Author Archive for Joshua Russell

You’re invited to predict the next 100 years

Published
by
Joshua Russell
on August 19, 2008
in History
. 0 Comments

Up to the challenge?

Brian Suda and I (and many others!) seem to continually discuss what may be.

We’re geeks, obviously, but as Chris Messina quoted while at Reboot, “Alpha-geeks are becoming alpha-citizens.“, and thus we discuss all manner of subjects:

  • technology
  • sociology
  • ecology
  • business
  • ethics
  • psychology

The list goes on. But all these conversations eventually evaluate the past, and then try to work out how things may change. Sometimes for the worse, but hopefully for the better!

Finding inspiration from an article written 100 years ago in The Ladies Home Journal, predicting the year 2000, we decided to try and do what they did and predict the future, 1 year from now, then 10, and then 100 years to the year 2100!

You’re now invited to join us in these predictions, firstly online, and then at a short meet up just before the dConstruct conference in Brighton. When we meet, we’ll also discuss the predictions submitted online.

So go submit your predictions, and then join us on the day!

http://predictions.sudabot.com/ < -- This is the important bit!

We’ll meet on September the 4th in Brighton at 5.30pm (upcoming), location TBD.

P.s. don’t feel any pressure to be 100% accurate, this is supposed to be fun too :)

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Mobile Industry Review, my podcast debut!

Published
by
Joshua Russell
on August 11, 2008
in Mobile
. 0 Comments

On Friday I had the honor of being the special guest on episode 17 of the Mobile Industry Review podcast.


Mobile Industry Review Video 17 from Ewan MacLeod on Vimeo.

It was great fun, we spent a few hours in Covent Garden putting it together, and generally being geeks in public. Which in this case was great fun :)

I got to talk about the start of the upcoming Brighton Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe), and a little about the future of tracking offline to mobile conversions and location specific behavioral patterns. Something that I’m really interested in at the moment, and will happily talk about, come find me at the weekly Tuttle!

Mobile Industry Review podcast shoot

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The Brighton Social Media Cafe

Published
by
Joshua Russell
on August 5, 2008
in events
. 0 Comments

Since I attended the my first London Social Media Cafe (also referred to as the Tuttle club after Harry Tuttle) I wanted to recreate the atmosphere and environment at an event here in Brighton.

Tuttle, from Sizemore photo by Sizemore

The room, while small, was crowded with people. Some old friends, and many that hadn’t attended before. All caught up in the excitement of being around people with genuinely interesting backgrounds and experiences. The conversation was loud and enthusiastic, if you know me then you’ll know that I thrive in that :)

So now I’m ready to announce that the Brighton branch will be starting on Saturday the 16th of August, at 11am, upstairs at the Quadrant.

What is it?
The Social Media Cafe, or Tuttle Club, is a place for people interested in social media to gather, get acquainted, and to plot, scheme, and share.. emphasis on open and interesting conversating!

Who should come?
If you’re interested in the future of media, how we organise, share, produce and enjoy it, then come along. If you’re an artist, film maker, geek, musician, designer, writer, photographer, or anything close or related, then come along. If you want to meet like minds, come along.

With the help of sponsors (which we welcome more of!) the coffee is free, and there should be some breakfast snacks to get us going. There’s free wifi, so bring your laptops if you need to get some work done or want to show off what you’ve been to..

I’m really looking forward to seeing you there!

Update: We have our first sponsor, local social media agency Nixon McInnes. Cheers guys!

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Skitch revealing users email addresses

Published
by
Joshua Russell
on July 31, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

update: The developers have now changed this on the site, email addresses are not revealed. However it is still revealing the domain of the email address, which, while not quite as bad, actually isn’t necessary and still leaves a hole. The pattern skitchusername@emaildomain.com, in my opinion, has a good chance of being a valid email (especially on privately owned domains that have catch-all aliases). Why reveal *any* part of the address? Users will either get a reminder email or they won’t!
–

In this day and age, it’s 2000 and f*cking 8 FFS!

Skitch revealing email addresses

Skitch revealing email addresses

So what’s happening here..

As I finally got around to signing up for a Skitch alpha/beta/whatever (Thanks Jimk) I thought I’d just check to see if I already had. I tried my usual login details that I pretty much use everywhere for non-critical accounts. Both the usual usernames/nicknames were taken. Now this isn’t unusual, but as an early adopter this is rare for me.

I then decided to go and try and retrieve a password for one of those accounts (it’s possible it was me). Providing a username or email address should confirm that the account exists or not and then send the password reset instructions to the registered email. If this was my account, I would receive the email.

Skitch’s lost password form

In Theory, that’s a relatively ok way of doing that process. What went wrong was this.. Having entered just the usernames, I was then shown a screen that contained the email address for that account. It was not my email address.

Recap:

  • email addresses are shown by providing any username
  • usernames are used as personal URLs, thus easily found
  • this is possible without being logged in, thus untraceable

Why is this a bad thing? Well apart from the obvious reason, it wouldn’t be very hard for someone to script up something that could systematically discover usernames, and thus email addresses.

Please, Please fix this!

There are surely other examples of this behavior, how long will it go on?

P.s. I really actually like Skitch, it’s a great tool. I’ve been using GrabUp more though, it’s much simpler.

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