Archive for the ‘Security’ Category

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StormDriver Cookbook, Part Two

November 10th, 2011 Posted by Chris 2 Comments

There are several thousand potato dishes known worldwide.

Before you start to wonder why am I going into this culinary metaphor, just think about it:   something as simple as a lump of starch and protein can be used in so many ways! What about really complex items? What about truly versatile things, like StormDriver? This one silly potato trivia made me think, that my recent StormDriver Cookbook simply isn’t enough. That’s why I talked to some other guys in our team, in order to check how they would use our platform, and what they would recommend to our users.  Now, I’m coming back with some more real-life examples.

And because right now we’re having a series of planning brainstorms, it’s probably not the last cookbook you’ll see on our pages. So sit back, turn on your imagination, and check some more cool ways to use the StormDriver. I hope our ideas will inspire you to try it out personally.

Because StormDriver, just like potatoes, can be used in many, many ways.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

StormDriver Alpha: Second Preview

November 10th, 2011 Posted by Chris 37 Comments

It seems that the exclusive sneak peak of StormDriver, we gave our readers two weeks ago, sparked some interest. We received a couple of questions about the system and we gladly answered all of them, as we’re prepared to do in the future. It seems some people are actually anxious to get their hands on this precious alpha build, and we’re really pleased about that.

As it stands now, the public alpha is planned sometime in mid-July. Don’t hold me accountable for this promise, though. It’s always been quality before deadlines in our team. We don’t want you to be disappointed, even with the first, rough build. And while you wait, this column can provide you with an in-depth look at various parts of our system. It’s the second of our Alpha articles, and I can promise you it’s not the last one.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Privacy, Releases, Security, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

Prismatic personality – a fresh concept for social networks?

October 21st, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

Publicity that followed the recent death of Steve Jobs proved who the true heroes of our age are. In last two decades, famous developers and IT inventors started to get the attention equal to pop stars and politicians. And all of those internet icons fall roughly in two categories. We have successful entrepreneurs and businessmen like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Bill Gates. And then we have some shady figures, the swashbucklers and buccaneers of the digital age, people like Julian Assange or Kevin Mitnick.

One of the messiahs of this underground web is a quiet New York student, Chris Poole, also known as “moot”. In 2003, being just 15 years old, he programmed a simple website that with zero marketing and one-man development grew to 18 million unique monthly users in less than ten years. I’d give you a link, but you would click it immediately and then you’d go back to complain about inappropriate content you found there. Because Poole’s invention is an anonymous, uncensored, and (almost) unmoderated image board called 4chan.

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized |

Intelligent home – a future that never happened

May 17th, 2011 Posted by Chris 7 Comments

There are concepts that have been tried many times over the course of the last century, always failed, and yet innovators don’t give up on them. No, I’m not talking about flying cars or miraculous hair growth formulas. It’s the intelligent home that grabbed the spotlight this time around, thanks to the recent Goolge I/O conference, and the Android@Home initiative.

If you haven’t seen a video from the conference yet, here’s a quick recap. A Google spokesperson takes the stage. Behind his back, there’s a poster with a family of disturbingly happy green robots. There is a brief talk about remote control of home appliances and lights. Then, stage spotlights are starting to flash as someone plays a game on an Android tablet.

Are you impressed yet?

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Internet Trends, Security, Technology, Uncategorized |

Madness? This is DARPA!

May 6th, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

Behind every mad scientist there is an even more insane project leader. After all, someone has to pay for all those laser equipped sharks, mind control weapons and doomsday devices. In today’s world, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seems to be the institution most experienced in pushing forward mad ideas, and employing Dr. Evil types. Only recently, they have commissioned flesh-eating machines, deadly nanobot swarms, death rays and behemoth space cruisers.

Before you laugh at those projects, keep in mind that DARPA has a good track record in bringing risky ideas to life. After all, we owe them the Internet. All those silly memes, redundant social networks, information overload, and Rebecca Black came to be only because of the work on ARPANET funded by DARPA in the 60’s.

A look at their workbenches might prove to be a peek into the future. That’s why we’ve thrown together this list, to show you what kind of toys people from DARPA would love to get their hands on now.

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Posted in Internet Trends, Security, Technology |

The Gray Zone

April 14th, 2011 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

The largest data theft in the US history. The highest sentence ever passed for a computer crime. Secret Service. Torture and treachery. Julian Assange’s faint shadow. This story has it all.

It starts with Albert Gonzalez, mastermind of a hacking group that stole almost 90 million credit card numbers in the famous TJX heist. In 2008, he was busted and found guilty of all charges. Then, he did an obvious thing for someone who’s going to stay behind the bars until 2025. He wrote a long petition, claiming he’s innocent.

His defense is so crazy it might just be true. The TJX hacker believed he is actually working for the US government. No, he’s not the tinfoil hat kind of guy – we know that he had a contact with a government agency. In 2003 he was arrested and forced to cooperate with Secret Service. Over the next years, he helped agents to infiltrate the hacking community – he committed many computer related crimes during covert operations, with full approval of his superiors.  He was still an active informant in 2005, when the TJX crime took place. Apparently, the agency forgot to notify him that his hacking carte blanche does not apply to this particular action.

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Posted in Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Technology |

Milking the cloud

April 1st, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

Not so long ago computing clouds were only talked about by strange mainframe guys (you know, the ones with plastic glasses, pocket-protectors, and their secret-mainframe-guy language) as well as some fad-chasing computer journalists. “Cloud’ was the new word, even though most things attributed to cloud computing existed before the term was invented, in form of VDI or distributed computing services. Now it seems that more and more cloud-based services trickle down to regular consumers.

For example, this week brought us the Amazon Cloud Player. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Amazon offers 5GB of music storage for free, upgradable to 20GB if you purchase any MP3’s through their store. If you have many devices capable of playing music, it might be something right up your alley – it will allow you to access your media locker with a smartphone, tablet, netbook, work PC or home PC. Amazon’s player is also intelligent enough to save your bandwidth by caching all files, so that you only have to stream them once on each device. Only iPhone users are left out, which is not surprising, considering fierce competition between Apple and Amazon in the digital music retail. To make things worse, iPhone fans still don’t have any cloud-based service, after Apple’s decision to close down LaLa. Fortunately, some clever folks took the matters into their own hands and provided a workaround.

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Posted in Content Discovery, Games, Internet Trends, Security, Technology, Uncategorized |

Pipe Wars: the Empire Strikes Back

March 15th, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

I admitt, the first part of this post, published yesterday, was all tease. But now it’s time to get to the real business, and find out what’s the state of the game in the net neutrality fight. Let me tell you why you should feel concerned.

For the past several years the question of who owns the internet pipework, and what they are allowed to do, was a bit of a grey area. There was a general consensus that it’s not fair to meddle with the content, but still many providers employed shady deep packet inspections, penalizing traffic from online games, video streams, P2P or FTP. Then, some of them decided to filter out P2P entirely, under the guise of anti-piracy. And then, they went one step further, and restricted the access to some questionably humorous websites. The Chinese are even further along the way. They perfected the art of blocking, and currently filter out most of the Western Internet content.

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Posted in Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Technology |

Pipe Wars: the Phantom Menace

March 14th, 2011 Posted by Chris 6 Comments

It’s safe to say, the future of Internet is being decided right now, in US Congress. You think it’s an exaggeration? A writer’s trick to grab your attention in the all-important first two lines? I assure you, that’s not the truth. Or at least not the whole truth. With the recent vote of House of Representatives subcommittee against the net neutrality, the way we use Internet might be about to change forever.

Let’s imagine two possible futures. In both, it’s year 2020, gallon of gasoline costs $7, the world economy is recovering from the terrible 2015-2016 recession, the health service is in shambles (as it has been for the last 50 years), TV shows went to a whole new level of silly, and people have some really bad haircuts.

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Technology |

Privacy: the evolution

March 9th, 2011 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

Just as I thought we’re done with the Social Browsing topic someone pointed out that there is one thing I’ve failed to mention. The reason why so many social browsing attempts failed. It’s the privacy, or to be more precise – the last shred of it we want to save in the digital age. That’s why, even though I should be writing about the aliens, like all of the Internet does at the moment, I decided to create this follow-up post.

Let me tell you: I understand why some people are concerned with StormDriver. After all, 75% of US HR professionals check the candidate’s digital footprints. They carefully comb through Facebook, Google, Twitter, private blogs, photo galleries. Over 70% at some point rejected someone only because they didn’t like what they found. And the government goes even further – recently the IT consulting firm HBGarry was accused of blackmailing bloggers and journalists in order to undermine Wikileaks popularity. They were no hackers. Most of the incriminating details they used simply came from publicly accessible web sources.

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Privacy, Security, Social Browsing, Technology |

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