The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we've sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
Following an experiment first validated by Radiohead with the release of In Rainbows in 2007, Louis CK shows that everyone (except the middleman) can win.
Hundreds of people in the information security, military and intelligence fields recently found themselves with egg on their faces after sharing personal information with a fictitious Navy cyberthreat analyst named "Robin Sage," whose profile on prominent social networking sites was created by a security researcher to illustrate the risks of social networking.
In a conversation with Computerworld, Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security, said he used a few photos to portray the fictional Sage on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as an attractive, somewhat flirty cybergeek, with degrees from MIT and a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire. Then he established connections with some 300 men and women from the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors.
The goal, said Ryan, was to determine how effective social networking sites can be in conducting covert intelligence-gathering activities.
Here we see how "Social Networks" facilitate the hacker practice of Social Engineering: manipulating people into giving you access to systems or confidential information that could assist in the penetration of a system.
Whats particularly wild is how blatant "her" LinkedIn profile is. (seen here on boing boing http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/23/faux-femme-fatale-fi.html)
I think this will be fascinating. I don't expected to be surprised of course, but I always appreciate the depth and balance to which Frontline examines all of its topics.
Shortly after getting my invite to Google's new fangled "replacement" for email, i found the trick where you can search all public waves. After clicking a few i realized they were all infested with scripts ('bots") and other interweb-nasties. I was so unimpressed that I didn't race back to check on my wave account but on the handful of occasions that I did, i found any public wave that i clicked on was still there, filling up with more crap. There is NO delete button in Wave, but there is a Spam and an Archive button. Sadly you have to click on the wave to be able to click any of these buttons, and as soon as you click your browser will likely go nuts, doing who knows what (have not tried to track all javascript/cookies etc)
So I've archived and marked as spam several of these trash waves and when i come back the next day, they are back.
Look, google does some extremely cool stuff and they have already changed the world (with Search). I love that they support and encourage open source software and they still have that 'cool factor' as a place for geeks to go and work, just like the way i wanted to work at Microsoft in the early 90's. I'm picking on Wave because this is the first time Google put anything in the wild that I didn't think was impressive or at least useful. So I'm saying that I'm done with Wave for now, but I'm also not saying that i don't think it can't be fixed or become useful for collaboration or as a sort of groupware system. Maybe. What I do feel pretty confident about, is that Wave as a re-invention of email is a failure.
I have a like/hate relationship with Twitter. I like that i can spam people, I hate that they can spam me back. this is the result of my using the word alcohol in a tweet. So I'm still calculating my Personal Value (abbreviated PV) to my Volunteering to be Tracked and Spammed (abbreviated VTBTAS) ratio for Twitter and things like this make me shift a bit towards the latter. Still, I invite quitalcohol2, quitalcohol3, and quitalcohol4 to follow me as well.
I often spend time helping friends lock down their Facebook profiles, by explaining how to group friends and create and control who can see those pictures I took of you drunk running through the Taco Bell parking lot looking for your pants. I've often thought I should write up a web page, but like any good idea on the internets, its already been done, and probably a bit better...
So, check out this easy to follow guide from Ars Technica and don't come crying to me when I tag that picture of you flipping off your boss behind her back.
