Kivus' Tumblelog

New Wordpress Post -> Is UpScoop paving the way to unleash SPAM with new changes to their Privacy Po

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:11:16 -0700

I did a write up on on my Wordpress blogs, very similar to the write up I did here earlier, about how social networking sites seem to be doing more than just searching your address book for your friends now. It's disappointing news, but if you want to re-read the story I wrote up here earlier, you can find it on kivus.com or johnkivus.com

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Social Networks Breaking Our Trust (Quechup & Upscoop Leading the Way)

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:25:01 -0700

So I guess it was bound to happen eventually, but it looks like those pretty little "check your gmail address book" features on social networks, are now going to be used by spammers as a way to spread their garbage. Quechup was the first one to use this trick, but the latest one is a product by "RapLeaf" called "Upscoop." A look at their privacy policy shows that the "address book" section used to say:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member's email address book. NOTE: Upscoop does not email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book. [ Google Cache Link -> (http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uL5Uoiffy6UJ:https://upscoop.com/privacy_policy+upscoop+spam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a)lkjklj ]

But now reads:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member's email address book.
(https://upscoop.com/privacy_policy)

As you can see, they're clearly positioning themselves to spam their repositories of contact information. Based on these latest examples, I'm thinking its time to stop using the "Check your Gmail Address Book to see if your friends are on our Social Network!" features.

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New WordPress Post -> Memo to Washington: Keep Your Hands off my Internet

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:18:55 -0700

My latest wordpress posting takes the, what seems like to people who are deep in web culture, "unpopular" position of being against Net Neutrality. You can read it on kivus.com & johnkivus.com

Excerpt:

One issue that most of the web media (i.e. podcasters, tech news websites, etc…) seems to have a consensus opinion on is Net Neutrality, namely: the government should step in and regulate the internet to prevent companies from distributing bandwidth via free market principles. It’s for this reason that the term “Net Neutrality” can be simply defined as “government regulation of the internet.”

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RSS Feeds Not Full Posts?

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:41:29 -0700

I just noticed my RSS feeds are now just excerpts from posts instead of the full posts? Anyone else seeing this? Anyone know how to get it back to the full posts?

UPDATE: Got a response from the Vox team:

For the feeds you've already subscribed to, you can change the URL to either atom-full.xml or rss-full.xml instead of the atom.xml or rss.xml you're using now.

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Blogging Platforms

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:26:29 -0700

I've been playing with blogging platforms lately, seeing how easy different platforms are to install, navigate, etc....Currently I'm running the following platforms on the following sites:

Fully Integrated Platforms: (these platforms are not installed at an external web host)
Vox: kivus.vox.com
Wordpress.com: johnkivus.com
Tumblr: justsithereandcarrydisease.com

Hosted Platforms: (these platforms are installed by me at my hosted account at websitesource.com)
Wordpress: kivus.com, kivus.info
Movable Type: 37feet2inches.com
Drupal: carolinasoxfan.com

Now, at this point, I've really only installed Movable Type and Drupal, clicked around it some, and just taken a look at the UI. One of the reasons I selected each of them was that they were supposed to be highly scalable, especially in regards to community features. Thought I'm sure I don't really have a community of people reading my respective blogs are this time, I wanted to gain some experience configuring them. I'll update my impressions after I've spent more time with them.

Also, I plan on doing a fuller review of Wordpress (the installable version), since I think that has become my favorite blogging interface.

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New Tumblr - ReaganAcolyte.com is up

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:44:41 -0700

So I completed my new Tumblr, reaganacolyte.com. It contains my own personal comments from my personal sites (kivus.com and kivus.vox.com), filtered to only include those stories I put a "political" tag on (the filtering was accomplished by using Yahoo Pipes), as well as some of my favorite columnists like Victor Davis Hanson and Charles Krauthammer.

I'm not sure how useful reaganacolyte.com will turn out to be, but at least the domain won't sit idle until I figure out something really good to do with it.

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Yahoo Pipes Completed

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:35:36 -0700

So, I made my 2 Yahoo Pipes:
Kivus.com (Tags: Conservative & Political) -> http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=XpHsIeYV3BGoRhAGqGIyXQ&_render=rss
Kivus.vox.com (Tags: Politics & Political) -> http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=dv2RheoV3BGnK5ui6kjTQA&_render=rss

to filter out the articles I wanted for my new Tumblr. It was pretty straightforward, probably use their functionality again.

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Creating Another Tumblr

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:45:06 -0700

So after yesterday's creation of clemsonsportsfan.com, I've decided to create another tumblr that will contain the various political posts I write on kivus.com and on kivus.vox.com. In order to further enhance the content on the site, I'm going to use some RSS feeds from Real Clear Politics to add columns from some of my favorite columnists, as well as a few key other RSS feeds (like Victor Davis Hanson).

The issue I ran into initially is that kivus.vox.com and kivus.com don't offer RSS feeds for just specific tags / categories. I tried something called Feed Rinse, but it didn't really work so well with Vox, so I moved onto Yahoo Pipes . That seems to work quite well for filtering my RSS content, so I'll probably stick with it. I might give Microsoft's
Popfly a shot too, since I've got an invite for that too.

I'll post again when the site is completed.

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MacBreak Weelky

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:23:48 -0700

Merlin just busted out with "I'm thinking of growing a NeckBread and
learning eMacs..."

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North Carolina Politicians Showing They're Out of Touch

nobody@vox.com(Kivus) — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:38:52 -0700

First it was the idea that they might ban normal light bulbs for fears of
the global warming hoax that Algore and his minions on the Left and the
Democrat Party are trying to spread. Now, there is talk that North Carolina
might make a law that would require kids to "get parent's permission" before
signing up for social networking sites. Though I do agree that Parent's
should have input over what sites their children visit, I don't see how a
law on this topic is helpful at all. Instead, the parents should simply move
the computer into a public part of the house (where the child never knows
when someone might walk up behind her) and also pay attention to what the
child is browsing for by turning on things like History tracking and
Google's History tracking. Placing an undue burden on the sites themselves
to verify children have parental permission isn't the answer, parents taking
responsibility for their children's online behavior is.

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