by Kate Olson on August 5, 2008
to take a break from Twitter, the news of the malware-Twitter issue is enough to make me extremely wary of clicking links there. After the craziness on April 1st where at least one of my close online friends mentioned having a virus attack after being rickrolled on Twitter, I let my guard down again. Yesterday I got another shocker when I tried doing a google search and was told that it appears that my computer is searching like a hacker (or something insane like that) - I then did a virus/malware scan immediately and all was well, but it seriously worried me.
The BBC article (one of many about the Twitter issue) states:
The worms transformed victims’ machines into zombie computers, used by criminals to send spam, launch phishing attacks and harvest data.
They were disguised as a link to YouTube which also installed a fake version of Flash Player.
“Unfortunately users are very trusting of messages left by friends on social networking sites so the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high,” said Alexander Gostev, a senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
Only those using Microsoft Windows are vulnerable to infection from these malicious programs.
My take on this? Using Twitter only among close friends wasn’t my intention, so I ended up with a HUGE network of really interesting people. Unfortunately, as the article states, this could mean I was TOO trusting, and clicking on one of the tinyurl’s could be harmful……….although of course I wouldn’t be intentionally clicking on the one mentioned (a porn video)! In the world of malware and viruses, though, once it’s done once, it’s going to be replicated - just something to think about.
Or maybe it’s just a message from Apple confirming what we already know - Kate should buy an MBP, and pronto.
Oh, and if schools didn’t already have a reason to block Twitter, unfortunately now they do - the naughty kids really do ruin all the fun………..
Related:
Social engineering on Twitter
CSRF Vulnerability Allows Twitter “follow” Abuse
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by Kate Olson on August 4, 2008
7 months of Twitter.
Now I have just one more month home with the most important people in my life before they head back to daycare in September and have decided that Twitter and the wonderful distraction it provides doesn’t have a place in my life this month. I might be back once I’m working from home in the fall, but for the next month, you can find me elsewhere - namely here, This Mommy Gig, and probably Facebook (friend me!). You can get in touch with me through the contact form here or by emailing me at kolson29 at gmail dot com. Want to know about new posts? Do it the old-fashioned way and subscribe!
And no, naysayers, this does NOT prove you’re right……….I’m already mourning my favorite playground right now.
And yes, I’m an all-or-nothing person - Twitter for me was a major thing to manage, I couldn’t just post once in a while and forget about it. The people I met and interacted with mean a LOT to me and I’ve carried many of those relationships off of Twitter and turned them into friendships, jobs, opportunities. I just can’t ignore it, I felt the need to nurture my relationships there and maintain a certain level of activity and interactivity to do it “right”.
Here’s why this impacts me so much: I have sworn that I won’t let my kids turn into many of the kids I know today - the ones who are attached to machines 100% of the time. I look up after 7 months of acting like a 21-year-old in a liquor store (or kid in a candy store - same thing) and realize that I don’t WANT to be a social media queen. I can’t keep up and no longer want to.
I need to think about what all of “this” has done for and to me and figure out its place in my life. I love blogging and will continue to do so - you just won’t see tweets about my posts for awhile now. I have a lot of life and family time to manage right now and no matter how much I love my network, there are people who need me more.
Can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out.
And yes, I tend to be a bit dramatic.
by Kate Olson on July 23, 2008
This is the status of the twitter network issues many of us had on Wednesday night (losing over half or all of our followers and followees) - the reply is from Jason Goldman of Twitter posted to the thread on GetSatisfaction.com:
Jason Goldman replied to Followers and Following are all gone - when will this be fixed?, a problem about Twitter.
Thank you to all the folks who provided additional information. We went into maintenance mode to recover from the missing user problem which was caused by a data inconsistency problem.
We were able to restore to an earlier version of the relationship data. You may still see out of date information for one of the following reasons:
1) The changes are still propagating out to all parts of the site. It will take several hours for the data to be correctly reflected everywhere.
2) There may be some missing data as a result of this restore. In particular, changes you made to your social relationships in the past 12 hours may not be reflected.
3) Notwithstanding the first two points, the counts that appear in your profile for followers or followings may be slightly different than they were before. Those counts are generated from a cache that was not always a perfect reflection of the true data. Therefore, the counts may slightly change.
I completely understand how frustrated everyone is by this outage. Thanks for your patience as we recover and work to make sure it won’t happen again.
I’m heading out of town for 3 days - I’m just going to hide out and hope for the best when I get back! Because, as much as I love Twitter - it’s all about the network. No network, no fun.
UPDATE: It appears as if my network is growing again, and there’s another post on GetSatisfaction saying they fixed the problem manually. Fingers. Crossed.
by Kate Olson on May 27, 2008
I know this is a sign of my infatuation with the shiny toy called Twitter, but I miss it working all of the time and all of the connections it brings to my otherwise small world. So, here’s my show of support for my favorite (well, tied with Gmail and Firefox) free thing:
Twitter, I won’t bash you, I won’t leave you in your time of growth…..I just hope everyone else sticks around with me……
by Kate Olson on May 1, 2008
After repeatedly becoming frustrated with the way some educators talk about twitter, I started compiling some information on how it’s being used OUTSIDE of education. Say what? They didn’t create this crazy little tool just for educators? Really? I’ve commented on a certain post too many times already and decided to just write my own post rather than cluttering up the comments over there any more.
See, I always feel like I’m straddling the line with my network as I interact and follow MANY educators, but I also follow and interact with almost as many people in business, especially social media types. I also don’t limit my blog reading to education blogs or twitter interactions to educators, so I’ve been rather frustrated when I see educators (and social media users, for that matter) try to make rules for twitter based on their particular use for the tool. As I’ve stated numerous times elsewhere, and to different audiences, twitter is not yours, it’s not ours, it’s for EVERYONE. You get out of it what you put into it and making rules for it just irritates the masses. Everyone has their own particular way of using the tool and for deciding who to interact with and that’s wonderful, that’s the way it should be! The only place I’ve seen sensible rationale for using twitter is in the PR/Marketing area, where there definitely can be right and wrong ways of using your corporate identity on twitter.
Listed below are just a few of the posts I’ve read lately (I’ll be adding to this) relating to how twitter is being used in PR and Marketing (one of my areas of interests), I think many educators will find it interesting to see how differently twitter is viewed by a different profession.
Also, if you’re in love with all things twitter, an excellent place for resources is the Twitter Freaks Diigo group (no, I did NOT name this group!) - there are tons and tons of great resources for all twitter users. I’m considering doing a blog post on links from that group in the future. By the way, I wrote this post in Diigo’s “send to blog” feature.
So, as I said about blogging a few months ago, let’s just tweet and let tweet, shall we?
Related Reading
I’m Nobody! Who are You? - Diane Cordell
Special Twitter Message - Al on What’s Up?
