Tech Space

That was my thought today as I was looking at the wonderfully developed, yet totally worthless, TweetDeck. Tweetdeck is so far my favorite, despite playing with Seesmic Desktop, and sobees bDule.

It seems like everyone has their own Twitter client: there are Excel clients, shell script clients, Perl clients, and many online Twitter interfaces.

What do I want?

• If I use a new client, I better be able to import my Tweetdeck groups. I’ve never latched on to any other clients because of this barrier.
• I don’t really want a limit on groups.
• For every new person I follow, I should be able to have the opportunity to add them to one or more groups as a new follow.
• I want to thread conversations and/or people’s updates.
• I want a “show less” of this person update.
• I would be thrilled if it would work on my mobile phone.

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• I can't agree with / didn't get the conclusions of this article The title says, "Advertising Growth Spreads in All Mobile Formats" The stats: "38% of US mobile phone owners recall seeing advertising on their cell phones in the Q1 of 2009" "...for Smartphone (such as iPhone) users, 59% recalled seeing mobile advertising"  (From this point on, it looks like "iPhone" is......

Social Media, especially Twitter, is so much faster than the traditional media channels at spreading the word about hot topics. I’ve been following @BreakingNews since they used @BreakingNewsOn, and found that I heard about news 1-2 hours before the “breaking news” placeholder showed up on major news sites.

It looks like CNN has demonstrated this point.

ReadWriteWeb posted an article last night @ 11:46 pm: Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran. This morning, it’s still a “developing story” on CNN.

At the same time, it looks like CNN is fanning the flames of the protests by posting the “football match” quote as a headline. That does ring like a member of the Iran state media.

Bureaucracy may be good for government. A hierarchical structure may be good for large corporations. However, I would imagine the editorial chain of command prevented timely reporting. Maybe there was too much thought given to being “politically sensitive” to Iran. Either that, or CNN is just *that* unaware of what’s going on in the world.

Social media is an enabler for the freedom of speech and of the press. It seems that by contrast, the analysis paralysis of a large news organization is a barrier.

Also: ‘#CNNFail’: Twitterverse slams network’s Iran absence | Webware - CNET.

Updated: CNN was outscooped by 9 1/2 hours.


@BreakingNews tweet @ 9:44PM on Jun 12th:

IRAN VOTES — Iranian president Ahmadinejad wins the presidential election, the official results show

@CNNBrk (CNN Breaking News) tweet @ 7:16 AM on Jun 13th:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won country’s election with 62 percent of vote, government says.

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The title says, “Advertising Growth Spreads in All Mobile Formats”

The stats:

• “38% of US mobile phone owners recall seeing advertising on their cell phones in the Q1 of 2009″
• “…for Smartphone (such as iPhone) users, 59% recalled seeing mobile advertising”  (From this point on, it looks like “iPhone” is used as a generic term for “Smartphone”

The iPhone has only about 10% market share in terms of sales.  See:  Wikipedia:  Smartphone and cnet: Apple doubles its iPhone market share.  Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm, and WebOS are definitely not iPhone users.

A second problem I see with the analysis is quoting the percentage of users who “recall” ads in various mediums and targets (”iPhone” vs. “non iPhone”).  Wouldn’t it be more useful to look at a report of who is serving ads and at what volume, to at least gauge how well the “recalling” of seeing ads matches the volume of ads being presented?  After all, standard banner ads, pop-ups, and pop-unders are often blocked out by the website visitor.  Only interstitials and page covering intrusive creatives which prevent website use by expanding over the web page really even demand the user’s attention anymore.

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Initially heard through Programmable Web: The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive?, twitter is rapidly approaching the maximum for a 32-bit signed int. You can view the countdown here.

This got a also mention at GigaOM: Today, We Think Think Twitter is Dead (for now). While the Twitpocalypse was not the primary topic of the post, it made use of it as a supporting argument:

there is a bug in the Twitter system that would be like Y2K. Apparently each tweet is identified by an integer value and the maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. And since Twitter is getting so popular, we are inching close to that number.

The implication of the mention here is that Twitter itself will come crashing down. It shouldn’t, although many clients might have issues: those written in C (anyone?), those using the default INT in MySQL (which is 32-bit, unsigned) or SQL Server (even 2008).

Interestingly enough, SQLite would only have a problem for INTEGER PRIMARY KEY (32-bit signed int), which could be a problem for TweetDeck, although it doesn’t look like status IDs are stored as INTEGER PRIMARY KEY (apparently, it’s the only fixed type in SQLite).

Apparently each tweet is identified by an integer value and the maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648.

Also, because I had way too much computer science in college, some technicalities (both articles above made this error):

• The correct range is [-2147483648,2147483647]. The representation for 2,147,483,648 (0×80000000) would actually be understood as -2147483648 (two’s complement).

• The range for signed 32-bit integer values doesn’t change.

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Saw this via the following article: “Opera passes iPhone to lead mobile-browser market“

What’s interesting is the trend graph itself:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile Browser Market Share

What about mobile operating systems, though? iPhoneOS and SymbianOS in a duel:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile OS Market Share

As far as mobile search goes, however, there is no competition (by comparison, Google has only 90% of overall search by these same measurements).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile Search Market Share

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What I found this morning:

List of providers of short codes, short codes for SMS reverse billing and premium SMS, SMS messaging:

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The last few times I’ve repaired a malware infestation, there have been some obvious clues to the infection source:  loads of “free” games, a couple suspicious browser toolbars, p2p file sharing software with a hefty repository of downloaded content, visits to questionable sites, etc…  This infection had none of the above.

It manifested itself (probably due to a partial clean-up attempt) as Windows errors:

explorer.exe - Bad Image

The application or DLL c:\windows\system32\dutujahi.dll is not a valid Windows image.  Please check this against your installation diskette.

…tied to winlogin, explorer, lsass, etc..  It appears that the PC was infected with the Vundo trojan or Virtumonde.  Of course, this infection hid itself from (or in?) Windows Explorer and was pretty good at replicating itself to evade capture.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon ComboFix at BleepingComputer.com.  I disabled System Restore temporarily, and allowed ComboFix to begin working.

The process took about 2 hours from start to finish, and in the process, Windows Recovery Console was installed.  Oddly enough, I noticed that there was no anti-virus software installed at all, and the copy of SpySweeper on the PC had been allowed to expire.

I replaced SpySweeper with Windows Defender and installed AntiVir free edtion.  When I ran Windows Defender after the ComboFix cleanup, it was able to find a couple of the orphaned copies of the Vundo trojan dlls in system32.

After the first couple steps of running ComboFix, the system no longer persistently popped the “bad image” errors, and the system appears to be running smoothly now.


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via Windows 7 Fail - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab.

Okay, I get annoyed with Windows’ design on a regular basis, but I don’t know that defaulting to showing file extensions for known file types is the right answer.

I guess the real problem is that Windows 7, like every other Microsoft-designed Operating System, relies on the extension to determine filetype/action, including whether to attempt to execute the code in the file or not.  Until the GUI file managers appeared in the *nix OSes, this was a limitation of *nix–if a file was not explicitly executable for the user, an error would be returned.

Today, Nautilus and Konqueror have mimetypes registered in their file managers, just like web browsers do.  However, they still rely on the “execute” permission bit being set on a file–which is not default behavior on a downloaded file (rusty Linux brain cells showing).  To execute the file, one of two things have to happen:  You either have to set execute permissions on the file or run the file as root/sudo/admin user.  Of course, execute permissions can still be stored in an archive file (.tar, .bz2, .zip), so an executable file can still appear on your system without you knowingly setting it to execute.

Back to Windows…  The default behavior of “Hide extensions for known file types” is user friendly for users who don’t want to know the legacy of file extensions and their uses.  However, in the absence of a useful non-administrative mode and explicit execute permissions, this opens the door for some really simple ways to dupe the user.  Fixing this problem goes beyond not hiding extensions or showing annoying “Are you sure you want to do this?” pop-ups. Related Posts

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(This was inspired by Jason Fall’s post on the Sustainability of Social Media)

What’s lost in the dismissing of social media as a fad is the fact that social media is simply an extension, through technology, of what has been around for ages. Determined people have always found a way to connect with others with similar challenges or interests. How long have networking groups and professional societies been around? What about Alcoholics Anonymous or other support groups? The geeks among us have been discussing things on BBS discussion boards pretty much since the modem was invented. On the web, those discussion boards made their way to hobby sites and company sites via phpBB and uBB.

What has changed? Two things:

Technology has drastically lower the barrier to entry for joining one of these groups. You no longer have to configure the modem with the right ATDT string, or walk as a green-faced introvert into a room of people who already know each other. “Following” someone or “friending” someone is so much easier, and less painful. (Even the pain of rejection is significantly lower.)

Secondly, social media has pulled connection groups out of a taxonomic hierarchy and into folksonomy.

Wha?

Think Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress system for cataloguing information. Some “higher authority” decided how information should be organized–a taxonomy. By contrast, everyone’s favorite pages on their personal web pages and blogs define the keywords that feed into the page ranking algorithm on Google. Ordinary people create the classification system, and if nothing currently fits, they create another classification system–that’s more or less a “folksonomy”.

Back to social media. What happens if no one is talking about your favorite topic? You create your own (possibly duplicate) group on Facebook, your own hashtag on Twitter, your own blog, or your own discussion board. Our associations no longer belong to the bureaucracy of “significance”. If one person is interested, it’s significant. You can now associate yourself with all fans of “Nuts the Squirrel” if you want to.
 

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