You dumbfuck

[trysail]

People who mindlessly follow fads and trends remind me of lobotomized rats. They're the same folk who make up lynch mobs and cause traffic jams by rubbernecking at accidents ON THE OTHER SIDE OF DIVIDED HIGHWAYS ( ).



The type is not noted for being overbright. Many are prime candidates for posthumous Darwin Awards.



They're the red meat that make marketeers and stockbrokers drool.



The moronic rush to post details of their lives online at websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and the like has potential consequences which the dolts haven't quite figured out ( not the least of which are increasing the possibility of identity theft, online fraud and theft, stalking, giving all kinds of personal information to the marketeers and, most obviously, the loss of privacy).



Here's but one example of a dimbulb who didn't quite think things all the way through:

HP Shows Hazard of Sharing LinkedIn Profiles
By Douglas MacMillan
Sep 20, 2011


Hewlett-Packard Co. Vice President Scott McClellan gave away more than his job status when he mentioned the computer maker’s new Web-storage initiative in his profile on LinkedIn Corp., a professional-networking site.

McClellan inadvertently tipped off competitors earlier this year to previously undisclosed details of Hewlett-Packard’s cloud-computing services. The information was later removed, though not before rivals got a look at the plans.

As workers put more information about their lives online through status updates, location check-ins and resume changes, employers are more at risk of competitors watching their every move. Investigators at Kroll Inc., the 40-year-old corporate sleuthing pioneer, are known for scanning deleted computer files and monitoring surveillance cameras to help large companies uncover rivals’ secrets. Now they’re trawling the social Web.

“Social media has become a much more efficient way of getting information that could only be gotten in the past by things like surveillance,” said Kroll Senior Managing Director Rich Plansky.

In a Forrester Research survey last year of more than 150 companies that monitor social media, more than 82 percent said they use this data for competitive intelligence -- the most cited reason for the monitoring. With good reason: A single insider’s Twitter Inc. post can be more valuable than a stack of analysts’ research.

“Competitors obviously watch each other in social media just as they have historically monitored each other in the media and in public presentations,” said Shel Israel, an author and consultant on online networks. “Social media is a new data- abundant source that is here to stay.”

Prowling Social Sites
Corporate investigators including Kroll, Nardello & Co. and Risk Solutions & Investigations are prowling social sites for oversharing insiders like McClellan. Michael Thacker, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, declined to comment on the matter.

At Kroll, a division of Falls Church, Virginia-based Altegrity Inc., social sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Inc. aid in investigations of employee misconduct, background checks and suspected cases of data breach.

“Who a person’s friends are, what bars they go to, which groups they are interested in, what they look like,” Plansky said. “All of those information sources are a potential gold mine for us in developing intelligence for our clients.”

Play-by-Play
When one client asked Kroll to find out how a potential acquisition target got leaked to a competitor, investigators found a series of social media posts in which a member of the client’s mergers-and-acquisitions team publicly discussed doing diligence on a company in a specific city.

“Twitter can give you a play-by-play about a person’s activities,” Plansky said. “‘A lot of these posts are time-and date-stamped.”

For another client, Kroll began building a case against a fired executive by seeing whom in his LinkedIn network he might be sharing trade secrets with, a violation of his termination contract. Plansky declined to name any of Kroll’s customers.

Sean Garrett, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Twitter, said in an e-mail that posts made on Twitter are publicly available. Erin O’Harra, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, declined to comment.

The amount of data on social networks relevant to corporate investigations may be declining as users get more sophisticated about protecting their online privacy, said Michael Walsh, managing director of London-based Nardello, which gathers intelligence for companies and governments.

‘Glass House’
“We will check” social sites, he said, “but it is increasingly becoming less a real source of information because people are becoming all too aware that this is a vulnerable spot for them.”

The people closest to a company’s sensitive information may be the most likely to leak it online, said Abhilash Sonwane, senior vice president of product management at Indian cybersecurity firm Cyberoam. Beginning in June 2010, his firm selected 20 companies and set out to track them across social media sites for several months. For each company, Cyberoam identified all the employees with a profile on LinkedIn, then subscribed to their feeds on Twitter and other sites.

“You can actually feel yourself inside that company -- what’s happening, what’s the morale of the employees, how the business is doing, where top management go on vacation, did the CEO have a fight with somebody,” Sonwane said. “It’s a glass house.”

‘Edgy’ Before Bankruptcy
At one of the companies, workers began to indicate in their postings that business was slow around October 2010.

“We could sense that they were edgy about something,” Sonwane said. A few months later, a vice president wrote in a LinkedIn status update that he was looking for a new job. When his followers asked why, he responded that the company was about to file for bankruptcy -- which it did less than six months later, Sonwane said. He declined to identify any of the companies in the study.

Preventing such leaks can be difficult, said Josh Bernoff, a social-media analyst at Forrester Research.

“Employees will post, regardless of whether the company endorses it or not,” he said. “It is far better to have a policy about what you can and can’t say than to try to stop it.”

Reputation.com Inc., a Redwood City, California-based service for helping individuals and organizations monitor what’s being said about them online, has been enlisted by one client to track activity related to the company’s top 300 executives. Michael Fertik, Reputation’s chief executive officer, wouldn’t name the client.

Managing Internet ‘Footprint’
“Everybody who is in business with you, in a personal, professional, romantic, transactional relationship with you, is looking up information about you, is finding information about you, and then, most importantly, making decisions about what they find about you on the Internet,” Fertik said. “That’s why everybody has a need and obligation to themselves, to their family members, to their shareholders, to manage their footprint on the Internet.”

More and more businesses are going on the offensive, collecting information about their own rivals. That has led companies including Bellevue, Washington-based Visible Technologies LLC to develop tools that detect competitive intelligence on the Web. For about $4,500 a month, Visible’s customers get a dashboard that identifies conversations happening about their industry in blogs, message boards and social sites including Twitter and Facebook.

Corporate Alerts
If there is a conversation with a negative sentiment, such as someone complaining about a rival company’s product, people monitoring the dashboard might intervene and offer a discount on switching to their own product or service.

LinkedIn has added tools to its networking site that send users alerts when competitors hire employees, or when its executives change roles.

“On LinkedIn, above all other social networks, people are very connected with their employer,” said Edd Dumbill, program chair for Strata Conference, a technology event hosted by O’Reilly Media Inc. focused on the use of online data.

As the generation of workers in their 20s and 30s take more senior roles in organizations, their greater exposure on social sites can make them more prone to investigations, said Steve Vale, a former Kroll managing director who is now a principal at Los Angeles-based Risk Solutions & Investigations.

During a recent background check on someone whose company was being acquired by a private equity firm -- a man in his mid- 30s -- Vale discovered numerous videos and online posts he created that raised additional questions and necessitated extra interviews with him.

“You just wouldn’t believe the amount of social networking this fellow did,” said Vale, who wouldn’t disclose the name of the client or the subject being investigated. “In the end, everybody was fine with it, but it begged a question you would never have posed just a short time ago.”

 

[Disgustipated]

That's a dumb business move but to compare it to online identity theft due to having a Twitter account is even more dumb.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

I concur completely. I actually have no problem with people sharing certain aspects of their personal lives. But relaying and posting exact locations and private information (accounts, ssn, etc.) is not such a bright idea. Even if such data is being released online to a potential employer.

What really disturbs me is the obsessive behavior of many of the strangers that read what you post. They become consumed with taking the most innocent of things posted and converting it into the most negative and evil level it can go.

There is not enough punishment for the identity thieves. It is like an unseen, violent rape that destroys honest lives.

 

[JohnnySavage]

I only skimmed and saw "cloud"

I'm becoming interested in the cloud thingy, although I'm not sure I understand it. I think it could eliminate my 3 hour per day visit to the office though.

 

[trysail]

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/28/140879480/who-are-you-really-activists-fight-for-pseudonyms



Who Are You, Really? Activists Fight For Pseudonyms
by Martin Kaste
NPR
September 28, 2011

Social media companies don't like people creating accounts under fake names. That's long been the case at Facebook, but over the summer, Google's new social network, Google Plus, surprised users by making a point of shutting down accounts with names that didn't look real.

Some online activists refer to Google's action as the "nym wars" — short for "pseudonym wars." They see it as part of a worrying trend to force people to use their real names online.

Trying To Weed Out 'Trolls'
It's a concern that goes beyond the social media sites themselves. More and more, social network accounts are becoming a gateway to other parts of the Internet.

"If you want to leave a comment, you have to be a Facebook user," says Jimmy Orr, managing editor of the online Los Angeles Times, one of several news sites now requiring commenters to use Facebook. He says it makes it harder for people to hide behind fake names.

"I'm impressed at Facebook's efforts at authentication. It's for real. You know, if I were just to join up on Facebook, for example, to leave a comment, and I made up a name, chances are it would not show up," Orr says.

Some of the Los Angeles Times comments sections still operate under what Orr calls the old "Wild West" system, where all you need is an email address. Those sections have more trolls — commenters who bait each other with racism or personal attacks. The sections with Facebook logins, on the other hand, are comparatively civil.

"The reason for that is trolls don't like their friends to know they are trolls," Orr says. "If you are who you are, you're less likely to leave a comment that makes you look bad."

Neither Facebook nor Google would comment for this story, but over the years, their executives have expressed impatience with Internet anonymity.

"One of the errors that the Internet made a long time ago is that there was not an accurate and non-revocable identity-management service," Google chief Eric Schmidt said at the Techonomy conference last year. "And the best example of an identity-management service today that's reasonably reliable is Facebook."

There's a lot of money at stake for both companies. Social networks are in the business of collecting information about their users, and that information is worth more when it's connected to real names. Schmidt went on to suggest that the anonymity of the Internet is a historical aberration.

"You know, 200 years ago, in a small town, you couldn't sneak around if people didn't know who you were," he said.

Seeking Freedom To Express Themselves
To be clear, Schmidt was talking about the kind of technical anonymity that facilitates cybercrime. But people who use pseudonyms for more benign reasons worry that "real name" culture is spreading across the Internet, with Facebook logins required everywhere they turn.

"There's a concern about being shut out of the conversation," says a woman who blogs and tweets under the Internet pen name Garidin Winslow. To her, it's an extension of the time-honored literary tradition of pen names — someday, she hopes to write a novel under the name. She wants the freedom to express herself without offending the sensibilities of, say, her boss — or potential future bosses.

"I think it's better to err on the side of caution," Winslow says. "Your employer is going to be searching for you on the Internet — they're going to be looking for you by name."

"Real name" policies keep her off Facebook and Google Plus — but she is on Diaspora, a new social network still in the process of rolling out. At Diaspora headquarters in San Francisco, co-founder Max Salzberg says this network does not insist on real names.

"Certainly with Diaspora, it's not a requirement, and in fact it's not even something we could enforce, because Diaspora is open source," he says.

Open source means the software is open for anybody to see and rewrite as they please. Diaspora is also a distributed system, which means users can host and control their own social networking data. Some of those who worry about the "Nym wars" see Diaspora as the great hope for saving online pseudonyms. But Salzberg actually agrees with Google's Schmidt on one point.

"There is a place for people to be able to use their real name, and have some sort of verified, like — 'This is actually Max Salzberg responding to your question.' "

What big social media companies need to understand, he says, is that there's also a place for pseudonyms.

"Anonymity and pseudonyms are slightly different," Salzberg says. "A pseudonym that's well-constructed is something that that person values and wants to maintain at a certain level. It's still an authentic personality they have."

Innovations like Diaspora mean pseudonyms aren't likely to go away. But as Google Plus and Facebook increase their reach, the question is: On how much of the Internet will those pseudonyms be allowed?


http://www.npr.org/2011/09/28/140879480/who-are-you-really-activists-fight-for-pseudonyms

http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n307/byroninexile/lolsroyce.gif


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rollsroyce
lolroyce

 

[HoHoBomb]

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UA-4xDk7GdU/TcgHjZ6uv6I/AAAAAAAAAFI/ECa5kIxJUcA/s400/apple-ipad-freaks.jpg



we have become a society of disposable items and instant gratification. obsessed with gadgets and other material techno items.


get off the fucking telephone
put the top down
crank the music
and drive