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This is nitpicky, and I certainly don’t mean to take lightly the seriousness of the matter. But I do want to clarify that the News of the World wasn’t technically “hacking” voicemail in its scandal. It was engaged in social engineering.

For those of you who missed the headlines (and for the benefit of posterity): News of the World was (until July 10, 2011) a Sunday tabloid; like most British tabs, it’s best known for printing racy pictures of women and sleazy stories.

News of the World  hired a private investigator to help it research stories. That contractor gained access to a number of voicemail accounts, including those of a murdered 13-year-old girl, several soldiers killed in the Middle East conflicts, and royal family members.

All the shoes involved here haven’t yet dropped, but as of this writing the scandal has closed the paper after 168 years of publication; threatens to bring down Prime Minister David Cameron; has led to several arrests and may well result in additional restrictions on Great Britain’s press. (Even overwhelmingly reasonable pundits, such as The Economist, are calling for a mucking out of British journalism’s stables.)

The entire affair is loathsome, no question about that, even for the British press, nefarious for its “chew people up and spit them out” appetite. It’s also caused other world press outlets to term what News of the World did “phone hacking,” needlessly worrying people who have taken reasonable steps to secure their voicemail that they, too, might be targeted.

So I want to clear things up. If you’ve changed your voicemail password (PIN), you almost certainly can’t be violated in the way News of the World violated its victims.

Continue reading: News Of The World Wasn’t ‘Hacking’ Voicemail, It Was Blagging »

Last weekend was New England GiveCamp 2011, in which 100+ developers, designers and other volunteers gathered to donate time and skills to some 30 charities who needed IT help.

This year, I was project lead for Alex’s Team Foundation, based in Andover, Mass. Our team was Saurabh Moondhra and William Wade, both experienced ASP.NET developers.

Alex’s Team Foundation, named after 16-year-old Alex Miliotis, who passed away from leukemia in 2002, raises money to support nurses and other oncology professionals, and supports youth sports. The foundation is largely the labors of Patti Rae Miliotis, Alex’s mother, and a handful of reliable volunteers. Like every small nonprofit, Alex’s Team doesn’t have a lot of money.

From the right to left: William Wade, Doug Vanderweide, Saurabh Moondhra and Patti Rae Miliotis of Alex's Team Foundation. The lady with her feet up is Deanna Lohnes, who worked on another project; the woman in green, whose name I do not know, was her charity's contact person.

Like every other leader of a small nonprofit, Patti is pulled in a lot of different directions and has all she can do to keep track of the people with whom she comes in contact, nonetheless all the donations she gets. Patti also hosts a few events every year. She basically needs a way to keep track of who attends those events or otherwise supports her organization, and to mail merge thank-you notes.

So that was the project I led this weekend: Converting a bunch of data stored in (of course!) Excel spreadsheets into a more relational database, with the ability to export that data in order to mail merge thank-you and fundraising letters.

Continue reading: New England GiveCamp 2011: What A Weekend! »

When I talk to new free-lance programmers about running a business, there are two core pieces of advice I offer. The first is that it‘s almost always better to have a little high-paying work than a lot of low-paying jobs. The other is the importance of a lawyer-reviewed contract that clearly defines the work to be produced, the date by which it will be completed and the cost of that work.

So I was very pleased to come across a Creative Mornings talk, given by Mike Monteiro of Mule Design and his attorney, Gabriel Levine, which reinforces and expands upon those basic ideas.

(via zeldman.com and Google Reader Play)

This is a long video (40 minutes) but worth every moment. But for the tl;dw crowd, here’s a synopsis of the salient points:

1. Contracts protect both parties – you and your client.
2. Don’t start work without a contract.
3. Don’t blindly accept your client’s terms.
4. Anticipate negotiation but don’t back down on important stuff – payment, deadlines and your intellectual property rights in the work until final payment is received.
5. Lawyers talk to lawyers. If your client is talking to you in the presence of, or through, his lawyer, get yours or don’t talk.
6. Be specific and confident about money. Ask for the rate you deserve and don’t back down on terms.

Continue reading: Good Contracts Make Good Business. Or, ‘F*ck You, Pay Me’ »

On CNET, via slashdot: Lendle, a Web site that had helped facilitate the loaning of ebooks among Kindle users, was effectively destroyed when Amazon shut down Lendle’s access to its Kindle API.

Lendle first reported the news via Twitter: “Amazon has revoked Lendle’s API access. This is why the site is down. It’s sad and unfortunate that Amazon is shutting down lending sites…According to Amazon, Lendle does not ‘serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.’”

According to Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft, “at least two other Kindle lending services” have been terminated from the API.

The problem with Lendle and its cousins is simple: It was too good at what it did.

Amazon does allow one-time loans of an ebook for up to 14 days, but they expect such trading to be among intimates. Lendle greatly expanded the ability for one person to trade with a complete stranger, and as a result posed a serious threat to potential Kindle edition sales.

After all, if I can’t find someone to lend me an ebook, I probably have to buy it. Put me in big enough a room of Kindle owners, however, and I’m likely to find what I am after for free.

I don’t care to get into copyright, the nature of modern publishing, or the like. I’m far more interested in pointing out the problem with using third-party APIs that this illustrates: If you make something too good, there’s usually nothing stopping the API service from cutting you off and stealing your work.

Continue reading: The Danger Of API Development: Making Something Too Good »

Federal postal authorities with Vitaly Borker after they arrested him on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The headline to this post is via Chris Rock, who repeats that line during his “Never Scared” comedy special (link very NSFW!), speaking about the difference between being rich and being wealthy.

It means that significant, lasting wealth is often created by exploiting something new, or using some means to circumvent the kind of behavior most people would consider fair or reasonable. The patron of the exhaulted Kennedy clan made his fortune from bootlegging and insider trading before the 1929 stock market crash. Rockerfeller, Vanderbilt and Morgan were the great robber barons of the U.S. industrial revolution.

I mention this because Vitaly Borker, proprietor of decormyeyes, was arrested today on federal charges of “mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking.”

Borker, as you will remember from this blog, discovered some time ago that Google’s PageRank algorithm didn’t consider whether the mentioning of an online store was positive or negative. (Google claims this is no longer the case.) Therefore, Borker took a extremely combative approach to customer complaints, intentionally stoking animosity, so that his online store would appear in multiple online complaints, often at very reputable, PageRank-enhancing Web sites, such as Get Satisfaction.

It seemed to work well, and I admired the ingenuity behind it, if not the tactic itself. Seems now, however, that Borker will be a test case as to whether anti-service, and preying upon the gullible / lazy, is at an end. (I might also note that this is further proof that for all the caterwauling, good journalism isn’t dead; if anything, it’s more valuable than ever.)

All links in this post on delicious: http://www.delicious.com/dougvdotcom/behind-every-great-fortune-is-a-great-crime