Salsa Scoop

Sean Taylor and Quiet Riot: Flash Tribute Communities

 We know about flash mobs. But online junctions are also poles that attract communal grieving, like the spot on a dead man's curve where a popular high schooler crashed. Adherents of the savage ballet are surely aware that NFL star Sean Taylor died this morning from a gunshot wound he had suffered Sunday night. News of the shooting broke Monday morning, and of his death, earlier today. Which made this otherwise innocuous YouTube of Taylor highlights posted over the summer an instant online shrine. Over 1,100 comments have been posted as of this writing (surely more by the time you click it) -- almost all of them during the past two days.  

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05:52 PM Nov 27, 2007 - 0 comments permalink

Photo of the Week

 This weeks photo comes from The Gulf Restoration Network. The image was taken at a Step It Up 2007 shindig. Stepitup2007.org is the first open source, web-based day of action dedicated to stopping climate change.  

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11:56 AM Nov 27, 2007 - 0 comments permalink

Inbox Zero

 Talk about Thanksgiving. There may be a few leftovers to feed the blog, but DIA is closed for Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday. We'll catch you next week for the homestretch. 

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06:10 PM Nov 21, 2007 - 3 comments permalink

Radical Conservative Transparency

 In web 2.0, your community is your cause. Observe. The key lesson -- besides the obvious -- might be that top ten lists are a poor medium for conservatives.  

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11:51 AM Nov 21, 2007 - 1 comments permalink

A Few Notes on Security

 DIA competitor Convio suffered a major security breach that unfolded publicly last week, as many readers may know. This post is well past its immediate news cycle, but we've quite understandably been asked in light of that event about our own security procedures as well, and wanted to put them on the record. For anyone unfamiliar with the story, the thumbnail version is that a compromised password enabled an intruder to download scores of Convio clients' lists ... and that those downloads included hundreds of thousands or millions of plain text (rather than encrypted) versions of ordinary users' passwords. The NTEN blog summarizes the affair here. Allan Benamer's initial alert -- and accompanying comment thread -- have a lot more. Any system could be hacked or compromised, of course; this is a risk all online providers face and strive to minimize -- we're doing the reflexive sympathetic wince over here that you do when someone on TV gets clobbered in a sensitive spot. But beyond the initial intrusion, the compromised passwords are the real problem. Since many users re-use the same passwords across many different systems -- including financial presences such as online banking, PayPal, amazon.com and the like -- it's potentially hugely damaging. So, most importantly for users of DemocracyInAction's Salsa platform: this particular aspect of the breach has not happened and could not happen in our system. We use, and always have used, industry-standard one-way encryption algorithms to protect passwords for all users and campaign managers. Neither intruders nor organization administrators nor users themselves can ever actually see even their own password.  

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12:05 PM Nov 16, 2007 - 14 comments permalink

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