Posts Tagged ‘google’
On Failing Gracefully #security #risk
Failing gracefully is one of the most important things, whether it is your responsibility or not ultimately customers believe it is your responsibility to perform in extraordinarily difficult situations. Some companies forget this and force their view and ideas of the world on their customers, that’s one of the quickest ways to turn customers into ex-customers.
I was inspired when I was at a customer site checking my Google Reader and selected Little Gamers, which is considered profanity according to the content filter, and received the message below. I could see the item in Google Reader when I used https rather than http to access Google Reader, although the cartoon was obviously blocked due to the content filter.
This is a fine example of failing gracefully.
GeoLocation and Data Leakage Prevention #foursquare #gowalla #dlp #security
To make it clear I’m not speaking of the information being broadcast by employees to social media, I’ve been musing on the risks of Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) of third party employees such as consultants using geolocation services such as foursquare, brightkite or Gowalla. Many companies – very usual with consulting companies – have requirements that their employees do not release the names of customers or customer data to the media, this includes releasing data pertaining to services which are offered, these policies have yet to be fully enforced when it comes to geolocation services.
For a consulting company, such as mine, which has a reasonably diverse offering of security software to customers, yet for a company who is known as a RSA, Oracle or Novell integrator it can create risk vectors when it is known that their in house software leans towards a specific platform. In this way it could become public knowledge that a company uses a specific product, and based on the date of the visits information pertaining to versions can be inferred.
Naturally posting the geolocation to a service such as foursquare doesn’t necessarily open security holes, and it may not violate the standard of “Due Care” in that it is not necessarily negligent to release this information. Although it might not be in the best interest of the customer to make this public knowledge.
On the other had there is also an advantage to be had, in any cases of disputes a travel log like an entry log can be produced as corroborating evidence, although without direct evidence this merely proves where the physical access control device was and not the location of the disputed individual. And only circumstantially where the owner was located.
Your thoughts?
Image source: me
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A catalog of this year’s risky articles #2010
Risk is something which can be difficult to evaluate for the average person, there is a lot of work which goes in to learning not to do the two things that people usually do when they are confronted with risk:
- Ignore
- Overreact
Facebook is the new Portal for Insurers and Banks #social #finance
It looks like every man and his dog needs to have a Facebook page, even banks…
@Google and @FaceBook battle over the back of @FriendFeed? #social #feedburner
It has been almost 1.5 weeks since Google’s FeedBurner removed the Frie…
Prosper allows loans to fund Kiva projects #microfinance
Some days ago I tweeted to Prosper, a personal loan marketplace, whether they…
Social Revolution – Do You Get It?
I don’t really think most people get “it” when it comes to …
Secret Google campaign against Hyves? #social #networking
Just noticed that Google Translate translates the name of the Dutch social ne…
Company Policy or People #hr
I find a 400 plus page manual of office policies and job descriptions for eac…
Social Media Syndication – Feedback Loop
In the last two days I’ve not been posting so much, and focussing on up…
Google Scribe – Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits #google
I started playing with Google Scribe and wanted to see if patterns emerged so…
@Google, please stop with the language! #google
I have my Google account set up with English as the preferred language, my br…
Did The LinkedIn Certificate Expire Again? #linkedin
For the last 2 years LinkedIn has been running a bad poor IT management depar…
Advert: Reserve your Agile/SCRUM Pack #scrum #agile
When I just started I too had trouble with getting all the items I required t…
GMail Quota and Statistics (follow-up) #google #gmail #dashboard
On August 11th 2007 I exceeded my GMail quota, I blogged about it here. At th…
More SMS banking by M&T #sms #bank #risk
Brian Szymanski send a reply to me concerning another bank implementing SMS b…
Solving the URL shortening problem #twitter #tweet
I don’t understand why url expansion after url shortening is such an is…
Is RevTrax violating FaceBook privacy policy? #facebook @RevTrax #privacy
I just read an article Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell in the …
China acquires more than China… #hacks
This morning/night China’s networks were sending rerouting messages to …
Implementation of Security #risk
The lack of trained and experienced computer security people working in small…
ING reveals names using account numbers #bank #risk
Last week I saw an episode of a popular Dutch Ombudsman program Kassa, they r…
Musing: Why can I fly solo?
After seeing a program about a lifecoach trying to find the time to get his p…
Image source Radio Nederland Wereldomroep
This year’s articles about programming #2010
In 2010 I was less focussed on programming articles on the blog than previous years, still I have managed to create some interesting articles with code in 2010. This is an overview of the activity:
Sync Web with Phone #html #javascript #scratchpad
Having some fun today with QR codes, JavaScript and the Google Analytics URL …
The Structure of a Daily Scrum #agile #scrum
The only questions that are asked in the Daily Scrum, aka Stand-Up, are: What…
Features I Still Miss in Mail #mail #email
UPDATE: GMail has introduced my number 3. YEAH! (Gmail introduces Priority In…
YouTube Channel Unsubscribe #bookmarklet
I like YouTube, and often subscribe to new channels and unsubscribe after a w…
PCI is nice (or what I do) #pcidss
Since I started working for my company I’ve been exposed to PCI DSS (Pa…
Solving the URL shortening problem #twitter #tweet
I don’t understand why url expansion after url shortening is such an is…
VeriSign PIP Browser Certificate workaround (PIN Request) #identity #openid
VeriSign – Personal Identity Portal is a OpenID provider with multiple …
Image source D’Arcy Norman
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New Google FeedBurner #rss
As I was writing the last article about Google’s FeedBurner I noticed that they have a new interface, which is far more like Google Analytics.
This means new views of the data, like maps and more detailed view of the interaction with the FeedBurner data, although the click data generated fron the last post is probably .
Perhaps this is the Phoenix…
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@Google and @FaceBook battle over the back of @FriendFeed? #social #feedburner
It has been almost 1.5 weeks since Google’s FeedBurner removed the FriendFeed subscribers from it’s statistics. Or is it that FriendFeed no longer publishes the data to FeedBurner? I know that the 1000+ FriendFeed readers can still view my blog items – if they want to – and I have no issue with the artificially boosted numbers being brought back to normal.
However this has revived a 2009 discussion in the Google Group about the quality of FeedBurner, and the need for there to be an alternative to this poor service this Google application is delivering. However none seem to mention the elephant in the room: FaceBook.
In 2009 FaceBook acquired FriendFeed, and with it the now infamous Like button. At the same time Google was busy developing their Wave, on which they seemed to wipe-out earlier this year. As I’ve said previously the time between the mainstream acceptance of the Social Media application and the start up is between 2-4 years. It’s could be easy for me to blame Google for not acquiring a great product like FriendFeed, yet now with this tit for tat strategy that FaceBook and Google have been employing it is no wonder that applications, like FriendFeed, and users thereof are being further effected by this exercise in Game Theory.
FeedBurner has indeed been living up to their caption: “We set feeds on fire!” Now all we need to wait for is the Phoenix that arises from the ashes.
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Secret Google campaign against Hyves? #social #networking
Just noticed that Google Translate translates the name of the Dutch social networking site Hyves as MySpace, is this a secret plot by Google?
On a different note, congrats to Hyves. I once said your stock options weren’t worth the paper they are written on, and now you sold yourself to a tabloid newspaper which isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. 
The power of RSS in Social Media Syndication in Content Curation #amplify
Inspired by @svartling I started playing with amplify, and added it to my Social Media Syndication Network Flowchart which I’m updating.
The way I’m setting it up focuses on the way your message can be spread in your information stream, by making your information stream more visible. This naturally includes the regular blogging (RSS) and microblogging applications, and events which are interesting for 3rd parties. For somebody like me who produces many Likes, Social Bookmarks and other items I discovered that the value of being able to extract and automatically curate items from the feed such asTwitterFeed and del.icio.us.
TwitterFeed can be used to extracted items and post these to a number of platforms based on keywords, although the keyword filter has always been poor and their OpenID implementation half-hearted.
Another RSS feature comes from del.icio.us, which in my opinion is one of the only Yahoo! product which hasn’t been exceded by a far superior Google product, del.icio.us produces multiple RSS feeds, specify feeds can be extracted based on the tags which are assigned.
Naturally FaceBook, Twitter and other services produce their own RSS feeds, the another great Yahoo! product Yahoo! Pipes gives us the ability to curate content multiple sources, which can all be used for external sources and for people like me who discuss multiple subjects which can be curated in different ways.
RSS has never been the exclusive domain of blogs, but they are more powerful than most think.
(Posted with Amplify)
Sync Web with Phone #html #javascript #scratchpad
Having some fun today with QR codes, JavaScript and the Google Analytics URL Builder to produce an image which can be used to sync the webpage you are on to your phone using a QR code.
document.write("<img src=\"http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl="+ escape(document.href) +"&choe=UTF-8\">");
Naturally the Javascript code should probably be more DOM oriented, but this was just for fun!
Digg with del.ico.us and Reddit #social #bookmarking
Since the change of Digg to New Digg there have been many prominents complaining about features having been removed and features being added. One of the features I like, which many of the older Digg users say they dislike is the ability to import RSS feeds into your account. The first thing I did was add my blog, and then I started thinking about the things that produce RSS feeds with interesting items, like del.icio.us. Read the rest of this entry »
