Last week I had the opportunity to attend AdobeMAX in Los Angeles. It was my first time attending a conference out of the PHP community in a couple years (unless you count DrupalCon). More importantly this was my first time attending a conference driven primarily by the design side of the fence. While it added a new flavor and vibe to the event, it made for some interesting situations too.

The Good:

First of all, the keynotes were spectacular. I've been to many keynotes that have an interesting speaker or that "oh nifty" moment, but I have to say that I was fascinated and impressed all the way along. The opening keynote was led by Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch where he gave an overview of some coming technology. But since no tech demo would be complete without a customer testimonial, he invited a few.

This is the third of what is intended to be a three part series. To catch up, read "Social Media for Social Evil - Part I: Impersonation" and "Social Media for Social Evil - Part II: Network Analysis". Since some of the darker parts of the web have been doing these things for *years*, I'm going to cover them in great detail here. Hopefully people can take steps to better protect themselves. Anything detailed here that might be illegal is neither condoned nor encouraged by me, anyone I work with, nor my ferocious kittens. I highlight it here for analysis only.

At this point, most of us use some form of online banking. Part of the "security" on these sites is a series of questions like:

• What is your mother's maiden name?
• What was your high school mascot?
• What is your favorite color?
• Where did you go on your honeymoon?
• Who is your favorite author?
• What street did your best friend live on in middle school?

I suspect you see where I'm going with this...

Take a quick spin around your friends' profiles on Facebook.

No, go ahead. I'll be here when you get back. Seriously, I'm not going anywhere.

My apologies if you've tried to use this site in the last couple weeks. Apparently Dreamhost's systems have been overloaded.. when I requested support, I was informed: "there are plenty of hosting company out there".

So I have some sites to move in the coming days. My apologies for the inconvenience. If you have suggestions, please drop me an email: keith @ (this domain) and hopefully my email will still work.

This is the second of what is intended to be a three part series. To catch up, read "Social Media for Social Evil - Part I". Since some of the darker parts of the web have been doing these things for *years*, I'm going to cover them in great detail here. Hopefully people can take steps to better protect themselves. Anything detailed here that might be illegal is neither condoned nor encouraged by me, anyone I work with, nor my ferocious kittens. It is highlighted here for analysis only.

This is the first of what is intended to be a three part series. I've used this space to talk about the concepts of Open Source Intelligence using Social Networks with the early analysis focused on LinkedIn (Part 1, Part 2).

This weekend when Mike Arrington created a fake Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) on Facebook, I was reminded of a few other attacks. He put a tiny new spin on it by using a believable email address but he missed some subtle cues that could have made it much more convincing and therefore devastating.

First of all, the style of attack that Mike did is pretty old news. Since some of the darker parts of the web have been doing these for *years*, I'm going to cover them in great detail here. Hopefully people can take steps to better protect themselves. Anything detailed here that might be illegal is neither condoned nor encouraged by me, anyone I work with, nor my ferocious kittens. I highlight it here for analysis only.

In the past month or so, I've taught php|architect's "Rich Internet Applications with Flex & PHP" a couple times. We cover a variety of topics ranging from the Data Connection Wizard to data binding to security to building visual components. Throughout the sessions, the students have asked some fantastic questions. In fact, some of the questions were so good, I'd like to share the answers here:

Yes.

No.

Although that works, it's better to do it the other way.

Thanks for the great class everyone!