Posts tagged Control
Email Notifications Getting Out of Control? Zap ‘em With This Handy Tool
Jan 17th
The last time you cleaned out your inbox, how many of those emails were auto-generated notifications from social networks and other websites? Unless you’re particularly aggressive about turning off default notifications, it was probably more than a few. You’ve been meaning to get around to going through and changing all those settings, but – oh hey, hang on, there’s another email.
Editing the notification settings on a few big Web services doesn’t sound like a big deal, and in reality it’s not. But in all the digital, real-time chaos of life online, it’s easy to put off. You might zap one when you think of it, but what about the rest of them? Are you really going to sit there, hunt them all down and annihilate them?
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It’s with this very basic, but nonetheless undeniable reality in mind that one teenaged entrepreneurial duo set out to create Notification Control. It’s an incredibly simple, single-page Web app that does one thing. It links you to the notification settings panel of many major social networks and websites.
Yes, that’s it. It may seem almost ridiculous that anybody would need such a tool, and it doesn’t pull off any great programmatic feat. But truth be told, simply providing all of those links in one central, command-and-control interface is all many people will need to actually go through and tweak their notification settings in a way that’s more conducive to reducing clutter and preserving sanity.
Notification Control is the brainchild of Ben Lang and Tim Kendall, both of whom are in their late teens. It lists popular services like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest and others and provides a direct link to each one’s notification settings. Naturally, you still need to sign in to each service to access the preferences; There’s no special cross-site authentication magic going on here. Kendall and Lang are just reaching out and helping you do something you swear you were going to get around to doing yourself, eventually. Maybe.
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World Bank Assumes Control of Google Map Data
Jan 16th
Google announced a partnership with the World Bank today to make Google Map Maker data more accessible to government organizations in disaster scenarios. Google Map Maker is the tool for crowd-sourcing the editing and maintenance of Google’s world map. Its user-generated data include locations of hospitals, schools, settlements, water sources and minor roads.
Access to these data will help governments, NGOs, researchers and individuals plan without waiting for the changes to be approved and added to the official maps. World Bank partner organizations, such as government and U.N. agencies, can contact World Bank offices to request access to the data. Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal and Haiti will pilot the project.
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Google’s New Gatekeeper
This partnership could improve response time and effectiveness in crises in underserved areas of the world. It’s just a shame that Google has decided to compete with Ushahidi and other open-source efforts to solve this problem. Access to Google Map Maker data is privileged, and Google has chosen the mother of all elite gatekeepers, the World Bank, to facilitate this program.
The World Bank has supported much-needed online mapping efforts, such as the April 2011 project in South Sudan that enabled Google to put the new country on the map. It has also financially backed apps supporting economic development in a worldwide contest for software developers. In partnership with academic institutions, the World Bank has also backed a Web-based knowledge platform for urban development.
These are all great efforts, but they establish a familiar pattern for the World Bank. In Web technology, just as in global economic development, the World Bank has positioned itself as an unavoidable, privileged gatekeeper, and this time Google helped.
No More Open Source
We’ve reached out to Ushahidi for comment on the news, and we’ll update with the response. While Ushahidi‘s non-profit, open-source efforts carry on, Google is closing off access to its mapping platform upon which great works of software were once built. Having realized the enormous value of Google Maps as a resource, Google decided to start charging for API access last year.
That’s Google’s commercial prerogative, but its proprietary efforts are now in competition with the open-source community. Today’s partnership with the World Bank is a clearer example than the murky history of access to the Google Maps API. Google Map Maker is a moderated Google program, and Google has selected the World Bank as an arbiter of its data.
Last December, Google overhauled Map Maker’s editing tools to make it easier for any Google Maps user to add new data.
What do you think? Is the World Bank a good choice for Google as a partner? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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How to Take Control Over Your Social Media Proliferation
Jan 10th
A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn’t counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.
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“This lack of coordination is a recipe for disaster,” posts Shel Holtz on his blog last week. “The inability to coordinate effort, maintain a consistent customer experience, monitor accounts, ensure legal and regulatory compliance and act quickly when an issue arises are all consequences of a fragmented approach to managing social media.”
Less than half of those surveyed by Owyang coordinate their social media approaches, and those that did spent on average $272,000 trying to do so. That is probably undercounting a lot of time that people contribute too.
The other part of the report is evaluating the various management solutions to audit and track an enterprise social media deployment. Here the news is equally depressing, with a lot of immature offerings, incomplete products, and halfway analytic tools. The APIs from the major social media networks are also in a state of flux, so relying on them can be troublesome. He has 27 different vendors arranged in a chart, based on their appropriateness with five different use cases for managing social networks.
Many of these are vendors that aren’t well known, or the province of ad agencies that are looking to branch out into social media. The five use cases are: an intense engagement to handle a high customer volume of tweets, posts and comments; social broadcasting that is more of a one-way communication; platform marketing on Facebook and Twitter; a distributed brand presence where a hotel or restaurant chain tries to coordinate actions across their many properties; and highly tailored or custom solutions. For each one he highlights a couple of the management vendors that excel in that particular area.
If you are looking to get back some control over your social media mess, it is worth your time to
view Owyang’s report here on Slideshare.
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Control: China Launches National GPS System
Dec 28th
The urge for control is powerful, made exponentially more so whenever two or more representatives of a government get together. Among the more prominent, and ridiculous, examples of this trend are Iran’s attempt to create a “halal” Internet (ostensibly to safeguard Muslim sensibilities, in reality to control the political thought of Iranian citizens) and the American former intelligence chief’s proposal for a “.secure” Internet in which users would voluntarily give up their Fourth Amendment rights.
Add to this China’s “national” global positioning system. This Chinese satellite navigation network will obviate the need to use the Pentagon-created and U.S.-run GPS system, which dominates location technology worldwide.
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This strictly Chinese system, according to a defense tech expert in today’s Wall Street Journal, “could help the Chinese military to identify, track and strike U.S. ships in the region in the event of armed conflict.” It has already been used to coordinate the movement of Chinese troops.
The network, called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BNSS), began transmitting yesterday, after 11 years of development. It consists of 10 satellites, with another six slated for deployment in the coming year. The BNSS is run by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, a state contractor serving the nation’s space program and run by the Chinese military.
Since 2009, China has been very busy launching satellites, and learning from the successes and failures of those deployments. The BNSS is not believed to be as accurate as the GPS system, but it may, in time, get there. Bedou, which means Big Dipper in Mandarin, is only the first step toward a global system, called Compass, which is slated to have 35 functioning satellites around the world by 2020.
Like the GPS system, the BNSS would also make its data available for developers. Now, if you’re uneasy with the notion of high-tech governmental scrutiny in an occasionally transparent, more-or-less representational democracy, imagine the kind of fun the government of China could have not just with a high-resolution, wide-coverage satellite network, but with that scifi scrutiny wired into a suite of ubiquitous consumer goods.
The only other GPS alternative is Russia’s Glonass. The European Union is building its own, called Galileo, also scheduled to go live by 2020.
Sputnik graphic via Bruce Irving
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3 Essential Tips to Keep Your SEO Under Control – Business 2 Community
Dec 8th
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3 Essential Tips to Keep Your SEO Under Control
Business 2 Community Once you're done with the actual on-site SEO, there is still link building to contend with, and I would argue that link building never really ends if you want to succeed in the long run. For site owners looking to manage their own SEO, it can get very … Link Building Company Announces Increase in Search for Keyword, 'Backlink … |
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Do Services Like Secure.me Really Help Parents “Regain Control” Online?
Dec 2nd
Secure.me is a new security service that “offers consumers a way to regain control over their privacy on the Internet and social networks.” Parents, too, can now monitor (stalk?) their children online.
“Our life has long merged with the online world,” says co-founder Christian Sigl. “We use online services, social networks and mobile apps so actively that it’s hard to keep track of every personal information about us, which is visible to others on the Internet – whether we put it there ourselves or it was placed there by friends, acquaintances or even completely strings.”
Should young people and especially children be required to read the legal jargon found on social networks like Facebook and just take more control of their online security, or is that the responsibility of parents? Or should that actually be in the hands of services like Secure.me?
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There already are kid-specific social networks like Everloop which give parents complete access to their childrens’ activity. But even these social networks function as training wheels for the big kids’ playground of Facebook and Twitter. Is monitoring kids via Facebook the right route for a parent to go?
Apparently parents are already doing just that. A September 2011 study from the Family Online Safety Institute found 83% of parents whose kids have Facebook accounts have at some point or another either logged on as their kid, or friended their kid on Facebook. That’s why Secure.me focuses first and foremost on Facebook. After the secure.me account has been activated, the Secure.me user can monitor activity on up to three Facebook accounts. The information they can see includes topics discussed by the Facebook user, messages, comments, likes and the Facebook user’s friends’ events and check-ins. Secure.me can also analyze data and events from the past and send email updates with notifications. Secure.me uses language recognition technology to identify any questionable content. Biometric face recognition identifies photos of the people the user requests to monitor whether or not the person has been tagged in a photo. It also identifies sensitive personal information and makes privacy recommendations based on that, along with identifying potentially malicious links.
These so-called “digital natives” may well be growing up with the Internet,” says Sigl, “but just like in all other areas of life, they must first develop skills in what they are doing – which, in this case, means developing media competency.”
Is that the responsibility of an online security service, or real-life parental units?
How do you feel about this potentially intrusive service? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
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Developer Hacks Siri to Control More Devices, Makes it So Much Cooler
Nov 22nd
If you thought the idea of using your voice to control your smartphone was neat, just wait. One developer has hacked Siri to allow it to control third party devices, starting with his WiFi-enabled thermostat.
In what he says is his first-ever Ruby project, St. Louis developer Pete Lamonica set up a proxy server in order to effectively trick Siri into thinking it’s communicating with guzzoni.apple.com, the server on which Siri’s functionality actually happens. Developers can write their own custom handlers for various actions. In this case, Lamonica uses Siri to get a reading off of his thermostat and then change the temperature.
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As more household devices get Internet connectivity, one can only imagine the possibilities this holds. The prospect of a Siri-controlled television set and other Apple-built products is exciting enough, but this hack blows the feature’s potential wide open. It’s a bit like when Microsoft’s Kinect game controller was first hacked to do things other than play video games on the XBox 360.
Microsoft embraced the Kinect’s customizability, releasing an SDK for developers to use. Now there are countless uses for the Kinect, which may well prove to be a substantial part of the future of how humans interact with machines. Intelligent voice control like Siri has been touted as another potential piece of that puzzle. It remains to be seen whether Apple will be as receptive to the idea of letting users tinker with Siri in this fashion.
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Water Utility Control System Hacked Last Week
Nov 21st
Last week the news blogs were filled with information about a second attack on a computer-based supervisory control system (SCADA) at the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District based near Springfield Ill. The first was the Stuxnet malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear facility that was extensively covered. We wrote about how the Symantec anti-virus researchers decompiled the malware and demonstrated it to us here earlier this summer, and how variants on Stuxnet called Duqu were also found last month floating around European networks.
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A second attack was reported by Computerworld last week based in a Houston utility.
The Illinois attack was revealed by SCADA cybersecurity expert Joe Weiss. Writing on his ControlGlobal blog he mentions the specifics. First off, the attacker’s IP address originated in Russia, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There were various “minor glitches” in remote access sessions to the SCADA system that were observed for several months prior to last week’s attack. “The attackers are thought to have obtained the usernames and passwords to the system by first breaking into a computer belonging to the utility’s SCADA software vendor, according to Weiss and subsequent reports.
The ultimate damage inflicted on the utility was a burned out water pump. If these reports were accurate, it would be the first time someone has targeted an industrial facility in the US in this manner. That is a big “if” indeed.
A friend of mine who works as an engineer for another water company told me that they “have very secure systems with firewalls between our SCADA and office net and finance systems. The guys that have access to our SCADA system are set up in 5 layers of rights. Those with access to actually change things have digital keys that reset password codes every few minutes. I suppose that the system in Springfield could be penetrated as they say and running the pump on and off could cause damage. It’ll be interesting to see if that was the case or if someone named Homer Simpson was just eating donuts in Springfield instead of responding to the pump alarms.”
Whether the Springfield utility followed best practices in how it connected its SCADA controllers remains to be seen. While these units use their own firmware and operating systems, typically they are connected via USB to Windows PCs that can be infected with malware. That is indeed how the original Stuxnet attacks started.
Weiss points out that there is a lot of misinformation at this point. There are various agencies that are set up to share reports about these kinds of events, and that few of them have posted anything authoritative yet. And in the Illinois case, there are a variety of state and federal agencies that have to coordinate their activities to handle this kind of attack, and they are still working out the details.
Photo c/o CleanWaterWaste.com.
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Learn To Control Your Message With Social Sharing & Open Graph
Nov 8th
Whether it’s optimizing a website, running a commercial or managing a Twitter Feed, controlling your brand’s message is crucial to ensure your audience hears what you intend. TheInternet has evolved and controlling your brand’s message is more important than ever in the advent of a…
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Attracta SEO Tools to be Bundled with cPanel Control Panel – Web Host Industry Review (blog)
Oct 12th
 Web Host Industry Review (blog) |
Attracta SEO Tools to be Bundled with cPanel Control Panel
Web Host Industry Review (blog) (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In one of the bigger stories to come out of the first day of the cpanel automation event in Austin, Texas this week, SEO software developer Attracta (www.attracta.com) announced on Tuesday … cPanel Announces Bundling of SEO Tools by Attracta |
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