A little Design Inspiration Google Reader “bundle” for you

InkSiene: New inking software from Microsoft Research, free install

InkSeine, Rethink your Ink!

If you don’t know what Microsoft Research does, go take a quick peek at their website. Microsoft Research is think tank at MSFT that explores, develops, designs, and tries to implement new technologies and thoughts. They are not harbored by having to make money. Its really just like a wonderful adult playground where your imagination is the only think stopping you.

They do some amazing work over there and some very interesting projects. They do everything from researching ways to display information, to ways to gather information from the bottom of the ocean. One thing I am particularly interested in is the project Ken Hinckley is working on, InkSiene.

Now the interesting aspects of this project are numerous, but he touches on some great things. Here is his list of features:

These are some of the cool features offered by InkSeine:

Blaze a super-fast trail by using radial menus for pen commands.
Just hover to preview the commands. Touch down in the center and
stroke towards the command you want to activate it.

Select existing ink right on the page to initiate a search.

Create queries in the context of your notes to keep track of searches,
reuse them, or return to them later.

Easily find emails, documents, ink notes, or web pages without
leaving your notes.

Drag links to the documents and web pages you find right into your
notebook.

and lots more…

I encourage everyone to go check it out and let me know what you think. To be honest, its not very often you get state of the art inking software for free, so go download and install it.

The interesting part about this is that Ken did this totally in a bubble based on user feedback. Rather than stick with the same methods as Windows, he went a different direction and innovated some remarkable things. I really like seeing something and thinking, “now that is smart.”

I currently have this running on a few machines to put it through its paces.

Check out his wonderful tutorial!

Sync and backup software

Here are the programs I am using or testing right now that all perform some sort of sync operation.

• Second Copy – $29, lots of profiles, lots of options. Needs to run all the time.
• Live Mesh – free, syncs with a cloud of 5 gig storage space. Very powerful and unique service.
• Windows Live Sync – free – powerful, does sync with other folders, but all the computers need to be online. Even if you are doing it on a network.
• Delicious Toolbar – I went to this for bookmark sync’ing because it does all browsers and it has some other decent functions like compare, tagging, etc.

Currently trying it out

• Good Sync – I am currently testing this one out. Not sure about it yet. Looks good, but only offers 3 simultaneous download profiles. You can do the paid version for $29 and do unlimited, but I don’t want to buy another piece of sync software. I like the look of the interface though.
• Sync Toy from Microsoft - free – small but powerful. Also has the ability to be scheduled in Task Scheduler so it doesn’t need to be running all the time.

Phased Out

• Google Calendar Sync - free – this only syncs one single google account and one calendar. Almost not worth mentioning.
• Foxmarks – they tried to turn this into a marketing thing. I had issues because it would only sync your bookmarks between Firefox installs and not IE.
• Sync2it – does bookmarks, but just not robust enough for any serious use.
• Cobian Backup – free, Open Source - theres also a paid version. I used it for a bit but he does not offer syncing. He only offers backups.

No Comments

How the twitter attack happened ~ the short version

Here is the main story, http://www.techcrunch.com/..

Executive Summary: Hacker finds gmail address of employee. Goes to Gmail’s lost password function. Sees secondary email account is a hotmail account that is deactivated. Creates new hotmail account with that address. Recovers password. Changes password back for stealth. Then has access to Google Apps on the twitter.com domain.

Basically, here is what happened:

A young Frenchman named “Hacker Croll” got interested in web security, social engineering a few years ago. He is unemployed. He wanted to hack into Twitter.

• He starts doing web searches on Twitter, accumulating vast amounts of names and email addresses of Twitter employees
• From there he uses the “Forgot Password” on a Twitter employees gmail address.
• Unable to determine what it is by guessing, he asks for a hint. Gmail balances usability with security by offering users to have a second email account attached to the main email account in case of password resets. Gmail informs Hacker Croll that they sent a password reset to “******@h******.com”
• Hacker Croll guesses that it is probably a hotmail account, so uses the same username at hotmail.com to check the email address
• Hotmail recycles old usernames, so the username was deleted.
• Hacker Croll creates a new hotmail user account with the twitter employees username. Asks for the password reset from the Twitter Employee’s gmail and gets the reset.
• Hacker Croll then searches through the account and finds what the password was before he changed it, so he could reset it and not alert the Twitter Employee.

Now, he has completely shadowed a twitter employees account and has their ‘main’ reused password. He uses that password to gain access to Google Apps on the Twitter domain. There he hit the goldmine with emails, and email attachments. Then he took control of their personal email, work email, iTunes (iTunes has a security hole that you can see the complete credit card numbers), banking account information, ATT, MobileMe, Amazon, everywhere the person was a customer through the vast amount of emails he had control of.

Then the CEO of Twitter downplayed the attack, so Hacker Croll got offended and sent all of the documents to TechCrunch to prove the severity of the attack. Then, they published a wealth of internal Twitter memos, strategies, and other documents. Here is HC’s apology.

I would like to offer my personal apology to Twitter. I think this company has a great future ahead of it.

I did not do this to profit from the information. Security is an area that fascinated me for many years and I want to do my job. In my everyday life, I help people to guard against the dangers of the Internet. I learned the basic rules .. For example: Be careful where you click the files that you download and what you type on the keyboard. Ensure that the computer is equipped with effective protection against viruses, external attacks, spam, phishing … Upgrading the operating system, software commonly used … Remember to use passwords without any similarity between them. Remember to change them regularly … Never store confidential information on the computer …

I hope that my intervention will be repeated to show how easy it can be for a malicious person to gain access to sensitive information without too much knowledge.

Croll Hacker.

Here is Twitter’s Official Response:

Twitter, Even More Open Than We Wanted

About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked. From the personal account, we believe the hacker was able to gain information which allowed access to this employee’s Google Apps account which contained Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps Twitter relies on for sharing notes, spreadsheets, ideas, financial details and more within the company. Since then, we have performed a security audit and reminded everyone of the importance of personal security guidelines.

That begs to make you think about the balance between usability and security. The security as a whole is only as strong as its weakest link. Better check those secondary email addresses and ensure that they are just as safe and secure as your primary. Which reminds me, I need to go change some stuff… brb. :)

Twitter’s Internal strategy, http://www.techcrunch.com/…

The “Peanut Butter Manifesto” internal Yahoo Memo from back in the day, http://online.wsj.com/…