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Digital Treasures: guard them wisely
Posted: July 27, 2010 (03:23) under Backups, Intellectual Property, Security

Buckingham Palace Guard

You’ve probably heard about this “terrific” new Twitter feature called Lists: you can arrange those you follow into groups like “People in Vancouver,” “Family and Friends,” “Colleagues,” “Wise People,” and “Dipsomaniacs.” This is a great thing: for Twitter.

My suggestion is somewhat different: instead of giving Twitter the pageviews when you painstakingly organize a list of people whose streams of thought you find List-worthy, put it on your OWN site, and put that page URL in your Twitter profile. Twitter does not need the pageviews, trust me.

This is an extension of the oft-repeated dictate to Own Your Own Land: put the things that you work on in a space that you control, so that not only do the rewards come directly to you, but nobody can take them away from you by, say, suddenly getting sold to a shadowy oligarch who shuts off that feature or perverts it somehow.

And of course, as always, back it up!

The Not-So-Fine Print
Posted: May 27, 2010 (03:23) under Humor, Intellectual Property, Security

We’ve discussed the monolitic data mining system known as “Facebook” before. Let’s discuss it again in light of the recent change in “privacy” settings and subsequent public outcry. I think this about sums it up.

Facebook Privacy

People know that when they post information about themselves to a website they and the website are bound by the user agreement that they signed during the registration process. The problem here is that Facebook (and several other sites to which you should similarly give the side-eye) reserves the right to rewrite their side of the contract at any time. Maybe they’ll actually tell you; maybe they’ll expect you to have Techcrunch on your RSS reader and check it hourly.

Remember: this is a service contract. It’s true that you pay nothing in cash, but you are giving them precious information which they then use to make a significant amount of money. Look at it as a consumer would, for that is what you are. Weigh the tradeoffs and realize that even though there’s no cash exchanged, there is a significant cash value to your information as far as Facebook is concerned, which is why they do not charge you for the service. You are entitled to bring critical intelligence to bear on the issue.

I still have my Facebook profile, one Facebook Group, and two Facebook Pages, and it’s unlikely I’ll join the so-called mass exodus on May 31 (we’ll see how many of them really delete their profiles; nobody wants to get left off a birthday party invitation list!). But it is similarly unlikely that I will actually trust Facebook to keep my best interests at heart, or even keep my settings.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook Not Screwing Around With Its PR Around Privacy Changes (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook Admits ‘Mistakes’ With Privacy (news.sky.com)

Don’t It Yourself
Posted: April 19, 2010 (12:33) under Backups, Intellectual Property

A simple reminder that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Learn from the mistakes of others; as the wise blogger said, you must learn from their mistakes, as you will never live long enough to make enough of your own. You can even learn from my mistake at Diary-X, where I lost a good, solid 400,000 words of blog; that’s FOUR BOOKS WORTH. Did I trust the guy running the site? You bet I did: Steve was a great guy. Did he back everything up? Of course he did.

And he didn’t.

He’d subcontracted the backups out without really reading the fine print about just what was being backed up. It turned out that he’d been paying to back up the technical specs, not the actual blog contents. When the server went kerflooey, you can guess what happened to the thousands of people blogging there: wailing, and the rending of garments.

Hammer time!
Posted: February 25, 2010 (21:16) under Hardware, Intellectual Property, Security

Hammer Time!

Ah, there’s nothing like a good metaphor! Without metaphors, we’d be as lost as…well, we’d be just plain lost, wouldn’t we? We couldn’t be fancy-lost if we tried, not without metaphors. And here’s a killer metaphor:

Your data is like the precious contents of an exotic shark tank in Dubai (no, it really is, bear with me here): without its proper support and maintenance, it can leak away so slowly you don’t even notice until it’s too late, to the point where it reaches a critical failure and comes crashing to the ground all at once in a massive and irreparable cascade that will cost WELL over Goliath’s arm and leg to fix. For example:

A friend of mine was once responsible for the computer systems of the government a small, here-nameless Asian country. He insisted his onsite team install duplicate systems in a separate physical location to ensure that in case of emergency they could continue to function, and they did so and reported it back to him. Then there was an earthquake.

And the mainframe computer housing the alpha of the government’s systems fell through the floor onto the mainframe directly below it, which was the one housing the emergency backup systems.

Offsite. It’s a very important word when it comes to backups. And no, the room immediately below is not off enough.

Your backups should not only be in a physically different location, they should if at all possible be on a completely independent system, so that no matter what virus, worm, trojan or act of Gob may occur, you can be up and running with minimal if any downtime.  Now, if you’re a Dubaious shark keeper, this is somewhat of a challenging proposition. If, however, you’re a webmaster, writer, photographer, filmmaker, or other creator or packager of information in any form, it’s not so hard at all. In fact, we’re here to make it easy.

Trust your precious data to a specialist who’ll make sure it’s there when you need it and not out there duplicating your content, diluting your audience, and weakening your brand when you don’t.

360 Degrees of Copyright Protection
Posted: February 2, 2010 (22:23) under Copyright, Intellectual Property, Security, Theft

Rebecca Bollwitt wants you to talk nerdy to her

Copyright’s a heated topic in the internet, and one about which there is a great deal of misinformation (see this example for an adamant, strongly held, oft-repeated, and completely illegal, belief about copyright). Essentially, if you’re using a major platform such as Blogspot, Wordpress, or Tumblr, or if the server hosting your site is in a country which is a signatory of the major international copyright agreements (such as Canada, the US, India, China, the UK, all EU members, etc) your post is protected by copyright the moment it is created. Yes, even before you hit Publish.

Naturally, as copyright owner you are entitled to sell various subsidiary or even All Rights to your work as you please. Sadly, that doesn’t always mean you can relax, as Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bollwitt, known as Miss604, found out.

What happened was this: Miss604 signed a contract with Tourism Vancouver to supply posts for their site. One of those posts suddenly showed up on NBC’s site, contrary to the exclusivity contract in the Tourism Vancouver contract, which was binding on both sides. When Rebecca complained, NBC removed her name from the post, but keeping the content up, as you can see by her tweet above. When this hit the thunderdome of teh intarwebs, meaning Miss604’s thousands of followers on Twitter, and their followers, and all of their blogs, NBC reinstated her name, in a tiny font, with no link. It’s unclear what position Tourism Vancouver takes in all of this; whether they gave NBC the right to repost the content in contravention of the contract is still not clarified, but all parties involved now consider the matter resolved.

If Tourism Vancouver had taken down the post from its site, which sometimes happens in these disputes when companies want to stay “out of the fray,” it would have been difficult for Rebecca to prove her case to NBC or the public, as she’d have had no objective proof that it was her content which had been copied. This is yet another reason that keeping a backup of all your work (and writing that into your contract) preferably at a neutral third party’s office or site is critical to anyone who makes a living from intellectual property. Can you ever have too many?