Off to South by Southwest (SXSW)

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All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go.....

I'm heading to the airport (Reagan/National) in just a few minutes to catch my flight from DCA to Houston, to Austin for the spring break of geek conferences, SXSW. I'm incredibly excited at all of the panels that are going to be available for me to attend in addition to all of the conference parties that happen each night (especially the Bigg Digg Shindigg).

Nate Silver of fightthirtyeight.com is the keynote speaker for Sunday.

Merlin Mann (43folders.com) and John Gruber (daringfireball.net) are doing a panel together on Saturday, called "HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility".

Gina Tripani of Lifehacker will be sitting in on a panel called Curating the Crowd-Sourced World.

One of my personal heros, Lawrence Lessig, will be doing a panel called "Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture."

These are just a few I'm most looking forward to. I could go on and on, listing the 20 or so on my personal conference schedule, but names such as Andy Baio, Daniel Burka, Brian Cain, Andy Carvin (NPR & local DC techie), Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Coulton, Felicia Day, Tara Hunt, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Merritt Kevin Rose, Alex Albrect, Robert Scoble, Christina Warren will be sprinkled throughout the panels over the course of the conference. Representatives from all of the major web companies/orgs/presences will be on hand to meet with, talk to, discuss, etc.


Now can you see why I'm excited? Well - look at the time. Off to the airport!

President Barack Obama's Inaugural Speech in Tag Cloud Form

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I always love tag clouds. They're a very good way to get a visual sense of the content of a speech. Just in case you do not know, a tag cloud is an array of words in an image, or textual display, where the words that are said most often are listed in the center, and in bigger fonts. There are many tag-cloud generators across the net. If you plug the transcript of Obama's speech into a tag-cloud generator, you will get an output like this:

inauguration-speech-tag-cloud

Twitter Discloses Reason For Several High Profile Account Security Breaches: Support Tools Compromised

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Several high profile twitter users' accounts were breached this today. Barack Obama, FoxNews, BritneySpears, RichSanchezcnn, LeoLaporte and others were all taken over. Some of the posts made by the hackers on these accounts varies from funny (FoxNews announced that Bill O'Reilly is Gay, RichSanchez said he was high on coke) to scams, (Barrack Obama offered prizes if you take a survey). The post from Biz over at Twitter is below:


Monday Morning Madness


This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been "hacked" including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama (who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts.

What Happened?

The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend. These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure.

Reacting Quickly and Fixing the Problems

In addition to this Monday morning madness we're coming off a wacky weekend where lots of folks were tricked into participating in a Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users. In both cases, our on-call team was able to attend to the matter quickly and prevent too many people from being affected. Our support team is definitely going to have a busy week because we reset a bunch of passwords just to be on the safe side.

Could OAuth Have Helped?

We plan to release a closed beta of the open authentication protocol, OAuth this month but it's important to note that this would not have prevented a Phishing scam nor would it have prevented these accounts from being compromised. OAuth is something we can provide so that folks who use third party applications built on the Twitter API can access to their data while protecting their account credentials.

Andy Ihnatko demonstrates his Internet Pants™

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Recently Andy Ihnatko was visiting the Washington DC area and made a guest appearance at the Washington Area Apple Pi user group. During his talk, he demonstrated the utility of his internet pants. I apologize for the this rough cut of this clip along with the fact that the camera shakes. I have VERY LITTLE video experience and this video was actually the first one I've ever taken with this new camera (Canon Vixia HF100) and this was my first time ever using Final Cut Express. I also did not have the best seat for videoing this demonstration, as you can see from the two people sitting in front of me. The best shots of the video start at 1:30 into it.