Today morning I got back to my normal routine and wanted to change the status on facebook from sleeping to back to work. I was presented with this window when I tried to log in. I am wondering why facebook is doing their maintenance during the peak hour. Why can’t they do it in the night/weekends? Any security problems?
Thanks to JP for the link
I have 10 invites for iMedix, your source for health information. It is still in alpha. If you are interested in getting an invite, drop me your email address.
I just posted a post on Social Networks and Identity Theft on TechBiz Media. Check it out here. It is about a security warning and I have posted it to increase the awareness about possible identity theft among social network junkies.
Listen to a satirical song dedicated to Google employees. Thanks to Phillipp Lenssen for the link.
I missed much of the brouhaha on how paid elite bloggers to participate in the People Ready campaign. I don’t doubt the integrity of people like Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, etc. Their credentials are so strong that events like this will not affect them. But I would have expected them to put a disclosure in the posts. That would have added to the credibility. You can call me old school. I do understand that marketing is conversation but all conversations cannot be marketing. Under such a scenario, how do I know that the conversation I am having with a person I trust, is a marketing one or his sincere opinion. I liked the response given by Om Malik on this issue. It definitely raised my respect towards him. In fact, Dave Winer nails this issue correctly when he says
Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.
Check out this story on Ubuntu Forums about how an user verified his Ubuntu installation with Microsoft’s genuine advantage test. It is really funny.
Thanks to Slashdot for the link
The Register reports
Londoner Jamie Cansdale has just discovered a new approach. He had the temerity to make Redmond’s software better.
As a hobby, Cansdale developed an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio. TestDriven.NET allows unit test suites to be run directly from within the Microsoft IDE. Cansdale gave away this gadget on his website, and initially received the praises of Microsoft.
In fact, Microsoft was so pleased with him, it gave him a Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award, which it says it gives to “exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others”.
However, his cherished status did not last. In December 2005, he started getting emails from a Microsoft executive called Jason Weber. The problem was that TestDriven.NET supported the Express edition of Visual Studio. Express is the cut-down version that anyone can download for free from the Microsoft website. It is limited in various ways, and is intended only for hobbyists and students. Everyone else is supposed to shell out for the paid-for versions.
The story then continues ……..
Finally, Microsoft lost patience, and in the last few days has hit Cansdale with a flurry of lawyers’ letters, also available on his website [see here and here]. Cansdale now has until 4pm Wednesday 6 June to disable the Visual Studio Express features of his product.
Wired Blogs points out to a possibility of potential identity theft attack when your Ipod is stolen or lost. The person who steals/finds your ipod gets an opportunity to kickstart an identity theft campaign if they want to. Your ipod just handed to them your full name and your email address. This tool could be easily misused, in many number of ways, to launch an identity theft attack. This possibility and the easiness with which this embedded information can be spoofed makes an itunes user vulnerable. I just hope that Apple takes a second look on this “embedding mechanism” and comes up with something better.
“There’s absolutely no reason that it had to be embedded, unencrypted and in the clear,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner.”
