Alpha Carter

My wife found a USPS Money Order fraud scheme...

2010-08-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

So my wife answered a ad on craigslist for a nanny (she already takes care of one so she figures why not 1 more) so she answers this craigslist ad and answers something that looks promising and after answering calls and such she got this email

Hello,

I am so sorry to be getting back to you so late. I am really very glad and confident about your acceptance to help look after my angel. She's is all I have got in the world and I always look for the best for her and right now I believe you are the best candidate.So, no doubt,this will be a very symbiotic relationship between you and me.
You shall be working under a very conducive environment and like I said earlier,you shall have no work to do except to look after her, make sure she takes her meal,make sure she uses her meds, she never over plays, make her laugh and feel warm around you. You shall be working around 5 other workers. John is my chauffeur, he is from Brazil. Debby and Flora are the 2 caretaker for the house, they do all the house cleaning. Marcus is the house Gardner while Mother Angela is the house chef,who prepares the meal for the house. I want you to know that there are 3 cars and 1 SUV in the house to take you people around and John will always answer to you anytime you call on him. I believe this is a perfect working condition for you.

Please I have attached Aaliyah's picture for you to get familiar with her face and I want you to know that you shall have the opportunity to meet with her soon when she will be coming with her former caregiver and the driver. I guess by then you both will have enough to discuss.

I want to believe you have been looking forward to the 31st of this month just like I have been looking forward to it and so is my little angel Aaliyah as well.. I will like you to know at this point that one of my accountants just informed me that he has mailed out 2 money order to you in the amount of $780 each and so it will be $1580 in total, which was mailed via UPS courier with the tracking number [1Z82V03X0199112580 ] and which from the last time I checked should have delivered to your address by 10 am your Thursday morning. I believe by 10 to 11 am thursday your time, you must have the check in your possession.

I am very sorry about our previous agreement to meet Aaliyah. I want you to know that Aaliyah has flown out of the state since Thursday due to her health issues which was such an impromptu one. She needed to meet with a specialist in Antioch, California and even right now as I email you, She is still there but will be back on the morning of the 31st of July..

Now, I believe one of the virtues of a successful employee is the ability to listen and adhere strictly to instructions which is why I will be giving you a series of instructions this moment which I want you to strictly adhere to.

In your possession is money order which is the amount of $1580 and it is so because like I told you I need to include money for eventualities that might crop up during the period of your stay with her. I had instructed my accountant to send that amount and to my surprise,I never even knew Aaliyah will be visiting any specialist.

Now I want you to do a few things. First I will like you to immediately after reading this email, you should run right away to your bank and get the money orders cashed and go to any Money Gram outlet closest to you using the information below;

Name: PAtricia Inez Singh
Address: 3311 gentry town drive
City: Antioch
State:CA
Zip code: 94509

You will deduct part of your salary($500) from the $1580, and send $1000 to the specialist because you shall be needing some simple Health Aid kits for Aaliyah which the specialist recommended and already told me about. You need to do this very fast this morning so the kit can be shipped over to your address. You can go through the simple things,read through it and understand easily how to handle it.Immediately you are done doing that this morning I want you to have 1,000 usd sent via Money gram. I want you to make sure you have the 1,000 sent within now and the next 24 hours so that Aaliyah might be quickly discharged and can come home to meet you.. I want you to keep the remainder of the 80usd with you while you come to meet Aaliyah at home. That money should be with you in case any other thing crops up and if eventually nothing happens,you can use that as a payment bonus for yourself.

I am sure I have not yet communicated our location to you but from your possible guess, I believe you should know it is within a few mile radius from where you are(63 Saint Stephens School Rd, Austin TX). I want you to know that Aaliyah and I live in Austin. I want you to know that I have already arranged with the driver to come pick you from home on that 31st and also get to drop you. Now you need to mail me as well with the convenient place and time when you want the driver to come pick you everyday,whatever place and time you decide will be fully taken down by the driver.He will always be at your service and anytime you need to go out with Aaliyah to play or do anything, he shall always be there to take you people out. I want to believe this is very comfortable for you and will ensure you spend no dime on transportation or anything else..

Now, I believe you have read carefully what I have instructed you to do. So, go right now and have the check cashed at your bank and send me the details of transfer which should include Sender's full name, receiver's full names, 8 digit confirmation code(Reference Numbers) and also the amount sent. I will because of you come back here online 9pm(GMT) UK time to check for the details of the transfer so I can have it immediately sent over to the specialist's email and then those things can be bought and sent over to you. I also want you to email me all necessary details of transfer for the 1,000 which I believe you know you will be sending to the same person.That I believe I will come back tomorrow morning to check and have emailed to the specialist so Aaliyah can be discharged as quickly as possible.

Thank you so much for your patience,your time,your anticipated honesty and most especially,the love you have for my angel Aaliyah. I am very grateful and shall never forget.I will be back by 9pm today my time to check my email for the details I require of you.

Bye and have a great day,

Cole

You can see up above that they are pretty convincing... i was hoping they were real but after she checked a few places we found they were fakes, they used watermarks but it was the one for a dollar not the postal money order. The security strip is painted on and off in a dash not woven into the paper but there is some microprinting that looks pretty good...

My question is when it took her just a few min to find this why are there cops on facebook pretending to be 13yr olds trying to catch kids drinking when there are such bigger better scams to be going after

Looks like Twitter is now giving out suggestions of users to follow

2010-08-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Twitter announced it last week

so looks like this was released on twitter blog a week ago but im just now seeing it. What do people think? are there users who you actually ended up following? It may help to show the last 5 tweets for a user in suggestions list so you can see the type of messages they create

Original Post

So im not sure if its a beta or twitter has already rolled it out everywhere but it seems like they are now including suggestions in the sidebar. See my screenshots below

it looks alot like Facebook's suggestions but when you click it tells you a bit more and i was able to start to infer what is driving these recommendations.

you can see it has the "followed by" and then names of people you are already following, I guess the ideas is that if multiple friends are following someone then you are likely to find that person interesting aswell... is anyone else seeing this test going on? talk to me in the comments or on @cartercole

Artificial Political Opposition bought on Amazon's Mechanical Turk

2010-07-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Artificial Political Opposition
Ive had my research assistant (wife) working on mechanical turk for the past few days after she wanted some easy tasks to make money online... I have heard about the system and how it can be used as a great tool for repetitive tasks or data entry. I looked through a few of the HITs and quickly saw there was abuse... people are asked to "clear cookies" before "testing lead form" or "enter real info to test a cred app form". its obvious that these accounts are cheating other affiliate programs but i saw a very interesting one just now. Here is an excerpt from the instructions

3. Say, "Hi, I am calling to oppose bill S6873. My New York zip code is 10003. Thank you"

They are paying for political opposition to the bill S6873 in New York which has to do with sub-leasing apartments and affects hotel rentals. You can specify different qualifications (like location) and yet the creator choose not to care about who or where they were from...

Heres the copy I made of the job unless it disappears and screenshot of the active job

Im always surprised when i see these kind of blatant attacks on the internet... and im really wonder if it works or if they have already caught on to the strange volume of calls with the exact same script... reminds me allot of money mules who help the hackers get the money out of people's accounts but most dont care because they are getting a cut themselves

I knew an open source CMS was a bad idea for whitehouse.gov

2010-06-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

I like playing with security... its fun to break things (of my own or with permission) and its what makes security work. If we never tried to break the design and assumed security then the less moral of us would and they would find our code easy pickings. XSS is one of my personal favorites because they are everywhere, usually easy to find, and can be super nasty (sammy is my hero)

So when i heard that Obama was going to make the WHITEHOUSE.GOV website a Drupal site i thought it was quite dumb... i mean its the whitehouse... you need a friggen CMS? hell waste some money on an old fashion webmaster and have it all flat html (i just think that a defaced homepage for america would totally suck) with the code for the site open source I instantly now know about most of the code that whitehouse.gov runs on and i can do my own pen testing before i even try on the whitehouse.gov domain. I wasnt alone in this ha.ckers.org makes these same exact points... and i commented on it

flash forward 211 days

what happens across my RSS feed? do my eyes decieve me? zomg its an article describing how Drupal is redefining its policy to clarify it only supports security on STABLE releases
and...

The clarifications are a response to the discovery of a potentially serious XSS hole in the Drupal Context module three weeks after White House developers proudly released their own plug-in based on the buggy module.

- from The Register

i hate being right

now i haven't looked at the XSS hole myself yet but they said it was in the administrative console (they say that makes it limited i think that now i can steal the admin auth cookies) even if they caught it in time this is the exact issue i was warning about. am I crazy? what do you think? id love to spark off a good discussion on it :)

Do your social media duty and share what you like! this is totally cool...

2010-06-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

This video was freaking awesome and it shows the whole start... but i wanted to skip that so heres some extra... to start the youtube video at a certain place you just need to add &start=58 and for autoplay &autoplay=1 to make it auto start...
heres a sample of the code below... im really liking Americas Got Talent and this is ony one of the super cool acts

if your really bored you can go look at my cool share chart and get your own and later fools! lolz :)

I rule teh interwebz

Another Facebook Privacy Issue... those leaking emails again not their fault

2010-06-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

UPDATE

Matt Cutts did his own little debunk here

Original Post

earlier i wrote a post in which I explained "Facebook divulging your identity to advertisers" and again now poor Facebook has another one. This one stems from Google loving Facebook too much... well its kinda like that.They were indexing pages that have no value but have email addresses displayed on them, when you enter your password and it scans your email account address book you choose to have Facebook send them an email on your behalf. now some people may want nothing to do with Facebook and they consider the message spam. So to provide a good experience for these people they give them an opt out link (thanks i really hate those emails) because this is sent to an email address it really should never become public, unless someone intentionally releases it. Here on hacker news a Facebook employee unofficially points out one of the pages that was leaking information (they have removed the address now i think its useful to make sure im removing the right address) but this links should have never been found and crawled... how did they find it? because it was publicly published oh now I get it... Yes Facebook could have done <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> but like other issue its small... quick fix... and those pages even seem to be gone from index already so again we have a minor data leak caused by user themselves that probably never could have been thought of. we dont just sit around and go oh i know some weirdo has no privacy anyways and will post the link publicly spiders will crawl and then people will be able to pull emails out of the search engines index oh noes! im mean we are nerd but we aren't psychic welcome to the digital world. Stay off the interwebz if you dont like it

just my opinion

the infamous

- Carter Cole

leave me your comments id love to agree or disagree with you :)

My super funny Iron Man II Comic

2010-05-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

so i have had this ideas for a strip in my head ever since i saw Iron Man 2... i thought it was pretty funny but then today after a certain video started going viral i knew i had to make it :)

Created with Pixton it was totally awesome editor i may actually start an ongoing strip after i found it. i want to know what you think so leave me comments!

Breakdown of how the Facebook advertiser privacy breach works

2010-05-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Lets say your spending thousands of dollars on advertising by doing a PPC campaign and people are clicking those links... and when they hit your server your browser passes the page your asking for (URI) and the HTTP REFERRER which is sent by your browser about where you came from (you cant even trust these they are trivial to spoof) heres the image from the wsj http://j.mp/dntZi4 you see how it identifies you? its because they dont scrub referrer and it has a ref=profile that means it only tells them when your on your own profile page and click on an add. They probably never thought of it... its in the HTTP protocol that all browsers and websites use and is mostly an afterthought used as a lax security measure. If they did they were like well some may abuse it but for the majority its helpful... why? because they dont care about you as a person they are running aggregate stats to help improve user experience and help provide you with better product. like seriously is there any proof that someone has had their name found and gotten a sales call from it? im all for privacy and control of my online life but this isn't a huge risk... close the hole and move on. i just hope all the referrer data from Facebook doesn't end completely and im not able to track visits to my blog from my Facebook fan page... (isn't that what it was for track community and drive traffic)

Endangered Species Condoms are here!

2010-05-05T15:59:00.000-07:00

So i saw this ad the other day and signed up... its been a couple weeks and now my free condoms are here! i got like 40 boxes... they say all kinds of funny things like "Hump smarter... save the snail darter", "Wear a jimmy hat... save the big cat" or "cover your tweedle... save the burying beetle".

so if you want your own endangeredspeciescondoms.com

Eat Fresh... for breakfast? A review of Subways new morning menu

2010-04-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was a Blimpie fan... i hated the way that Subway cut their sandwiches, i mean what the hell why would i want a trench dug out of my bread instead of just cutting it in half like the rest of the world. That changed and Subway got better for me... then they released the $5 footlong and their now famous "eat fresh", which btw is what my son screams whenever we pass one "daddy daddy eat fresh" but now after the King has stolen McDonald's egg sandwich for a dollar Subway with its thousands of locations thinks its loosing money by not offering breakfast and is trying its had at the morning meal.

i decided to try it (hey they did enough advertising ill give it a shot and see if they pass snuff...) i walked over to my office park subway and its empty, which is a change because at lunch that place has a line out the door from 11:50 to 1:20. apparently nobody else got the word so i take a look at my choices and decide on a flat bread double bacon and egg toasted thing (see picture below) its kinda cool because they try and make it like a build your own breakfast but theres really only a couple things that go with an egg, bacon and cheese sandwich... so i also got the green peppers and onions. the english muffin version is like 2$ but its too small... it was decent but not that impressive, i may go back and try something else but theres not much of a choice (beef or ham something like that) but thats my useless post for the day :)

HTML 4.0 Special Characters - My Symbol Cheat Sheet

2010-04-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

I use these all the time and alyase end up looking them up... now we have a cheat sheet....

Character	Entity	Decimal	Hex	Rendering in Your Browser
Character	Entity	Decimal	Hex	Entity	Decimal	Hex
Latin small f with hook=function=florin	&fnof;	ƒ	ƒ	ƒ	ƒ	ƒ
Greek capital letter alpha	Α	Α	Α	Α	Α	Α
Greek capital letter beta	Β	Β	Β	Β	Β	Β
Greek capital letter gamma	Γ	Γ	Γ	Γ	Γ	Γ
Greek capital letter delta	Δ	Δ	Δ	Δ	Δ	Δ
Greek capital letter epsilon	Ε	Ε	Ε	Ε	Ε	Ε
Greek capital letter zeta	Ζ	Ζ	Ζ	Ζ	Ζ	Ζ
Greek capital letter eta	Η	Η	Η	Η	Η	Η
Greek capital letter theta	Θ	Θ	Θ	Θ	Θ	Θ
Greek capital letter iota	Ι	Ι	Ι	Ι	Ι	Ι
Greek capital letter kappa	Κ	Κ	Κ	Κ	Κ	Κ
Greek capital letter lambda	Λ	Λ	Λ	Λ	Λ	Λ
Greek capital letter mu	Μ	Μ	Μ	Μ	Μ	Μ
Greek capital letter nu	Ν	Ν	Ν	Ν	Ν	Ν
Greek capital letter xi	Ξ	Ξ	Ξ	Ξ	Ξ	Ξ
Greek capital letter omicron	Ο	Ο	Ο	Ο	Ο	Ο
Greek capital letter pi	Π	Π	Π	Π	Π	Π
Greek capital letter rho	Ρ	Ρ	Ρ	Ρ	Ρ	Ρ
Greek capital letter sigma	Σ	Σ	Σ	Σ	Σ	Σ
Greek capital letter tau	Τ	Τ	Τ	Τ	Τ	Τ
Greek capital letter upsilon	Υ	Υ	Υ	Υ	Υ	Υ
Greek capital letter phi	Φ	Φ	Φ	Φ	Φ	Φ
Greek capital letter chi	Χ	Χ	Χ	Χ	Χ	Χ
Greek capital letter psi	Ψ	Ψ	Ψ	Ψ	Ψ	Ψ
Greek capital letter omega	Ω	Ω	Ω	Ω	Ω	Ω
Greek small letter alpha	α	α	α	α	α	α
Greek small letter beta	β	β	β	β	β	β
Greek small letter gamma	γ	γ	γ	γ	γ	γ
Greek small letter delta	δ	δ	δ	δ	δ	δ
Greek small letter epsilon	ε	ε	ε	ε	ε	ε
Greek small letter zeta	ζ	ζ	ζ	ζ	ζ	ζ
Greek small letter eta	η	η	η	η	η	η
Greek small letter theta	θ	θ	θ	θ	θ	θ
Greek small letter iota	ι	ι	ι	ι	ι	ι
Greek small letter kappa	κ	κ	κ	κ	κ	κ
Greek small letter lambda	λ	λ	λ	λ	λ	λ
Greek small letter mu	μ	μ	μ	μ	μ	μ
Greek small letter nu	ν	ν	ν	ν	ν	ν
Greek small letter xi	ξ	ξ	ξ	ξ	ξ	ξ
Greek small letter omicron	ο	ο	ο	ο	ο	ο
Greek small letter pi	π	π	π	π	π	π
Greek small letter rho	ρ	ρ	ρ	ρ	ρ	ρ
Greek small letter final sigma	&sigmaf;	ς	ς	ς	ς	ς
Greek small letter sigma	σ	σ	σ	σ	σ	σ
Greek small letter tau	τ	τ	τ	τ	τ	τ
Greek small letter upsilon	υ	υ	υ	υ	υ	υ
Greek small letter phi	φ	φ	φ	φ	φ	φ
Greek small letter chi	χ	χ	χ	χ	χ	χ
Greek small letter psi	ψ	ψ	ψ	ψ	ψ	ψ
Greek small letter omega	ω	ω	ω	ω	ω	ω
Greek small letter theta symbol	&thetasym;	ϑ	ϑ	ϑ	ϑ	ϑ
Greek upsilon with hook symbol	&upsih;	ϒ	ϒ	ϒ	ϒ	ϒ
Greek pi symbol	ϖ	ϖ	ϖ	ϖ	ϖ	ϖ
bullet=black small circle	•	•	•	•	•	•
horizontal ellipsis=three dot leader	…	…	…	…	…	…
prime=minutes=feet	′	′	′	′	′	′
double prime=seconds=inches	″	″	″	″	″	″
overline=spacing overscore	&oline;	‾	‾	‾	‾	‾
fraction slash	&frasl;	⁄	⁄	⁄	⁄	⁄
script capital P=power set=Weierstrass p	&weierp;	℘	℘	℘	℘	℘
blackletter capital I=imaginary part	&image;	ℑ	ℑ	ℑ	ℑ	ℑ
blackletter capital R=real part symbol	&real;	ℜ	ℜ	ℜ	ℜ	ℜ
trade mark sign	™	™	™	™	™	™
alef symbol=first transfinite cardinal	&alefsym;	ℵ	ℵ	ℵ	ℵ	ℵ
leftwards arrow	←	←	←	←	←	←
upwards arrow	↑	↑	↑	↑	↑	↑
rightwards arrow	→	→	→	→	→	→
downwards arrow	↓	↓	↓	↓	↓	↓
left right arrow	↔	↔	↔	↔	↔	↔
downwards arrow with corner leftwards=carriage return	&crarr;	↵	↵	↵	↵	↵
leftwards double arrow	⇐	⇐	⇐	⇐	⇐	⇐
upwards double arrow	&uArr;	⇑	⇑	⇑	⇑	⇑
rightwards double arrow	⇒	⇒	⇒	⇒	⇒	⇒
downwards double arrow	&dArr;	⇓	⇓	⇓	⇓	⇓
left right double arrow	⇔	⇔	⇔	⇔	⇔	⇔
for all	∀	∀	∀	∀	∀	∀
partial differential	∂	∂	∂	∂	∂	∂
there exists	∃	∃	∃	∃	∃	∃
empty set=null set=diameter	∅	∅	∅	∅	∅	∅
nabla=backward difference	∇	∇	∇	∇	∇	∇
element of	∈	∈	∈	∈	∈	∈
not an element of	∉	∉	∉	∉	∉	∉
contains as member	&ni;	∋	∋	∋	∋	∋
n-ary product=product sign	∏	∏	∏	∏	∏	∏
n-ary sumation	∑	∑	∑	∑	∑	∑
minus sign	−	−	−	−	−	−
asterisk operator	&lowast;	∗	∗	∗	∗	∗
square root=radical sign	√	√	√	√	√	√
proportional to	&prop;	∝	∝	∝	∝	∝
infinity	∞	∞	∞	∞	∞	∞
angle	&ang;	∠	∠	∠	∠	∠
logical and=wedge	&and;	∧	∧	∧	∧	∧
logical or=vee	&or;	∨	∨	∨	∨	∨
intersection=cap	∩	∩	∩	∩	∩	∩
union=cup	∪	∪	∪	∪	∪	∪
integral	∫	∫	∫	∫	∫	∫
therefore	&there4;	∴	∴	∴	∴	∴
tilde operator=varies with=similar to	&sim;	∼	∼	∼	∼	∼
approximately equal to	&cong;	≅	≅	≅	≅	≅
almost equal to=asymptotic to	≈	≈	≈	≈	≈	≈
not equal to	≠	≠	≠	≠	≠	≠
identical to	&equiv;	≡	≡	≡	≡	≡
less-than or equal to	≤	≤	≤	≤	≤	≤
greater-than or equal to	≥	≥	≥	≥	≥	≥
subset of	⊂	⊂	⊂	⊂	⊂	⊂
superset of	⊃	⊃	⊃	⊃	⊃	⊃
not a subset of	&nsub;	⊄	⊄	⊄	⊄	⊄
subset of or equal to	&sube;	⊆	⊆	⊆	⊆	⊆
superset of or equal to	&supe;	⊇	⊇	⊇	⊇	⊇
circled plus=direct sum	&oplus;	⊕	⊕	⊕	⊕	⊕
circled times=vector product	&otimes;	⊗	⊗	⊗	⊗	⊗
up tack=orthogonal to=perpendicular	&perp;	⊥	⊥	⊥	⊥	⊥
dot operator	⋅	⋅	⋅	⋅	⋅	⋅
left ceiling=APL upstile	&lceil;	⌈	⌈	⌈	⌈	⌈
right ceiling	&rceil;	⌉	⌉	⌉	⌉	⌉
left floor=APL downstile	&lfloor;	⌊	⌊	⌊	⌊	⌊
right floor	&rfloor;	⌋	⌋	⌋	⌋	⌋
left-pointing angle bracket=bra	&lang;	〈	〈	⟨	〈	〈
right-pointing angle bracket=ket	&rang;	〉	〉	⟩	〉	〉
lozenge	&loz;	◊	◊	◊	◊	◊
black spade suit	&spades;	♠	♠	♠	♠	♠
black club suit=shamrock	&clubs;	♣	♣	♣	♣	♣
black heart suit=valentine	&hearts;	♥	♥	♥	♥	♥
black diamond suit	&diams;	♦	♦	♦	♦	♦

These entities are all new in HTML 4.0 and may not be supported by old browsers.Support in recent browsers is good.

Wordle - way cool word clouds that look really pretty in posts

2010-03-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

I really like this tool it creates cool word graphics from RSS feeds or a word list whatever and has a bunch of options and fonts... i created this one based off the text from all my blog posts in 2009 (it broke trying to pull all of them)

you should go try it out and create your own... post links in comments i want to see them :)

thats it theres my personal post for the month... im workign on creating new content for all my sites but with custody of my son (awesome thats now handled) and my upcoming wedding i have a bunch on my plate... not to mention the like 9 open projects i have at work ugh!

CarterCole.com Social Media Policy

2010-03-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

This policy governs the publication of and commentary on social media by employees of CarterCole.com and its related companies ("CarterCole.com"). For the purposes of this policy, social media means any facility for online publication and commentary, including without limitation blogs, wiki's, social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, flickr, and YouTube. This policy is in addition to and complements any existing or future policies regarding the use of technology, computers, e-mail and the internet.

CarterCole.com employees are free to publish or comment via social media in accordance with this policy. CarterCole.com employees are subject to this policy to the extent they identify themselves as a CarterCole.com employee (other than as an incidental mention of place of employment in a personal blog on topics unrelated to CarterCole.com).

Publication and commentary on social media carries similar obligations to any other kind of publication or commentary.

All uses of social media must follow the same ethical standards that CarterCole.com employees must otherwise follow.

Setting up Social Media
Assistance in setting up social media accounts and their settings can be obtained from Carter.

Social media identities, logon ID's and user names may not use CarterCole.com's name without prior approval from Carter.

Don't Tell Secrets
It's perfectly acceptable to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it's not okay to publish confidential information. Confidential information includes things such as unpublished details about our software, details of current projects, future product ship dates, financial information, research, and trade secrets. We must respect the wishes of our corporate customers regarding the confidentiality of current projects. We must also be mindful of the competitiveness of our industry.

Protect your own privacy
Privacy settings on social media platforms should be set to allow anyone to see profile information similar to what would be on the CarterCole.com website. Other privacy settings that might allow others to post information or see information that is personal should be set to limit access. Be mindful of posting information that you would not want the public to see.

Be Honest
Do not blog anonymously, using pseudonyms or false screen names. We believe in transparency and honesty. Use your real name, be clear who you are, and identify that you work for CarterCole.com. Nothing gains you notice in social media more than honesty - or dishonesty. Do not say anything that is dishonest, untrue, or misleading. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, point it out. But also be smart about protecting yourself and your privacy. What you publish will be around for a long time, so consider the content carefully and also be cautious about disclosing personal details.

Respect copyright laws
It is critical that you show proper respect for the laws governing copyright and fair use or fair dealing of copyrighted material owned by others, including CarterCole.com own copyrights and brands. You should never quote more than short excerpts of someone else's work, and always attribute such work to the original author/source. It is good general practice to link to others' work rather than reproduce it.

Respect your audience, CarterCole.com, and your coworkers
The public in general, and CarterCole.com's employees and customers, reflect a diverse set of customs, values and points of view. Don't say anything contradictory or in conflict with the CarterCole.com website. Don't be afraid to be yourself, but do so respectfully. This includes not only the obvious (no ethnic slurs, offensive comments, defamatory comments, personal insults, obscenity, etc.) but also proper consideration of privacy and of topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory - such as politics and religion. Use your best judgment and be sure to make it clear that the views and opinions expressed are yours alone and do not represent the official views of CarterCole.com.

Protect CarterCole.com customers, business partners and suppliers
Customers, partners or suppliers should not be cited or obviously referenced without their approval. Never identify a customer, partner or supplier by name without permission and never discuss confidential details of a customer engagement. It is acceptable to discuss general details about kinds of projects and to use non-identifying pseudonyms for a customer (e.g., Customer 123) so long as the information provided does not violate any non-disclosure agreements that may be in place with the customer or make it easy for someone to identify the customer. Your blog is not the place to "conduct business" with a customer.

Controversial Issues
If you see misrepresentations made about CarterCole.com in the media, you may point that out. Always do so with respect and with the facts. If you speak about others, make sure what you say is factual and that it does not disparage that party. Avoid arguments. Brawls may earn traffic, but nobody wins in the end. Don't try to settle scores or goad competitors or others into inflammatory debates. Make sure what you are saying is factually correct.

Be the first to respond to your own mistakes
If you make an error, be up front about your mistake and correct it quickly. If you choose to modify an earlier post, make it clear that you have done so. If someone accuses you of posting something improper (such as their copyrighted material or a defamatory comment about them), deal with it quickly - better to remove it immediately to lessen the possibility of a legal action.

Think About Consequences
For example, consider what might happen if a CarterCole.com employee is in a meeting with a customer or prospect, and someone on the customer's side pulls out a print-out of your blog and says "This person at CarterCole.com says that product sucks."

Saying "Product X needs to have an easier learning curve for the first-time user" is fine; saying "Product X sucks" is risky, unsubtle and amateurish.

Once again, it's all about judgment: using your blog to trash or embarrass CarterCole.com, our customers, or your co-workers, is dangerous and ill-advised.

Disclaimers
Many social media users include a prominant disclaimer saying who they work for, but that they're not speaking officially. This is good practice and is encouraged, but don't count on it to avoid trouble - it may not have much legal effect.

Wherever practical, you must use a disclaimer saying that while you work for CarterCole.com, anything you publish is your personal opinion, and not necessarily the opinions of CarterCole.com.

Carter can provide you with applicable disclaimer language and assist with determining where and how to use that.

Don't forget your day job.
Make sure that blogging does not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

Social Media Tips
The following tips are not mandatory, but will contribute to successful use of social media.

The best way to be interesting, stay out of trouble, and have fun is to write about what you know. There is a good chance of being embarrassed by a real expert, or of being boring if you write about topics you are not knowledgeable about.

Quality matters. Use a spell-checker. If you're not design-oriented, ask someone who is whether your blog looks decent, and take their advice on how to improve it.

The speed of being able to publish your thoughts is both a great feature and a great downfall of social media. The time to edit or reflect must be self-imposed. If in doubt over a post, or if something does not feel right, either let it sit and look at it again before publishing it, or ask someone else to look at it first.

Enforcement
Policy violations will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination for cause.

Built with Social Media policy Tool

Pingdom.com Free Monitoring and Social Uptime Graph

2010-02-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

a while ago i started using Pingdom to monitor my server's stability... they give you one free account and it has a bunch of way cool features. you can tell it the interval ot check the site (and not just with HTTP Gets) and it will send you SMS when your site goes up and down. i really like the service and will probably start offering it to my clients so i can monitor their onsite hosting or if they chose not to host on our server... whats even cooler is now they have these cool graphs that you can share of your uptime and response time so i created this page so i would have a place ot jump to and see my server's stats (and to tell all you nice people about the great service)

Carter Cole is a hero in Sweden

2010-01-26T19:55:00.000-08:00

Watch the video

earlier i did one of these where i was a guru of social marketing and viral linkbait and heres my next one... im a hero :) watch mine and make your own

Best of SNL Shorts | My Favorites

2010-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

Picture A Day of Carter Cole

2010-01-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

not sure who was seen this video but its way cool... the guy takes a pic of himself every day for 6 years. very cool you can see him like growing old but im lazy and theres no way i could rember thats where this way cool site DailyMugShot.com comes in. They will email me reminders and have a cool flash thing to take the pictures... they also implemented these things called landmarks which let you place markers on the images so you can make them line up properly from day to day. Im really excited about mine... just goes to prove that if you wait long enough you wont have to program anything :)

NYTimes promotes personal gripes without ability for commentary

2009-12-29T09:36:00.001-08:00

This is crazy... the frame busting code on NYTimes.com breaks the ability to share sidewiki comments... so articles without comments (like the one i comment on below) cant be argued against. Thats why i published this gripe out here but commentary should always be allowed i would love the author or anyone else to talk with me about this...

in reference to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html

I’m an SEO guy so I’m always thinking about how Google ranks things by relevance and importance and there are a couple things you need to pay attention to in this article…
“For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.”
“Adam Raff is a co-founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm”

These two quotes make me believe that this is just another bitch from a website owner that doesn’t understand how or why Google penalizes sites but I will still run through the points he made and explain why Google has that behavior

If you use webmaster tools Google will tell you about imposed penalties and allow you to ask for reconsideration… the only reason Google doesn’t tell you if you are trying to game the results in an unfair way and giving you the information would allow you to manipulate the results more effectively. Google’s battle cry is “Don’t be evil” so the fact that they impose penalties is only to improve the quality of the results and help users experience. In fact Yahoo has the ability to promote some results to the top of the SERPS editorially (rather than through an algorithm) basically overriding their ranking system… Google doesn’t have this ability at all they can only impose penalties for spammy or unfair practices… The reason Google sites rank so well for their industries is not because they are put there but because they are doing users a great service and therefore they have massive linking profiles and tons of high quality links.

Now lets take on his point about “universal search”. Universal search helps the user experience… rather than punting users to another website of questionable trust and content they show you the best results right on the search page, effectively saving you a click. Bing does the same thing they show you the results that are relevant from a trusted source rather than sending you off to somewhere else of questionable value. Vertical search helps the user therefore Google implements the practice

And then there is a bitch about Tom Tom stock dropping… sorry that Google does so many things well and is kicking ass but if they have a better product it is totally fair that they put it out for users. Just because some other company is already doing something doesn’t mean that you cut all the other competition… are we going to stop Bing from truing their hand at overthrowing Google because Google already does so well?
Then he tries to bring in the FCC saying that we need “neutrality” just like we have the net neutrality fight going on right now… sorry they are a company providing a free service and they are trying to help the users not hurt them. Just because you company was hurt because they didn’t understand SEO and were probably engaging in unfair practices and breaking Google’s TOS

This is just another bitch session from a guy who doesn’t understand SEO and is complaining because he couldn’t figure out how to not be evil…

Im not affiliated with Google in any way (although id love to be they are a great company)… psst Google give me a job :)

i am an evil genius | lost... found... and beaten

2009-12-27T21:48:00.000-08:00

so i lost the evil genius game and then found it again and i just wanted to comment how awesome it is... i heard its way cheap (like $2.50) on steam. i have a bunch of cool screen shots of the game i took and me launching my doomsday device but for some reason the api key flicker gave me is dead

Im a geek aparently... and i love to share... online anyways :)

2009-12-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

Im a geek so this way cool geek chart is kinda cool to me... ~~i had to turn off my twitter updates because it was overloading with like 90%~~... ok i wasted some more time on stumbleupon and digg labs so im a little more rounded in my chart now... says something about my volume of tweets but i encourage everyone to go put in their social profiles and get their own chart...

To get your own go here...

the flying trash project

2009-11-29T10:50:00.001-08:00

this is the flying trash project... we had some extra helium so we made 4 trashbag balloons tied some messages to them and let them on their way... ill be posting the results here as they come in so check back and hopefully someone will find the messages

1)

no results yet...

2)

no results yet...

3)

no results yet...

4)

no results yet...

bring it on stalkers... now you can know where i am at all times! playing with Google latitude

2009-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

I already have a bunch of automatic tweets set up and such so i dont really feel like my privacy is being violated when im using google latitude . there are cool services that i can set up to alert me when im near friends and most of the time im just home so its really not a big deal to show my location on a map (at least for me). these kind of constant updating services are really cool i believe they will change the way we socially interact but what i have found even crazier is how they know where i am... apparently some smart people go huh you know the SSID and MAC address of wireless access points really doesn't change all that much so if a bunch of people drove around everywhere mapping where different ssid are then you wouldn't even need GPS we could calculate your position based on the strength of different access points around your laptop and if we add this technology to cell phones then they can find and map even more access points (by crowd sourcing) for us so we have the ability to locate a phone by GPS, cell tower or by SSID of a nearby access point and constantly update our location on the website. yahoo had this service a little earlier than google i think yahoo used skyhook wireless. Google doesn't say how they did theres but i assume its much of the same stuff so if you want more details on how they do it check this out

its a pretty cool service and if you dont mind people knowing where you are i think i could be a great way to meet up, interact and chill in this awesome new interconnected world...

man technology is scary :)

Carter Cole's LinkedIn Profile

2009-11-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

Carter Cole

playing around with the linked in embed api they just released a new api today for external sites ot use and ive requested access... i want to make something to mash the twitter api to linkedin connections i think it will be cool to see how many of your connections have twitter, follow you and how many you follow

tricks and tips for monopoly city streets | embeddable badge and special toolkit

2009-11-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

oh noez! i logged in and saw this message today...

so it looks like the game will be ending so use these tools while you can...

original post:

so ive been playing monopoly city streets [read my first post here] and its quite a strange game if you start to do well at all then you are targeted for tons of hazards an it makes it hard to play the game. it feels like they are forcing turnover of streets in the game but i understand its required to keep it moving and growing. but when the game first cam out the was lots of cheating and hacking going on in the game but hasbro has cleaned up alot of it so its pretty cool now but ive always been slow building and navigating the game so... i decided to make some tools for the game. the first thing i did was fire up wireshark and watch all the http traffic for the game then built a proxy fro the json calls and whala my very own dashboard for managing monoply city streets but it was still hard to build and i was having some trouble getting build locations and constructing them so ive turned to the monopoly city streets clan they have this great toolkit that gets injected into the page running the city streets game.
See the demo video below

to use the tools you just need this link you can right click and copy it then paste it in address bar while in game (my preference) or you can do the bookmark thing and add link to your favorites (detailed favorite method explained)

and they have a new database of a bunch of the streets
and im making my own but here is an img badge that you can use...

heres how you generate your own...

and the last thing i want to leave you with is a Pro Tools section of a monoply streets forum

their form manager allows you to query all the json apis of city streets and see the results

ill be releasing my dashboard and embeddable HTML badge soon so keep checking back

How to verify your Google profile name

2009-10-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

I am Carter Cole

Google says so...
My Google Profile

And Check out my cool embed code for Google profiles...

Its pretty easy to get your name verified. just head on over to the name verification page on knol and follow the process

you can use either a Credit Card

or your Social Security Number

and thats it you get your name verified on your Google profile and if you want to embed your Google profile like i did

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[username]&type=2"></script>

Alpha Carter

My wife found a USPS Money Order fraud scheme...

Looks like Twitter is now giving out suggestions of users to follow

UPDATE: Twitter announced it last week

Original Post

Artificial Political Opposition bought on Amazon's Mechanical Turk

I knew an open source CMS was a bad idea for whitehouse.gov

var a=new Date(2009,10,12);t=new Date;document.write(Math.ceil((t.getTime()-a.getTime())/864E5)+" days ago i made a prediction... and 211 days later, I was right");

flash forward 211 days

i hate being right

Do your social media duty and share what you like! this is totally cool...

I rule teh interwebz

Another Facebook Privacy Issue... those leaking emails again not their fault

UPDATE

Original Post

the infamous

- Carter Cole

My super funny Iron Man II Comic

Breakdown of how the Facebook advertiser privacy breach works

Endangered Species Condoms are here!

Eat Fresh... for breakfast? A review of Subways new morning menu

HTML 4.0 Special Characters - My Symbol Cheat Sheet

Wordle - way cool word clouds that look really pretty in posts

CarterCole.com Social Media Policy

Pingdom.com Free Monitoring and Social Uptime Graph

Carter Cole is a hero in Sweden

Watch the video

Best of SNL Shorts | My Favorites

Picture A Day of Carter Cole

NYTimes promotes personal gripes without ability for commentary

i am an evil genius | lost... found... and beaten

Im a geek aparently... and i love to share... online anyways :)

the flying trash project

1)

2)

3)

4)

bring it on stalkers... now you can know where i am at all times! playing with Google latitude

man technology is scary :)

Carter Cole's LinkedIn Profile

tricks and tips for monopoly city streets | embeddable badge and special toolkit

oh noez! i logged in and saw this message today...

so it looks like the game will be ending so use these tools while you can...

How to verify your Google profile name

I am Carter Cole