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A Trailblazer?

Posted on by Bigglesan

I’ve been using the internet for some time now. In fact I’m not ashamed to say that my first experiences were with Lynx! So I think I have a pretty good handle on finding my way about, and finding what I need.

So when I read a post today on Gizmodo that talked of a competition, where, with no keyboard, no google or bookmarks allowed, participants where challenged to get from one site, to another totally unrelated site my interest was peaked.

At lunchtime when I had a few minutes spare I took up the challenge for myself. The starting site was amazon.com and the destination piratebay.org I imagined a convoluted journey through a bizarre assortment of sites, but instead found myself at my destination in only a few clicks. I suspect posting that path here may be a bit of a spoiler for anyone wanting to try it out, so why not give it a go yourself before reading on (and then post your results in the comments!)….

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Spoiler Below!

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Here’s how I did it, each bullet point represents a click.

  1. At Amazon I realised they had a blog, this seemed the most likely source of external links.
  2. The very first article today mentioned an LA Times article, and a newspaper is likely to have a lot of links!
  3. At the LA Times website I quickly headed for the Technology section of the paper.
  4. A handy tag cloud on the site had ‘piracy‘ as a keyword
  5. Here it was just too easy, the final link click that took me directly to thepiratebay.org was in an article titled “Even Pirate Bay can be downloaded on Pirate Bay. Dated August 17, 2009″

So that’s it, 5 clicks, about 2 minutes of my time. Anyone got another challenge for me?

Mandatory Internet Censorship

Posted on by Bigglesan

It’s important that you make your voice heard on the subject of Mandatory Internet Censorship. However, in this modern age our government is yet to introduce guidelines or facilities for the lodging of electronic petitions, even though a house committee has been looking at it for at least 4 years now.

So if you want your voice to be heard read on, and this is true for all petitions to the federal government! Whether it’s about No Clean Feed, R18+ Gaming or any other subject.

Why signing the official paper petition against internet censorship is the only sure way to make your signature count!

The House of Representatives is the house in Australian Parliament that will be passing the legislation to filter the internet, This House can only be petitioned on paper and each signature must be in the persons own signature, online petitions are not valid, when petitioning parliament you must petition the appropriate house on an issue in which they have the power to act, and only the House of Representatives have the power to act on this bill that imposes mandatory filtering of the internet.

Please take 5 minutes to print out this pre-approved official petition, that is going to be tabled in Parliament in 6 weeks, it’s great if you have already signed a digital one, however it does not take the place of the official paper petition.

Official Paper Petition against internet censorship at any of the below addresses:

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;www.thecrowhouse.com/savethenet.html

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;loveforlife.com.au/node/7113

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;stream.adamdodson.org/items/view/1610

Please share this information around, so we can show parliament how serious we are about opposing censorship.

PornStarNames invade Twitter

Posted on by Bigglesan

I’m not surprised really, Twitter is, after all a perfect medium for a meme like this. But the name game isn’t a new one, hell I think I remember first figuring out my Porn Star Name when I was in early high school, a long long time before the internet existed as we know it.

But now…wow! Paranoia is brought to new levels. Warnings abound now on Twitter about how revealing your PornStarName is akin to giving those nasty hackers/crackers/russian mafia you credit card number and PIN. Well, get over it. A couple of things to think about…

1) I’ve never seen Street names used as security questions in over 17yrs online IT work. Occasionally pet names, yes but think about it…

2) If you DO use these things as passwords, security answers, then you’d be pretty damn stupid to start typing them out anywhere, I hate to say people deserve to have ID stolen, but if you’re going to be that daft, then maybe you do.

I think someone mentioned something about mother’s maiden name being aprt of the game, and if someone’s trying to slip that in, then yes, I’d be a bit more concerned. It was never part of the game, and may be an obvious attempt at social engineering, but again, you wouldn’t be that stupid in the first place would you. I mean, does anyone actually USE their mother’s maiden name as a security question answer? It’s probably one of the least secure items you could use to start with, easily discovered by any really interested person.

PornStarNames is a laugh itss been doing the rounds since long before the internet, just because it made it to Twitter, no need to think it’s some great social engineering scam, it’s not.

Have a laugh, at your own expense and others, and if you have, foolishly, used any of this information as a password or security question somewhere, then surely you’ll see those letters appear on the screen before you and know it’s not a good idea to share.

The Search for Traffic

Posted on by Bigglesan

Millions of blogs, so why read this one? I update infrequently, I don’t talk about any particular subject. But seriously, my ego would love to think that the occasional person found what I had to say interesting!

So I’m signing myself up at a number of places, and trying to generate a bit of traffic.

One of those places is Technorati, my profile there is here: Technorati Profile

I’ll add others as I go. In the meantime, have a browse, stumble my posts, and spread the word in your Facebook or MySpace.

Add to Technorati Favorites

Commenting

Posted on by Bigglesan

I just realised that I had the blog set to disallow commenting my unregistred users. While i’m happy for people I know to register an account, and perhaps even post, I also like the idea of anyone beingable to comment (sensibly) on my posts and images etc. So I’ve opened up commenting! Go for your life.

Update … wow. The amount of SPAM comments that thi sblog attracts is just ridiculous! It would be nice if some of you readers left a comment every now and then, if just to relieve the monoteny of deleting SPAM ones for me!