21 February 2011

Full Circle

Last week, I once again became an expatriate of the Show-Me State. I accepted an offer from my once-previous employers, KURM, and again am a member of their programming staff in Northwest Arkansas' Rogers. (And again I must note that views expressed here, past present and future, do not reflect the view of any of my employers, past present or future.)

This could easily be the inevitable death knell of this blog. With Missives from Missouri averaging 25 hits a day on weekly reports from nearly one-fifth the General Assembly, it has simply become the crux of what I publish online. If you haven't already, please start following Missives from Missouri on Twitter as well as the site itself.

However, I'm still that stubborn Missouri mule. I'll probably have something to post here from time to time. Good chance this will become a clip site featuring interviews I've done for them (seeing as the most riveting content on the station's Web site are the rules for Dial-A-Trade; were that not the case this blog would be on indefinite hiatus!)

As it has taken awhile for me to get situated in my flat in Missouri's 118th county, I have only now just gotten around to posting this, and a backlog of missives from the weekend are finally getting uploaded.

So here we go again: yours truly, The Missouri Expatriate

08 February 2011

A Setting Everyone in Lohman Needs to Set

Four Missouri lawmakers and a staffer have had their Facebook profiles hacked into over the past month. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the victimized profiles logged onto Facebook via the House's public WiFi network shortly before being targeted.

Amid suggestions that the House should tighten access to their network, Facebook has introduced an option where users can log on and and surf with a secure connection. All users need to is go to their account settings and set up HTTPS browsing under "Account Security". Using an HTTPS connection, while resulting in longer waits for pages to load, would result in more information being encrypted when sent to and from the site.

Facebook's new security options includes e-mail and text alerts when a computer or mobile device access a user's account for the first time. They're also experimenting with social authentication, using pictures of the user's friends to verify that the person logging on is not a random hacker.

The change comes as an effort to prevent hackers from gaining access via public wireless networks, like those the House and Senate have in place at the State Capitol in Jefferson City. Since the session started last month, Democrat Stacey Newman of St. Louis, three Republicans (among them freshmen Donna Lichtenegger of Jackson and Dave Schatz of Sullivan) and a legislative aide to another Republican were victimized by hackers.