Tag Archive for Facebook

| July 2, 2011
Comments Off on AccountKiller KO’s Online Accounts

AccountKiller KO’s Online Accounts

AccountKiller KO's Online Accounts AccountKiller.com says it is a website dedicated to helping social network users reclaim their personal data. The website helps users reclaim their personal data by explaining and ranking social networking sites. The website explains how to delete online accounts and ranks them by how hard it is to reclaim your personal information.

AccountKiller provides instructions to remove your account or public profile on most popular websites, including Skype, Facebook, Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Live, Hotmail, MSN,  Twitter,  Google (GOOG), and many more.

The creators of AccountKiller have also created a blacklist of sites that do not allow their users to reclaim their online account information.  According to the website a black-listed site indicates it’s probably impossible or highly difficult to get rid of your account. Among the sites AccountKiller has blacklisted are:

The grey-listed sites may cost you some irritation or effort – but it should be possible to terminate your online accounts says AccountKiller. These sites will require you need to send a mail to the site, send a message using a webform or even call them to recover your personal information.

The creators of AccountKiller say that social media sites purposely make it difficult or even impossible to delete your account for two reasons. First, because they are profiting from their users’ data. These sites are in the business of data customer retention.  Alternatively, they suggest that these developers may simply be ignorant, lazy, or incompetent, i.e. not being able to create some account deletion function.

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Kudos to the creators of AccountKiller, I now recommend this site to anyone who has questions about these social networking sites. It is time for social networking sites to provide transparency into their real business model, data collection, otherwise, there could be a social networking bubble.

What do you think?

Do you know how to get out of your social networking sites? Can you?

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Apple (AAPL)
Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| June 13, 2011
2 comments

Tech Regulatory Capture

Tech Regulatory CaptureRegulatory capture occurs when governmental bodies created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can encourage large firms to exploit the public.

Former Sen. Chris Dodd Named MPAA Chief

Former Sen. Chris Dodd Named MPAA ChiefChristopher Dodd, the former five-term Democratic senator from Connecticut is the head of the Motion Picture Association of America. He sat on the Foreign Relations Committee, headed the Banking Committee, and co-authored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Among other things, he attempted to filibuster the legislation that immunized telecom companies from lawsuits over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

As head of the MPAA, he’s likely to be a little less friendly to the average netizen. The MPAA has lobbied hard for the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

It has pushed for the government to shutter websites suspected of hosting infringing material and is responsible for using the American legal system to sue U.S.-based torrent search engines out of existence. A case against Canadian-based Isohunt is pending.

Facebook Adds Friends in Washington

Facebook Prepares to Add Friends in WashingtonDemocrat Sheryl Sandberg, the former Clinton administration official is a chief operating officer for Facebook. Ms. Sandberg, is the company’s No. 2 official behind co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

Republican Ted Ullyot, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is the social networker’s general counsel. Mr. Ullyot, was a White House lawyer and chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales when he was attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. Facebook  told the Los Angeles Times that Mr. Ullyot “has extremely strong connections with the Republican Party, and we think that’s a good thing.”

Facebook Adds to Its Public Policy Staff

Facebook Adds to Its Public Policy StaffFacebook increased its Republican credentials by adding Catherine Martin, who is the site’s first director of public policy. Previously, Ms. Martin worked for President George W. Bush, serving as deputy assistant to the president and deputy communications director for policy and planning.

Facebook May Hire Former Obama Aide

Facebook May Hire Robert Gibbs, Former Obama AideFacebook is in talks to hire Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s former White House press secretary, for a senior role in helping to manage the company’s communications, people briefed on the negotiations told the New York Times.

Mr. Gibbs, who left the White House in February after two years on the job, had planned to help set up President Obama’s re-election campaign before taking a private-sector job, these people said. A job for Mr. Gibbs at Facebook could be worth millions of dollars. While details of his potential compensation package have yet to be discussed, people briefed on the talks said that he would receive a cash salary as well as shares ahead of the initial offering. Some investors have valued Facebook at more than $60 billion and could be the largest offering in history. Mr. Gibbs and a spokesman for Facebook declined to comment.

Facebook Woos Washington

Facebook Woos WashingtonThe Daily Beast points out that Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has 600 million members, making it about twice as big as the United States. The Daily Beast says that Facebook needs to get as cozy as it can with the U.S. Government and Barack Obama. This company is gathering more personal information about more people than any other company ever, even more than Google. Suddenly it is dawning on everyone, including members of Congress, just how much power Facebook is amassing.

Co to counter the trend Facebook has hired two more former government officials.

  • Elliot Schrage worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and Google before joining Facebook. Mr. Schrage, a lawyer by training, serves as Facebook’s head of global communications and public affairs.
  • Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, ran Obama’s 2008 social networking operation via a website called My.BarackObama.com.

$35,000 For a Dinner With Obama

Yelp Just Paid $35,000 For A Steak Dinner With ObamaAfter President Obama’s love-in speech video on Facebook, another group of tech luminaries got a meeting with POTUS. The steak dinner at the home of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff cost $35,000-a-plate. According to Business Insider other Silicon Valley big-shots in attendance included:

Related articles
  • Facebook Prepares to Add Friends in Washington (nytimes.com)
  • Chris Dodd shows how Washington works (salon.com)

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| June 4, 2011
Comments Off on Google, Facebook and Yahoo Test IPv6

Google, Facebook and Yahoo Test IPv6

Google, Facebook and Yahoo Test IPv6A global trial of IPv6 is scheduled for June 8th 2011. Google (GOOG), Facebook, Yahoo (YHOO), and Akamai (AKAM) will reportedly take part in the IPv6 “test flight.” The Internet Society, a non-profit group that educates people and companies about net issues is coordinating World IPv6 Day. Those who sign up for the test will make their pages available via IPv6 for 24 hours to help iron out problems created by the switch to the new addressing scheme.

IPv6 good news

Internet Society logo“By providing an opportunity for the internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption and help make IPv6 ready for prime time,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society in a statement.

“The good news is that internet users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day,” said Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer at Google in a blog post. “Our current measurements suggest that the majority (99.95%) of users will be unaffected. However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”

According to Google, Vint Cerf, the program manager for the ARPA Internet research project chose a 32-bit address format for an experiment in packet network interconnection in 1977. For more than 30 years, 32-bit addresses have served us well, but now the Internet is running out of space. IPv6 is the only long-term solution, but it has not yet been widely deployed.  In November 2010 Mr. Cerf, one of the driving forces behind Google’s IPv6 efforts warned that the net faced “turbulent times” if it did not move quickly to adopt IPv6.

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Vint Cerf wants you t use IPv6It will be interesting to see the number of participants. This all may just blow over the top because not enough of the right people in organizations see the need. I spoke to my Boss about this a while ago and I think one phone call has been made to our upstream ISP to see what they are doing. We probably won’t deal with it until there is a need for a point-to-point IP video conference with China or something and when it won’t work, then it is a crisis that gets addressed.

Does your organization have a plan for IPv6 migration?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| June 2, 2011
Comments Off on LinkedIn Accounts can be Hijacked

LinkedIn Accounts can be Hijacked

Help Net Security has a report that users of the newly minted public LinkedIn (LNKD) are in danger of having their account hijacked. The Linkedin accounts can be hacked when accessing them over insecure Wi-Fi networks or public computers. Independent security researcher Rishi Narang told Help Net Security that the risk is due to two reasons. First, the LinkedIn session and authentication cookies have an unnaturally long lifespan. Secondly, LinkedIn does not remove the cookies once the user logs out.

LinkedInThe article says the cookies in question are JSESSIONID and LEO_AUTH_TOKEN, and are available even after the session initiated by the user has been terminated. The cookies are also set to expire only after one solid year, and this fact allowed the researcher to get access to a number of active accounts of various people from all over the world during a period of many months. “They would have login/logged out many times in these months but their cookie was still valid,” Mr.Narnag writes on his blog.

In addition to all of that, those two cookies and the others that the welcome page stores are transmitted in clear text over HTTP, because they don’t have a secure flag set. “If the secure flag is set on a cookie, then browsers will not submit the cookie in any requests that use an unencrypted HTTP connection, thereby preventing the cookie from being trivially intercepted by an attacker monitoring network traffic,” explains Mr. Narang.

According to the researcher, until LinkedIn makes some changes, the only way to “expire” the cookies is for the users to change their password and then authenticate themselves with the new credentials. This could be a stopgap measure if you know that someone has stolen those cookies and is accessing your account, but won’t new cookies be created after the password change and authentication?

Help Net Security says that the only solution to this problem is for LinkedIn to effect some changes, and according to Reuters, they are planning to offer “opt-in” SSL support for the entire site in the coming months (and that would encrypt the cookies in questions), but have not commented on the cookies have such a long lifespan.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| May 18, 2011
3 comments

Tech Regulatory Capture

Tech Regulatory CaptureRegulatory capture occurs when governmental bodies created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can encourage large firms to exploit the public.

Sunlight: Congress’ Revolving Door to Telecom, Cable Firms

Congress' Revolving Door to Telecom, Cable FirmsAccording to a 2010 Washington Post article, broadband providers including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon Communications have amassed armies of former government officials to lobby against net neutrality and other regulations at the Federal Communications Commission, according to a report by the Sunlight Foundation. The nonprofit public interest organization said those firms hired 276 former government officials, including 18 former members of Congress, to fight against rules that would require them to treat all Web sites and content equally on their networks.

AT&T (T) has hired Republicans and Democrats from the US House and Senate to lobby for them including:

  • Jim Davis former Democratic congressman from Florida;
  • Trent Lott former Republican senator from Mississippi;
  • Vic Fazio former Democratic representative from California;
  • John Breaux former Republican senator from Louisiana;
  • J.C. Watts former Republican representative from Oklahoma.

Comcast (CMCSA) has also hired former politicians like:

Verizon (VZ) hired Republican representative Jack Fields from Texas.

The cable industry trade group National Cable & Telecommunications Association, hired Chip Pickering, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi.

The US Telecom Association, the Broadband Association hired Al Wynn former Democratic representative from Maryland.

Revolution LLC.

Revolution LLC.Ron Klain is General Counsel of former AOL CEO Steve Case’s Revolution LLC. Prior to joining Mr. Case’s firm Mr. Klain has extensive public service, most recently as a senior White House aide to President Obama, and Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden. He has also served as Chief of Staff or Staff Director for Vice President Al Gore, Attorney General Janet Reno, the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Klain was also Associate Counsel to President Clinton and a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Byron White. He has served as a top debate preparation advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton, and Democratic Presidential nominees Al Gore and John Kerry.

State Department’s Katie Stanton Moves to Twitter

State Department's Katie Stanton Moves to TwitterTwitter has captured Katie Stanton, a special adviser at the State Department and former White House staffer. She is heading to Twitter to work on international business strategy according to the Washington Post.  Ms. Stanton tweeted her move to the social information platform’s San Francisco office. The Post says Ms. Stanton will be a vice president driving Twitter’s international business strategy and operations. Ms. Stanton previously worked at Google as a product manager for the search engine’s finance application.

She joined the White House as the director of citizen participation after working on new media strategies for President Obama’s election campaign. Stanton moved to the State Department last year, working with Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation, on how to use social media tools and technology for diplomatic goals.

Facebook Hires White House Adviser as New VP

Facebook Hires White House Adviser as New VPAppScout reported that Facebook has captured an economic adviser to President Obama to serve as its new vice president of global public policy.  Marne Levine is the special assistant to the president for economic policy and chief of staff for the National Economic Council at the White House.

“With over 70 percent of our users living outside the United States, her unique mix of government and Internet industry experience will be invaluable to help Facebook address some of the most interesting questions at the intersection of technology and public policy,” Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications at Facebook, said in a statement.

Levine will work out of Facebook’s D.C. office where she will oversee and coördinate interactions with governments and non-governmental organizations, Facebook said. She will also help to build Facebook policy teams in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

According to the article Ms, Levine helped launch an online peer-to-peer payment platform and helped manage its privacy and compliance issues which are probably why Facebook hired her so she can lobby her former boss on privacy and banking issues.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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