Oosah free terabyte sounds good except

The new online storage offering from Oosah of one terabyte of online storage for free sounds great until you read the Terms and Conditions. First you are not allowed to store your music collection or at least any of your copyrighted songs because this violates Oosah's Terms and Conditions. The same goes for copies of videos you have purchased since most of those are also copyrighted. So you say ok fine I can store the 1000's of digital pictures I have personally taken and yes from what I have read that is allowed. But once again read the Oosah Terms and Conditions in particular 9.c which says you retain ownership but once you have uploaded your pictures Oosah can use, copy, perform, display, distribute and prepare derivative works. So my advice think twice before uploading anything to Oosah. But Oosah isn't the only one that may produce derivative works evidently Facebook claims the same right to produce derivative works from your uploaded digital pictures. So I think I will stick with my paid Flickr Pro account but I'm going to reread the Flickr Terms and Conditions and in particular how it applies to photos I have not made public. So my advice read through the Terms and Conditions on any of the various free or paid online storage offerings before uploading.

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Malware on Facebook

Public Safety/Computer Safety message to Facebook users.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone but malware (i.e. virus, worm) is on Facebook, if you already know this and/or have had to deal with it what I call "runtime error 21" skip the rest of this post. If not here is how the scenario went at my house -

daughter - "Dad my computer is acting weird"

dad - "what is it doing?"

daughter - "it keeps giving me this message - Runtime error 21 followed by some numbers"

dad - "ok ... does it go away when you reboot"

daughter - "no"

dad - "ok, I'll look at your PC when I get home"

later that evening

dad - "so did you install anything new on your computer"

daughter - "no ... but I did click on this link on my Facebook wall from this girl I haven't talked to in about 2 years, it looked like some sort link to a funny joke or ecard"

dad - "oh wonderful"

initial investigation - well the Runtime error 21 is there and constantly repeats and System Restore doesn't get rid of it. None of the System Restore points work they all come up with nothing has changed even though System Restore clearly shows one new item installed earlier in the week. In addition as of 08/08/08 Norton 360 and PC Tools Spyware Doctor do not detect or remove it. So looking like time to restore from that last backup, glad I did that a few weeks ago.

dad - "do you remember a couple years ago when your sister clicked on that link in the IM message from some friend she rarely talked to"

daughter - "yeah I kind of remember that"

dad - "well it looks like someone is doing the same thing with messages on your wall, so please don't do that again."

resolution - well I just could not take the easy way and do a full restore, so instead I finally did find a link on Tech Support Guy Forum with info on what I needed to do to remove this malware. The problem with this information is my particular strain of malware required booting from a standalone BartPE disk otherwise it just kept reinstalling inself. So for many users creating a BartPE boot disk or some other standalone boot is not going to be something they want to tackle. So if I find a removal tool I will let you know, likewise if you find a removal tool please comment so everyone can clean this up quickly and easily. I have also sent a message to Max Kelly who according to this post on eSecurityPlanet.com is head of Security at Facebook asking for information on removing this malware but so far no answer.

Scoble kicked off Facebook due to Plaxo Pulse

Well known blogger Robert Scoble/Scobleizer was kicked off Facebook yesterday. According to Scoble's blog he was using an alpha version of Plaxo Pulse. Well I don't have the latest version of Plaxo Pulse like Scoble but the beta of Plaxo Pulse 3.0 is starting to make me consider paying for the Premium version of Plaxo Pulse. But I think $49.95/yr. is high once again when you compare it to Flickr which gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth for $24.95/yr. I know apples and oranges as far as the type of service but I think Plaxo needs to think about price points and where users will buy in. In general $20-$30/yr. to me seems to be a good price point, when you get to $50/yr. I have to really want whatever it is.

Anyway back to Scoble and Facebook, if Plaxo Pulse and the harvesting of information Plaxo does gets you kicked off Facebook, then Facebook is going to be losing more than a few customers in my opinion once the new version of Plaxo is released. Also there is a movement to get Scoble reinstated on Facebook and popular opinion is it's only a matter of time before Robert Scoble is reinstated. Another interesting side note - some Facebook users actually want to be deleted/wiped from Facebook but in the past Facebook has claimed that can't be done. Well obviously that's not the case since Scoble has been completely removed according to those who had access to him on Facebook.

Last I wonder if Facebook may have shot themselves in both feet with this move. What if Facebook rushed to remove Scoble and oops forgot to think ahead about the backlash and then having to restore his id but in removing his id made no provisions/backups needed for reinstatement. bang bang - more negative PR if word gets out you don't do proper backups.

PS to Facebook - your view is Robert Scoble violated your TOS but you might want to consider the negative PR your recent actions and new features have generated in the past few months. If you just want buzz well then your doing a great job but some how I'm guessing that's not the case.

Update: Scoble's Facebook account has been restored this afternoon. Of interest is the fact that in Facebook's response to Scoble they take the path that they view this activity as a possible malicious script. No indication or reaction to the fact that Scoble was using a Plaxo tool to scrap data. Also Facebook indicates that an automated process disabled Scoble's account, so if other Facebook users want to be removed they just need to find a script to scrap all the data they can find under there Facebook account. I am glad to see that Facebook has the means to restore an account when it get's wiped by the automated script detection bot. Now it will be interesting to see how the data portability aspects of this event play out. If your interested in data portability and the associated issues go over to dataportability.org