Golly jeepers, what could be better?

How about: not even getting paid for it?

Welcome to LinkedIn’s new Social Advertising program. Congratulations: you’re not just a personal brand; you’re a model!

If you’re having flashbacks to Facebook, congratulations, the anorexia hasn’t gotten to your brain yet. Yes, they pulled this two years ago, so you should know the drill by now; if not, here it is, straight to you from Steve Woodruff at BrandImpact:

1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.

2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account*”.

3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising” .

4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” .

And, with quite impressive rapidity, LinkedIn has dialed back on some of the other “social sharing/advertising” options they just dialed you in on:

what we’ve learned now, is that, even though our members are happy to have their actions, such as recommendations, be viewable by their network as a public action, some of those same members may not be comfortable with the use of their names and photos associated with those actions used in ads served to their network.

So, we will be changing how these types of social ads look, from this:

Linked In Social Ad Before

To this:

Linked In Social Ad After

Well, there go your dreams of hanging backstage with Marc and Kate.

Counting. Like a Boss.

You’d think, with all the money in the world (literally) that banks would have the best security systems.

You’d be wrong.

You’d be especially wrong if you’re the quarter-million or so Citibank retail credit card customers whose entire accounts were laid bare by an audacious if breathtakingly simple hack by an as-yet-unidentified group.

Fom the NYTimes:

In the Citi breach, the data thieves were able to penetrate the bank’s defenses by first logging on to the site reserved for its credit card customers.

Once inside, they leapfrogged between the accounts of different Citi customers by inserting various account numbers into a string of text located in the browser’s address bar. The hackers’ code systems automatically repeated this exercise tens of thousands of times — allowing them to capture the confidential private data.

The method is seemingly simple, but the fact that the thieves knew to focus on this particular vulnerability marks the Citigroup attack as especially ingenious, security experts said.

One security expert familiar with the investigation wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.

To which one can only reply, “whatEVER!” Any security-conscious and tech-savvy person (and there must be a few of us out there, right?) would have noticed that the URL contained the account number, and it’s a short step from that to plugging in a linear series of numbers and seeing what comes up: ooo1, ooo2, etc.  You don’t even have to plug in many numbers, as a commenter on Gawker explains:

Credit card numbers are limited. The first 4 numbers indicate the card type and bank, and the last number is a check on the validity of the first 15. That means that each card has only 11 digits. That’s 100 billion. if there are 100 million cards issued by citi with the same first 4 digits, you’ve got a one in one thousand chance of hitting a real card with random numbers. That’s a really high chance for a computer. To get 200,000 real numbers, you’d have to run 200 million cycles, which could be done in a day or two on a reasonably fast web site.

Heck, you could probably randomly guess your way into several juicy accounts from your iPhone on the way to that restaurant you couldn’t afford yesterday.

But why am I still blogging? You’ve all left this site and signed into your online banking to check the URL, haven’t you?

Thatta boy!

PicApp picked a fight

PicApp has a problem, and so does everyone who uses them. Formerly a benevolent, free photoservice which allowed bloggers of all types access to fresh, high-quality images, over the weekend it morphed into an unstoppable plague, taking over websites all over the interwebs while their owners slept.

It happened this way.

There comes a point in every free service’s life when it feels the need to generate income. If you’ve been around longer than ChatRoulette, you know this, and you knew the day of reckoning would come. Well, it came over the weekend in the form of an email to bloggers that if they wished to use Picapp images in the future, they’d have to register and install the Picapp widget on their blogs (or insert a line of code in their themes).

That’s a simple yes/no proposition, and easy enough to make up one’s mind about. But whether or not one agreed to the terms, Picapp went ahead and did something to its existing images already embedded in blogs, with the following result:

- every image on the front page of a blog now links to PicApp instead of wherever it linked to before.

In the case of blogs that give credit to their image sources by linking to them, this is a huge deal. Well, I wouldn’t want some third-party service messing with the actual links and content on my site without specific permission in any case, so PicApp has some ‘splainin’ to do this week.

Yet another example of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Does this clarify things?

This is just what I’ve been saying all along, only not as well.

Customer Service Manifestos

“You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers—advertisers. Forget this at your peril”

August 6, 2010 5:31 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@glassbeed

Clarence Fisher

(quote from @cqwww)

The soothing announcement

FACEBOOK WANTS TO MAKE TWO THINGS CLEAR: 1. WE’RE COMMITTED TO PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY. 2. YOU’RE ADORABLE WHEN YOU SLEEP.

October 18, 2010 2:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@PROMO_TWEET

Promoted Tweet

The Facebook Phone

Image via Wikipedia

Generally, we’re here on this blog to let you know about data safety. Today, we’re here to give you a gentle reminder of personal safety.

We take technology so much for granted that it’s hard to imagine someone who hasn’t, for instance, gotten at least halfway into the shower while plugged into an iPod. Not. a. good. idea. Today, Gawker blogger Adrian Chen got a not-so-gentle reminder that basic precautions around electricity can go a long way towards, say, preventing you from getting struck by lightning in your own bedroom.

Like he was.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a thin strip of white flash in the window that looks onto an alley behind my apartment—it was so thin it might have been traveling down a wire. Suddenly my left arm shot off the keyboard, pulsing with the same weird combination of numbness and pain you feel after grabbing an electric fence, if you’ve ever been dumb enough to do that. It was enough to shoot me to my feet, and I stood there for a few seconds wondering what had just happened. The first thing I did after realizing I had been hit by lightning was scream something along the lines of: “HOLY FUCKING SHIT I WAS JUST HIT BY FUCKING LIGHTNING WHAT THE FUCK.” The next thing I did was check to see if lightning strikes were covered under Applecare.

Just like a blogger. Typical.

So, everyone, go buy a good surge protector! And if you already have a surge protector but are lazy like me and don’t plug your laptop into it because it’s all the way under your desk, while there’s a perfectly fine outlet right there on the wall, and what the hell does a surge protector even do? You probably deserve to be struck by lightning.

…

(P.S. Do not ask if I have super powers. Lightning strike victims hate when you ask us that.)

Noted. So, boys and girls, what did you learn from today’s lesson? That’s right: Steve Jobs wants you to protect his precious products properly, and if you fail to do that, he’ll call down thunder and lighting upon you.

That said, by far the easiest way to get at someone’s site is to convince them to give you the password. Don’t think it’s easy? Check this elegant, yet evil little trick out:

Facebook Password Trick

That’s not nice; don’t fall for it. But if you do, remember that you can delete your posts on Facebook if you hover your cursor over the right-hand side of your comment, just above the line of typing. But if your friends do this to their friends, GET NEW FRIENDS.

But it really IS greener!

Have you ever sent an email or posted something to someone else’s Facebook wall or to the comments section of their blog and then thought, damn, I shouldn’t have said that! Of course you have: we all have. If you haven’t posted something you later regret saying, you haven’t posted enough!

The question is, what do you do then?

You get over it. In some cases you can “withdraw” an email, but the sad fact of the matter is that this fails more often than it works, particularly in an instant-alert culture where people open their emails on receipt. You can email the blogger and humbly beg them to take your comment down, but if it happens to be a swipe at said blogger, you’re probably only going to make the situation worse. And you can delete your Facebook account, but if you posted something to someone’s wall, you have to delete it before you delete your account, otherwise you are well and truly hooped.

The moral of the story, boys and girls? While we are all about backing up your own material, we advise taking a deep breath before posting something to a region of the web you yourself do not control. As comfortable as you may be in the blogosphere and the Facebookosphere, it’s pretty much always a mistake to drink and comment.

And speaking of which, when you’re tempted to drink and dial, it’s probably best to avoid those with Google Voicemail, otherwise you could find your slurry imprecations forwarded all over the internet as mp3′s. Get yourself one of these drunk dial blockers and never wake up wondering what you have to regret again!

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!

My name is Prince and I am crazy

Yeah, well this particular blog saw it coming. And we saw what he’s not saying, and we posted it ages ago!