New Social Media Sites

As Social Media grows and becomes more and more popular, many new sites have started popping up. Two have recently caught my interest.

Blippy.com is like Facebook for your credit card purchases. It allows you to publish how much you spent on your credit card, where you spent the money, and what you bought. Then, your friends can comment on the purchase. Why? I don't know, but it certainly is following the social media trend: everything is public, and nothing is private any more.

Another up and coming site is Unvarnished. This site allows people to create profiles about people and then anonymously rate them as a person, in the business context. The catch is, you can not edit or delete any comments made about you! It's like that slam book on Mean Girls, but in real life! You can check out the website at www.getunvarnished.com. If you go to Unvarnished.com, this is what you will see:



Some guy's blog just got really huge, or really screwed.

Kavi

For the last several years, I have had the opportunity to vote on the short film submissions for the USA film festival. Last year, one short film really stood out to me and the other panelists. Kavi was actually still a work in progress, but the spark was already there. It was actually one of the least beautiful-looking films we saw that year. Technological advances have made it much easier to make a beautiful looking movie, but the story and the substance has to be there. The actors have to be good and you have to be interested in it. Kavi had all of those things. A story about a slave child in India, Kavi is filmed on location and is based on the actual life style of the brick-making slaves that still exist in India. The story was compelling and rang true. We passed it on to the next round.

Kavi ended up winning best short film in the 2009 USA film festival, which qualified it to be nominated for an Academy Award. Gregg, Helvey, hte writer/director of the film spoke at the festival and emphasized that his reason for making the film was to create awareness about the slave problem still alive in India today. In fact, 30% of profit for the movie benefit anti-slave non-profits. I hoped that the movie would make it to the next round.

Academy Awards nominations came out a few weeks ago, and we heard all about Avatar 's many nominations, but no one talks about the short films. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and when I checked the Academy Awards site today, this is what I saw:



Needless to say, I am excited, and I really really hope Kavi wins, not just because I had some part in voting its way to an Academy Award, but also because it's a good movie for a good cause. If you get a chance, I encourage you to check it out. You'll be glad you did.

Foursquare Widget for Capture the Market

For the last several months I have been playing Foursquare on my iPhone. It's a fun social media app where you can "check in" to places you visit to let your friends know where you are, if they want to come and join you. The app also has a game element in which the person who is at a location the most in a 60 day period becomes its "mayor." You also earn points for checking in and creating new venues. Checking in certain numbers of times and at certain places can also earn you "badges."

Foursquare has an open API, which allows people to use it to create other applications. One of the things that has been created is a widget that people can place on their websites or blogs. This is aimed mostly at venues that want to advertise their popularity and their mayor. Here it the widget for my office. And yes, of course I am the Mayor!!

A Wordle of this Blog

The Future of the Internet: Applications

FarmVille and MafiaWars! Just the names of the two Facebook applications that dominated my Live Feed (until I recently removed them) drive me crazy. The open platform that allows them to exist on Facebook also opened the gateway to other types of spam. In a recent NPR interview, former Facebook spammer, Dennis Yu, described several different ways people let spammers into their Facebook lives, simply by participating in applications. Yu explains:

"When a user clicks Accept, that they want to join, most of their profile information is now available. That can be used to create a very intense, addictive game, but it can also be used to [sic] advertising, and when you can use that data inside an ad to inject a user's name, their profile picture, the information of their friends, it creates highly relevant, highly targeted advertising, very smart ads. We can call them appvertising..."

These "appvertisements" can now be opted out of by in-the-know users, but many of the less savvy users might be taken in by these targeted ads. The real trouble comes when spammers use the collected information to hack profiles. This has happened to several friends of mine, who suddenly send uncharacteristic comments, messages, or status updates wanting friends to go to certain websites. Luckily, these incidents can be mostly alleviated by changing passwords.

Appvertising and spammers are just a few of the downsides to open platforms found on Facebook and MySpace before that. Identity theft, Phishing, and viruses have also become problems on these once mostly safe sites. Before Facebook opened its platform in 2007, there were only a select few Facebook created Applications for sharing photos, groups and events. Now, it seems like there is an application for everything, including those crazy addictive FarmVille type games. Some people would vote for a more sterile Facebook of the past, but others clearly enjoy the new offerings an open platform can bring, even if the bad comes along with the good.

This is the dilemma faced in Jonathan Zittrain's book, "The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It." Zittrain argues that the open platforms or Generative-ness of PCs and the Internet, while beneficial for their initial development and popularity, are now becoming more of a negative than a positive. In 2008, when his book was published, Zittrain noted that 90 percent of email was spam (p.99) and that 80 percent of it came from zombie computers sending it without their owners' knowledge (p.46) and nearly half of those computers were in North America. These are staggering statistics, and they are beginning to make people sit up at take notice. Last week I wrote about the prevalence viruses on Windows-based PCs, but according to Zittrain, the truth is that all personal computers are likely to be infected with some kind of virus, especially if they are hooked up to a constantly open Internet source like broadband or a T1 line.

The solution in the past has been to just throw more bandwidth at the spam problem, so that the email lines don't get so clogged that the relevant email can't get through (p.99). However, at some point that solution will not work any more, and then people will have to face the real problem: there are people exploiting the Generative nature of PCs and the Internet, and they're ruining it for everybody. People like Alan Ralsky, the self-proclaimed "King of Spam" and many even more malicious people have used the easily re-programmable nature of PCs and the Internet to not just make a profit, but to take advantage of and hurt people in the process. Although Ralansky was caught and punished, there are thousands more to take his place, and as more patches are made to the system, even more work around programs will be written.

For some, the solution to these problems is to just close the whole thing off and create tethered technologies. Tethered (or appliance) technologies like iTunes, TiVo, and XBoxes are not generative, meaning that they can not be changed or reprogrammed by the consumer, but must be used in the way the manufacturer intended (p.3). These technologies can be reprogrammed and often are, but only by the remote manufacturer. Tethered technologies still serve many useful functions, but they allow for less innovation and their content and functionality are not fully controlled by the user, even if the user has technically bought the product outright. This can of course lead to undesirable outcomes, like a service getting changed or canceled, and the user losing content or functionality that he or she already paid for.

Zittrain includes iPhones to the tethered technology list, but I disagree with him, since there are thousands of applications (written by third and fourth parties) that can be downloaded and added to iPhones, changing what they can do. Perhaps technologies like the iPhone could be the happy medium between too much freedom and too little. Apple does allow applications created by virtually anyone to be uploaded to their App Store. I say virtually, because although anyone can create and upload applications, they first have to pay to become a developer, and then go through online training to learn how to develop, and finally their applications have to pass standards before they can be added to the App Store. Except for the having to pay for the privilege part, this program seems to me to be a great solution to the programming woes of traditional generative technologies. In the Apple Application setting, programming is allowed and even encouraged, but standards have to be met, before new programs can be released to the general public. And, unlike Facebook, iPhone/iPod Touch users do not have to send applications all of their personal information in order to be able to download them. Apple's program may not be perfect, but I think it's on the right track.

Exploit: The Dark Side of Networks

My computer's hard drive died this weekend. Although it is clearly inconvenient, and will be costly to repair/replace, it's not the end of the world. In fact, I did not lose any pertinent information to this or the other class that I am taking this semester, because all of it is stored on the web, either via this blog or files I have emailed to myself. In this case, connectivity via the internet saved my academic butt.

However, not all stories of connectivity end quite so happily. My office subscribes to Vyvx, a nation-wide fiber network that is used, among other things, to broadcast live video feeds. Their headquarters and main hub is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, pretty much the center of the US, for easy central access to the continental US. But in the spring of 2006, their basement (which contains the servers) flooded, causing the nation-wide network to go down. Since Vyvx nearly has a monopoly on the fiber connectivity world, almost every live shot for every network scheduled that day had to be canceled or re-booked with a satellite truck (if possible). Not only did Vyvx lose thousands of dollars that day, but so did the TV networks and production companies that use their service. The stations lost more than money, they lost content for their shows, which their producers had to scramble to replace at the last minute. Although Vyvx works for all of their clients 99.9% of the time, that day has been etched into the memories of all involved. It is truly an example of how "...networks fail only when they succeed. Networks cultivate the flood, but the flood is what can take down the network" (p. 96). Although the flood was not a malicious attack, it exposed the vulnerability of the Vyvx network to exploitation.

According to Merriam-Webster, to exploit is "to make productive use of , or to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage."

According to Wikipedia, an exploit is " a piece of software, a chunk of data, or sequence of commands that take advantage of a bug, glitch, or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic (usually computerized)."

In their book, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Galloway and Thacker emphasize that the more homogeneous network is (especially a software driven network), the easier it is to exploit, once a vulnerability has been found. And in particular, " the more Microsoft solidifies its global monopoly, the greater chance for a single software exploit to bring down the entire grid "(p. 17). Computer viruses tend to target Microsoft computers (PCs) way more often than Apple Computers (Macs) or others for this very reason.



Big computer viruses or worms come around every now and then, the latest one being the Conficker Worm, which may have just been one big April Fools joke on everyone, but it really got the Windows world in a panic, causing many patch downloads, and fearful computer users on April 1, 2009. More recent viruses are connected with the Twilight craze. And again, they only effect Windows users. These Twilight viruses exploit two overlapping groups; they exploit people who are into Twilight and they exploit Windows based computers, both of which happen to be very popular right now. Twilight fans tend (for the most part) to be younger females, who are very likely to be on the web. These fans are excited to get the inside scoop on Twilight: New Moon, which came out this week in theaters, and will be searching online for interviews with the actors and any other inside material they can find. Knowing this, hackers have created websites that will show up in search results, prompting unsuspecting fans to download viruses, thinking that they are getting interviews or a sneak peak of the movie.

Although it would be possible to exploit these groups on a case by case basis, it is made infinitely easier with the network of the World Wide Web. Web browsers are also susceptible to virus contamination, especially, you guessed it, Internet Explorer. With a usage percentage of nearly 65%, Internet Explorer is by far the most popular web browser. So, since "computer viruses thrive in environments that have low levels of diversity" (p. 84), viruses have targeted Internet Explorer much more often than Firefox and Safari, the second and third most popular browsers. The reason for this is obvious, apart from homogeneity, monopolies provide a way to use the network to the viruses' advantage and affect the largest group of people possible.

So, is the solution to vulnerability to buck the trend or get out of the network altogether? Would the relief that comes with knowing you won't have to worry about exploitation be worth the pain of being disconnected? And even if it is, “the idea of connectivity is so highly privileged today that it is becoming more and more difficult to locate places or objects that don’t, in some way, fit into a networking rubric” (p. 26). Plus, you would lose the benefits to gained from being connected, like not losing everything you've done all semester when your computer dies, among other communication and information losses. So,maybe the simple solution (if there is one) is this: be smart. Have a contingency plan. And back up your files.

The Science of an Infected Age

When reading this week's book, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" by Duncan Watts, I couldn't stop thinking about the Swine Flu epidemic. Watts discusses networks, how they are organized, how to use them, and how they effect our lives. One of the many ways in which networks effect us is by spreading things: trends, ideas, information, and even diseases. The more connected a person is, the more access/ influence they have to/on the world.  But being highly connected also has its drawbacks.

This has been made very apparent with the Swine Flu outbreak. The group that has been effected by the outbreak the most is people in schools, whether they work at or go to them, this group seems to be the most likely to get the disease. Not just because children are susceptible to disease, (As it turns out, everyone is likely to get it, but interestingly people over 65 are less at risk, possibly since they survived a previous outbreak.), but because they are in contact with a large number of people (who may not have the best hygiene) every day. As you may have noticed, the epidemic went mostly into remission over the summer, while school was not in session, but as soon as classes started again, here came Swine Flu all over again. 

But not just school people have gotten the flu. Some people who have not seen the inside of a school building in years still manage to get it. This is where networks come into play. For example, little boy gets Swine Flu from someone in his class, then comes home and infects his dad, who goes to work and infects someone there, who goes to worship and infects someone there, etc. Pretty soon the disease has spread to people who have never even heard of the original little boy, but they are connected to him, though the chain of disease. Not a pretty story for sure, but it does illustrate the chain of connections through network. 

By now almost all of us at least know someone who has had swine flu, if we haven't had it ourselves (knock on wood). A year ago, we have never even heard of it, 

and feared the "looming" Bird Flu pandemic. The high level of contagiousness of this disease made the "slow growth phase" pretty much non-existent, and pretty much just skipped straight to the "explosive phase (p.172)." Luckily, unlike his example of *shudder* the Ebola virus, the Swine Flu does not guarantee death, but because of this, it does not reach the "burn out" phase quite as fast.  If God forbid, something like the Ebola virus did break out in the United States, or any highly populated area, it could be devastating, like the plague, but faster. According to Watts, the only people who are "safe" from an outbreak are those who have been "removed", either by recovery, inoculation, or death (p. 168). 

So what do you do to control the disease? UT Dallas has this advise on the Student Health Center website:

Take these everyday steps to protect your health:

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
  
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective.
  
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread this way.
  
• Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
  
• CDC recommends that people with influenza-like illness remain at home until at least 24 hours after they are free of fever (100° F [37.8°C]), or signs of a fever without the use of fever-reducing medication

Once you have contracted a virus best way to protect yourself and others is to cut yourself off from your network.  This is also true for computer viruses. Once a computer is infected with a virus, it should be cut off from the network until the virus has been eliminated. 

But what about the massive power outages or factory breakdowns Watts discusses? In the situation of the power outages, cutting off "infected" areas by the automatic breaker system, which was supposed to protect the system actually ended up making the situation worse, by rerouting power to other branches of the system and overwhelming them to the point of overload and meltdown. Sometimes cutting off a problem area in a network is like cutting off your nose to spite your face...it does more harm than good. 

The networks in our lives are very powerful, but also very fragile tools. The same chain or group of people that can help you get a new job or introduce you to your future spouse can also spread hurtful gossip or expose you to the swine flu. So wash your hands and be careful who you defriend, you never know how it can affect you down the line.