the radar” of your employers. People have already lost their jobs because of their Facebook activity. Most people don’t think about online privacy concerns like these unless they’ve had a bad experience because of being too free with information.
But Facebook can be used safely and with little impact on the rest of your life by following these tips.
So an Ottawa grocery chain (Farm Boy) has fired employees because of postings they made on Facebook under their real identity (via: Michael Geist). Facebook is a MySpace clone focused on University/College students. Devon Bourgeois and James Wood are now jobless because of messages they posted on a message board on Facebook (although it was [...]
(this is a follow-up to the Great Firewall of Canada)
spyblog.org.uk notes how “systems like British Telecom’s CleanFeed are inherently vulnerable to reverse engineering attacks, which can reveal the list of censored websites”. While I doubt the technique mentioned in the paper still works, it does give more technical information about CleanFeed than I’ve seen [...]
The title of this article is, of course, a reference to the Internet censorship that is rampant in China.
Mark Goldberg pointed me to the press release of “Project Cleanfeed Canada”. Canadian carriers Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, MTS Allstream, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw, TELUS, and Videotron have all opted in to a blacklist provided by Cybertip.ca, [...]
This is related to my series on web anonymity and how privacy does not exist online (part 1, part 2, part 3).
It’s a video by Dan Frankowski with wonderful examples of how information can be tied together to find out who you are even when information was supposed to be private.
Very well done, worth taking [...]
I recommend reading Web Anonymity 101 - Digital Breadcrumbs as an introduction, and Web Anonymity 102 - A Case Study of how easy it is to find information about a person online.
For most people being anonymous on the Internet is not a life-or-death matter. You aren’t dissenting against a fascist police state, or trying to [...]
dooced: to lose one’s job because of one’s website.
This is the highest profile case of a Canadian blogger getting fired because of his website. Garth Turner has been ejected from the Conservative Party. Like it or not, when you blog you The irony is that I’ve been a Conservative longer than most people who [...]
We are putting more of our lives online with the “social networking” Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is becoming easier to find information about a person. People are building extensive databases about themselves without thinking about the long-term consequences. The Internet is forever; once something is online it is cached and archived.
We are living more of our lives online. In real life if someone followed you, listened in on your conversations and went through your photo album without your permission you would call the police (or maybe they are the police). Things are different online. That information is easy to find; easier than people think.
There’s a new search site called the Internet Address Book. Put in a person’s name and town and they’ll try to find them on all of the top social networks: MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Flickr, ICQ, Xanga and Hi-5. This looks like a great resource for digging up dirt on blind dates and job interviewees.
Not only [...]
Mark Goldberg doesn’t understand how the Internet works. He thinks that the CRTC can mandate ISPs to block content that originates outside of our borders.
The news will be breaking shortly, so you might as well read about it here first. Late in the day on Tuesday afternoon, I helped in filing the first application requesting [...]
 | On Why FriendFeed Ma… on How to Import Your Twitter Con… |
 | Charlie on How to Import Your Twitter Con… |
| Charlie on How to Import Your Twitter Con… |
 | Stevi Deter on How to Import Your Twitter Con… |
Click to subscribe using email
Most Popular Posts
Most Recent Posts
Site Map
Random Post
About Me
Subscription Options
Free Software
Wordpress Tools
How to Earn a Six Figure Income from Blogging in Two Easy Steps
How NOT to be a Successful Blogger
81 movies for geeks that do not suck
Web Anonymity 101 - Digital Breadcrumbs
76 Romantic Movies for Guys and Girls
107 t-shirts for geeks that do not suck