Josh Benner

Category: Technology

  • Amber Alerts now available on Facebook

    I’ve said before that I feel that people increasingly love online social networking, but don’t necessarily love Facebook. But Facebook is the best place to go to connect with friends and relatives and so we go there. With Facebook itself, people are largely growing more and more annoyed.

    Well, with at least one new feature on Facebook, I would like to applaud the site today. AMBER alert notifications are now available on Faceboo. Each state has it’s own AMBER Alert Facebook page. You can simply search “Amber Alert” and the name of your state, it will bring that page up, click “like” and you’re set.

    It’s that simple.

    In case you are unfamiliar: an AMBER Alert is a notification that a child has been abducted locally. It is a collaborative effort with various law enforcement, transportation, broadcasting institutions, and the wireless industry, according to amberalert.gov

    Part of the point is to utilize so many different types of technologies in an effort to locate the missing person as quickly as possible.

    jrb

    questions/comments, feel free to Tweet @bennernotes (just as soon as you login to Facebook and “like” your state’s Amber alert notification page)

  • Why your Android doesn’t have that trojan everyone is talking about

    No. You did not download the Trojan that is running on Android. Have you downloaded any third party apps from China lately? No, you haven’t, and so you don’t have the Trojan.

    I’m seeing a lot of posts on Twitter talking about the Trojan. I think the fact that people like to use social networking sties to spread the word when there are risks is wonderful.

    However, a negative is that it can sometimes make something a bigger story than it really needs to be and cause more confusion about whether or not an individual’s phone might have the malware.

    Mobile Lookout posted on their blog yesterday that an application which has been named “Geinimi” has been running on recreated versions of legitimate applications (mostly games) on third party Chinese Android app markets.

    But it has only been detected on Chinese apps, so you really don’t need to worry about it.

    For what it’s worth, in order to even download a third party app on an Android, you would need to go to “Settings -> Applications -> Unknown Sources” and check the unknown sources box to have the capability.

    Also, this application asked for downloaders to give it permissions which far exceed the normal permissions you grant any ordinary application you would ever download in Android Market. Checking the box also brings up a warning that you must ok.

    So for the vast majority of Android owners, it would not even be possible for you to get the Trojan.

    For people who have checked to receive applications from unknown services, they need to know the risk they’re taking and pay special attention to what they’re downloading.

    Also, if you haven’t downloaded Mobile Lookout or some other safety application that scans what you download, you really should. It’s free.

    jrb

    questions or comments? email benner.joshua@gmail.com or twitter @bennernotes

    Link to the Mobile Lookout blog post on Trojan http://bit.ly/f8hTtB

  • Skype having worldwide connection issues

    Skype, the popular person to person video communication site went down globally today. This is the first time since 2007 that this has occurred. In a blog post at around 4:00 est, Skype addressed the issue and stated that engineers are working to fix the problem but that it may take several hours to be completely resolved.

    For some, Skype is already working, but if there is someone with whom you wish to Skype, he or she might not currently have access to the service. Again, it could be several hours before everything is working properly.

    In the vast majority of instances, the site is still not working propperly as of 8:48pm e.s.t.

    Why is Skype down?

    The Skype blog post attempted to explain it:

    “Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype.”

    What does that mean? The response is a bit complicated to understand, so let me try to explain what I think is happening.

    If two people are communicating on Skype and the peer to peer relationship has been established across the network (according to “An experimental study of the Skype peer to peer VoIP system). Skype has various fail safes in case the initial connection between one or multiple parties is blocked (by something like a firewall).

    A supernode is created when nodes are in areas with extra bandwidth and that are public (according to the same peer to peer study).

    If you connect with someone on a regular basis and the two of you typically use the same computers, you are connecting by nodes. Supernodes are what finds the person when the node doesn’t work to immediately locate them, according to the Skype post.

    The Skype post continues:

    “Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.”

    Skype did not say why the supernodes are uncharacteristically failing today. To me, that’s the most interesting aspect of the entire situation! It is possibly too early to tell what has caused the problem.

    Ironically, Twitter also was temporarily slow this afternoon on the east coast and the slow down could have partially been a result of increased traffic from people who were not using Skype (many of whom undoubtedly using Twitter for the purposes of complaining about Skype not working).

    Click here for the official Skype blog post on today’s slowdown:

    http://bit.ly/gQw0hg

    For the really cool study I cited on how Skype’s person to person VoIP works, click here: http://bit.ly/giOpUW

    jrb

    questions or comments? Tweet me @bennernotes or email benner.joshua@gmail.com

  • MySpace: Finger lickin’ good

    I was checking my emails this morning, and THIS is what I get from Myspace.

    Wow.

    Creativity grade: A+

    I was overwhelmed by the originality of this email blast pertaining to their new push to get people to use their new mobile app. First I read the subject “Myspace Mobile, it’s what’s for dinner.” And then I open the email and it’s a picture of a table with cell phones on it.

    I feel like my response to the “Myspace it’s what’s for dinner” email was about the same as it would have been had I received an email this morning from broccoli saying “Broccoli, I’m what’s for dinner.”

    I would have thought, “This is sad. Broccoli is so removed from reality and so completely not relevant.”

    In all seriousness, I find it ironic that a company who was once king of social networking but is fading into obscurity would have a subject line that quotes a popular catch phrase from the 90s. It’s one thing that used to matter using another antiquated relic of popular culture.

    I argue that a more appropriate email would have been “Myspace: where’s the beef.”

    The app basically does the same sort of things that any other social networking site’s app does (it’s just coming after the big boys have already made apps that people, you know, use).

    I briefly considered getting the app, but I don’t remember my Myspace password.

    Don’t get me wrong, I know that I could easily reset it, but what’s the point? I noticed a change that Myspace made to the layouts. As many people will recall, Myspace pages used to say the date that the person last logged in. They took that down.

    Makes sense to get rid of. Myspace probably doesn’t want people to be profile hopping and noticing that no one has logged in in years.

    Sad. I thnk a lot of us liked having that “last login” back in 2007 as a badge of honor. And now it’s gone.

    jrb

  • dlvr.it: sharing social networking content made easier

    dlvr.it is a new URL shortening website that is currently in Beta testing and that I think could become a real player in the world of URL shortening.

    There are already popular websites where you can shorten URL addresses, such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com. So what is unique about dlvr.it? You can take an RSS feed and post the link into your dlvr.it account.

    So?

    You can then have your dlvr.it account synced with social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Any time the RSS feed(s) you paste into your dlvr.it account are updated, it will automatically update any social media site which you have synced to dlvr.it.

    So if you have a personal blog and you are using dlvr.it, any time you update your blog, it will automatically create a shortened URL and post an update. What’s more, like bit.ly, dlvr.it keeps track of stats like visitor traffic from the links you post.

    It also does not need to be your own website. You can paste any RSS link into dlvr.it.

    An advantage I see of dlvr.it over bit.ly is that the updates are automatic. With bit.ly, if you want to be able to shorten a link, you have to go to the site and manually post a link to get a shortened version. With dlvr.it, you don’t have to login or even think about it. Dlvr.it does the work for you.

    I think dlvr.it is far more useful for Twitter than for a stie like Facebook. While Facebook is certainly a popular way to share content, there is not the same necessity to shorten links. Twitter is also much more conducive to multiple updates per day. For a Twitter profile, I think dlvr.it, and the idea of automatic URL shortening witll change the way people go about sharing content.

    If you share content online, I think dlvr.it is worth at least trying, looking at the traffic your links are generating, and then evaluating if it is worth it to continue using the servie (which is free).

    URL shortening 101

    What’s all of this talk about URL shortening?

    If you are unfamiliar, sometimes URL’s (Uniform Resource Locators, aka the destination of the page you are going to) can get really long. For instance the link to this YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhqxFNZgSHQ&feature=related is 58 characters. And URL’s can get significantly longer.

    If you’re trying to send a long link in an email, it can be tough to keep the link together, and long URL addresses can be difficult to work with on Twitter because of the 140 character limit per tweet. So you use a website that shortens the URL, and change http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhqxFNZgSHQ&feature=related to http://bit.ly/dcUwbB.

    A word of advice

    If using dlvr.it, you should be mindful of how many RSS updates are made to the RSS feed. If it’s a blog that updates a few times a week, it’s not a problem. If it’s an active RSS feed that updates several times a day, you could add dozens of tweets per week to your Twitter profile.

    Certainly the point of this is posting content, but it is important to keep in mind how much you are posting.