Joseph Playing Away in a Manger at Piano Recital
Month: December 2009
JesseStay – 16-Dec-09 02:19
Joseph Playing Away in a Manger at Piano Recital
JesseStay – posted on 12/16/2009
Joseph Playing Away in a Manger at Piano Recital
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 2:16 AM
Thomas Playing Deck the Halls at Piano Recital
JesseStay
Thomas Playing Deck the Halls at Piano Recital
JesseStay – 16-Dec-09 02:16
Thomas Playing Deck the Halls at Piano Recital
JesseStay – posted on 12/16/2009
Thomas Playing Deck the Halls at Piano Recital
Potential FriendFeed Hole Allows Users to Embed Web Bugs
I have discovered a feature (or perhaps vulnerability?) of FriendFeed that, intended or not, could enable marketers to track every single view of their RSS posts to FriendFeed. The feature revolves around the ability to embed images, via a subset of RSS called MediaRSS, into your RSS feed. If your RSS is MediaRSS formatted, FriendFeed automatically reads the images in the feed and displays the first one as the main image in the post to your feed on FriendFeed.com. Here’s the problem though (or maybe it’s a feature?) – FriendFeed stores the original URL to the image as the main image URL. They don’t re-format it at all or store it on their servers. This means you can dynamically produce anything you want on FriendFeed.com, set cookies, store IP information, etc. without the user ever knowing about it.
I discovered this hole due to an annoyance I had with my TweetMeme button always showing up as the image in my posts to FriendFeed. I noticed that the number of retweets was dynamically updating, right on FriendFeed. Sure enough, looking at the source of the image, the image was being generated from TweetMeme’s servers, not FriendFeed’s.
Such Web Bugs are common throughout the web, especially in advertising and other marketing-based mediums, so the threat isn’t huge. However, this may be something the FriendFeed team may want to look at if they don’t want marketers to be getting information about their users off the FriendFeed.com site itself. If anything, I’d like to see them just ignore 3rd-party image URLs altogether and maybe my pesky TweetMeme icon will stop showing up as the image on my posts to FriendFeed. Is this a feature or a “bug”?
Googling, here’s some more information I found about “Web Bugs”: http://www.leave-me-alone.com/webbugs_growing.asp
Happy Mormon Christmas! (From a Mormon)
The Tonight Show did a hilarious remake of Orrin Hatch’s “8 Days of Hannukah“, just for Mormons (since Hatch is a Mormon). I thought it was very tactfully done – I’ll be singing this all Christmas!
To learn about what Mormons really believe, be sure to check out Mormon.org, or this site which has some great videos on what we believe.
Netflix’ Little Known Information for Parents Feature
This post is guest-authored by Luke Stay – you can find him on his blog, AfroWhitey.com, on Twitter, or on his Facebook Page. Luke is Jesse’s younger brother.
I was doing a little exploring on Netflix a while ago when I came across a feature that I had never seen before. It’s called “Information for Parents,” and I don’t know why Netflix doesn’t promote it more. It takes a little digging (as far as I can tell) to even get to it, but it should be one of the most-used features on the site.
To get to the feature, you must first click on the link for a movie (not all movies have the feature, so stick with popular releases). For this post, I will use the new Star Trek. Under the “Details” section, you’ll see the rating of the movie with the MPAA reasons for the rating, and below that you’ll see Netflix’ rating, along with a link for more. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to the Parental Information feature.
The section that comes up is full of valuable information. I am a firm believer in active viewership, meaning that when watching a movie, especially with children, attention should be paid to the messages and themes underlying the plot and all the spectacle. In this feature, Netflix provides sample discussion points for parents to address with children after viewing, thus promoting the active viewership so often missing in many households. It also brings up some possible underlying messages you may have missed.
Next, the feature spells out specifically what elements gave the movie the rating Netflix awarded and why it is or is not appropriate for a certain age group. The categories covered are: Sexual Content, Violence, Language, Social Behavior, Consumerism, and Drug/Tobacco/Alcohol. Your bases are fully covered here, as it provides information for things I wouldn’t have even thought to include. Even the most protective parent can be satisfied.
So there you go, kudos to Netflix for providing this feature that every parent should be using. There is no reason to go into a theater or to rent uneducated. Now, if Netflix would only promote this valuable feature more.
This post is guest-authored by Luke Stay – you can find him on his blog, AfroWhitey.com, on Twitter, or on his Facebook Page. Luke is Jesse’s younger brother.
