Creation Robot

Facebook Security Guide

CreationRobot — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:06:20 +0000

Do you use Facebook but not trust that Facebook’s default security is good enough? Welcome to the majority!

This is my guide to making your Facebook account secure. Well, as secure as it can be and still be nice and usable. It’s pretty easy, just follow each of the steps right through to the end.

Anyone can do it – and it is free. The whole guide is after the jump…

Don’t forget to visit Story A Week for some great free stories!

2012 Facebook Lockdown Guide

This document is written in a geeky version of business speak. You’ll just have to get over it, I don’t have time to rewrite this so that it is less nerdy. This guide is provided as is and is not connected to my employer in any way and neither I, nor they, hold liability. Nor is it connected to Facebook in in any way. Use entirely at your own risk – from http://www.creationrobot.com

This is a short guide on how to secure Facebook. It keeps Facebook usable but won’t allow anyone to view your private information, unless you friend them. It will also prevent people logging on from unauthorised devices even if your account was compromised through click-jacking or phishing.

Action, Check, Post

These are three steps to go through when using social media:

Action: Whatever the action it is you are performing – writing, posting a picture or singing on YouTube.
Check: Pause and check before you press post. What does this reveal? How can this be used against me by the worst person I could imagine?
Post: Pressing that send button.

Within Facebook

Security

Log in > (Look to top right of screen, use down arrow) Account settings > Security
Disable Secure browsing if it is enabled (This is a required step or everything below fails. This gets enabled again later in the document.)

Account settings > Login notifications – enabled
Account settings > Login approvals – required
Account settings > Apps – remove ALL non-essential Apps by pressing X next to App name
Account settings > Mobile – make sure only your current phone is listed here
Account settings > Payments

Remove any payment methods saved
Check currency is CDN dollar

Account settings > Facebook Adverts

Edit third party advert settings – no-one
Edit social advert settings – no-one

Privacy

(Look to top right of screen, use down arrow) Account settings > Privacy Settings

Privacy settings > Select Custom > This sets your default post level. Who can see your every post without you selecting privacy settings every time. List here who you want to see your default posts, or more usefully, who you don’t want to see your posts.

Privacy settings > How you connect – These settings will allow you to be found by name, and let them contact you, but restrict anything further until they are ‘friends’:

Who can look up your profile by name or contact info? – Everyone
Who can send you friend requests? – Everyone
Who can send you Facebook messages? – Everyone
Who can post on your Wall/Timeline? – Friends
Who can see Wall/Timeline posts by others on your profile? Note: Stories about Likes, friendships and some other types of wall content aren’t included in these settings.) – Friends

Privacy settings > How tags work >

Profile review – On
Tag review – On
Maximum profile visibility – Friends
Tag suggestions – Not yet available in Canada but in future – Off
Friends can check you into places – Off

Privacy settings > Apps and websites >

Apps you use – Already done earlier in this guide
How people bring your info to apps they use – Untick all
Instant Personalisation – Not yet available in Canada but in future – Off
Public search – Make sure Enable public search is not ticked

Privacy settings > Limit the audience for past posts – Limit old posts This setting turns all your old public posts into ‘friends only’ posts. This only works on public posts you made in the past, not custom or more restricted posts.

Privacy settings > Blocked people and Apps >

Add friends to your restricted list – Edit list This setting allows you to create a restricted list of friends you already have, the people in this list will only ever see your Public posts. They are not made aware of being placed on the restricted list.
Block users – Block users, they are not informed of this action
Block app invites
Block event invitations
Block apps – Makes sure an app can never access your details again.

Last step

Account settings > Security > Enable Secure browsing – save changes

Done!

Facebook’s ‘Opt in Security Features’ page (as of Apr 2012): https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=132501803490562

Don’t forget to visit Story A Week for some great free stories!

Free cloud storage for your important files

CreationRobot — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 19:09:24 +0000

How are you saving the things that matter to you? A harddisk crash can happen pretty damn quick and it can cost a lot of money to get back vital files. I’ve had this happen. So for the files that matter, I’ve switched to cloud storage – Dropbox. For example, over on my other website, StoryAWeek, I have the HTML stored with my webhost, and my actual stories, which are a mixture of different file formats stored on Dropbox. Why? If my harddrive fails, the files are easy and FREE for me to get back. If I have a house fire, or a break-in, same applies; I get my work back to me. If you are not using cloud storage yet, why not? You really should.

Japan before and after the Tsunami

CreationRobot — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:19:20 +0000

See these incredible pictures over here.

Doctor Who Series 7

CreationRobot — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:26:16 +0000

Neat list of what *should* be in series 7. I agree with all of it aside from the last – a multi-Doctor Who story would be neat! See here.

The Oscars no longer count as awards

CreationRobot — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:06:02 +0000

This is why the Oscar no longer is an award you should want.

“94% of Oscar voters are Caucasian and 77% are male. They have a median age of 62, with just 14% of voters under 50.”

So unless you are old, white and male, don’t bother with the Oscars any more. They no longer represent the society in which we live. The question then becomes, what was the last time they did reflect society? Via

How to build the TARDIS from scratch

CreationRobot — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:42:05 +0000

How do you build a TARDIS? Well it’s like this … OK, so maybe it is the wrong colour, but it is close, and it beats the TARDIS you made.

How do I add all my Google Calendars to my iPhone

CreationRobot — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:21:47 +0000

By default only your default calendar is synced to your iPhone. This is a real pain when you have more than one calendar. So, how? It’s easy. Log into Google, then go to this URL: https://www.google.com/

calendar/iphoneselect

Tick the calendars you want to sync and press Save.

Amazing Book Sculptures

CreationRobot — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:24:27 +0000

You really should go and look at these books, over here.

Story A Week

CreationRobot — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:48:14 +0000

If you are wondering why I don’t post much here you can blame two things:

Facebook
My new website

This new website is called Story a Week. Much like the title suggests, I write a new story each week for an entire year. It’s mostly Sci-Fi, Fantasy/Urban Fantasy with a few other genres thrown in – such as horror or erotica. Please go take a look, it’s been running for six months already so it has quite a bit of content already!

Moving Name Host

CreationRobot — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:45:05 +0000

CreationRobot is moving from Xsession.com to Aztus.ca This is for two reasons, Aztus is cheaper and Canadian. As I now live in Canada all my services have been moving to Canada, CR is the last. Sorry if this takes anything offline – it should only be brief.

Aeros Zeppelin

CreationRobot — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:35:54 +0000

The newest Aeros zeppelin might be coming to a sky near you in 2013. In an effort to reduce fuel and helium usage on airships and blimps, the company, headed by Igor Pasternak, is testing a project called Pelican.

Source: Green design will save the world | Inhabitat

Beating Procrastination

CreationRobot — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:21:48 +0000

I wrote a this incomplete post back in 2009 and never published it. It’s interesting to look back on where I was going with this from the distant future that is 2011. I’ve done a little editing and some additions for the flow and added a retrospective on the end. So welcome back to 2009: I am a terrible procrastinator. Scratch that, I am a damn good procrastinator. I can procrastinate until the cows come home, go out again and, well, place that on perpetual repeat. Eventually they’d die of old age waiting for my epic procrastination to end. I am the best. The only person who comes near me is the late great Douglas Adams, who, bless him, could have represented planet earth in the intergalactic procrastination Olympics. I now have to take on that challenge. Or I would, but I’d never attend due to procrastination. I’ve suffered a lot of different things in my life, slings and arrows of my own making and those from others. The worst are my own, of course, here’s a sample of amazing volume of self created weaponry that I have thrown at my brain: Overly active inner critique Severe depression Hording Cluttering And sharp pointy things of others making such as divorce, betrayal and the general failure of humanity(!) So 2007 was my super low point, 2008 a little better, 2009 was alright until the end, 2010 was meh, anyway I intend to make a step up and beyond. I’m doing this in a number of ways: Tackling my depression for good rather than for the now Getting on top of my desire to horde. And - This is a departure for the CreationRobot blog, a blog that was and is remaining to be successful despite my disinterest. I’ve decided to come out of the blogging closet, so to speak, and make this into less of a link blog and more about personal thought, life and experience. Do I expect anyone to be interested in my thoughts, life and experience? Oh lord no! Why should you be! Don’t be silly! I’m incurring no charge by writing this, and you are equally free to read this – or not. So let’s pretend you have enjoyed this post together and we can both be happy. Please leave a comment, it makes my day reading them. You can also catch my personal Twitter at flapfoo. So here we are in the future again, completing the past, or at least twisting it. So did I beat depression? Oddly yes, I get low but not depressed. No, I’m not on drugs, prescribed or otherwise. Depression itself is an addiction and it’s damn hard to beat because your mind wants to keep you depressed. When I understood that then I could move forward; plus a million other factors but it would be about as dull going into them as watching a sloth sleep. How about making CreationRobot shift from a BoingBoing / Neatorama link blog to a more personal blog? Nope, I’ve opted out of blogging all together. ‘Why stop blogging?’ I don’t hear you ask, I’ll answer you anyway as I’m just like that: Facebook – I send links to that and get more instant feedback on FB than I ever got on CreationRobot. Way less readers of course, but more fulfilling for me. Twitter – When you have no time, but you are enthusiastic enough to want to post I turn to Twitter. I doubt it will stick, I’ve tried Twitter many times and just can’t get into it for long periods of time. Time -Speaking of time, I have less time to spend blogging. My work is harder and more time consuming as I get older. I have a daughter and a partner that need my attention more than a blog. So is blogging dead? Of course not, it is just not the juggernaut that it was, now it’s just another niche. The 800lb banana smushing gorilla of the Internet is Facebook, with the smaller apes of LinkedIn, MySpace and so on, following in its wake. Did I beat procrastination? Did you really need to ask that? This post originated in 2009! I may never beat procrastination but I still think about it sometimes, like now for example. I’ll probably do a follow up post on procrastination, probably. So what now for CreationRobot, one of the venerable internet blogs, yes it’s that old. I’m not sure, I’ve struggled with how to keep pulling CreationRobot forward with me as I move through life. I’m going to try updating a bit more often than 3 or 4 times a year with whatever takes my fancy. The more I try an codify my blog, the more I tell myself it should be THIS, no wait, this, the more I trap myself and make it impossible to update it. So, my dear website, fly and be free. You are no longer to be anything, you can be everything.

Why I love the Internet

CreationRobot — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:44:29 +0000

The Inattention Age, part 2, or Why I love the Internet So you may have read my idea on the ‘Inattention Age‘. This is of course in response to the concept of the Attention Age, which intellectually I find to be the wrong term entirely. The Attention Age Wikipedia page is the first hit in Google, so it is a term that is defining itself. I created a Wikipedia page for Inattention Age and it was flagged for deletion in about 5 minutes as the mod googled the term and found nothing about it. Annoying but fair enough, I thought, so I have to get the idea out. Ironically, due to the Inattention Age, the idea is unlikely to gain traction unless it comes from a ‘source’, and by source I mean some highly visible spokes-thing; a person or website. The volume and speed of updates assumes things will get lost in the wash, information needs a source that is publically weighty enough to give it traction. That’s the way it has always been of course, politicians, stars, tabloid opinions hold sway, no matter how vapid, due to the fact they get ears and eyeballs. As an infrequent blogger, very much Z-list, my opinion online carried no such weight, again annoying but fair enough. So how do ideas, concepts, new ways of looking at things get out into public thought? They explode though a source or seep through the everyman. The latter is what the Internet allows, and bless the Internet’s cotton socks, it sometimes works. This is proven again and again by memes that take over, however briefly, those eyes and ears. I’ve had conceptual ideas before that I felt made no ground, such as my concept of digital history degradation, where your online past is virtually forgiven or forgotten after a period of time. That concept was, of course, postulated by others as well and it has seeped out. I like to think I was a part of that. If someone asks you ‘What’s the point of the Internet?’, or some subset of the Internet like blogs or Twitter, then you can answer to allow seepage. The Internet allow ideas from the everyman to get out, to be ignored or taken up, no matter how thoughtful, vapid or outright crazy, the Internet is present for the everyman. Long live the freedom of the un-commercial and uncensored Internet.

Spam

CreationRobot — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:19:43 +0000

“Akismet has protected your site from 151,588 spam.” Wow. Seriously spammers? Just WTF.

The Inattention Age

CreationRobot — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:57:52 +0000

The Inattention Age is an idea defining the current period of time, the early 2010-onward years. As we all have so little time to put into any one thing and have to parcel out our attention to many tasks the term Attention Age became the Inattention Age. This characterises the use of many Web 2.0 technologies such as FaceBook and Twitter, which are often accessed on the go while doing other tasks. The Inattention Age overlaps and builds off of the Information Age, characterized by the increasing commoditization of attention as it relates to the increasing abundance of information available, particularly on the Internet. The Inattention Age is marked by the ability of individuals to create and consume information instantly and freely as well as share it on the Internet using social media, often while performing or between other tasks. The period this idea characterises is believed to have begun with the success of Web 2.0 technologies and social media around 2007, but represents the post Web 2.0 era of 2010-onwards.