Avenger Penguin

Facebook has been home to no shortage of awkward or destructive moments for some users with one woman getting fired for speaking ill of her boss, another woman losing insurance benefits after the company dug up photos of her on holiday and thirteen employees of Virgin Atlantic being sacked for comments made on the website. It is clear that many users willingly put up private information without due consideration of the consequences of certain eyes viewing it.

Did these users bring it on themselves? Is Facebook responsible for its handling of privacy in these cases and similar ones? Facebook has certainly been under attack a lot for "privacy concerns", so what can be done about it if these attacks are justified?

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As stated in the previous article about the difference between authentication and authorisation, it is important to understand the different aspects of security in order to control access to resources in as secure and as user-friendly a way as possible. However, the step of authentication itself — the act of ascertaining who a person is — comprises the two components of identity and trust.

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I awoke from a short, but much needed snooze on the train to find us far removed from Glasgow city centre geopraphically and aesthetically. Sporadic raindrops spotted the windows as we moved out of a small raincloud back into the embrace of the sunshine.

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At some point whilst interacting with many websites or web-based applications and services, users are asked to state and prove who they are. Whether this is to make sure only that user edits their own profile or it is for secure financial transactions, identity, trust and authorisation underpin almost any secure communication. Here, I will break down the basic, distinct components of user identification and show why the distinction between them is important for designing or even using a secure system.

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I'm running behind by about four days in my attempt to catch up with the 12 Week Challenge partially because this is a step that can be very time consuming: deciding on branding. The brand that I am building up will require a name, associated colours, relevant imagery (or a logo) and some words to describe the message or "story" the brand is telling.

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The third installment of my speedy efforts to catch up with the 12 Week Challenge includes building on the OGSM from last time by making overall decisions about structure and how the business will be marketed.

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My efforts to catch up with the 12 Week Challenge continue. I have spent the past few days working on the the task for Week 2. The focus of week 2 is to develop my idea from week 1 into a single page plan with a few more details.

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In my attempt to catch up with the 12 week challenge, I have spent the last couple of days looking over the details of Week 1 and I believe I can say I have now completed that stage.

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A whole weekend has passed since the election and the British public still await conclusive decisions on the nature of the cabinet that will be formed. I note at this point that the discussions in the press imply that we're pending a decision on who will "run the country" which is simply not the case. With 649 out of 650 seats decided, I would say we already have a pretty good idea of who will be debating and voting on legislation.

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You can't awesomise your life without making some changes. However, as I previously highlighted, procrastination is soon to be banished to the discarded Amazon packaging of time and changes from this moment onwards will be hard and fast.

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I was recently asked on Formspring the following question:

What are the worst character traits people can have?

In order both to answer the question tersely and to give my full justification for my choices, I have written this post to which I shall link in my short answer. Herein I shall endeavour to go into full detail why I singled out these particular character traits as the worst.

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It is often highlighted that given any proverb, one can find another that supposedly contradicts it. "Many hands make light work" preaches the value of sharing a work load over many people whilst "too many cooks spoil the broth" warns us of the perils of and the complications from having too many people on a project.

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In my previous post about building RossFenning.co.uk, I only covered the basic templating system which is suitable for applying a common theme to several pages. However, this still requires making a file for each page on the site. Clearly, this is not how blogs with potentially thousands of entries are done sensibly on the web.

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One of the primary purposes of this blog will be to describe different projects as I am working on them and my experience with software tools old and new. My personal approach tends to be one of minimalism and flexibility; I rarely buy into large products or applications when a smaller one will do. It could be argued to be an extension of the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". My personal feeling tends to be that one application that does many things won't do any of them nearly as well as individual, lightweight tools combined together. Generally tools built with this philosophy in mind will work better together.

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It was the Summer of 2004 when I first attended the Cambridge Folk Festival. The Afro Celt Soundsystem had played the previous year and I regretted missing that (which was in fact the same reason I first attended the Hebridean Celtic Festival in 2008; the Afro Celts had played in 2006). I wouldn't have predicted myself on one of the stages even in a minor capacity half a decade later.

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On the morning of Saturday the 19th of January 2008 CE, six brave men gathered at a special location for a special mission. This location was a pub near Old Kent Road and the mission was to visit every other location on the monopoly board for London.

Coincidentally, each of the locations picked to visit in each area were pubs. This is their story.

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I spent the weekend just past boiling in a tent and getting bitten by insects while enjoying the Latitude Festival.

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The festival is over and I'm back into the swing of things at work. The festival itself was pretty good; it was a chilled atmosphere and certainly nowhere near as busy as Cambridge.

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