August 3, 2009

lock your machine

if you’ve worked in the tech field for any amount of time, you learn the importance of locking your screen when you are away. my current company policy requires this action, but not all follow. i learned at my previous employer to be wary of my colleagues when it comes to this principle. even the most disciplined will give into the temptation to pull shenanigans on an open system.

the other day, i gave into the desire to post this tweet on @ryanberg’s open twitter account. my hijinks are shown in the image to the right. (for those not used to a twitter client, read from the bottom up.) i almost got away with it but was quickly ratted out by his fellow designers.

i heard he was furious at this. his reply tweet employing some cursing and assessment doesn’t quite communicate the level debauchery he felt this was.

and i can understand how he felt. i’d be mad if someone invaded my computer like this. indeed, i felt a little bad about it…until the next day when i walked into his area and saw his account left wide open again. dude had not learned any lesson about security. i no longer felt any remorse. what’s the old saying? “fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me.” shame on him, right?

even though my regret had been (mostly) purged, someone else felt no inhibition to taking advantage of this situation. so, sitting down at his workstation, he pulled up tweetie’s post box and typed the following under the guise of mr. berg:

ryan hacked again

LOL! that’s pretty funny. and what makes this worse is when someone else retweets your invasion. you cannot remove that post since you do not own it. @ericmoritz, at the suggestion of a couple of others, ran with this:

ryan hacked again – retweeted

the beautiful thing about this retweeting with hash tags is that more people will see it who keep up with groups, such as #drupal and #django.

he isn’t the only person to suffer from this. felicia day’s twitter was taken over by her own brother. read about that at mspixel.com.

i don’t believe @ryanberg saw this last hijacking. nevertheless, i walked into his area again today to see his computer wide open still. i didn’t feel the need to mess with it again as he has vowed revenge upon me, but my conclusion is this: how can you justify your disappointment when you take no steps to correct a problem?

April 28, 2009

astronaut twitter

i have a indifferent/hate relationship with twitter. while it has suffered from the inability to handle scaling back when it first was launched to its infrequent outages to date, there is a bit more stability, and i don’t hate it as much as i once had. in fact, i’ve been using it about as much as facebook in terms of posting my activities rather than updating my fb status.

my geeked interest in space/nasa has been hightened lately by the past several shuttle launches (and nasa tv) which provides great coverage of the launches, landings, and missions including activity on the international space station. no news agency has better footage of the inner workings of nasa.

now, news from space can be feed directly to anyone subscribing to mike massimino’s twitter account. in this computerworld article,astro_mike will be sharing his activities while on mission for hubble maintenance/upgrades. he only has 64 tweets under his belt yet over 140,000 followers. that’s a heck of a lot. this twitter experiment/experience will be nice added coverage to the nasa tv coverage. it also means that if you can’t stream the video, you can at least keep up with the mini-messages from time to time.

as gmoney, one of my colleagues, joked, we’ll see a tweet along the lines of, “it’s full of stars!”