I went to the Slashdot 10th Anniversary party in Ann Arbor, MI, which happens to be home of the founder, CmdrTaco. The turnout was excellent! At least 200 geeks of various shapes, sizes and colors were there. I met Hemos, who gave me the shirt, as well as CmdrTaco. They had name tags printed out for everyone who had RSVP’d with their username and member number on them. The lower the number, the cooler you seemed to be. My number is 102,267 (out of over 1,100,000 registered users) which I got almost 8 years ago. I never though my Slashdot member number would be good for anything, guess I was wrong!

It was a good time. I got my ass kicked in foosball but did manage to set the high score for Mrs. Pac-Man (geeze, I am a geek). The party was still going on when I left and I’m sure it still is. The Leopold Bros. Pub in Ann Arbor is making a killing tonight I’m sure. Thanks for the free shirt Slashdot!

The e-mail was legitimate – depending on how you look at it.

I went to the site, signed up, and decided to import my contacts from G-Mail. It works the same way MySpace or Facebook does, it checks to see if any of your contacts are already members and then links you with them automatically. Unfortunately I didn’t read the fine print – neither did Hugh. When I entered my info for G-Mail, Quechup decided to send and invite to EVERYONE of my G-Mail contacts. In G-Mail, every person you have ever sent an e-mail to is in your list. I’m guessing many hundreds of people had a Quechup invite in their Inbox from me. I didn’t know until it was WAY too late. The following day I awoke to several e-mails from people asking who I was and why I sent them an invite. I also had e-mails from friends saying they had signed up. It’s been two days since I spammed everyone and I am still trying to clear up the entire mess.

If any of you reading this got an invite, please disregard it. I didn’t mean to send it to all of you.

Beware of Quechup. They received an extremely disgruntled e-mail from me that contained more than one four-letter word. Quechup may be a fine social networking site but their underhanded tactics to gain new members is unethical. I’ll never know because I will never be going back to the site.

Mashable covered the story on the 2nd of this month.  Too bad I didn’t check my RSS reader that day.

Most MySpace users have probably noticed that when you copy-and-paste code from a MySpace Profile design site a graphic or logo toting where you received the code from appears (which you can remove). If you can identify that part of the code then you know more than most. It looks something like this:

a href=”http://www.codesite.com” img src=”http://www.codesite.com/image.gif” /a

The problem is not so much these graphics (unless they take you to malicious sites) but other code you may be unknowingly putting into your page.

Example 1: Adware laden MySpace Videos

Adware doesn’t necessarily destroy your computer but it can really junk it up and cause pop-up window hell. So much that if can crash your computer.

“A profile that pops-up a licensing agreement for a video on the page – if the user clicks OK, Zango Adware is installed on the machine. However, the Zango distributor isn’t creating all these pages…” (from mashable.com)

Example 2: Trojans (back-doors to your computer)

These can be nasty and compromise your MySpace profile as well as other personal information on your computer.

“Most of these malicious codes are Trojans, like the dangerous FireByPass.BA, which captures confidential information entered or saved by users on computers. This and other Trojans found in MySpace use rootkit techniques to hide their processes, which makes them even more dangerous.” (from ITsecurityportal.com)

Example 3: MySpace Trackers

These, quite possibly, are the worst invaders of privacy.

Tracking software IS spyware and creates an open door to your computer as a platform for hackers. Even if you have a firewall in place or a hardwired router; you have now done their job for them by happily copying and pasting the code into your Myspace profile which allows access to personal information. As soon as you copy and paste the code into your profile, the tracking service now has full access to your IP address and the IP address of anyone who visits your page.
(from associatedcontent.com)

My advice…think twice about what you are copying and pasting into your MySpace profile. In a future post I will tell you how to block MySpace trackers from sharing your personal information.

Personally, I use a custom profile for my MySpace page, which you can see here if you like, that does not track you nor contain any malicious code. I have yet to have my MySpace account compromised in anyway.

For a great place to get safe MySpace codes check out this site: boostmyspace.com

Sites to avoid: EverythingMyspace, MyspaceGlitters, LoserAlliance, Deltox and Videocodelab.

When I installed Linux a while back, I noticed my music software – Amarok – had the option to have information about your listening habits sent to Last.fm That was several months ago. Yesterday, I finally got around to checking out Last.fm Damn I’m glad I did.

All I can say is, “Holy Crap!” The best way to explain it is to just see it. This is my page. I’ve only been using Last.fm for 24 hours and that is how much information it has collected. You can see what I am listening to at this moment! If you look a little further down you can see that I have been heavily playing the new Fall Out Boy album and that I prefer Alternative and Rock. I listen many genres, just not in the last 24 hrs.

You can change all sorts of settings including the types of recommendations you get ranging from popular to obscure bands. It finds people with similar music tastes and you can import your contact list from G-mail, AOL, MSN, Yahoo! or any other e-mail with a contact list to find friends immediately. I knew about 10 people already using the service based on my G-mail contact import. From what I undersand, Last.fm is becoming quite popular but to give you an example of the difference between this and other social networks in terms of popularity…when I imported my G-mail contacts into MySpace a while back, there were 100+ of my “friends” with an account compared to 10 on Last.fm

One of my favorite features is the “Event” tab. I enter a city and it recommends music events in my area based on my taste. Freakin’ cool.

So this isn’t much of a review. I mostly wanted to spread the word about Last.fm. Give it a try. If you already use it, let me know via comments and tell me what you think.