Posts tagged Control
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…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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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Google Plus Now Lets You Control Who Can Notify You
Oct 7th
Google Plus is currently rolling out a feature to let users control who sends them notifications. There will be a new option in settings called ‘Who can notify you.’
“We’ll be rolling this out slowly,” says Google engineer Kathleen Ko, “so if it’s not available for you yet check back soon.”
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In this public post Ko outlines the notifications that users can now control:
This setting controls who you’ll get notifications from, if they:
- Share with you individually
- Select ‘Notify about this post’ (when sharing to a circle you’re in)
- +Mention your name
- Invite you to a hangout
- Invite you to play or send you messages from a game
Users will still receive all notifications when someone comments on their posts or adds them to a circle. By default, ‘Who can notify you’ is set to extended circles. The options are: specific individuals or circles, all circles, extended circles or anyone.
This is a small update, but with traffic skyrocketing on Google Plus after opening to everyone, noise control options are a welcome addition. Earlier this week, Google Plus turned on new options to lock posts before sharing in response to user feedback.
Do you get a lot of notifications on Google Plus? Will this update help you manage them?
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The Other Steve Jobs: Censorship, Control and Labor Rights
Oct 6th
The death of Steve Jobs has rocked people the world over, affecting everyone from the most hardcore Apple fanboy to Barack Obama to all those gathered outside the new Apple store in Shanghai. While Steve Jobs will be remembered for revolutionizing personal computing, the music industry, consumer mobile products, film animation and even fonts, the other side of his legacy is one of hyper-control: Apple’s proprietary software, the iPhone’s closed-off ecology, App Store censorship and the company’s labor law violations. If there was ever a company that capitalized on American consumers languishing in late-stage capitalism, it was Apple. And they did it by inventing “cool” products that we didn’t even know we needed – till we needed them.
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Apple’s Highly Objectionable App Store Censorship
When Jobs introduced the App Store in June 2008, porn was at the top of the not-allowed-here list of content. Some apps containing nudity snuck into the App Store, and were later pulled. Now only partial nudity seems to show up (e.g. Beautiful Boobs, Asian Boobs), especially if it it only focuses on boobs.
Speaking of boobs, in June 2010 Apple once again censored “Ulysses Seen,” a web comic version of the classic James Joyce novel. Apple forced the creators to remove images that contained nudity before they would approve it as an iPad app. History seems to have repeated itself here: Ulysses had been put on trial in 1933. Apple ended up changing its mind after all, so the boob-filled web comic is available for download.
A few months after the App Store opened in June 2008, a great controversy erupted over an app called Podcaster that Apple decided to reject. It would have permitted people to listen to podcasts without downloading them first to iTunes; Apple worried that the app “duplicated the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes,” and thus saw it as a threat. Here is a longer list of types of apps that Apple rejected from its Mac App Store.
In September 2010, Apple’s iTunes social network Ping omitted Lady Gaga’s Tweets in which she protests anti-gay marriage legislation Prop8. But don’t worry, Apple still released an It Gets Better video, so they must be pro-gay folks, right?
Not long after that, in October 2010, Apple was awarded a patent that could stop people from sending “objectionable” text messages. It was filed in January 2008, and approved on October 12, 2010, and would allow certain content to be filtered based on parental controls. While it might seemed like Apple is trying to keep its devices safe from porn, and therefore more workplace and school-friendly, this was still one step closer toward authoritarian control over the iPhone.
Additional apps were banned from the App store: In July 2011, Apple removed the ThirdIntifada app from its store because it “glorified violence against Israel.” Apple also banned the violent comic book “Murderdrome” from its App Store, based on the Apple SDK which states that “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.” There were a few beheadings and ripped out limbs – but those aren’t unusual in the world of comic books.
Here’s perhaps the most telling App store ban of all: On September 13, 2011, an app called Phone Story, a game that also serves as social commentary, was banned from the Apple App Store only a few hours after its release. The answer as to why this happened was actually quite simple, and can be found in this elegantly written description of the game:
“Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West.”
Oh wait, that sounds a whole lot like exactly what Apple does! Yet Apple would never come out and say that. Instead, they said that the app was banned because it “depicted violence or abuse of children,” and “presented excessively objectionable or crude content.” This highly questionable act raises serious concerns over the freedom of information in a democratic society, playing into Apple’s “walled garden” approach to both its products, and the Web at large.
The Lies That Apple Sells Us
In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority responded to two British TV viewers who claimed that a TV ad featuring a voiceover that said “all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone” was misleading because the iPhone didn’t support Flash or Java. The ad was found to breach CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1 (Misleading advertising), 5.2.1 (Evidence) and 5.2.2 (Implications), and could not be broadcast again.
Also back in 2008, a gaping security hole in Apple’s firmware posed serious problems for anyone who wanted to lock their phone. Instead of being able to lock the phone with a security code, anyone would bypass that by tapping the ‘Emergency Call’ button and then double tapping the homepage if it is set to the default favorites.
Apple’s Inhumane Working Conditions
Apple outsources its labor to China’s most horrible factories, and abuses at one in particular stand out: The Foxconn Factor in Shenzhen, China. Here, some workers as young as 12 years old were forced to work for extended periods of time to meet increased demand for iPhones and iPads from all over the world. As popularity increased for Apple devices, workers were pushed to work longer. Workers ages 18-20 were being forced to work 60-80 hours of extended overtime every month in cramped, low-quality conditions. They were being treated like the very machines they were being forced to produce.
Inhumane treatment of workers first came to light when seven workers at the Foxconn plant committed suicide in May 2010. They were working on the iPad production sector. After these suicides, workers were required to sign a statement that says they are not allowed to commit suicide.
Image via Flickr user mailox.
Will you continue to buy Apple products? Tell us why or why not in the comments below.
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