Privacy

So university is officially back in session, this is bad news for me but good news for you because it means I need to do more procrastinating than during the holidays which in turn requires me to write more blog posts. Going on holiday is always frustrating from a news point of view because unfortunately the world doesn't go on holiday as well, so you have to catch up on hundreds of news stories that you missed while you were away, I'm still trying to catch up while I write this so I thought I'd instead of recapping what I've missed while I've been away I'd look at a much more recent issue hitting headlines.

You may have heard about a small problem Playstation has been having for last couple of days, unfortunately for them they decided to enrage some linux nerds (which is ALWAYS a bad idea) and consequently the linux nerds decided to hack into Playstations online network and steal their PSN (Playstation Network) database, the what? I hear you say... lets just say these nerds now have the following data about all Playstation users:

Their...

Name

Address (city, state, zip)

Country

Email address

Birthdate

PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login and handle/PSN online ID.

Oh and potentially all their credit card details....

One must also remember that most people aren't very password savvy, so it is highly likely that the password they use for their PSN account is the same as their password for many other things.
Playstation did politely send an email out to all their customers 9 days after the intrusion warning them and you can read it here.

Now this isn't the only time that people's private information has been compromised this year, you may remember that just 3 months ago Vodafone Australia had an "unbelievable" lapse in security and published millions of customer's private information on the web for all to see.

And just the other day apple was in some hot water when some researchers discovered a little file stored on every iPhone that has been recording every place the iPhone has been since June (You can read that article here), however this information isn't public until you get a hold of that file, and apple did announce today that it was a "bug" and would be fixing it and releasing a patch very shortly.

Finally, Google last year had a bit of an issue when it was discovered that they were collecting data from unsecured wireless networks. You may remember the Australian Government making an inquiry into the matter, and google later making a public apology for the incident on their blog.

However what I find more disturbing than there being 4 major instances of privacy leaks in under a year is how little public concern there is for these issues. Sure they get featured in the news for a week or so but the next week something else happens (ie. a royal wedding) and it all just gets forgotten about, it is as if people's sense of privacy has been numbed by this new web 2.0 generation whereby millions of people put very sensitive data onto Facebook or Twitter without any thought of the consequences.
In addition the consequences for the two companies whose problems have now been resolved and forgotten about were very minimal:

"Vodafone will escape any form of punishment even if the Privacy Commissioner finds it breached privacy laws that may have affected millions of customers.

The telco is likely to face the same fate as Google Australia, with an apology on its blog the only consequence for conducting what Communications Minister Stephen Conroy described as possibly the biggest privacy breach in the Western world."
(Australian IT)

The public should have a greater concern for privacy especially considering how easy it is now to access data from the internet. People should be more aware that any information that is put on the internet is potentially up there for all to see, even if they try to take it down...
Even this week you might have seen that a couple have decided to have an internationally filmed wedding where potentially billions of people will watch it, their sense of privacy must be so poor...

Having said all that I do think we sometimes completely overreact about the data that is being collected about us, especially data that google collects, and while you wait for my next post you should check out one of my favourite xkcd comics about privacy: http://xkcd.com/792/

And if you are an unlucky playstation user that now no longer has any privacy or a multiplayer network to play on then you should check out this guide of 5 things that you should be doing while PSN is down, I especially like the "Win a real trophy" idea...


Petey

Montage!

I've been putting on my arty hat for the last couple of days and I must say that I have been thoroughly enjoying it! I have had two projects running parallel for the last week which have both been tricky but I think I pulled them both off pretty well and am looking for more to do! The first project was a poster for uni and the second a website; both of these I'll expand later.

But first! I have an upcoming conference that I'm attending next week and I'll be dabbling in some of the media aspects of it to help out, one task given to my brother and I is to create a montage each night of some of the photos taken during the day. Now creating the montage is not so difficult, generally you can just chuck heaps of photos into an iMovie template, make a few tweaks and tada! However the difficult part is finding amazing montage music! So for the last couple of nights I've been scouring the internet for great montage music, this requires listening to hundreds of songs from all over the place and trying to determine whether the song will work as a montage. I've found a couple that I like and the best one so far in my opinion is by an indie band called the "freelance whales", it's just got that kind of montage funk that I need. I also found this other song by a band called Barcelona , it's an amazing song (but probably not very good for a montage) but I can't buy it anywhere in Australia! It is so frustrating that I try as hard as I can to legally buy an album but nowhere will let me... Sanity said they have it in stores so I might pop in tomorrow and have a look, here's to hoping.
Anyway back to topic, if you know any good montage songs please let me know, even though it is quite enjoyable listening to heaps of songs on youtube to find that perfect one, it can become tedious at times...

Back to my art streak.
I managed to tick off 2 boxex on my list of things I must do in my life; making a mobile website, and a podcast. For some this would cause a great groan as you think how shallow my life is but to me it was quite an achievement.
The reason for making these two things is for this conference that I was just discussing, what they wanted was a website to upload podcasts of the talks after each of the sessions where users can either access it on their phone and listen to them there or go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast and listen there, now having never done either of these before I thought it'd be a great experience to go all web 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0?) and bust up a cool website.
If you're interested in how I did it then read on, if you're allergic to code then here's the place to skip top the next paragraph (don't say I haven't warned you)....
To begin I created a normal page with a nice looking table and a list of available tracks to download, without going into the details I managed to detect what kind of device is accessing my page and then change the css stylings (the look of the page) appropriately to match the device. It was surprisingly easy and I can put up the code if you're really easy (to be honest just google it and you'll probably be able to figure it out) but it was a good learning curve on both how to actually do it and how to make content look good on a phone.
To make the podcast was a little more tricky, first you need to make an xml document that has a list of all your tracks on there, iTunes then reads this xml document as an RSS feed and updates when you add another item, you then need to add specific tags (piece of code for those that have no idea what I'm talking about) for iTunes to read your podcast and output the correct data to the downloadee and finally you need to upload it to a site somewhere.
All in all I was quite impressed that I managed to do both of these things in a night but I was on a bit of a roll and so am now looking for what to do next!

Finally the second arty thing I made was this poster for university.

As a group project I am part of a team with 3 other people who must create an application that searches through tweets and display trends depending on what you search for. For part of the assessment we needed to make a poster about our project and we had this great idea of making one look exactly like twitter and have all of the required information displayed as tweets. I, the supposedly arty one, was given the task of making this poster on photoshop something you might think isn't too difficult. However you don't notice the really small details of a webpage until you have to recreate it exactly and twitter has a lot of little lines that you never notice until you've almost finished and then you find one and have redesign the whole thing again. Anyway I'll upload it and you can take a look, I think it turned out pretty well (if you click it, it will expand).

I'll let you all get back to your lives now, I'm not even sure if this post is even interesting to many of you but there are some of you that just read this to procrastinate... and I'm happy to help facilitate that anytime. If you want to further procrastinate then you can go and look for some montage songs for me and leave them as a comment :D

Petey

Polls

To begin I must apologise for the complete lack of blogging over the last week or so, it's currently the last week of the university term and so it's been a bit assessment heavy and funnily enough lecturers do not appreciate me using their studying time writing blogs, unless of course it's somehow furthering my studies in a course... of which it's not. But the next couple of weeks are holidays so you should expect an influx of my rantings.... Now on to this week.

Whilst checking up on the news on my trusty ABC website I came across this poll section. You may or may not have come across this webpage before but for those who haven't it's just a page where you can vote on anything from a local or international contentious issue to a question like "Which type of ball should the PM have taken to the Oval Office?" but not only can you vote you can also view the results of the past 534 polls. Now I know I've discussed polls before I can't help but enjoy dwelling over them, looking for interesting results from the past, seeing how the polled issue has actually panned out and whether the general public was actually right in it's decision.
For instance one that is especially poignant this week is this question which was asked around the time of the QLD floods (Mid Jan): "Will the Defence Force investigation into sexual misconduct effect change?" Now if you haven't followed the news this week a young female was filmed having sex with another man without her consent and another lady just this morning said that her niece had been raped whilst at the academy and was told to "suck it up" by an officer, this has made way for fresh new calls for an investigation into the conduct of people at the Defence Force Academy. Interestingly enough the poll asked in January had a result of 86% of people announcing that they thought that the previous investigation would have no effect on the culture at the Academy, so here the public got it right in that there has been no apparent effect of the previous investigation on the Academy. So is a further investigation enough or do we need to do something more drastic? One would hope that after these events the culture within this and many other organisations changes.

There are some strange results in there as well, for instance the question "Has the Government gone about introducing a carbon tax correctly?" polled at only 54% of people saying no, however if the poll was so close then why did Julia Gillard's public rating drop so dramatically as a result of the announcement?

Climate change appears quite often in the questioning and I particularly find this one interesting: "Is the recent extreme weather a symptom of climate change?" where it finished dead even on 50% either way. It's a very good representation of the insecurity of the public at this time about how our nature is behaving and what is just normal earth phenomenon and what the human race has actually caused.

It's also good to see the Australian spirit in some of the answers, for instance when asked "How do you feel about the $1.8billion flood levy?" out of the four possible answers "Happy to pay" won by a margin of 15 pts at 55%.

And finally just to add a little spice to the blog "Does the NBN's business case look solid?" 53% no, 25% yes...

Just before I go a couple of quick links:

Buying the Presidency - If you were interested in my politics course or the American President race then check out this video, the man interviewed (Dr John Hart) is both my lecturer and tutor for that class and really knows his stuff, it was funny listening to his reaction about the interview afterwards and how he thought the questions asked were really stupid.

Q&A - I hope you were watching Q&A the other night with Kevin Rudd on it, I love to see word maps of the transcript afterwards to highlight the key topics of conversation and this little video was a word map of all the twitter comments made during the program (at one stage they got to 500 tweets a second). It's very interesting to see how the tweets and wider public discussion progressed throughout the show, if you've got a spare 60 seconds it's definitely worth a look.

Anyway take a look through the other ABC polls and leave a comment below on any other results you find interesting...

Petey