I’m starting to think I might hit my stride with screencasts. I’ve made a few in the past, but have done three this week already. If any of these topics interest you, head over to my youtube channel and hit “subscribe.”
Transcoding h.264 files in MPEG Streamclip:
Going back to the old Facebook news feed (in one click):
An easy way to turn bookmarklets into Chrome extensions:
Paul
I don’t usually talk about political stuff, but I’m really concerned about the “Protect IP” act and the “COPA” act going through congress now. From what I can tell, anyone can accuse anyone of piracy and their site must be removed (without a trial or Judge). This breaks the internet. I even wrote my congress-people. Here’s what one of them wrote back. I think the last paragraph says it all.
Paul
December 6, 2011
Dear Mr. Clifford,
Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP Act). I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue.
The PROTECT IP Act aims to protect the rights of trademark and copyright holders, including a private right of action for intellectual property owners. This means that intellectual property owners as well as the government can seek injunctions against websites “dedicated to infringing activities”. Many websites are large with a great deal of content. Having an entire website blocked from searches due to questionable content is a broad overreaction to the problem the bill’s sponsors are trying to solve.
Copyright owners already have legal remedies at their disposal to remove infringing material piece-by-piece. The definition of an “Internet site dedicated to infringing activities” in this legislation is both broad and vague. Many industry experts have also raised security and other technical concerns relating to the domain filtering requirements of this bill. Using a similar law, the Department of Homeland Security has already seized web site domain names – including some by accident. This hardly seems like a good solution, and such problems need to be fixed before this bill is considered.
On May 26th, 2011 the PROTECT IP Act was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar, where it awaits further consideration. Again, thank you for contacting my office regarding this matter. Rest assured, should this issue come before me in the Senate, I will keep your thoughts in mind.
Sincerely,
Rand Paul, MD
United States Senator
My latest article for Technologies for Worship Magazine has been released and it’s the cover story. You can download the iPhone app or read the digital version here:
http://www.tfwm.com/digmag or http://bluetoad.com/display_article.php?id=823841
Paul
Saturday I started getting messages on twitter. The format was: “Is this you in this picture?” and then a link. I thought that it was probably a scam, but I don’t live in fear. I went there on my iPhone and found that it wanted me to sign it. I didn’t do it. I got another and then a third, followed by a fourth. One of these was from someone I’ve met in real life.
I sent him a message. He was immediately concerned that his personal data was at stake. So I asked him a couple of questions. First, when he typed in his twitter password (this was a phishing scheme), was he on a PC, Mac, or some other device. Secondly, was his antivirus up to date (if he was on a PC).
As it turns out, he was on an iPad. He was concerned that there was a PC on the same network. I told him that it was theoretically possible, but I hadn’t heard of any attacks from phishing sites that could cross infect other machines on the same network from one platform to another (in this case iOS to Windows).
I told him not to beat himself up. With 1000 followers, I’d gotten the same message multiple times and that’s why I didn’t fall for it. I couldn’t imagine that four people (most of whom I don’t know personally) could have come across a picture of me. My 9 year-old thinks I’m famous, but my bank account shows I’m not.
This brings me to three pieces of advice:
1. If you click a link someone sends you that asks for a login and password, don’t give it. In a separate browser, preferably on a different machine, go to the known site that the site claims to be to access the information. Double check the url in the suspected browser window. Twitter isn’t going to send you to a phishing site with a similar, but different enough url.
2. Use a browser or a dns service with phishing detection. I use Chrome and OpenDNS. Chrome warned me when I went to the site on my MacBook Pro. If I’d ignored the warning (which I didn’t), OpenDNS would have warned me, too.
3. If you get phished on a site that doesn’t include financial info (like Twitter, Youtube, etc.), change your password at the real site immediately to one with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and at least one other character. A lot of banks make you do this. There’s a reason. At current computing power, a password like that would take over 100 years to break with brute force. Letters only or numbers only is a matter of seconds.
Happy twittering,
Paul
In November, I wrote Podcasting Church. Maybe it’s just the creative person in me, but I’m feeling another book come on. I’ve just registered the domain for the series (thanks to NameCheap‘s facebook $1.99 promotion). It’s not up yet, but ingchurch.com will be the home. So while I have podcastingchurch.com, I can also have podcast.ingchurch.com and my next book, too.
I think it’s about time to start.
Paul
