Corey Rants

Tonights ranting is on: Trademark and branding

Over my winter session of classes, my professor introduced us to a website. It was more so to show us how social media and random websites can have such a larger following then even our local papers.  We compared our Stevens Point Journal, to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

As you can see, GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle has a higher daily reach then even UWSP, and even a lot more than the Stevens Point Journal.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle’s idea was quite simple.  It was 4 iframes on the page each pointing to Google.  You could resize the windows; point them to other sites and a few other pretty cool tasks.  I made a comment to Professor Krause, about wondering how long it would take before Google complained about the use of their trademark.  The site clearly didn’t alter content or gain anything from the users, however because of the domain name, it does violate Google’s trademark claims. We were not sure how long it would be, but figured Google would likely find it soon enough.

Today during class, I went to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle to do some side-by-side searching, to find a note from the site’s author saying the site was going to be taken down because of a take down notice that they received from Google.

I am going to miss the site, because it did come to be pretty useful.  Trademarks and branding are important to a person and company.  From Google’s side, if they don’t protect their trademark, they risk losing it.

It brings me to a new point as well.  I’ve gone by the nickname Freekie for most of my “Online” life.  I’ve moved away from it slightly, using CoreyRants.com instead of my old Freekie.net.  Mostly because the projects I’ve started on freekie.net have never worked, and Corey Rants seems to be more about what I blog about. Rants, raves and other stuff that happens in my life.    I’m thinking of possibly switching my twitter nickname from Freekie to Corey Rants.  It would create a single online presence, but haven’t decided what I want to do just yet.

I’ll keep you all updated as I progress on the Twitter handle.

Feel free to stop over to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com and write the author a few well wishes.

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Edit

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Professor Krause also wrote about this, check out his take on the topic.

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In Class we’ve discussed how more and more companies are taking an active role in social media. The best example that comes to mind is the @ComcastCares Team. If you tweet about them, odds are you will get a response asking if they can help. This has had mixed results in the past it seems, but it’s a little nifty to get a response from a big company saying that they actually do see you, the little person.

Last night, I tweeted, asking if anyone has ever forgotten to hit send when waiting for a text message. In replying to a follower, I wrote that my phone randomly switches to SOS (Emergency Calling only) mode quite often and needs a power cycle to fix it. I tagged my tweet #att #fail.

When I woke up in the morning, I had an @reply from @ATTCustomerCare “@Freekie Hi, I’m with AT&T and saw your tweet. If you DM you contact info, I can reach out to try to help. I’m following. Thanks!” I thought that it was pretty cool, however did wonder where this was when I had phone problems in the past. So, I followed them and sent my phone number along in a Direct Message. A few hours later, I got a voicemail from AT&T’s Social Media Department. He explained who he was, and why he was calling me. While I haven’t had a chance to call them back, it was pretty cool to actually get a response and know that they have an actual department to handle such things as twitter. I do wonder what else they monitor, if it’s face book, or what else. Apparently they have a presence on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and even YouTube. It is a pretty impressive list.

I think that it is very important for companies and even people to watch what is said about them on twitter and other social media places. Doing a quick google search usually finds you a good place to start. Search.twitter.com allows you to look over tweets that have been sent as well. I have a few of my frequent searches as an RSS feed and have it into my RSS reader. I think it’d be worth checking out for most companies to keep their tweeters happy. Good PR goes along way on the internets (sic).

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As you may or may not know, I help run a few IRC Networks, and reading up on exploits and other security problems is a must.  Part of security is obscurity, i.e. how much can we hide the exploits so people don’t know about them, so they can’t use them, and the other part is openness.

The open source community usually responds very quickly to reports of exploits and fixes them. For instance, Joomla will not publicly announce that there is an exploit until they have fixed it, allowing webmasters a chance to patch them. This allows them to patch their sites before the exploit is known. While this works for most sites, the problem comes from what is know as a ZeroDay Exploit. In the Zero-Day case, the exploits are being used do not have a patch out there for them, and usually can be very dangerous to system administrators. They can range from sql injections to crashes to taking over a computer. Zero-Day’s suck.

Now, Background on the Firefox incident:

Firefox blocks some  nonstandard ports from being used to send commands to.  One of the ports that isn’t blocked by java script in Firefox is 6667.  6667 is the default IRC connection port.  With some java script code, attackers are able to get users to flood different IRC servers just by visiting a website.   The browser then floods the IRCD (IRC Server) with either random data, or a spam message.   Feel free to read about this more here.

I think that this type of attack is just the start, and until the Firefox and Open-Source community actually fix this type of exploit it will be used in more dangerous and evil ways.  While I do understand that sometimes a non-standard port has to be used,  for example Direct-Admin (Web interface configurator) might use port 1111, which would look like http://website.com:1111 .  I think a simple fix for this, is that any type of connection to a nonstandard HTTP port (80, 443) should have an opt in or prompt alerting that it could be used for abuse and that something including fishing could be up.

While every product will likely have some exploits and bugs with them, I do have to say that I have been very impressed with the Open-Source companies about how fast and accurately they actually fix bugs.

Adobe (Closed Source) for example, operates on a longer time frame to fix issues.  This example shows them being aware of an exploit on December 15th, but not expecting an update until Jan 12th.  That is a long time.

Just  a random rant.  Security is always important, and I wouldn’t think that going to my boss and saying, “This exploit can crash our program, and its widely known, however we don’t expect to fix it for a month” would go over to well.  I would expect a resolution or work around quickly.

Anyways. that is all for tonight. Thanks for reading and go Open Source

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