dougv.com « Doug Vanderweide

Last week I logged on to Tumblr and was confronted with this abomination:

Missing e notice from tumblr. Way to encourage API development, guys.

Needless to say, this is pretty disturbing, and I wonder what Tumblr is thinking by posting this.

Continue reading: Tumblr Mangles Developer Relations »

flickr /compujeramey

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 »

As I was saying … today’s comic from xkcd:

Tynt's annoying Read More clipboard jacking: You can kill it with AdBlock Plus for Firefox.

I love Firefox. It’s pretty much the only Web browser I use.

I hate Tynt. If you’ve ever copied text from a Web page, then pasted it, only to find a mysterious “Read More:” link inserted at the end of the text you copied, you just ran headfirst into Tynt.

Each time a user pastes content from your website into an email, blog or website, we automatically add a URL link back to your site’s original content. When someone clicks that URL, they are directed back to your site and see the original content. This drives incremental traffic to your site when your content is shared without your knowledge while maintaining a consistent user experience.

It may well be a “consistent user experience” for me to have to hit the backspace key to delete the “Read more” link Tynt adds every time I copy a small block of text, but it’s a consistently annoying experience.

I appreciate the importance of reciprocal links. I understand the challenge to content publishers of having content lifted from their Web sites without attribution.

So before I get into details about this fix, let me be clear: If you copy Web content, attribute it. It’s the right thing to do.

That said, there’s a wrong way of getting people to do the right thing, and Tynt is definitely the wrong way.

I find having my simple act of extracting a quote from a Web page turned into a link-spamming takeover of my local machine to be far more disturbing than a tracking cookie or layer ad.

Don’t be messing with my clipboard. It’s mine, not yours. I will put into it what I want there, not what you want.

Fortunately, I was able to put an immediate end to Tynt’s “Read More” clipboard copy highjacking in Firefox with Adblock Plus, a highly popular add-in that does what its name suggests: Blocks advertisements, and other content, from displaying on a page.

Continue reading: Killing Tynt’s “Read More” Clipboard Copy Hijacker With The Adblock Plus Plug-In For Firefox »

It’s a trial for me to listen to people complain about privacy on Facebook or anonymity on the Web.

Don’t get me wrong; you aren’t going to find a bigger defender of anonymous speech than me. The same way a secret ballot preserves the integrity of the plebiscite, anonymous political speech protects republicanism.

But there’s a difference between standing up for the right of someone to publish an anonymous blog and listening to people carp about whether some stranger can see pictures of his kids.

In the case of the former, the author wants to be heard, but to protect himself from the repercussions of speaking. That’s a tradition as old as politics itself, albeit that in time, anyone who makes an impact with anonymous speech is exposed.

In the case of the average Joe bitching about his boss via a tweet, there’s a far simpler point to be made: If you put it on the Internet, it’s not private. Period.

When we waste time debating whether it’s right for some potential employer to use a five-year-old drunken tweet against you, we don’t focus on the real things people should be doing to protect their Internet identities. For example, using strong passwords.

I’ll bet a dollar to doughnuts that the average person who worries about Facebook privacy is using his dog’s name as his Facebook password. And not only that, but using that same password for every Internet site he visits, including Amazon.com, online banking, travel sites, etc., etc. And not only that, but has been using the same password for years.

I’m willing to make that bet because that described my password strategy up to about a week ago. Until I discovered, and started using, LastPass.

Continue reading: LastPass: A Great Way To Protect Your Actual Internet Privacy »