TechAddress

Obama White House to Broadcast Weekly Radio Address on YouTube

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:31:27 +0000

This week has seen an incredible amount of interest around Twitterank, a new tool that popped up that computes a numerical score of … something.

At first, no one was really too sure what Twitterank was computing, but, it related to Twitter, one’s perceived popularity, and had a quirky site, so, why not enter in your credentials and see what the site had to say about you seemed to be the thinking.

Alas, as word of Twitterank spread (through automatic tweets of people’s scores), concerns arose that the site might be stealing user passwords, as Twitter users began seeing Tweets pop up in their timeline that they thought they didn’t make themselves. The phenomenon is perhaps best summarized by one of our commenters, Michael Bailey, who wrote:

“This whole password stealing rumor got started when a few people who did NOT bother to uncheck the box for sending their Twitterank to Twitter. Then it became a matter of self-preservation expressed in the form of “I did NOT give them permission to send that to Twitter” - well, yes they did because of the default setting, which they didn’t bother to read.

So, as most self-preservation of ones ego goes, many people began the rumors that the site must be stealing their passwords, even rumors of DM’s being sent from their account.”

In other words, the user flow on Twitterank – automatically tweeting one’s score unless the user explicitly opts out – was apparently enough to confuse a lot of people into thinking their accounts had been compromised. Additionally, you could (and still can) enter anything into the “password” box on Twitterank and have your score computed, although this won’t post your score to Twitter since it can’t be authenticated (although several commenters dispute this).

Twitterank’s developer, now known to be Ryo Chijiiwa (@ryochiji), has noted in his blog that he regrets these decisions, writing “I probably would’ve done 2 things differently. Firstly, I would’ve come up with an algorithm that works with Twitter’s Search API, which doesn’t require authentication. Secondly, I would’ve handled posting to twitter differently, which would’ve sacrificed virality, but after today, I’m not so sure insane rapid growth is really worth it.”

Indeed, the design of Twitterank certainly had much to do with its massive word-of-mouth spread, and it’s still Twitter’s #1 trending topic today. This design is also what led to speculation that it might be a phishing scam – a fire we added fuel to by simply asking our readers: “Is Twitterank Ranking Your Popularity or Stealing Your Password?”

The answer now appears to be the former, though the design flaws of Twitterank are certainly a valuable lesson for anyone building a Twitter application, or, on a more serious note, applications that actually do important stuff (as a recent victim of being opted into a credit card scam, I can relate). And for users, the Twitterank “scare” was an important reminder to keep your passwords safe, and use a diversity of them. After all, if something as innocuous as Twitterank was actually a phishing scam, it could easily be parlayed into accessing email, bank accounts, and other sensitive data.

As for Twitterank’s future, it’s self-deprecating developer probably describes it best: “by tomorrow, most of Twitterdom will have forgotten about Twitterank. Thank goodness for short attention spans.”

Source:Mashable!

Some signs of how President-elect Barack Obama will use his massive Internet following are starting to surface. The President’s weekly radio address, a staple of American politics since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, will be posted to YouTube, starting this week with the Democratic address (the party not in power has also traditionally broadcast a weekly radio soundbite). The videos will also be posted to Change.gov, the President-elect’s transition site that launched last week.

According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is also likely to launch a YouTube Channel for The White House after taking power. As a candidate, Obama (and rival John McCain) made heavy use of YouTube, utilizing the service for broadcasting speeches, campaign rallies, and political commercials. While placing the weekly radio addresses online in video will be a first, the current administration offers a full archive of all of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses as sound files at WhiteHouse.gov.

While this is certainly another sign that the Obama administration will continue to make social media and transparency an important piece of his Presidency, critics are quick to point out that he still has not updated his Twitter account since November 5th after winning the election. Presumably, we’ll continue to see new tools come out piecemeal as the transition team decides how to best utilize the Web.

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17 Killer Mashups for Taking Control of Your Government

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:32:28 +0000

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Now that the breaking up via Facebook status update bridge has been crossed, the online dating space probably knows no bounds. In addition to social networks serving as a hub for finding out about the dating status (or non-status) of your friends, a number of other trends in online dating have emerged, like dozens of niche sites for different ethnic groups and people with very specific lifestyles.

We recently took a comprehensive look at many of these sites in our resource list: 120+ Sites for Singles to Find Love. Did any of these sites help out your dating game in the past year? Nominate it in the widget below:

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Source:Mashable!

Government is increasingly putting much of its public records online, creating opportunities for developers to build useful applications for citizens. From being alerted to neighborhood crime to finding the best mass transit routes, these mashups are helping solve everyday problems.

Recently, the Washington DC government launched the Apps for Democracy contest to encourage developers to build applications using its data. Today, the winners were announced, and below, we take a closer look at 17 of them.

Let us know which are your favorites and which you’d like to see in your city.

iLive.at - If you’re a resident of DC interested in learning more about your neighborhood, or if you’re looking to move to the city, this application serves up essential data pertaining to area businesses and crime reports and things of that nature. It’s well designed, intuitive, and quite detailed in the information it delivers to users.

D.C. Historic Tours - The nation’s capital has been doing its thing for quite some time, and so there are plenty of things to see that are of political and cultural significance to natives, visitors, as well as foreign tourists. To that end, this application is helpful to all.

Park It DC - Learn the roadside parking meter infrastructure so you’re as prepared as a city driver can be.

Where’s My Money, DC? - Short of watching over the shoulders of government accountants, this Facebook application enables users to see where their tax dollars are going. Anything over $2,500 in cost is counted, and you’re given a forum to discuss with fellow networkers. Does increased citizen awareness breed fiscal discipline? Here’s one way to find out.

DC Crime Finder - This is somewhat like iLive.at, but singular in focus. Call a number to learn of crime reports in a segment of the city or offer your location on the Web to get a view.

Stumble Safely - You’re out at night and fairly tipsy from your time at a bar several blocks from home. Depending on your access to the Web at such a moment, or your exceptional foresight in plotting a route before you went bar hopping, Stumble Safely can help you navigate without getting lost in spots deemed troublesome.

DC Location - Aware Realtime Alerts - An iPhone application that alerts you to crime and building permit notices based on your location.

We the People Wiki - A user-controlled DC Data Catalog-based wiki. The name speaks for itself.

D.C. Pedestrian - Logic would have it that sources in the capital would have better grasp on the production of walking directions. Here’s one realization of that very idea.

Citystat - All about city spending. According to its official description, Citystat “focuses on DC Government procurement data.”

DCRA Building Permit Dashboard - Building permit information laid out in more digestible fashion - with Google Street View, to boot.

Achieve D.C. - School performance statistics and poverty levels juxtaposed against one another.

Hansen Daily Quick Browse - A bird’s-eye view of Hansen requests in D.C. Simple as that.

DC Bikes - Your Guide to Biking in DC - Similar to D.C. Pedestrian but specific to biking. This involves numerous data points, from crime to metro stations, etc.

Carpool Mashup Matchmaker - Find carpoolers or be one yourself more easily. An efficient effort in the real world is met with an efficient application in the online realm.

DC Community Gardens - Find your community gardens. Enough said.

MPD Incidents - Mobile Phone Access - A mobile front for MPD (Metropolitan Police Department) activity.

Mashable is a sponsor of the Apps for Democracy contest.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, diademimages

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Yahoo and Google: It’s Over, Folks

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:34:44 +0000

Source:Mashable!

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Last year’s Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes combined between Mashable and our 50 international blog partners. This year we’ve doubled in size: nearly 100 blog partners have signed up from 18 countries, providing unprecedented global coverage for the nominees and winners. You can read more about the timeline, categories, rules, sponsors and blog partners at the Open Web Awards site.

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Source:Mashable!

Earlier this year, as Yahoo fought off an acquisition attempt by Microsoft, it began to entertain a search advertising deal with Google. They even even went so far as to conduct a live trial of such a measure. Now the two Internet giants have effectively terminated the effort.

In June, as the US Department of Justice began its investigation of that arguably brazen move, the two companies forged an outline of what such an arrangement would look like if it were to see official approval.

But opposition steadily grew as Google and Yahoo heads stood strong for an October launch. Weeks later, they softened a bit, deciding to allow the DOJ to do its business. Yet, late last week, The Wall Street Journal reported a high potential of failure for their original proposal. Finally, today Google has confirmed the end of its agreement with Yahoo.

Google’s senior vice president of Corporate Development, David Drummond, who also sits as the chief legal officer for the company, cites government regulators’ ongoing scrutiny and concern and the possibility of a “protracted legal battle” and potential “damage to relationships with valued partners” as the key factors in its discontinuation of the search advertising plan put forth in late spring.

Drummond wrote that it was four months of review and “discussions of various possible changes to the agreement” that made it an ultimately unsuccessful venture. And in what seems to be a sort of token concession, the Google executive explained that an attempt to weather any and all conflicts “wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users.”

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LunchTimeDeals Dishes Local Coupons to Your Inbox

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:30:37 +0000

Source:Mashable!

So you live in a major American city like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, or Chicago. You’re hungry. You know you’ve got tons of lunch menu options in a given area to choose from. But do you go for a standard recipes, or do you seek out one of the day’s specials?

If you’re on the prowl for something new, Lunchtimedeals might help to simplify and streamline your decision making process. The idea behind the service is to give restaurants a platform by which to reach potential customers with discounts and special dishes.

You can visit LunchTimeDeals and simply seek out featured items as they come. But if you want to give it the least bit of effort, a quick sign up of your email and location can give you regular messages about things being pushed out by neighborhood eateries. Of course, this entails names in the food business to join the fold and push highlights to a select segment of the site’s audience. But Lunchtimedeals is young. If it manages to connect to the right set of “early adopters,” it could grow fast quite soon.

We mentioned a few cities that Lunchtimedeals lists in its database. Other locations include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Yet it should be said that New York is essentially the only place worth searching. All others are devoid of entries. (Or, to be thematic about it, entrees.) This can certainly make the site feel empty and host some unnecessary linkage, but just as long as you recognize its informational limitations, it might serve you well.

Naturally, the creators of LunchTimeDeals are as eager for consumers as they are for producers in the great big (prepared) food chain we have in this country, so they provide basic “Tell a Restaurant” and “Tell Your Friends” Web forms for people to interact with. If all goes as planned, it’s not unimaginable to think it will be long before LunchTimeDeals manages to diversify its day-to-day attentions to breakfast, brunch, and dinner, too.

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Obama Dominates Content Sharing as Election Approaches

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:42:53 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

ViewBug

20-Word Description

A fun environment where members can win daily and weekly cash prizes based on creativity and originality of their media.

CEO’s Pitch

We are a small team of young and creative individuals who are committed to offering a collaborative online environment that allows our members to win cash prizes. We promote creativity and award originality. Share your art in a fun and rewarding way.

We offer many opportunities to win money. We pride ourselves on keeping a close relationship with our members; we want them to: be creative, have fun, learn from others, share their creations with the world & be rewarded! Our mission is to give back to the community and our members, who are the ones that keep us going.

Mashable’s Take

Sharing your creative output with the world is pretty much natural. You put photos up on Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, PBase, or elsewhere. You upload videos to YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc. You might even publish your music to the Web for all to hear. ViewBug just so happens to mash all these areas of artistry into one venue. And it puts an interesting, competitive spin on it all.

If you simply want to post content to ViewBug for the sake of posting content, you may. You don’t have to seriously compete for prizes if you don’t feel so inclined. But if you do want to battle the user base for props and cash, ViewBug can make that happen. Just take the current crop of challenges as examples.

There are four currently in play. One has to do with “Color,” another is about “Light and Shadow,” a third labeled “Architecture,” and the fourth for “Halloween.” With two days left to play, the Color Challenge has a pot of $200 up for grabs, with $100, $150, and $150 going to each subsequent title, respectively. As you might expect, photography is by far the biggest draw. More than 500 images are vying for the money, whereas videos count at 13, and music a mere single. There are also “doodles” and “twitbugs” to consider.

Suffice it to say that ViewBug is a real treat for those keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. The more you contribute, the better your chances at some real returns. And when I say returns, that doesn’t just go for cash promised. The ViewBug environment and interface is quite slick, and while you can take it to be a place simply meant for challenges to be waged, the roundup of communities alone looks attractive. The potential financial rewards are more of a bonus, a cherry on top, rather than the bread and the butter for the service.

On the whole, ViewBug looks like a really fun time for all. It’s a haven for the creative class, and it just so happens to trumpet tangible benefits to keep things buzzing and interesting. Which is something to appreciate. It won’t interest all visitors, of course. But it’s garnered enough movement to make it something to keep coming back to - again and again and again.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

What Does Sarah Palin Have in Common with Miley Cyrus? (smcb)

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:32:04 +0000

Source:Mashable!

While most web mail services have remained largely unchanged over the last ten years or so, Google has been updating GMail on a near constant basis, whether it’s updating the core of the product or releasing new upgrades via the Labs.

Earlier this evening, they announced a new feature I can see myself using quite frequently called “canned responses.”

Just like it sounds, it’s the ability to offer pre-written responses for commonly written emails:

If you’re sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the “Canned responses” button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

It couldn’t get any easier unless Gmail automatically pushed the Send button.

I’ve always preferred that people refer to me with the much more politically correct term “convenience enthusiast,” and given that I’m such a convenience enthusiast, I’m pretty glad that they’ve also included the ability to hook these autoresponses in to filters.

Several years ago, when I made the migration from Microsoft Outlook to GMail (due to the fact that my decade-long email archive was taking up a measureable percentage of my hard-drive space), the feature I missed the most was the ability to do custom responses based on what sort of emails I was recieving.

As I pointed out the other day, working for Mashable has swollen the amount of email I get on a daily basis to an almost unmanagable level, so this feature could go a long way towards simplifying this aspect of my life.

Source:Mashable!

Monday morning, the FBI closed in on one of the greatest criminal masterminds of the 21st century - Josh Holly. What was Holly’s great crime? Breaking into pop starlet Miley Cyrus’s email account and distributing risque pictures that were found in the sent items section.

The news comes not long after it was discovered that the son of Democratic Tennessee State Representative Mike Kernell, David Kernell, hacked into Vice Presidential Republican nominee Sarah Palin’s email in an effort to find incriminating documents and expose them to the world.

The two cases don’t have too much in common other than the fact that they’re two examples of high-profile email hackings… or do they?

Wired’s Threat Level has been covering the story as it developed and summarizes the method that Holly used to gain access to Miley’s GMail account thusly:

Holly told Threat Level he stole about a dozen Cyrus pictures but only published the most provocative ones. He said he got access to Cyrus’s Gmail account after obtaining unauthorized access to a MySpace administrative panel where he found passwords for MySpace accounts stored in cleartext. He found the password Cyrus used for her MySpace account — Loco92 — and tried it on a Gmail account Cyrus was known to use. The password worked on that account as well, but only for a couple of weeks before it was changed.

Conversely, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo mail account was compromised by David Kernell’s “brute force” attempts of simply guessing the challenge questions, and was then served up an interface to reset the password from the web interface.

So far, the similarities are only on the surface. Sure, I suppose there could be an interesting case made that web-based mail products are inherently insecure or some such nonsense, or the need to properly utilize and organize your passwords so they can be less easily hacked.

What’s more interesting is a point I saw brought up by Mike Massnick last week with regard to the Sarah Palin incident, and it could have direct bearing on this case as well:

“…Orrin Kerr suggests the entire indictment is legally flawed. Specifically, the statute used, claims that the intrusion is only a felony if used to further a criminal activity. ”

“As Kerr notes, it’s not clear what criminal activity was “furthered” by hacking into the email — unless you read the whole thing recursively, such that the act itself is illegal, and thus doing it is furthering that illegal act. But, obviously, that’s legally problematic. So once again, it looks like a situation where plenty of people believe that the act was illegal (very reasonably so, I might argue), but the feds are having trouble finding a law that actually makes it illegal. “

The question then becomes whether it’s open season on high profile emails. Generally, I’m against the legislature coming in and making laws against things online, but it seems a fairly simple task to say “Hey, email hacking? Yeah, that’s illegal now.”

There are laws against interfering with the delivery of the US Postal Service, so most of us simply assume that those laws would similarly apply to emails, but it appears that isn’t exactly the case. Beyond the legal assumption, it seems common sense that we should have a reasonable expectation of privacy with our email accounts, doesn’t it?

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