Another thought on security

Secure your campaign sites

Have you ever wondered why there are those individuals out there in the world of the web that just exist to hack in and to compromise your work? I have. There isn't really any meaningful gain to be made from doing it yet it happens all the time. The trick is to make sure that whatever you build, you try and get in the head of the 'hacker' as you build. Believe me they will try everything to get in there and mess with your system, purely for the thrill of it.

There are a large number of forums out there so take a quick look as you are building to see what type of processes are being used and the methods employed to get in. Lock up your code as best you can, use encryption and secure protocols for passing sensitive data around because they are looking for it.

So if your online promotion has a form for entering in data be sure and trap as much information about your users as possible to get back to the source of the input. This means IP address, time and date. Use methods to stop bots and server apps such as Captcha to make sure your entries are from humans, not servers.

Make sure your hosting location is robust enough to handle a large amount of activity, whether legitimate or not, this includes your database.

Food for thought, don't let your promotion go sour because there was a little hole through which an enormous amount of data was squeezed.

Here's a good article from Adobe about reducing risk of attack on Flash based applications.

Does Your Idea Have Legs? Social Media Project Networks

Kickstart Your Idea
I recently came across an American site http://www.kickstarter.com/. Its a pledge site for people who need help getting there art, design and ideas off the ground. Or as they put it:
Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers...
So the deal is if you have an idea you may submit it and if you reach the pledged amount you receive the funding. Its a great use of digital media and online social networks. It demonstrated the scale and breadth of which the online communities are willing to support good ideas.

FaceBook film wins attention at Canes
A film created by volunteers and donations using FaceBook and social media networks has grabbed the attention of Cannes and all for under a hundred bucks! The film, Colin, which is surprising Cannes critics could be the first of a series of similar trends that seem to populate social media networks in waves of thought which is to use social media to create. Look out Hollywood.
http://mashable.com/2009/05/23/colin/


Open Flash
This site takes the concept of open source and puts it online. Wonderfl is an online flash project manager and compiler that lets you create and compile ActionScript to swfs. Again this site uses the social network to publish and share your code giving you access to many rich developed project code and it also allows you to push your developed concepts through the established network
http://wonderfl.kayac.com/

On Knowledge and Digital Learning - Who Controls Knowledge

In response to the previous post on "Wolfram Alpha - computational knowledge engine" I instantly though of the library scene in Star Wars where Obi Won searches for a planet which has been erased from the public library catalog, though fiction the concept is still valid. This lead me to ask the question who controls knowledge?

We used to go to libraries and get information from books. So I ask, aside from the fact that I was told to never believe anything your read on the Internet and given that the Image is the new carrier of information, how do we know what we are reading is the truth?

"We stand at present on the crest of our own critical wave. From orality to textuality we now move towards a hypertextual, data-driven, digital, 'New Media' revolution. The impact that this revolution will have on the acquisition and transmission of language, and the effect in turn imparted upon mind and the matter of thought and consciousness are interesting in their own right. For my purposes though, and as a distant echo to some of Socrates’ concerns, I perceive the current digital momentum behind language and textual technology as a creative force that will fundamentally alter the 'written' model." A Polyptychal Discursion by Daniel Rourke

So if during this shift of knowledge, learning and information sharing we remain critical through art and free thought, the path of knowledge will remain true.

I am all for new ideas and as Bruce Mau states in his manifesto "Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead." So why not try Wolfram Alpha and make up your own mind.

Always question your sources, and to answer the question what is knowledge and who controls it? Perhaps the answer is in the process of learning through social and communal growth itself.

Useful Links:
http://spacecollective.org/Spaceweaver/4701/What-about-wisdom

A pair of Thylacines in Hobart Zoo prior to 1921 (Note that the male in the background is larger than the female)

Wolfram Alpha - computational knowledge engine

Wolphram Alpha could be as important to the web as Google according to some experts. The "computation knowledge engine" is coming soon and has the ability to compute answers to questions as opposed to simply providing search result links. This system is no "Ask Jeeves", instead it is a "vast electronic brain" that can literally answer questions posed in normal language. This natural language processing is pretty serious stuff and i'm personally keen to see if this system will be more than just a tool for finding the answers to simple facts.

Interesting that the system doesn't crawl the entire www for it's information, but uses a select set of public and private data for doing it's answer crunching. Is this the future for search, or just the collected wisdom and opinion of one individual, Stephen Wolfram?

Read more here.