Sock Puppet Theatre

The guardian.co.uk is reporting that the US military has contracted a Californian corporation to create software which would allow military personnel to create and maintain multiple online persona, up to 10 identities each, based all over the globe. In other words a single person would maintain, monitor, and distribute comments to and from 10 online personalities, sock puppets, in order to spread propaganda misinformation.

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US." Claiming that none of the interventions would be conducted in English as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" in such fashion. Interventions would be conducted in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

While it is very noble of them to strike English from their vocabulary, if you've followed any of the coverage coming out of the recent unrest abroad, you'll have undoubtedly noted that many if not all of the media outlets are heavily relying on Twitter and Facebook accounts of the situations on the ground to report the "news". What's to say that the news being reported to us is not coming from Centcom?

Interesting, scary, and not surprising all at the same time.  

Please Rob Me, Really?

Boy Van Amstel and a group of Dutch developers created pleaserobme.com to prove a point about the dangers of sharing your precise location information on the internet, according to this BBC article."It started with me and a friend looking at our Twitter feeds and seeing more and more Foursquare posts," said Van Amstel, one of PleaseRobMe's developers."People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address - I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing."

While the site does heighten awareness to the potential dangers of broadcasting your current location online, I think the logic is slightly flawed as it assumes a number of things:

1. That you live alone;

2. That you haven't taken any precautions against theft; and

3. That the bad guys are sifting through millions of tweets to single you out.

Not to say that there aren't potential risks and that you shouldn't take precautions! I just don't buy into the notion that this makes you any more vulnerable than the next guy, if you use you head a little.

Thanks for the post idea Dawn!

Exploding Or Eroding Your Brand Via Social Networking

Social media savvy can come in handy while trying to market your business, brand, product, or service; however the Globe and Mail has compiled a list of anecdotal evidence and they've spoken with the "experts" who warn that the opposite can also be true. The truth of the matter is that exploiting social media is like a wild fire rather than a controlled burn, and just as you might hope the winds are in your favour, they'll sometimes turn on you and you'll get burned!

"...where potential returns come with risk, summarized in this warning from Della Smith, the principal of Q Workshops: With social media, “you can do a lot of brand damage very easily.”"

Check out Timothy Taylor's "Are Twitter and Facebook evil?" a short, but interesting read.

Small Business Owners Turn To Twitter For Word Of Mouth Marketing

The New York Times has an interesting read regarding the successes of mom and pop type businesses marketing their wares via Twitter. “I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” says San Francisco food vendor Curtis Kimball. While Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, an antique shop owner in Texas says “We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.” She joined Twitter in February of this year...

Fake Parking Tickets - Real Viruses

Using a clever bit of social engineering, hackers in in Grand Forks, North Dakota have placed tickets on vehicles citing fake traffic violations and referring the "offender" to a website that claimed to have photos of the alleged violation, but which actually tricked users into downloading a virus.

"According to internet security watchdog The SANS Institute, the website then had photos of cars in various car parks around Grand Forks and instructed users to download a tool bar to find photos of their own vehicle.

But the tool bar was actually an executable file which installed a Trojan virus that then displayed a fake security alert when the PC was rebooted. The fake alert then prompted the user to install fake anti-virus software."

It still amazes me how easily we are duped into falling for these tricks... clever though!

Source: BBC