Everyone has their own understanding of what social software is.  Here is mine:

so·cial soft·ware:

Software that leverage, facilitate, or amplify social phenomena.

Impact of powerful brands on our minds is stronger than most people realize because it hits us below the belt, at the subconscious level.  It swoops under your flailing arms of reason and strikes hard, leaving long lasting bruises of wanting and trusting.  Those bruises are weak spots hackers will attack to knock you down.

Enough with words.  Click on some of the links below to experience the impact of powerful brand images.  They are links to phishing parody pages.  To experience the impact fully, try to observe the effect of the brand image on each page.  Note that you already know that these pages are fake cockeyed pages.

• eBay
• Visa
• Merrill Lynch
• UPS
• Wells Fargo
• Amazon
• MCI

I think protecting brand images from being abused at the browser level make sense even if strapping DRM technologies into IE or Safari might seem distasteful to some of us.

I like much of ongoing Microsft's .NET-based push, but I think they are going too far with respect to Microsoft SQL Server.  For example, BizTalk Server 2004 requires it.  Across the board, arrows points to Microsoft SQL Server as if it was Rome and I see it just getting worse with Yukon and it's special brand of XML features.  Let up, I say.

I just got a HTML e-mail from email.bankofamerica1.com (notice the '1') asking me to sign-in at:

http://links.bankofamerica1.com:8082/Click?
q=c2-oXxLQUEyqThpeyRgVnmX3Fn0xOFR&a=1

Clicking on the link will peg me as a potential Bank of America customer, but I was curious to see if there was a phishing page at the other end so I went ahead and ended up at the real Bank of America login page.  Hmm.  Curious.

This is what their WHOIS record say:

Registrant:
Bank of America Corporation
1201 Main Street, 12th Floor
TX1-609-12-15
Dallas, TX 75202
US

Checking Google, I found that the domain name is on several spammer blacklists.

All this leaves me wondering whether these guys are crooks or just a corporate vehicle for spamming.  Fish or spam makes a terrible menu.

BTW, I am now receiving at least one genuine phishing e-mail everyday.  For me, at least, they are proving to be a good source of entertainment.

Dave is making another effort to pull RSS and Atom together with an outline of a proposal that differs from past attempts including mine (see Making Atom Happen and Atom-Syntax Sin Tax).  These are the bulletpoints of his proposal:

1. The format would differ from RSS 2.0 as little as possible.

2. It would have the great spec that the Atom people are promising. A great validator, and lots of support from developers who evangelize the format. There wouldn't be many flames because everyone would be getting most of what they want.

3. It would be managed by an IETF working group that would be open to anyone who wants to participate, not just me, or Sam Ruby or Blogger and Movable Type, but anyone who wants to make the effort to contribute to furthering the art of syndication technology.

4. It would be backward compatible with RSS 2.0, so that any 2.0 feed could become an RSS/Atom feed by changing (fill in the blank, as little change as possible).

5. The top level item in the feed would be called rssAtom. It's a problem for at least one aggregator that the top level item in Atom is called "feed" — not such a problem today, but later when another format comes along that also calls its top level item "feed." Formats in general should use a distinctive name for their top-level element. (Prior art: HTML, RSS, SOAP, RDF.)

In essence, he is suggesting a common format that is backward compatible with RSS 2.0 at the data model level instead of the syntax level.  I like the proposal and sincerely hope it works out, but engineers are notoriously bad at finding the reverse gear…

Latest update of JDK 1.4.2 series is released.  Unlike the previous update (1.4.2_03) which I didn't bother installing because it only had new certs, this one has a boatload of bugfixes.