Facebook hacked??

It’s currently 7.50pm in Australia, 1.50am US PDT. Facebook has been down for the last ten minutes. According to an entry in the Wikipedia profile for Facebook:

IT WAS RECENTLY HACKED BY CHRIS DOHERTY ON TUESDAY 31ST JULY. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE UK. CHRIS DOHERTY PROCLAIMED, “NOW PEOPLE MAY SEE THAT I AM THE TRUE CREATOR!”

G’DAY WORLD #271 – Vernor Vinge, SF Author Extraordinaire

Today I had the fortune to chat with another living legend – Vernor Vinge (pronounced “vin-jee” as in, he explained off air, “stingy”). While VV may not have the public profile of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, in geek circles no SF author carries more respect. Why is it so?

In 1981 Vernor wrote a novella called TRUE NAMES which was the one of the earliest stories to present a fully realized concept of cyberspace which he called the “Other Plane” and which people accessed by attaching electrodes to their scalp. Inside the Other Plane, people hid their “true names” from the Government by creating avatars with pseudonyms – sound familiar? This was several years before NEUROMANCER (William Gibson, 1984) or SNOW CRASH (Neal Stephenson, 1992) and is therefore a seminal work in cyberpunk fiction.

Vinge’s novels A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (1992) and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY (1999) both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 1993 he wrote an essay called “The Coming Technological Singularity” which popularized that term.

His latest novel, RAINBOWS END, is a masterpiece of near-future Sci-Fi which explores the world circa 2025. Marc Andreessen called it “the clearest and most plausible extrapolation of modern technology trends forward to the year 2025 that you can imagine.” It has been nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Rainbows End
You can learn more about the huge potential ramifications of the Singularity by attending the Singularity Summit 2007.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

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    The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.


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    Cam’s World 31 July 2007

    I’m amused this morning that Duncan wrote up my “Telstra Bans Facebook” in TechCrunch and the rash of comments accusing him of being a Facebook shill. I often tell corporate-types when they ask about why blogging is important that I may only have a few hundred regular readers of my blog but a handful of them are people with real reach – like Duncan. Google “telstra facebook” and see what happens.

    Meanwhile, some people like Allen Stern still miss the point. This isn’t about Facebook. This is about businesses feeling the need to block the use of online services because they feel their employees will waste time on them and not get the job done. I know of at least one Melbourne government agency that still blocks instant messenger! Even their online team can’t use it!

    Any employee who has enough functioning brain cells to use a PC and the net should have enough to work autonomously towards a set out pre-agreed results. When companies block access to internet services, rather than change their corporate culture, all they are doing is shoring up their command and control environments. This is bad – for profits, for shareholders, for employee satisfaction, for everyone.

    I’m going to be talking more about this (and Telstra’s brief banning of Facebook) in my Marketing magazine article.

    ******

    Prepping for my Vernor Vinge interview this afternoon by re-reading his classic novella “True Names” which he wrote in 1981 predicting the internet YEARS before Gibson or Stephenson. If you haven’t read it, you should. Here’s a sneak peak but buy yourself a hard copy as well, it’s an incredible piece of work.

    ******

    I chatted with a representative from Telstra’s media department today about the Facebook issue. She said that it was a “technical problem” that prevented employees from accessing Facebook last Friday and that the error was resolved later in the day. When I asked for details about the problem, she couldn’t provide any. I asked if it was true that Telstra employees are not allowed to have Instant Messenger at work and she also said she couldn’t confirm that. When I asked what Telstra’s official position is on making Facebook and other internet services available to their employees, she said they don’t ban access to anything but all employees have to abide by their guidelines which means they can only use them as a “business tool” and as part of their job function.

    Do you believe the official story?

    ******

    Cam’s World 30 July, 2007

    Shoe-lovin’ Telstran CathyE has created a Twitter profile purely for announcing Melbourne tech events. Very handy. Don’t forget MODM this Thursday night! We’ve got our biggest registrations to date and a new venue.

    ******

    I’m writing an article on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 for MARKETING magazine. If anyone has any good examples of how Aussie companies are using Web2.0 in a respectable fashion, let me know so I can include them.

    ******

    Speaking of Enterprise 2.0, I had lunch today with Tony Clement, one of the guys behind AEGEON, a young Melbourne-based services company focused 100% on helping corporate clients adopt Web2.0 technologies. I’ve known Tony for a few years, he was a CTO client of mine back in my MSFT days, and it’s great to see him taking the stuff we were doing back then around web services and helping other companies adopt them. Tony ran one of the first significant Microsoft.Net-based projects in Australia back in 2001/2 and had a bold vision even back then for how to use web services in an enterprise environment to innovate and engineer value. Keep an eye on Aegeon. They are the first services firm I’ve heard of in Australia that is really throwing serious effort behind Web2.0.

    ******

    I’m back on my weight-loss regimen. Listened to The Health & Fitness Show #058 – Easily Identify Low Fat + Low Sugar + High Nutritional Value Food this morning. Lots of great tips from Beti on how to tell what you are putting into your body. I was thinking we should run a competition for G’Day World listeners to see who can lose the most about of weight over the next 90 days. Get a sponsor to put up a prize. Who’s in?

    ******

    McDonald’s just don’t get blogging, do they?

    Some of you will remember the fake blog they put up in early 2005.

    Now some hired PR guy in Perth is blogging on PerthNorg under the alias “cookie2”. He’s pushing the “Name the Burger” campaign that McDonald’s is running in Australia at the moment.

    Cookie2 writes: “Burger naming legend Ken Thomas, renowned for his creativity in naming the Cheeseburger, Double Cheeseburger, McChicken and the Hot Apple Pie, has retired from the senior ranks of McDonald’s Australia, giving the company the opportunity to throw the job open to the Australian public.”

    Unfortunately, Cookie2 (aka John Cooke a PR consultant working for McDonald’s Australia) has just broken Rule #1 of Corporate Blogging – Be Honest.

    “Ken Thomas” is (perhaps obviously) a fictional character
    , created by advertising agency Leo Burnett.

    So why can’t McDonald’s just tell the truth? Why not just start a campaign about naming a burger? Why do they have to make up some bullshit story? I don’t get the rationale. Do you? Can someone explain it to me?

    ******

    Watching this amazing “Russian Scam” video (aka “How To Take Someone’s Wallet Just By Asking Them”) by Derren Brown. Amazing.

    After you’ve watched that, watch this guy’s attempt at explaining it using NLP.

    ******

    Just been watching Tanya Levin, author of a soon-to-be-released book about the very scary Hillsong Church, on Denton’s Enough Rope. My old mate Phil McCreddan has an article about Hillsong, which includes an interview with Tanya, on his Signposts blog. Interestingly, publisher Allen & Unwin were going to publish her book (“People In Glass Houses”) but pulled out of it, apparently because of a perceived risk of defamation. The book was picked up by Black Inc which is owned by Morrie Schwartz, who also published Monthly magazine. This is the church that has links to Gloria Jeans (see my earlier posts on that here and here and why I don’t drink Gloria Jeans anymore), has received a bunch of government grants, and where the founder’s father, who held senior positions in the church, but was forced to resign in 2000 following exposure of his homosexual paedophile activities whilst ministering in New Zealand some thirty years earlier.

    I’m looking forward to reading her book.

    G’DAY WORLD #270 – Affluenza

    Richard Giles joins me tonight to talk about a bunch of questions that have been on my mind:

  • Are we all suffering from Affluenza?
  • Are the Government, the advertising industry, and the mass media all conspiring to make us feel broke and scared?
  • Does the car I drive define me as a human being?
  • Do we really want a country where the government runs our health care? (after watching SICKO)
  • In Second Life, does everyone know you’re a dog?
  • All that and more, on G’Day World 270.

    Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

    I’ve created a couple of groups inside Second Life. You can now add yourself to the following groups:

  • Friends Of G’Day World
  • MODM
  • The Podcast Network
  • If I knew how to link directly to those groups from here, I would. But I don’t. So for now you just need to search for them in-world. Or you can add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends and check out the groups I belong to.

    If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

    Add me to your Twitter account.

    Do me a solid and digg the show.

    Get the TPN version of Particls.

    Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

    You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

    If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

    The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.


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