Flour Power

Amnesty International Portugal and Leo Burnett Iberia launched Tyrannybook, a social network dedicated to the surveillance of some of the world leaders who violate Human Rights the most.

Tyrannybook was born as part Amnesty International's plan for 2010 of getting more involved in social networks, both to gain the visibility inherent to these web platforms, and to facilitate the contact between the causes it promotes and the public. The network aims to generate a global consciousness about the countless atrocities that take place across the globe.

As the name implies, the website is a Facebook clone, and looks almost exactly the same, with the familiar blue giving way to an aggressive red.

Using a following system, the users can be updated about the faults committed by those leaders against the Human Rights. It’s up to each user to decide which leaders they are most interested to watch. The profiles of the tyrants are released by Amnesty, and can be updated both by the organization itself and by the users.

For now there are ten tyrants in the site: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Myanmar, Hu Jintau of China, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Radovan Karadzic of Serbia, Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov of Chechnya.

Inside the Tyrannybook all their actions are reported through news articles, with a link to the source.

Between them, users can become allies (the equivalent of friends on Facebook), exchanging points of view and discussing current issues. Much like Facebook, it's possible to create groups, events, and upload videos and pictures.

The homepage shows a News Feed displaying all the activity on the site, from all the users. I believe this should be tweaked to only show updates from allies and the tyrants one is watching.

This is a very interesting way of approaching the problem that Amnesty is faced with. It's not that this information is not already available in lots of other places, but keeping everything in the same place and wrapping it in something familiar to a huge number of people might be a powerful way of raising awareness to the task at hand.

There's not a lot of functionality on the website, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as more users sign up. One thing is for sure, people will try to abuse the system. At the time of writing, there is a user in the site that calls himself George Obama as a reference to both George Bush and Barack Obama. This user is also using a picture of George Bush tinted red (like the pictures of the tyrants). There's also a group for the president of F.C. Porto (also tinted red) and a few other groups for completely unrelated subjects. If the site grows a lot, which is the whole point of it, the admins will have a hard time getting rid of all the abusive behavior.

Check out the promotional video that also serves as a guide through the website:

(via College Humor)

It was the happiest day of my Facebook-life when the possibility to hide applications from the news stream was added.

Since then I've been able to get rid of all the crap app/quiz/game that kept showing up on the screen. And a lot of it was from a single game - FarmVille. If only I had been shown this video, I might have been convinced to play it...

And while you're at it, check out the parody commercial for MafiaWars. This one I do play, but only due to my OCD ("obsessive completion disorder"), because I'm sick of the damn thing. The enjoyment is as big as the video shows...

The geek in me just gave a few good laughs at these screen shots of what Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Chewie, C-3PO and other Star Wars characters would write on their Facebook walls.

And if you haven't seen it before, here's another Facebook parody - The Facebook of Genesis.

It's a bit of an oldie, but I just saw it now, and thought is was worth sharing. The Facebook of Genesis was created by the guys at College Humor and it's a very funny take at re-telling the story of creation:

This is just one of many (very funny) fake Facebook Pages. Others include Hitler's Facebook, Satan's Facebook and Jesus Facebook. Once again, I'm glad some people have too much free time to come up with these.

(via Mashable)

Earlier today Facebook started offering the possibility for everyone to get their own custom URL. This means that you can change your cryptic profile URL (mine was facebook.com/profile.php?id=690301786) into something more easily identifiable, in the form of facebook.com/username.

Now, these vanity URLs have been around for some time in most modern web thinguies, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. What took Facebook so long? To be fair, this shouldn't be such a big deal. Other than making it easier to remember the URL, there's really not a lot more to it. Some say it will help your search engine rating, but that's irrelevant for most people. Anyway, I managed to get mine before anyone got to it first. My Facebook URL is now facebook.com/farinha.

I'm just wondering why are they doing this now. It's not like users have been clamoring for it. And why all the hype and press around it? They even gave early access to journalists.

Allow me to try and start a rumour. What if Facebook is getting ready to launch an email platform? Everyone knows that the Facebook messaging system is pretty limited and could use a overhaul. I wouldn't be too surprised if a whole email platform came out from there, already with 200 million members to kickstart it.

I did it. I managed to get a post to be the first Google result for a couple of search terms. And I did it 3 times, for 3 different posts, in 3 different days.

At first this sounds something really hard to do. And I guess it is, in normal situations. But on this occasion a couple of factors contributed to make it possible. And quite easy. Here's what happened.

It started when I received a Facebook message urging me to visit some website. The message had no description of the site, and the website address was a bit obfuscated. I immediately knew it was a scam, and deleted it promptly. Later that day I got another such message and thought I might as well post it here on my blog as a way to warn people to not visit that website. To my surprise, this is what I saw just a few hours later:

At first I was convinced it was some kind of bug, but upon looking at the most visited pages I saw which one was the "culprit". I noticed a huge amount of visitors coming from Facebook and Google and went on to confirm that post was the first Google result if you searched for the contents of the Facebook message.

So, what happened? Apparently Google's crawlers can be really fast sometimes and my post was indexed almost as soon as it was posted. With the Facebook scam in full throttle, thousands of people were receiving the same message. A lot of them probably did like me and deleted it immediately, but many others googled it (some before and some after entering their Facebook credentials on the site). At the same time the link to the blog post was being passed around on Facebook, meaning even more visitors. With a lot links for it from Facebook, the page became the #1 Google result, and that resulted in a lot of visitors, and eventually some more links to it, making the position even stronger.

Now, guess what I did when, 2 days later, I received a similar message? Yes, I posted it as well, and lo and behold, the visitors started pouring in again.

By the time I got a third message, just 1 day later this time, I knew that I could do it again. This time I took a slightly different approach and instead did a list of the pages that are conducting this Facebook phishing scam. Sure enough, the post got another wave of visitors.

At the time of writing of this post, the avalanche is dying down, but I'm still getting way more visitors than normal. And the original post is still the most visited, although it's not #1 in Google anymore.

In my opinion, there were a few very important factors that made this possible. First, and maybe the most important, was the fact that I was probably one of the first to post about it (lucky me for having technologically gullible friends). How Google found it so fast I don't know, but when people searched for it, this blog was the only one talking about it and so it showed up right at the top. Second, the Facebook message hit a huge amount of people in a short span of time. As I saw someone commenting, it must have been because it was weekend and there were less Facebook employees "policing" the site, and it took some time until such messages started being blocked.

The results? About 6500 visitors in the first hour and a total of 35.221 unique views on that first post until now. The whole thing (the 3 posts) produced almost 50.000 page views during the last 5 days. The number of RSS subscribers shot up from 28 to 120 on that first day, and has now come down to about 50, which is still a good improvement. The revenue from the ads is enough to buy a couple of pints.

Now I hope I can do it again sometime soon. Will try to get myself prepared so that I can get a higher visitor retention rate, and better clickthrough rates on the ads.

Well, it really seems like a new site trying to steal people's Facebook credentials shows up every day. The .at and .be domains were attacked last week and this week the target seems to be the .ru domain. Yesterday I got a message to visit vingers.ru, and today the attack is coming in the form of nanoraw.ru. The Facebook message is similar: "Hello" for the subject and "nanoraw(insert dot)ru".

Here's the list of sites that have been spotted as part of this scam so far:

• afoi.ru
• areps.at
• bests.at
• bestspace.be
• brunga.at
• goldbase.be
• greenbuddy.be
• indigoline.be
• kirgo.at
• mymarket.be
• nanoraw.ru
• nutpic.at
• picoband.be
• ponbon.im
• redbuddy.be
• redfriend.be
• silvertag.be
• simplemart.be
• sweeter.be
• vingers.ru
• whiteflash.be
• whitemart.be
• yospace.be

Instead of making a new post every time a new scam site shows up, I'll instead update this list as soon as I find a new one. So you can bookmark this post to keep safe.

I've also noticed that the sites only work the first time you access them, and return a 404 Not Found error in subsequent requests. I'm guessing this is some kind of attempt to hide from the victims.

So it seems that every other day a new Facebook phishing scheme springs to life. Or rather the same scam keeps showing up disguised in a new country domain. First it was the .at domain, a couple of days ago the .be domain and now it seems .ru is being targeted.

I just received a message from one of the friends that sent me the "wwww whiteflash be" message, now with "Hello" as the subject and "www vingers(enter dot)ru" as the message body. Again, the site looks like the Facebook login page to try and steal your user credentials. The good news for Google Chrome users is that the browser identifies the site as a malware sites and displays the corresponding warning. Can't say the same about Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, though.

You should NOT provide your Facebook credentials to any site that is not http://www.facebook.com. You shouldn't even blindly trust the browser address bar, and instead make sure you type the URL yourself. Take a look at this article that outlines the danger of having your Facebook credentials stolen.

Here's a list of sites that are being used to conduct the attack:

• afoi.ru
• areps.at
• bests.at
• bestspace.be
• brunga.at
• goldbase.be
• greenbuddy.be
• indigoline.be
• kirgo.at
• mymarket.be
• nutpic.at
• picoband.be
• ponbon.im
• redbuddy.be
• redfriend.be
• silvertag.be
• simplemart.be
• sweeter.be
• vingers.ru
• whiteflash.be
• whitemart.be
• yospace.be

UPDATE: The vingers.ru site is returning a 404 Not Found error at the moment. I guess the scammers are changing domains faster now. I would expect a new one showing up soon.

UPDATE: Check this list of scam sites that I compiled and will be updating when some more sites show up.

UPDATE: Check this list of scam sites that I compiled and will be updating when some more sites show up.

I wasn't affected by last weeks areps.at Facebook phishing scam, but it seems like another one is underway right now. I've been getting some messages on my Facebook account with the subject "Look at this" and "wwww whiteflash be" as the message body. The site whiteflash.be looks like a Facebook log-in page, and is designed to steal your credentials and use them to send similar messages to all your friends.

Mashable mentions some other sites that are also part of the attack:

goldbase.be
greenbuddy.be
silvertag.be
picoband.be

So, if you receive such a message, DO NOT go to those sites.

UPDATE: You can add simplemart.be to the list of culprits, just received one message poiting me to it, with the subject line "Hello" and the text "Check simplemart D0T be, , 575222". The weird thing here is that when I went I actually went to Facebook to check it (I saw it as an email notification) is it said I had deleted the message, which I didn't. Maybe the Facebook staff is now onto it.