Flickr and Censorship

Read:

• http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/11/flickr/
• http://thomashawk.com/2011/03/flickr-cites-community-guidelines-for-censorship-of-egyptian-bloggers-photos.html

Like many other famous community based tools like Facebook and Twitter, you do not trust them AT ALL. They have an agenda which is commercialisation. You are better off opening your own website or a Freenet site if you are afraid of censorship and have mirrors.

Not credible hosting

After the events where companies like EveryDNS, Amazon and other companies got subjugated and coerced into removing Wikileaks from US and other countries servers including France. Can these nations and servers who are easily coerced, be trustworthy hosting for any website or company or organisational infrastructure ?

Can you guarantee a safeguard that your materials would be removed the next day ? Aren't the USA servers being prided as a platform for free speech ? Look at the mess of USA. How can we trust USA, France, Sweden ... these countries as hosting nations for our contents whom they pride themselves for freedom but in the end, they gave in to pressure ?

How can we trust EveryDNS, Paypal, Amazon, Wikipedia (Removing Wikileaks Mirror article), Twitter (block Wikileaks topics from trending), Mastercard and Visa ... ?

How can we trust the infamous Swiss banks from being neutral to our money (Read: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/7bg5kc) ?

The UN is very concerned with these extreme ways of prosecution and attacking of Wikileaks and Julian Assange (Read: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6B81RO20101209).

So who do you trust your hosting to and your technology ? Now cloud computing seems rather more unreliable as someone (if you hosted in the wrong hosting companies or countries) could shut you down.

Spoofing Geolocation

Read:

• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/how-to-spoof-your-geolocation-on-facebook-places-or-twitter/6764?tag=content;search-results-rivers

Nice trick. Such things aren't very trustworthy btw.

Insecurity and Malicious Ferocity

Twitter Insecurity

Read:

• http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9187160/Twitter_antibodies_help_kill_worm_says_researcher

Twitter should serious look into it's input sanitization mechanism. Don't end up like in this XKCD comic depiction... catastrophy... but this comic is about SQL Injection, Twitter's problem is unsanitized input... similar to SQL Injection.

HTML 5 Insecurity

Read:

• http://samy.pl/evercookie/
• http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/lawsuit-targets-advertiser-over-sneaky-html5-pseudo-cookies.ars

PLEASE, the World needs less of these stupid insecurity and dirty business tricks. Why can't the World be in peace and less of these trickery and human flaws ? Oh... humanity loves these hypes and daily miserable drama.... I almost forgot about that... that's why we have so much meaningless things going on.

HTML 5... is just as INSECURE... that's my conclusion. It's time someone write a Free and Open Source software to take out these insecurities in HTML 5 and disallow others from misusing it. I suggest browsers should give users some sort of user friendly control to literally 'WIPE__CLEAN' all available storage areas. Browser makers knows best where and which corner in the browser data could be stored and hidden and what sort of mechansim can be made to cause data to resurrect like evercookie. We need a huge 'NUKE OUT THE NASTIES' button to take out these yucky things and never allow them to replicate on our side.

Browser makers should also step up security, making sure what sort of javascript and client side scripts that can be safely executed and not harvest user informations. It's unethical to disturb a person's privacy but what if one day YOU ARE A VICTIM OF PRIVACY ISSUES ? Ever consider that ?

HUMANS... think ....there are always consequences to actions we do. Consider well.

Twitter's Big Problem (OAuth Problem)

Read:

•  http://arstechnica.com/security/guides/2010/09/twitter-a-case-study-on-how-to-do-oauth-wrong.ars/

• http://hueniverse.com/2010/09/all-this-twitter-oauth-security-nonsense/ (OAuth hueniverse account I presume)

So all of us have known the BIG problem with Twitter's OAuth authentication mechanism. I do not need to go in and talk about the problems with it's (Twitter) authentication as the above links would give you a good enough picture and for those who have been locked out of their Twitter because of OAuth problems, you know the problems better than I do (I don't use Twitter btw).

Imagine OAuth's hueniverse account posted about Twitter's problems... what a SHAME to Twitter. 

Twitter, please set things right. Listen to users and STOP being STUBBORN or sooner or later, people would SHUN you.

Services like Twitter builds themselves around users.When users finally realize that it's Twitter who is not paying enough attention to them and have failed to satisfy them, it would be Twitter's bane.

What should users do if they can't reach Twitter via their mobile devices... stop tweeting. Since Twitter decides not to listen to their consumers and users, why should anyone consume Twitter ? Yes... direct boycott.

It's sad that Twitter is just too stubborn.

Well, that's all for today.

(P.S. I have not been blogging lately because I am busy building a Java application. It's secret and I would not tell you would it is. It is meant to be a surprise for all of you. :D )