The story of Kevin Mitnick is legend. As a hacker he was able to gain access to strategic systems in order to poke around and satisfy his curiosity. He spent years in jail as authorities tried to figure out what he did and if they could prosecute him somehow. They were simply scared of his abilities and keeping him locked away alleviated those fears. In a recent NPR Talk of the nation interview Mitnick compares LulzSec to Mafiaboy who launched relatively simple DOS attacks on American e-commerce sites from his house (literally next door to where I lived) in the late 90s.

I am fascinated by the legal and enforcement process when it comes to hacking because it requires a whole other set of competencies compared to traditional case work. Hacker friends have been arrested for accomplishing awesome tricks only to be released because the arresting officers don’t understand what the heck they did. Prosecuting a hacker requires incredibly detailed and tedious chain of custody work and it’s really hard to prove after the fact. And because every piece of evidence is highly corruptible along the way (be it photos, emails, logs…) and the general public, prosecuting and defense attorneys do not have the technical knowledge to point the finger to potential problems, the world of cyber crime is going to become really interesting. I was privileged enough to watch the entire Mafiaboy case as it happened and held in my hands one of the key judge order to allow for the gathering of data to correctly document the crime. I was very impressed with the technical knowledge of the local and FBI teams who devised the methods to document all aspects of Mafiaboy’s online activity. And also, I was surprised that so much money was invested to catch someone who did something so simple. But just like every crime lab in the USA is not equipped like CSI, not all events can benefit from the full attention of the best cyber crime labs. I wonder if authorities understand what is important to focus on and what is a waste of energy and money.

I do not deny that hackers can use attacks effectively to bring attention to their message however, these attacks are not dangerous to the infrastructure by themselves. I live close to an epic underpass. On it runs 4+ lanes of trains and really impressive maintenance equipment leading to the Hochelaga train yard. Under the tracks graffiti artists paint interesting murals at the rate of 5-8 per day. This means that if you do not walk by everyday (or even twice a day) you will miss the artwork constantly being repainted over. Generally speaking I loathe graffiti vandals who have written their name on every piece of Montreal wall and vehicle that goes unattended for more than 5 minutes… but the underpass is a cool focused place that can almost be categorized as an art studio.

 

There is a fine line between art and vandalism and it is the same thing on the Web. The Web is only a little bit safer than an unattended wall and it will fall prey to vandals and require cleaning and patching. However saying that Web vandalism is a huge threat to national security is inaccurate. That’s like saying the kids who paint the tunnel under the trains are compromising train travel in Montreal.

And another thing about Mitnick. After his release from prison, he was prevented from using a computer. That did not prevent him from writing a landmark book about social hacking called The Art of Deception. The human link is ALWAYS the weakest part of a system and the Internet is simply an optimization tool for criminals whose business is deceiving regular folks.

When Facebook implemented their new Page design, my clients’ custom tabs were deprecated to a very discreet place under the profile picture so some of them opted for a custom FBML tab directing users to the additional content they are offering. Now that FBML is no longer available for newer pages, you need to create independently hosted applications for each content tab. This doubles the amount of work required for each tab. While it’s not a technical challenge for me, I deplore how long it takes for Facebook to render application tabs over FBML.

I am happy to offer my clients hosting free of charge for the apps/tabs I develop for them and I have begun developing customizable apps for often-used functions such as sign-ups forms, contests, polls, RSS and the likes. While there are free Facebook apps that provide these services, a lot of them do not correctly display the clients brand, are hard to share and push annoying deceptive ads above the client’s content. This is not acceptable.

Recently I have released a few projects:

• Boston Pizza Brossard‘s contest Facebook application. This is a simple secure system for letting users participate in a contest via Facebook.
• I also created a magazine page flipper app for Magazine PREMIUM. Incidentally, the just released number 8 of PREMIUM is all about Social Media with long-form content from Harvard Business Review, STRATEGY+BUSINESS and Bloomberg Businessweek. PREMIUM, the most awesome business management magazine you’ve never heard of, has just won it’s third publisher prize. It’s well worth a read and my favorite part is always the exclusive interview with a Quebec business person and, of course, Rémi Tremblay‘s column. Working with Les Affaires to bringing PREMIUM to Facebook and now LinkedIn has been awesome.

Last weekend my spouse and I opened the new space for Club Nagaika, our martial art school. I would say that the progress on our recently enlarged space is at about 25%. Two of three weekend seminars with international Systema masters are announced starting in July 2011. At the same time, my health challenge is featured in a national magazine (Web version here). My spouse, Stéphane Beaudin, has developed remarkable understanding of human mobility and formerly-crippled-me is so lucky to have met him. My health and mobility continues to improve as I attend EVERY mobility class now that I’m here all the time. I know that our approach is very effective is healing mobility problems, especially in women my age who have been wearing heels, have lower back issues due to work or child birth but I am still at a loss to communicate this to women. Until very recently, Systema was a secret martial art only practiced by Russian Special Forces so its entire presentation around the Web is highly militarized and quite ‘tough’ but it’s a wonderful and effective health system that unlocks what seem like super powers to the untrained eyes. Because it’s based on bio-mechanics (i.e. being effective with the least effort) it’s ideal as self-defense for women. Even as the worst student amongst a slew of twenty-something guys I see immense benefits and progress. Most of my days are painless and I have not had a headache or a migraine in months. This is incredibly beneficial for my brain and it improves my ability to analyze and build complex solutions. Yet I still spend most of my days doing analog things while constructing Canada’s ‘Systema Wonderland’.

Oh and of course I am still managing 3 businesses, coaching two entrepreneurs and advising on 3 startups at this time. I have been accepting ‘disaster recovery’ jobs recently. These are usually 2-day gigs fixing urgent ‘shituations’ whether in management, code or security/hacking recovery. I am wondering if I should make this a specific service like my WordPress Emergency services. These confidential mandates are few overall but the high impact they have is very satisfying.

I recently unearthed my immense collection of vintage and antique bagatelles. They had been in boxes for 7 years waiting for a suitable place to display. I decided to adorn the lounge/office with most of them. My favorite ones are the Space themed games (all plastic from the 1960′s and 1970′s) which require a shrine of their own.

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Martha Stewart Living Magazine, MSLO has released an iPad special issue. I have been an avid reader of the magazine since its inception and I have been following Martha’s domestic advice since she wrapped a turkey in pastry on an early PBS special. I know that my early editions of the magazine are priceless but I will never let them go. Unfortunately, I have decreased my consumption of magazines in the past few years, even slacking on Marie-Claire Idée (France), the greatest magazine ever made.

So it is with trepidation that I downloaded the eco-friendly iPad issue.

Generally, I am annoyed with magazines trying to be cool by inserting a bunch of options in their incredibly data-heavy publications, I prefer simple PDFs… But I love the animated cover and the across and down navigation of Living.

Now if I was head of interactive products at MSLO (my dream job since 1998), I would immediately devise clever ways to remix the massive amount of company media… My fist task: The Ultimate Collection of Good Things! with videos and pictures, all easily searchable! But knowing Martha and her awesome crew of collaborators, it’s probably already in the works.

Please Martha, do make more!

When my father bought a Zenith Z-100 I took ownership of his TRS-80 Model II. Back then people were more interested in celebrating the moment over time stamping what they did so there is no date on the diploma I got after my BASIC course. I believe I was about 10 or 11 when I started spending entire days writing simplistic programs on a horrendously expensive $4000 dollar computer with only 64k of memory (1982). $4000 in those days was the price of a sweet car and that was about the same amount of money my father paid for his 1969 Dodge Charger. Of course the cassette recorder/player, for the TRS-80, was hundreds of dollars extra. But I never got it to work and every day I would start over. I was envious of my father’s new computer, a fancy 8-colour machine that came with two 320k dual-sided 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. Those floppies worked almost every time! My father expanded the 128k RAM that came with his computer in order to do his house plans. You see, my dad wanted to be an architect, but somehow wound up with a masters in Physics because, it is rumoured, that was a preferable career to his dad, a mechanical engineer. Back in those days, there was only one way to get your hands on cool tech in town… the local Radio Shack. Software was harder to find so computer enthusiasts would turn to Popular Electronics. My father was a long time subscriber of this magazine from when he sourced and configured computers for the Canadian Army. These magazines had so much cool content I could never wrap my head around but also some curious things. In the back there were small advertisements for software and content. This was the time when men started programming in their basement and used small ads in magazines and hobbyist newsletters to sell the fruits of their labour. If using a computer to connect and communicate an idea or a feeling is the essence of Social Media, then Social Media took off when men used the old fashion postal system to buy and sell ASCII porn for their computer. It wasn’t Social Media that I got to be a part of, I could only observe from the outside what other people got to do with their computer.

If using a computer to connect and communicate an idea or a feeling is the essence of Social Media, then Social Media took off when men used the old fashion postal system to buy and sell ASCII porn for their computer.

The home that my father built using the plans he made on his fancy Zenith had a special room for his collection of Popular Electronics Magazines. The latest and greatest computer was always the most awesome thing in our home and it seemed like my father was always the first to acquire each new processor. It is no surprise that when I was 20, I got a custom built computer, an 8088 with a graphic card that could support thousands of colors. Of course I couldn’t test the amazing quality of my graphics card until I figured out how to download pictures using the 14,4KPS modem that my brother gave me soon after that. Around 1990, I discovered Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) when I joined Remy Gendron’s Starfleet Command BBS in Québec City. There I found my way to the international forums, notably, InterUser with its hundrends of users scattered all over the world, going as far away as Vladivostok, Russia. When I officially joined the revolution, I got up at 4h30 daily to read and write with people everywhere. I even printed out the daily messages so I could read them at school (I was studying Tourism at Mérici) and at my weekend job in a religious museum. Back then my handle was *Milly* and I felt like the most popular girl around… I was also the only girl who actively wrote on InterUser. I grew frustrated that I could not see who I was writing to so I asked everyone to send me 5$ and a picture so I could make a photo album of all of us. My little four page book of faces went out to about 10 people, most of whom are still friends on the newest Facebook.

In mid-1992 I joined Douglas Kitson’s SquareHeads BBS, Québec City’s only English BBS. SquareHeads had user profiles which made it particularly fun to browse. In fact, it is on SHBBS that I found my first husband after posting a short personal. I published another InterUser yearbook in 1993, the same year I purchased and implemented a pre-Internet computer dating system that used snail mail mixed in with computer matching of profiles. That was tedious to operate and I soon discovered the ‘real’ Internet, in 1994, and immediately began building Web sites. It was more work-intensive to create a thousand page site about As The World Turns than to simply list the soap opera as an interest on a Facebook profile. But it became the main catalyst that created connections with others including a few of the show’s cast. Usenet, the text-based forum system, fell by the wayside as users moved to online bulletin boards with profiles that tracked your contributions and allowed for private messages and having friends. This step was necessary on the road to Social Media the way we know it today, a system with zero barrier to entry that everybody can use and abuse for free.

I need a Sunday so that I can enjoy one day alone and quiet to work on PingCognito! I need a Sunday so that I can spend the afternoon practising Systema with my sweetie. I need a Sunday so I can do laundry and clean… okay maybe not clean but definitely do the laundry.

Volo – Le Dimanche from Cube Creative on Vimeo.

Directed by Tom Haugomat&Bruno Mangyoku&Quentin Baillieux, Produced by Nicolas de Rosanbo/Cube
Thanks to Paul Feton , Raphelle Tinland, Mathilde Ollitraut-Bernard et Emmanuelle Walker for their nice pictures, thanks to Francois Maumont for his help on the 2D animations also.