Categorieën
Boeken Journalistiek

Panorama (BRT) 29/05/1986 Beveiliging Doel (nav Tsjernobyl)

Vandaag 26 april 2016 is het 30 jaar geleden dat de kerncentrale van Tsjernobyl in de lucht vloog. Iets meer dan een maand later zond Panorama (BRT) deze reportage uit van Terry Verbiest over de beveiliging van de kerncentrale van Doel. Met onder andere een interview met yours truly opgenomen vóór Doel 1 (ik had enkele jaren geleden daarvoor een boek over deze materie gepubliceerd bij EPO, getiteld België, de dag na de bom).

Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek Privacy Security

Fake Linkedin Profiles Worryingly More Difficult to Spot

As others have mentioned, Fake Profiles Are Killing LinkedIn’s Value. The few fake invites I receive are generally easily to spot, for example because they use a private e-mailaddress from a known spam-domain such as mail dot ru, or because the profile is filled with spelling errors.

Today was different. Peter Fleischmann, CEO of the German consulting company FIMAD GmbH, invited me to contact him. He looks like an agreeable kind of guy, as you can judge for yourself from this screen capture of his Linkedin profile:

The good looking "Peter Fleishmann"
The good looking “Peter Fleishmann”

Peter’s profile looked okay to me. Granted, I didn’t know the guy personally, but as a journalist it’s often impossible to remember whom I’ve been in contact with through e-mail, chat, at a conference or on a social network.

Generally I do not connect with people I do not remember at all, but since Peter had 500+ connections, was a paying Linkedin Premium-member, which sets you back between 226 and 899 euros a year (sales tax not included), and even shared one connection with me (whom shall remain unnamed), I decided to accept his invite.

A few minutes later, I received this Linkedin message from dear Peter:

A subtle offer from Peter
A subtle offer from Peter

A subtle offer indeed. This screams spam, phishing, I know not what.

Dr. Morris Chang and TSMC are very much real, but I sincerely doubt that the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. would want me to contact him through his gmail.com address, which he probably doesn’t even have, and use the CEO of a small German consultancy company as an intermediate.

A reverse image search gives the scam away. “Peter Fleischmann” uses the picture of Dr. Shaun C. Williams, an endocrinologist  from Connecticut.

Dr. Shaun Williams bio at RMA of Connecticut
Dr. Shaun Williams bio at RMA of Connecticut

The person(s) responsible for the fake Linkedin profile of “Peter Fleischmann” probably stole his picture from Dr. Shaun’s bio at RMA.

Dr. Shaun's Facebook profile
Dr. Shaun’s Facebook profile

I responded to Peter and asked him to give me some more details about his “subtle offer”, but I haven’t heard back from him. I do not dare to send a message to the fake gmail-address, so the precise nature of this “offer” shall remain a mystery to me.

You can report profiles with inaccurate employment or education information, or a profile that is impersonating someone with the Linkedin Notice of Inaccurate Profile Information form. I have done this for “Peter Fleischmann” and am awaiting Linkedin’s reaction.

According to Facebook, between 5,5 and 11,2 percent of its members are fake. Linkedin hasn’t reported such statistics, but if the same ratio applies and based on Linkedin’s 300 million plus-user base, between 16,5 and 33,6 million of its users are fake.

We know now that some of these users are even paying members of Linkedin, which is worrying to say the least…

Update: the fake profile has been removed:

Fake profile removed
Fake profile removed
Categorieën
Boeken Hardware Journalistiek

Zure regen – Het Vermoeden 10 december 1986

Op 10 december 1986 interviewde Betty Mellaerts Peter Vanhoutte en mezelf over ons boek Zure Regen (EPO) in het legendarische radioprogramma Het Vermoeden op wat toen nog BRT1 (radio) was. Ik nam het programma indertijd op vanaf een Kenwood KT880L tuner met een Nakamichi LX3 cassetterecorder op een BASF LH extraI 90m compact cassette. Die opname is bijna 29 jaar nog vrijwel perfect, dus de bewering dat compact cassettes niet lang meegaan klopt duidelijk niet. Ik digitaliseerde die oude opname met een Terratec Audio Rescue soundrecorder. Wat het onderwerp betreft, is er in 30 jaar gelukkig heel wat veranderd. In 1986 maakte men zich bv. pas op om de katalysator te verplichten in auto’s.

Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek

Are sixteen minutes that important?

We reported it on Twitter exactly 4 minutes AFTER it actually happened, without any crew at the scene or nearby. (It took local media some 20 minutes more to my information..)

Michael van Poppel writing about his popular twitter-newsservice @BreakingNewsOn. Technically, he and his growing team can and do beat many traditional news outlets in speed. (Mainly thanks to 24/7 monitoring of all 750 local US news affiliates.) The question remains: are those 16 minutes (20 minus 4) that important? Important enough to make money out of it? No question such a service costs money to run and maintain. No question is it is valuable to some. But I think you never can monetize it enough to cover the cost, or even make a profit. And if you can, the big guns will jump in and crush the little guys. Just my 2 cts and I hope I’m wrong.

Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek

Maakt dat mee…

Dan werk je bij het enige IT-weekblad van het land en dan blokkeert je werkgever Facebook (en andere sociale netwerksites)?

Het wordt hier hoe langer hoe leuker met die it-guys. Misschien moeten we maar eens een stukje schrijven over hoe it-journalisten nuttige informatie – ja zelfs nieuws – halen uit Facebook en andere sociale netwerken.

En ‘to add insult to injury’ zijn de mailboxen van de werknemers ook nog eens beperkt tot een paar honderd megabyte. Gmail geeft ondertussen gratis aan iedereen die het wil tot 8 GB weg… tja…