I think you just threw your privacy out the window… weknowwhatyouredoing.com
WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com is a social network privacy experiment by @callumhaywood
Essentially it queries Foursquare for search terms then passes to Yahoo to find out the latlong from the place name given, and then uses the lat long with google street view to display the images for that location. The result is this below: When i search for Wellington i can see a whole lot of of people checking into their homes and publishing this information to the world...
Search for Wellington
Another rather humorous feature of the tool is it's general searches under the categories: Who wants to get fired? Who's hung over? Whose taking drugs and Whose got a new phone number?
So what does it mean? Well it kind of makes some of the privacy concerns about such location services a little bit more obvious for people who probably don't realize what they're doing when they are checking in. (despite the fact that it is re-iterated time and time again by privacy experts) I've mentioned this before too:
Modern society seems to be geared up to deal with and accept casual tradeoffs of privacy - I personally am subscribed to this. You're reading my blog and know I have a twitter, I'm willingly giving a plethora of information about myself out into the fabric that is the Digital Age, but hey, who really cares about what Mark is doing? Well, A tech savvy burglar could potentially use the information i'm publishing to find out where i live, when i am at home (and more importantly to them, when i'm not) and read my twitter to find out that i just bought a brand new TV... food for thought.
Anyway, take a look at the website: www.weknowwhatyouredoing.com
The trials and tribulations of @nzanon
As many of you know earlier this year I created @nzanon (http://nzanon.anadav.com)
Essentially @nzanon is a service which allows anybody in the world to send a SMS message to a New Zealand cell phone number and have their message then displayed on @nzanon's twitter account.
At the beginning it worked well, but as with anything that involves people, slowly people started to test the boundaries and sure enough we had some of the most vulgar things i've ever heard being said through the service.
After warnings and a few blacklistings, I decided to take the service offline until I could be bothered fixing it. (The service, not humanity)
Yesterday I was a wee bit bored and so decided to look at the project again, i came up with two solutions which I think should work....
The two biggest type of abuse i could identify were:
- General vulgarities
- @mentioning people on twitter to insult them
The solution for number 2 is as simple as just blocking people from @mentioning anybody using the service - whilst stopping people from abusing others, it also stops a problem which wasn't in itself a "bad thing" but as NZanon has a lot of followers, people would shamelessly promote themselves through the service i.e. "Hey i'm @AeroFade - follow me because i'm awesome" or whatever.
The solution to problem number one (and I note here that this is an evolving process) is to borrow from the school of anti-spam which uses Bayesian filtering techniques to differentiate between spam and legit emails. (this is as much a test as a solution in that i am probably being a little ambitious using 140 character strings [i.e. twitter length] as training data -I also note that initially my setup has very little training data to base the filtering on so it will not work very well until it has 'seen' a lot of example tweets.)
You may ask the question, why don't i just use a simple key-word blocker, eg: blocking swear words as this will be less work than implementing Bayes. Well, without starting a philosophical debate - I don't believe swearing is too bad, but in certain contexts it can be (Usage of the word FUCK) - so i wanted to avoid being too simplistic and at least implement some sort of learning/training system.
In short: I don't expect this solution to be infallible, people will fundamentally be people and always find devious ways to circumvent safe guards. I argue that I have put in some degree of due diligence to prevent abuse of the service. 
If you have something to post anonymously to @nzanon - find the number to send an sms to on the twitter profile or the website.
Peace,
Mark
Improve your digital privacy
In case you were not aware, when you visit a website, use your cell phone, participate in company loyalty programs, using twitter, Facebook or any kind of social media. Hey you're willingly compromising your privacy. Though personally I think privacy isn't compromised as such, it's more of a linear scale in that we trade off acceptable amounts of our privacy for convenience.
Privacy is something which has been described as a commodity that is hard to hold onto in this day and age.
Frank. M . Ahearn teaches how to reclaim privacy in this digitally enabled age. By following his (somewhat over-zealous) advice you'll be able to fall off the grid.
He authored a book with Eileen C. Horan entitled "How to disappear: erase your digital footprint, leave false trails, and vanish without a trace" - Quite a catchy title and very apt for the very privacy concerned individual.
In my experience those who are really privacy concerned have nothing that any marketer would value as they are in fact just an outlier and therefore help very little with statistics. Modern society seems to be geared up to deal with and accept casual tradeoffs of privacy for ease - and I personally am subscribed to this. You're reading my blog and know I have a twitter, I'm willingly giving a plethora of information about myself out into the ether that is the Digital Age, but hey, who really cares about what Mark is doing?
Take a look at the book, it makes for an interesting read.
Peace.
New Shave
Shaving has been the thorn in my side since the first rough growth on my upper lip: razor burn, cuts, pain, uneven shaves etc. Though cutting myself shaving is something that happens irregularly, on occasion it will happen and it's just a pain.
About 2 months ago I came across what looked to be a pretty awesome razor. Not only did it look elegant, it promised to eliminate shaving related issues.
Drum roll if you please....
... It's the Goodfella Razor - Designed & Made by New Zealand's own Andrew James.
The first time I saw these razors on the website, I saw the name, then I saw how beautiful they looked.
After spending a good few minutes on the website and looking through the provided literature on why the razor is good, I decided to take the plunge and invest in one of these beauties.
From ordering to it arriving in my mailbox took less than a week, I was really impressed, my experiences with a lot of online shops tend to be that you place an order and you get a 2 week turn around.
Here it is:
This razor looks better in the flesh than it does on the website or in my pictures, pictures can't do it justice - it's finish is outstanding!
As cliché as this sounds (and I really try not to use cliché's) after my first use I felt like shaving experiences had been redefined, it was so easy to use - intuitive even - no doubt part of the design, the weighting makes it balance exactly in the right angle if you hold it as described in the instructions. The main advantage of this is it makes it very easy to shave awkward places such as under the nose and chin - without the worry of nicking myself.
The blades for this beauty only cost around 20 cents each - so economical!
Go out and get one! You won't be disappointed.
I just told you a whopping lie!
A Norton cyber crime study titled "The Human Impact" looks into the proportion of web users that are dealing with cybercrime - quite an interesting study - have a look for yourself here, but to get your interest take a gander at some of these facts
Out of all respondents to the survey:
- Over 25% of people online lie about their name
- 25% had secretly viewed somebody else's browsing history
- Over 20% admit to doing something online they regret
- 17% admit to lying about their age
- 9% admit to lying about their financial or relationship status
- 7% admit to lying about their appearance
- 17% view plagiarism as an acceptable practice
- 17% feel it is legal to download a music track without paying
- Almost 33% of people have posted pictures of somebody else on the internet without permission
Peace!
802.11 Wireless Dish
For a project I am working on I needed to make some modifications to this sat dish, I have made several a custom antennas to test on my sat dish for 802.11 wireless networking.
Unfortunately there exists the problem that my custom antennas have no easy way to be mounted to the location where usually the LNB would go on a sat dish.
During my walk this morning I stopped to rest here with a bottle of coke:
After finishing the bottle of coke and looking around for a bin and not finding one, I had to cart it home to recycle, while thinking about recycling I realised that this very empty coke bottle would help with my aforementioned LNB dilemma.
After getting home I set to work on making my new mounting fixture. This is the original LNB holder:
Unfortunately the coke bottle is not big enough to fit into the hole exactly, so using my new heat knife i sliced a hole into the side of the coke bottle big enough to fit the old New Zealand 5c coin.
In true recycling style, using:
An old NZ 5c coin
An empty coke bottle
The combination gives me the right size to fit into the old mount:
And here we have the finished product attached to the dish:
The true beauty of this is that all my antennas that I have made can be hot glued to the back of a coke bottle cap for an easy interchange ability.
Peace!
Mark
Detect a lie with an MRI!
The NoLie MRI Truth Verification Technology claims to provide an unbiased method for the detection of deception and 'other' information stored in the brain (not sure what they mean by 'other') Putting it simply, a good old fashioned Lie-Detector or Truth-Verifier. It bypasses conscious cognitive processing to measure the activity of the CNS (Central Nervous System) - as opposed to traditional techniques (such as polygraphs) which work off the peripheral nervous system.
The technique is built upon neuroscience and pattern matching algorithms which work together to distinguish patterns in the brain which are identified to be related to deception. With a commercial application such as corporate espionage detection, a $5,000 testing session could well be worth it for some of the major innovative technology companies.
The website itself does not seem to give much away about the testing process which I think is partly because with the use of such algorithms a ground truth will need to be established for each person being tested, so the less they are aware about how the process establishes these ground truths, the less likely the participant will be able to 'play' with the results while trying to establish a ground truth. (Though this is just my speculation as if the process really does bypass concious cognitive processing then fudging would be very difficult if not impossible.)
Thoughts?
Peace!
I just cracked your wifi
It surprises me how many people still have open wireless networks. I live in the inner city in Wellington, from my apartment I can pick up 17 different 802.11 wireless networks, 3 of which are completely open with no security, 4 using WEP encryption, and the rest using one version or the other of WPA with a pre-shared key (PSK).
I'm not going to discuss the implications of having an open network because if you're sending your traffic out 'in-the-clear' then really you don't deserve an explanation.
If you want your wireless network to be safe from unauthorised users and/or prying eyes then enable encryption on your network - when you enable encryption you are obfuscating your transmissions on the air so that they cannot be understood unless the correct key is known to decrypt the transmission - the result of this is:
- Your network now has authentication
- Machines 'listening' will not be able to understand your transmissions
Right, so you've enabled encryption on your network - you're already well on your way to being safe - but really the only thing we've done is create a delay tactic - that is all encryption is as given enough resources and processing time any encryption can be brute forced (have the key guessed).
However with some encryption standards, flaws in the design actually mean the key can be deduced with relatively little effort. One such example of this is with WEP- I won't bore you with the details of how this works but the long and short of it is if you listen to enough traffic that you know to be WEP encrypted, there is a 50% probability that a given IV (Initialisation Vector) will repeat every 5000 packets - we can then use this to work out the mathematical relationship and recover the encryption key. With free software out there such as Aircrack & security penetration distributions such as Backtrack you would be surprised how easy it is for somebody with no technical knowledge to break your encryption on a home computer in under 10 minutes.
Even with WPA using PSK you're only as secure as your passphrase, if you use a relatively short passphrase or a word in the dictionary then your encryption key can be worked out pretty quickly using either a dictionary attack or failing that a brute force attack - if it's a complex non-dictionary passphrase then it becomes significantly more work to brute and impervious to dictionary attacks.
Peace