Where are my pancakes?

Maybe giving up a little privacy to Facebook is a good thing.

At 11:49 a.m. on October 17, 19-year-old Rodney Bradford’s Facebook updated his Facebook status from Harlem, asking “Where are my pancakes?” according to the NY Times. A moment later, someone was robbed at gunpoint in Brooklyn.

Bradford, who has other robbery charges pending was brought in for a line-up and wrongly identified as the assailant and detained.

But his father knew better, and was on the hunt for evidence – and that’s were facebook came in.

According to CNN:

It wasn't until Rodney Bradford Sr. discovered his son's Facebook update that the young man's defense attorney realized he had an unbeatable alibi.

"Throughout that week," said the attorney, Robert Reuland, "I worked with the district attorney's office and made them aware of who our alibis were, presented the Facebook evidence and generally tried to convince them that it would be wrong to proceed to an indictment in light of this evidence."

The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook for documentation that would prove Bradford had updated his account from his father's home in Harlem. It worked.

Confirmation of the time stamp on the update and the location from which it was entered showed he could not have been at the scene of a robbery in another part of New York City. After he had spent almost two weeks in jail, the case against him was dismissed.

Read the full story here.

Inconsequential to the alibi story, Gawker has clarification on the actual status update here.

Miley Cyrus: Ban Twitter from the Universe

In a recent interview, Miley Cyrus let it be known that she thinks Twitter should be “banned from the universe.”

About a month ago the Hannah Montana star closed down her account on the microblogging site, citing her want to regain her privacy. Luckily she explained it through a rap she posted her YouTube site.

As silly as it sounds, I think Miley is onto something here. As we continue to live an increasingly digital lifestyle, the question is where to draw the line. Especially for kids (Miley is 16!), parents need to help navigate the online world effectively and responsibility.

Hear that Billy Ray?

Time Warner leaves 64,000 customers vulnerable

It’s pretty impressive that Time Warner Cable manages to provide universally dismal service and yet stays in business. Yay cable monopoly!

From their laughable customer support to the dysfunctional cable boxes, TWC is really one of the most hateable companies. And here’s just one more reason: A “gaping” security hole in their cable modem routers left approximately 64,000 homes wide open to cyber attack.

The hole was discovered by David Chen, who blogs at Chenasaurus, when he was doing work on his friend’s modem.

Chen writes: From within your own network, an intruder can eavesdrop on sensitive data being sent over the Internet and even worse, they can manipulate the DNS address to point trusted sites to malicious servers to perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Someone skilled enough can possibly even modify and install a new firmware onto the router, which can then automatically scan and infect other routers automatically.

He said he called Time Warner to report the problem, to which they said “we are aware of it but we cannot do anything about it.” CNN says there’s a temporary patch in place until the cable company can come up with a permanent solution.

Ummm … Thanks TWC.

And we're back...

Ok, so I took a quick birthday hiatus from posting, and then work went nuts. But now we're back on a regular posting schedule.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Cloud Computing: A cautionary tale

It was revealed last week that hackers had stolen sensitive account information from a major online payroll processing company to directly target its customers.

PayChoice, a company that provides online payroll tools to over 125,000 organizations and back-end support to 250 other payroll companies, was breached. Hackers emailed PayChoices customers directly with detailed information about their accounts to coerce them into giving up their passwords.

According to the Washington Post: Unlike typical so-called "phishing" scams -- which are sent indiscriminately to large numbers of people in the hopes that some percentage of recipients are customers of the targeted institution -- this attack addressed PayChoice customers by name in the body of the message. The missives also included reference to each recipient's onlineemployer.com user name and a portion of his or her password for the site.

PayChoice is taking appropriate steps to understand what happened and to correct any issues caused. Nevertheless, this serves as a cautionary tale as we move further down the road to decentralized cloud computing.

Google v. Skank

While it’s easy to hide behind your keyboard in a veil of anonymity, the expectation of privacy may be a thing of the past.

Last month, Google faced a subpoena to reveal the identity of an anonymous user of its Blogger service (i.e., the one I’m using now) posting to the blog “Skanks in NYC,” which has since been removed. The blogger, now identified as Rosemary Port, had called model Liskula Cohen a “skank” among other choice names.

Cohen decided she wanted to sue for defamation, and pushed the New York courts to issue subpoena, forcing Google to unmask their otherwise anonymous user. Unlike the California courts, which said that “skank” is a “derogatory slang term of recent vintage [and] has no generally recognized meaning,” the New York courts determined that “skank” is a specifically defined word and that the case could move ahead.

Yet, as soon as Google revealed Port’s identity, Cohen dropped the charges. Now Port is planning to sue Google for $15 million.

And as much as I like working the word “skank” into an academically focused blog, there are some real and significant implications here. According to Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “If average users on the Internet think that they can use the court system to just figure out who is being mean to them, I think you really open the door for abusing the court system.”

We’re still very much in Wild West phase with the web, adjusting norms, expectations and regulation as it evolves. The courts need to quickly catch up to adequately protect the First Amendment and our rights as private citizens, while understanding the threshold for should and can be legitimately enforced.

(Photo of Liskula Cohen, accused skank, via New York Daily News)