IT Department Blocking Access to YouTube? Facebook?

I understand that I live in a world, and in a business space, that demands I “play on the internet all day”. But what confounds me is when I’m asked to consult with companies on their online marketing strategy, and those companies are blocking their staff’s access to social media sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Left hand. Meet the right hand. Social media marketing, online marketing, interactive marketing, whatever you want to call it, happens on the internet. In order to create an online marketing strategy, in order to listen to what your customers are saying, in order to react and interact, your staff need to access these sites on company time.

Mitch Joel has a great business column in the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun on Digital Natives and blocking access. I really like this article for its commentary on the changing face of new employees and how businesses need to adapt: http://tinyurl.com/68hzpp

EERoadshow: Susannah Gardner on Templates & Modules

Susannah Gardner of Hop Studios is currently showing the attendees at EE Roadshow how to customize an ExpressionEngine template. I just learned a cool trick. Ok, not a trick really, I just learned something that should have been painfully obvious.

As Susie was demonstrating that you can use a weblog to populate a header, meaning that you can create a custom weblog for your headers, pre-load the information and then set the order to randomly display one of the images, she happily clicked away on the Upload File button and this is what lead to my revelation ...

In EE when you want to reference an image that you’ve already loaded to your system, you click Upload File. And in the second half of the pop-up window, you click View. This will show you all the images in your directory and you can click link to auto-insert the link into any field.

I did not know this. It’s totally obvious! But in the past I have gone to my FTP client, found the filename and typed in the link.

Step 1: Click the Upload File Button to get the pop-up window.
Step 2: Click View

Step 3: Select Your Image. Decide what field it’s going to and select Link.

Ta-da! There’s the code.

4 tips to detect phishing attempts

Late last week I received an email from Google AdWords at an email address that looked like .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Except the email wasn’t from Google AdWords and the originating email address wasn’t really .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

It was a phishing attempt. Phishing?

In computing, phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and online banks are common targets. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging,[1] and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.

Most phishing attempts are pretty easy to spot. Misspellings, fake email addresses and domain names in Russia or some other country extension usually give them away if you know what to look for. But this scam was above average in its execution.

Here’s what the email looked like.

And here’s the landing page the link in the email brought up.

Here’s the actual login page for Google AdWords.

I was following along half absentmindedly up to this point. Then I took a closer look at the URL.

adwrods.google.select.wapisbank.cn/select/Login/index.html

The actual domain name is wapisbank.cn, in China. I smelled a rat.

At the same time I was impressed. This was phishing done far better than I had seen before, and for Google AdWords, not common targets like banks, Paypal or eBay.

So how can you spot an attempt at phishing that shows up in your inbox?

1. Are you expecting an email from the sending organization? If you don’t deal with a bank, they won’t send you email. If you don’t have a Paypal account, they also won’t send you email.
2. Don’t trust email. The sender email address can be masked or ‘spoofed’ very easily. Email is inherently an unsecure communication. Email messages travel over the open Internet just as they are. A detection program called a ‘sniffer’ can watch the traffic going past and respond to specific words or cues (like passwords or credit card numbers). Don’t email sensitive information. Don’t expect large organizations to email sensitive information.
3. Watch URLs. The URLs are the address of the web page you’re visiting. Phishing attempts almost always use URLs that mimic the URLs of the organization they’re impersonating, but they can never be that organzation. Here’s a short example of the distinctions between URLs, domain names and registered domains.
   • URL: http://www.example.net/index.html
   • Domain name: http://www.example.net
   • Registered domain name: example.net
4. Contact the organization sending you the email directly, not through a link in the email. Go straight to their website. Call them. Ask through a channel you’ve used before if you need to do anything to manage your account. Also, be ready to send the phishing email to the organization being impersonated.

Now that you’ve been warned, here’s the phishing webpage in case you need to see it in action.

Copyright, Permissions and Online Rules

This month one of our Underwire subscribers asked a great question about copyright and whether the rules for online publishing are different than those of print publishing.

* What are the copyright laws in relation to the practice of posting other people’s full articles on your website?
* Do you need author and publisher permission?
* How are the rules for online publishing and print publishing different?

It is a complex question, and I’m not an expert on copyright, but disclaimers aside, here’s my opinion.

Seek Permission

The internet is a vast resource of excellent articles, images, photos, and videos—all things that we want to filter and sort and compile in order to share with people within our social network.

Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and StumbleUpon,  have sprung up to support this miraculous tenacity we have for organizing data.

But what happens when we want to go beyond quoting reasonable amounts of text and linking back to the original source?

In this example, our Underwire subscriber wants to create a database of research articles and allow users to download those full articles. How does copyright apply? Who do they have to seek permission from in order to store these articles in a database?

See, it gets more complex right?

In the case of copyright materials (anything not licensed under Creative Commons—and even then, pay attention), you need to get permission to essentially re-publish these materials.

The question then becomes, who do you need to get permission from? The author? The publisher?

Understand Who Can Grant Permission to Share, Re-use and Re-publish

The answer is that it is dependent on the author-publisher contract. In many cases, when an author publishes an article in a journal or other publication, they sign an agreement with the publisher, which grants the publisher the exclusive rights to that article. In some cases this includes the right to self-archive, i.e., to keep a copy of their own work in an online CV or on their own website or to submit the work to an open repository.

If the author has not retained these rights, you must seek permission from the publisher. If the author has retained those rights, you must seek permission from the author.

So how do you tell who has the rights to the work if the copyright message does not clearly identify the rights holder?

I say cover your bases and make sure you seek permission from the publisher and author. They will be able to determine who has the legal right to grant you permission. Then you must make sure that you have, in writing, permission from the entity that controls the legal right to grant permission.

Each situation must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The Short Answer

The short answer is that you can create a database of citations with links to original materials. As soon as you want to deal with archiving full articles, you must go through the process of checking how the rights to the work are assigned, confirming who the rights holder is, and, if necessary, requesting permission.

For more information on copyright:
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office offers a guide to copyrights.

The Creative Commons website explains the licenses and legal concepts behind them.

Need help learning a computer program? Take an online tutorial.

At Barcamp Vancover on Saturday, Tod Maffin of CBC led a discussion on favourite tech tools, widgets, gadgets and other geekery.

All of the tips were great, but I want to point out one in particular.

Lynda.com is $25 per month service that provides online training programs. The Lynda movie library is the best tutorial site I have ever seen.

Lynda is the show-me tool.

No time to take a course but you learn by watching, check out Lynda.com.

Ask for Support: Excel Tip for Finding Duplicates

What do you do if you suspect that you have duplicate entries in your Excel spreadsheet?

Just find them. But use a formula.

1. You need to have at least one column that holds a piece of standard data, like an email address, ID number, phone number. Something that is identical against which you can compare.

2. Sort the grid by the column with standard data. For this example, the data is in column A.

3. Create an empty column next to this standard data column. Make sure the column is formatted as General.

4. In cell B2 type this formula:

=IF(A1=A2,“Duplicate”, “Unique”)

The formula reads, “if cell A1 is equal to cell A2, then this is a duplicate record and put “duplicate” into the empty cell, if it is not a duplicate then put “unique” into the empty cell.

5. Copy and paste this formula in the whole column.

6. Then you want to change the data from formulas to values. Select the column with formulas. Go Edit > Copy. Then Edit > Paste Special.
In the Paste Special pop-up, select “Values”.

7. Now you can sort your file by the column showing Duplicate and Unique, and delete the Duplicates.

Fun stuff.

Ask for Support: Excel Tip for Separating Full Name into First Name Last Name

Microsoft Excel is that program we love and love to hate.

Exceltip.com is a good resource for tips on doing the craziest, and most useful, things in Excel.

Excel Tip: Separating first name and last name using formulas in Microsoft Excel

Let’s say you have a grid of subscribers. The first column (column A) contains the Full Name, “John Smith”, but now you need to sort by last name. How do you do it?

Cell A1 contains a name: John Smith

1. Create a new, blank column.

2. Make sure the format of the column is “general”.

3. In the new, blank column, in row 1, type this formula:

The formula for extracting the first name is: =Left(A1,Find(” “,A1))
The formula for extracting the last name is: =Mid(A1,Find(” “,A1)+1,Len(A1))

4. If the formula works, copy and paste the formula in the whole column.

Now, you want to make the new column contain the value rather than the formula.

5. Select your new column. Copy > Paste Special. Select Value. Save.

Now you can sort the column containing Last Name.

Note: Paste Special is different than Paste. Paste Special lets you define what part of the info you want pasted into the column. In this case you want the value of the formula, “Smith”, rather than the formula “=Mid(A1,Find(” “,A1)+1,Len(A1))”.

Is some piece of technology driving you mad? Are you a non-techie in need of support? Email me. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
I will answer your questions in upcoming newsletters.