Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

We already had online virusses and worms, now we got paraSites too.

The word ‘parasite’ comes from the Greek ‘parasitos’ (but then in Greek) which means ‘person who eats at the table of another’. In general we use parasite to refer to “an animal or plant that lives in or on a host; it obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host”. I first heard of web paraSites on the APWG mailing list, used by Russ McRee from Microsoft (working at Live Messenger looking for malware and phishing sites) to refer to a sites which are:

“service” offerings designed to see who has blocked or deleted your IM alias from their messaging contacts. These sites always have significant disclaimer language, and often disclose that they will send SPIM (SPam over Instant Messenger) to your contacts if you enter your Live ID credentials.

One such example he gives is finecommunity.com which bluntly asks for your Microsoft Live ID and has a very dry Terms Of Use at the bottom of the page, which nobody ever reads, and which ends with:

To unsubscribe from our services you just need to change your Windows Live password.

This is all too familiar on the Twitterverse. Due to the lack of a decent authentication api for Twitter (until recently, they now support oAuth, but the damage has been done), a lot of Twitter related services have popped up asking for your Twitter username and password. But even besides Twitter, other social networking sites would ask for your Gmail or Hotmail credentials to “find your friends” and “invite them”. This isn’t phishing (for your credentials), they just ask them from you so they could “help” you. There have been plenty of instances where these services would add spammy content and links to for example your Twitter stream, or send out emails to your contacts, automatically (because that’s part of the service they offer). Those too are what you could call paraSites, living off of your account.

Even right before I started writing this post I encountered such instance: the HP Touch the Future Now contest, which tells you to twitter about the future (or rather answer some weekly questions on Twitter) in order to win and asks for your Twitter username and password. The T&C doesn’t say anything about spamming your Twitter account. It does say if you don’t provide the required details, you’re disqualified. And that it may pass your personal information to related bodies corporate and agencies assisting with the contest. But why would they need your Twitter username and password? Just tell people to tweet and reply to @hp_<whatever>. Would you trust HP with your Twitter username and password? Didn’t people get bitten before by one of those other “services” wanting your credentials? This might well be a lack of understanding of social media on the part of HP and their marketing team, and they actually mean no harm (as in they won’t spam your Twitter stream). Or at one point in time they might just suck the life out of your Twitter account!

Just the other week I experienced two occurrences where Twitter was used by business for product support, which I’d like to share, for those who still doubt the power of social media. These are web businesses (UserVoice and Google) but that shouldn’t make any difference. Any business should monitor the Internet for their brand and reputation. I wasn’t necessarily looking for answers from them, but they did answer.

Earlier last week Google introduces a new version of their Profiles. I had set mine up, and using it I had a concern:

It was a rather generalized question I put out there for the twitterverse. I wasn’t expecting a response at all. Less than two hours later I did get a response:

Google obviously cares about their reputation and seem keen to keep track of whatever’s being said about them. Unfortunatly they didn’t include a link to their report abuse system, which would have been nice if I had a problem (which I didn’t). They could have pointed to a particular blogpost addressing these concerns, or they could create one based on these concerns found around Twitter or the blogosphere in general.

Then last Thursday at a workshop I was demoing a couple of my little web apps where I noticed that one was crashing Firefox and the other had a weird Firefox rendering issue (in effect duplicating the content, though view source only showed the content once). I quickly dugg around and uncommented the UserVoice script loading in those page, which seem to resolve the issues. I posted my concerns on Twitter, to see if anyone else had the same problem.

Two minutes later someone (who I think/hope is involved in UserVoice which wasn’t obvious) replied:

Since I had the UserVoice code removed and was at a workshop (and it’s not really critical to me), I told him I had fixed it for now, and would look at it again later, to which he let me know that I could contact him if I needed any more help. I did not have to go to a UserVoice forum to get help (I wasn’t looking for help actually) , as it could well be an issue with one of the Firefox plugins I have installed. But UserVoice cares enough about their reputation that they try to keep all customers (even little old me, even free customers) happy.

Twitter has been useful for me before in resolving (or sharing) problems. For example, when all my sites hosted on (MediaTemple) were down a couple of weeks ago, I obviously tweeted about this, and got responses back from other people having the same problems. Some of them then pointed me to the MediaTemple Twitter account which was giving out status updates on the cluster problems they were having, to which I then subscribed and got into the loop of how and when things got resolved.

Twitter is an open micro messaging platform which allows people to use it in any way they see fit (within the 140 character constraints). It’s a diary, a bulletin board, a self-help system, a publishing platform,… enabling real time search for events, brands, people… and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

Just watched this cool bullet-time-like movie (you know, the Matrix) on the Philips site as a demo for their 21:9 cinemascope tv set due out this month. Great if you’re a movie buff watching lots of DVD or Blueray, and I love the ambient light feature. But one other feature their new sets offer is so called “Net TV”.

Net TV looks to be a proprietary service through Philips (you need them to get onto their Net TV platform), which is based on CE-HTML (Consumer Electronics), a subset of XHTML, CSS TV Profile 1.0, ecmascript, DOM,… intended to improve the experience to browse the internet on a tv. But why do we need another standard? Why are manufacturers trying to set up new walled gardens? Did they not learn? My mobile smart phone is perfectly capable of displaying full featured webpages, why wouldn’t a tv set? It might have been true five years ago, when we were all still on low resolution CRT tv sets, but with the lcd/plasma revolution we had last couple of years, resolution has improved greatly and tv set sizes have grown.

Browsing the web on tv has been around for ages, but never took off, with for example now defunkt Microsoft WebTV. I myself worked on a TV banking platform back in ‘99-2000 for a Dutch bank and cabeltv company accessing internet banking over a settop box (“t-commerce”), which if I remember correctly was also using a version of CE-HTML, but there was certainly no JavaScript involved. And if you have a Nintendo Wii, you can browse the full internet on your tv using a version of Opera (a 5$US upgrade). But unfortunatly Wii isn’t an HD device, and isn’t an optimal browsing experience even on new full HD tv sets (native resolution seems to be 608×456, with pages being zoomed in and out). Playstation 3 (and I guess XBox 360) has a full featured browser too, and again people complain about text being too small.

But why would Philips not get on board with Opera (or Mozilla, or use WebKit), in stead of using CE-HTML? And it’s not a single manufacturer getting on board the internet-on-tv train, it’s also Samsung, Sony,… getting on board though with different solutions. And yesterday Adobe introduced its Flash Platform for the Digital Home
with Intel at NAB, but the tv makers seem to be reluctant to join them. While browsing on tv might never take off, one thing I am looking forward to are tv widgets, using web standard XHTML and Javascript, where Samsung and Yahoo! are leading the way (sets already available at Bing Lee).With these widgets you could keep track of Twitter while watching tv (without having a laptop on your lap, or an iPod/iPhone in your hand), and we might see new ways of interaction with tv programs through backchannels displayed at the bottom of the tv, as already happening on Twitter (#newinventors instigated every week by @mpesce). What I am looking for is actually some kind of Chumby for tv, something that injects widgets onto the screen (without me buying a new set), though better integrated (form, transparency, bottom or sidebar positioned) like the Yahoo! widgets.

In stead of a new browser war on television, we’ll get a widget war, between Flash, Yahoo!, Google (imagine the advertising potential) and all the other widget makers out there, trying to get their hands on whatever little time you still spend watching tv. Hmmm, come to think of it, Google Calendar as an EPG on your tv…

We are on a the road to a major conversion of different technologies, a merger of disparate data points into a singular intelligence previously unknown (yeah, sounds preposterous, I know). And Google is (yet again) right in the middle of it. I won’t be fear mongering about a Skynet entity, or any of the privacy issues related to this. It is the nature of progress that technology disrupts people’s lives. People will adapt, and life evolves.

Google already knows all there is to know. But knowledge is only as powerful as the relationships you can make between facts. Recently Google started to add related results to its search results list. For example, you might look for Copernicus, and it dutifully lists all facts it can find about Copernicus. But Google also knows “who” Copernicus is, and it shows me related subjects, like Plato and Galileo. We finally see the Semantic Web coming into fruition, usable in our day to day lives. But it is still Google who decides to show me what it thinks I am looking for, what it thinks is interesting based on an algorithm, PageRank, they developed, based on number of relevant keywords and links.

But what if I was to ask my friends, my social network of contacts? What if I ask Twitter who Copernicus is, or services like Aardvark who query not a humongous set of data, but a collection of real people, my friends, my connections. They would point me to particular interesting articles they have read, book titles, facts they know. This is where the power of social recommendation comes into play, and the reputation (or social evaluation) of individuals, my connections. I know people who know nothing about software, or cars, or whatever, but who now a lot about philosophy, and are, for me, reputable sources of knowledge on this. They could have a list of recommended books on this subject at Amazon, or Goodreads,… or bookmarks to articles on Delicious.

How can I grow my own reputation in a connected world? By participation in the online social environment. Not a single social network (not just Facebook, or just LinkedIn), but a collection of different, topic specific networks. I am participating: bookmarking on Delicious, postings links on Facebook, blogposts on various websites, Twittering hashtags, writing book or movie reviews, reviewing restaurants (or public toilets), posting and (geo)tagging pictures on Flickr, presentations on Slideshare… The participatory design of social applications not only adds value to the network and whoever visits them, but they grow my own reputation which adds value to my own personal social network.

How does Google fit into Social Search (or Socialized Search)? Google started out as “just” a powerful search engine. Now it offers a whole bunch of, seemingly disparate, tools. With Gmail it knows what I converse about, who I talk to (people and companies) and it neatly keeps track of my address book with Google Contacts. It knows my day to day connections. Google allows me to broadcast my location using Google Latitude (in quasi real time using Android or iPhone), and knows who from my contacts I allow access to my location data, who I trust with this information. Based in Latitude’s proximity, it knows which contacts I socialize with not only online but also in real life. Google knows about Groups and Alerts I subscribe to, the Docs I have online, my search queries, my Calendar. I have a Google Profile which conveniently shows me a list of links of what it thinks are my public pages that I can add to my profile, and I can add additional ones myself. It even allows me to prioritize these links. Through my profile Google knows which social networks I reside on. It knows about me. It knows me.

Next time I ask Google “what movie to see tonight”, in stead of showing me some strangers’ recommendations, while it knows about me (and what I like), it could query my personal social knowledge network for movie reviews and recommendations, and show me a timetable for movies near me. In stead of merely searching for information, I could “discover” what my connections like or dislike, growing my relationships at the same time. Google could incorporate this through their OneBox results or optional through Subscribed Links (subscribing to my personal links). There still are some technological limitations for Social Search, especially with data portability, as a lot of this data lives behind social network walled gardens, and we might need to trust Google as a friend in order to allow it to handle this information.

Is this a privacy nightmare? It sure could be. Private data could be inferred from querying social data. But you only put out what you want, when you want it. And when you do, whatever you loose in privacy, you win in knowledge and reputation. Knowledge is power, reputation is social control.

I don’t remember who it was they were quoting yesterday morning at Sun’s Let’s Talk breakfast presentation on Cloud computing, but Facebook being defined as “Friendship as a Service” kinda made sense.

In which case LinkedIn would be “Reputation as a Service”, I guess, and as Reputation Management as a business slowly starts to take off (as a specialization of SEO), this service could well be considered “Reputation as a Service” too: SocialRecommendator.com. Give it some information like a name, company name, position,… and it generates a randomised recommendation for use in endorsements on sites like LinkedIn or Xing (refresh to get another one).

It even sort of has an API, returning plain text:
http://socialrecommendator.com/recommend.php?name=aname&gender=M&positionTitle=atitle&positionDescription=adescr&positionType=sometype&companyName=acompany&domain=aspecialtydomain

SocialActions.com throws a challenge at web developers:

“Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge is about building innovative tools to help people find and share opportunities to take action on the websites, blogs, and social networks that we all visit everyday.”

There are a lot of organisations out there that need a conduit to get their message across. This challenge is about developing ways to put a spotlight on their issues, to remix the web for social change: new Wordpress plugins, interactive buttons, widgets, bookmarklets, scripts,… There will be 20 finalists and 3 winners, April 28th, so you better start cracking!

Why not Digg it?!

The Xmas season is upon us, as evident by the Xmas trees appearing in shopping malls, and the Xmas promotions filling up our (e-)mailboxes. One such Xmas promo is PayPal’s (Australia). If you’ve got a PayPal account, you probably received it too. It sends you (after going through their email tracking system on http://email1.paypal.com/) to a motion sickness inducing Flash app, which allows you to scroll horizontally through their promos. Check it out (keep a bag or a bucket at hand)! I do like that scrolling effect on CoolIris, but not so much here. But that’s actually another discussion.

Check out the URL: http://122.201.77.222/paypal-offers.com.au/
You get redirected if you’d go to http://www.paypal-offers.com.au/. Is this really PayPal?
Now, go to http://www.paypal.com.au/, just to make sure you’re at a PayPal site. What, no mention of any PayPal offers or promotions?

There’s a couple of things wrong here:

First of, is it really that hard to configure a server/DNS to get paypal-offers.com.au to show the PayPal offers? Why the redirect (in addition to their email redirect through http://email1.paypal.com/)?

Second, there is no integrated marketing plan, having the PayPal offers linked from the main PP site to this offers site (as of the mailing’s date). Why have a separate and totally different address for the offers to begin with? It dilutes the brand. Why not use offers.paypal.com.au, or paypal.com.au/offers? I know, often the marketing department lives on their own little island within a company, and things outside of their island doesn’t move as fast as they would like it. Still they should have access to this sub-domain, their little corner of the PP site.

But thirdly, an unforgivable, stupendous error, the URL: an IP address,… with the domain appended (for good measure, the same page appears without the append domainname). Djezus people, this is a financial services site. PayPal must be one of the most targeted phishing sites out there. PayPal should not be spreading around these types of URLs. And I can’t verify from the main PP site that it is a PayPal controlled domain either as it isn’t an integrated campaign.

From their own Phishing Guide:

“Fake Links. Many phishing emails have a link that looks valid, but sends you to a fraudulent site that may or may not have an URL different from the link. Always check where a link is going before you click. Move your mouse over the URL in the email and look at the URL in the browser. As always, if it looks suspicious, don’t click it.”

“Deceptive URLs. Be cautious. Some fraudsters will insert a fake browser address bar over the real one, making it appear that you’re on a legitimate website. Follow these precautions: Even if an URL contains the word “PayPal,” it may not be a PayPal site. Examples of fake PayPal addresses: http://83.16.123.18/pp/update.htm?=https://www.paypal.com/=cmd_login_access, www.secure-paypal.com”

Yes, I do think paypal-offers.com.au is a legitimate PayPal offers site, it does not ask for login details, though it does link to the PayPal signup page. Looking through the email’s source code does not reveal fake domains or IP addresses, all links pass through the email1.paypal.com domain. The domain is registered by PayPal Australia Pty Limited, hosted at Net Logistics in Sydney. But it is child’s play to register paypal-specials.com or whatever, show fake offers like they do here, and ask the user to login to take advantage of these offers. It is incomprehensible that an online-only, financial company like PayPal, and their marketing division, would do such a thing.

Be saphe online this Xmas!

PS: I submitted the URL to PayPal as a suspicious URL. The process is confusing, and as of now I still don’t know if my submission got through. I did not receive an (automated) email back (maybe thanking me for taking the time to submit a suspicious URL?).

Next Wednesday I’ll be presenting Mapanui at Ignite Spatial:

What if a presenter could tell you their spatial story within 5 minutes? They have 20 slides, and each slide lasts for 15 seconds. You vote for your favourite presentation. That’s Ignite Spatial.

Ignite Spatial is on Wednesday, 12th of November at the Occidental Hotel. Doors open at 5.30pm with the first talk at 6.30pm. Ignite Spatial is free, and is open to anyone with an interest in spatial sciences, technology and applications.

Ignite presentations on the evening:

1. GIS Today – Beyond mapping and data maintenance (Jason Grech – gViz)
2. GPS – Debunking the myths (Chris Loty – Ultimate Positioning)
3. GIS and GPS in tourism (Tony Hart – Strategeo)
4. Intro to the Google maps API (Mickey Kataria – Google Australia)
5. Mapping the Sky  (Richard Lane – Sydney University)
6. How I build cool stuff for Government (Diana Mounter – Local Govt Association)
7. Is GIS Really Mainstream Now? (David Hayward – Ajilon Consulting)
8. Web Mapping Services and GIS (Win MinSwe – Blacktown City Council)
9. Mapanui – a pocket map for your browser (Jean-Jacques Halans)
10. How to talk GIS to the spatially naive (Chris O’Dell – Parsons Brinckerhoff)
11. Advanced 3D modelling with Pictometry (Alex Cowdery – AAM Hatch)
12. What’s new in Microsoft’s Spatial offerings (Andrew Coates – Microsoft)

Should be interesting!

Looks like I’m on at 7:15pm!

BarCamp Sydney is back! This time for one day only in the fantastic UNSW Roundhouse. Join us for interesting people talking about interesting things in technology and entrepreneurship.

BarCamp is an unconference: an open, participatory workshop-event, whose content is provided by participants. Ad-hoc conference, unorganised, unrestricted and unpredictable, BarCamp is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.

More info about BarCamp Sydney on the wiki: http://barcamp.org/BarCampSydney
Sign up at http://barcamp.org/BarCampSydney4

Poverty manifests itself through different guises. When we think of poverty, we’d immediately recall a homeless person or a malnourished African child, a reflection of economical poverty. Social poverty is the result of lack of social capital. As per J.D. Lewandowski, “the concept of social capital refers to the networks of social trust and social connections that serve to enable individual and collective actions in a given social structure or society.” Social exclusion is often a cause of poverty, conflict and insecurity. Improving social inclusion increases one’s well-being, mentally as well as economically.

The Internet has enabled a way of social interaction and connections which facilitate the kinds of action that “make democracy work” (Robert Putnam). It enables freedom of movement up and down the socio-economic and cultural ladder through social participation and human development. It offers economic opportunities and access to public and social services.

On the Internet, everyone can be anyone, and social division becomes a non-issue (though actually new social divisions are constantly being created, on a different level – are you on MySpace or Facebook?). In fact, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (Peter Steiner’s cartoon). Another joke goes “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Internet and he won’t bother you for weeks.” But that man might rise up to be the next Internet millionaire. Access to the Internet is an instrumental right for the improvement of people’s capability. Missing out restrains personal growth. That’s also why gouvernments provide libraries, and Internet access at libraries. It gives people access to knowledge, but libraries are a less than ideal environment for social interaction. Bringing the Internet closer to the community, closer to home, empowers people to take control of their own social network (online and offline). That’s where Free Sydney Wireless (Free Australia Wireless) fits in. By providing free Internet access, through a shared connection, we try to bridge the social divide in our own community, closest to us. This hardly costs us anything extra, as we already pay for Internet access. This is our small contribution to tackle social poverty.

The growth of social networking and user generated content reflects the deep rooted need of people for self expression, social interaction and peer validation. People sharing without personal financial gain. As they do, others do. Or so we hope anyway.
What are you waiting for, why not get involved?