Stating The Bloody Obvious Part 2

In another one of the “stating the bloody obvious” The Guardian and other newspapers and websites have been reporting  “Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert” (read the full report here).

The so called “technorati” that live in that closed bubble called London are loving the story.

No one seems to be saying “der!” What strikes me from this story is that it “generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.” Morgan Stanley also said “We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.” How has this surprised these powerful men? I would imagine a lot of them have trophy wives and children. Some of these children may even be teenagers. So I ask again why is this such surprising news for them? I can only assume that even though they have these families that their home work life balance is so heavily skewed towards work that they don’t talk or know their own children.

Those working in the City are well known for having a long working day, in early and out late. They then also work weekends as well. Even on family holidays they tend to take work with them, and are constantly checking emails etc. So where in this life style have they had time to spend with their families? If they spoke to their teenage children then they would know all this already, or a lot of it. They have this expert in their own homes that they ignore. They use the excuse that they are keeping a roof over the heads of the family, putting food on the plate etc. But I ask at what cost?

As I write this post the lyrics for the song Cats In The Cradle keep coming to mind. Maybe these City types with families should all have this on their MP3 players and have to listen to it daily to remind them

The real news story isn’t that a 15 year old has said his peers don’t use Twitter, or own expensive smart phones, and use pay as you go. The real news story is as I pointed out that City executives do not have relationships with their families.

I’ll write about the London based “technorati” and how they are so up each others arse some other time.

Microsoft Security Advisory For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 Users

If you are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 then you will need to take heed of a new Security Advisory being issued by Microsoft. The vulnerability is “in Microsoft Video ActiveX Control. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. When using Internet Explorer, code execution is remote and may not require any user intervention.”

Microsoft are saying that:

“For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers, Microsoft is recommending removing support for this ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer using all the Class Identifiers listed in the Workaround section. Though unaffected by this vulnerability, Microsoft is recommending that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 customers remove support for this ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer using the same Class Identifiers as a defense-in-depth measure.”

As you can see from the above quote Microsoft are also recommending that Vista and Windows Server 2008 users also do this.

There is an automated fix for this available from Microsoft, which makes things easier for you.

You can get the Microsoft fix at the following link:

“Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Microsoft Video ActiveX control could allow remote code execution”

For those that want to read more go to the following link:

“Microsoft Security Advisory (972890) Vulnerability in Microsoft Video ActiveX Control Could Allow Remote Code Execution”

Setting Up A New Site

Well it’s been a busy busy day. I have been registering a new domain, and setting up a website for it.

For the website I am using Wordpress as a CMS. I’m not going with the usual blog set up of when you land on the site of seeing the blog and the latest blog entries. Instead visitors will land on a static webpage.

Once the installation of Wordpress was done, it was then a matter of installing the plugins that I needed. Followed by configuring the plugins, which for one or two meant setting up appropriate accounts elsewhere. So the new site has been added to my Google Analytics account, and also the RSS feeds have been added to Feedburner.

I also spent some time looking through for a suitable theme for the new site. Which has been installed, and just in need of configuring to suit my needs. By that I mean changing default graphics, and adding the widgets to the right hand side bar that I want to be there. The really great thing about Wordpress 2.8 is that installing new themes and plugins is really simple. They have really made it easy for a non-techie to install change things.

I also have a google mail account setup now as well for this new site/enterprise. Which I have added to my iPhone so I can check the email on the move, as I do with my personal email account already.

My next task is to get content up on the site, which I have already started. I need to write copy for the welcome page, and the other pages, get my graphics and logo up. The contact page has already been done, for which I have a contact form for visitors/potential clients to email me. There is an initial blog entry up as well, which is the Facebook and MI6 post I wrote on here with an extra paragraph tagged on the end. I will also expand the last case study to a bit more detail. Plus there will be more case studies going up over there, along with some of the more suitable previous posts from here.

I still have a Facebook Fan Page to do, along with adding a FriendFeed stream, and my delicious account to the new site. These last two will hopefully add useful resources for visitors. Might also add a Twitter stream as well. Plus I almost forgot to do a LinkedIn page as well.

So much to think of and set up,so little time.

Facebook Privacy And MI6

I woke up today with Radio 5 covering the following story “MI6 boss in Facebook entry row”. My first thoughts were how did this happen? Had the next MI6 Bosses wife friended reporters from The Mail on Sunday? Had she not set her privacy settings correctly?

Well the answer was the later,  “She had not imposed privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access "London" network to see the entries, it added.”

Now there are calls from politicians and security experts for an inquiry to what happened, and the security implications. Well let me save them some money and more importantly the tax payer some money from a lengthy inquiry. They can look at the security implications for the new boss and his family. I’ll tell them what happened. It basically falls down to a lack of education. That’s it, nothing else.

You can’t stop the families of these “V.I.P’s” from using the social networks that everyone else is using. What you can do is educate them. Tell them how to set their privacy settings, not to friend people left right and centre, to also think about what they are posting.

But I should point out that it’s not just the families of the “V.I.P.’s” that need educating I think everyone needs to be educated. Especially our young. How many times have we seen stories of teenagers falling foul of something they have posted on a social media site of some sort? Surely at our schools and collages there should be a compulsory lesson or two about using social media sites. Within one of those lessons they should cover privacy settings, and protecting your identity. It’s the least we have to do to prepare our youth for a life online.

It’s not hard to get the information about setting the privacy settings on Facebook. A quick search on Google finds some good advice out there. So it seems pointless of me to re-write all this advice again. Here are a couple of links I think folks should read.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Facebook best practice