Brayansong's Blog

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Hashtag or Bashtag

 

Unless you are totally not interacting with social media, if you does, you probably had heard before hashtag. Hashtag starts with the symbol ‘#’. Hashtag became clickable in 2009, which allows user to redirect to a link with all related content with the hashtag.

Studies shows that 70% consumers are motivated to explore new content when hashtags are present. Recently Instagram updates and added a new feature, which allows its users to follow a particular hashtag.

Alright, so what is Bashtag.

Official definition from Wikitionary is a ‘Noun in Internet, a hashtag used to criticize something, especially one that was intended for promotional use but repurposed by users to criticize that which it was intended to promote, or make the opposite point.’

From my point of view it is just a term used when the intended positive purpose hashtag goes viral but in the opposite side. When using social media, always remember things can’t be predicted 100%. If you search through the internet I bet you can find lots of failure examples while using hashtag as marketing or PR purpose.

When Hashtag become Bashtag.

As hashtag become more and more popular, many social media platforms are adopting this new culture and technology. Lots of marketing and PR team also keep an eye on this trend. They use hashtag to start campaign or activity and try to build positive image of their respective company or host.

Well, what happens when hashtag become bashtag? A very typical answer is that it will cause bad image or bad reputation, or in another word in the opposite way of original intention.

There are plenty of examples of hashtag become bashtag such as: Coca Cola #MakeItHappy. NYPD’s #myNYPD that actually wants members of the public to post their selfies with New York police officers and tag them with the hashtag but in the end become a bashtag to spread police violence. McDonald’s, Eat Your Heart Out #McDStories, that actually wants its user to share about their experience having McDonald, but end up become a bashtag of sharing about negative information about McDonald.

In conclusion, when hashtag become bashtag it could be a loss of a person image or company image depends of what the hashtag represents.

Here are some examples of hashtag became into bashtag:

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Images Taken by Brayansong

Hashtag Hijack.

A hashtag could go viral but in a wrong way either because of the strategy is bad or because of intentional activity. This type of activity is dubbed as hashtag hijacking. Hijacking a hashtag could cause a hashtag become a bashtag, like mentioned above. There are two main types hashtag hijacking, first is to troll or to seek attention second is to intentionally cause damage to one’s image. These two types of hashtag hijacking can be done by spamming big amounts of hashtags with intentional purpose messages which are different from the actual original hashtag messages resulting the original messages to go down. Here’s an article about how to hijack hashtags.

Recently BBC News report that a journal infiltrate into black market and try to ask about how much is to make a fake trend in a country. The full news is in here It now just only talks about how much is to make a fake trend on Twitter. The strategy to make a fake trend on Twitter involves hashtaging and bashtaging. The unbelievable fact is that, in order to fake a trend in one country it only cost £150.

Investigating #myNYPD

#myNYPD goes viral at moment it is proposed, but in a wrong way. #myNYPD first founded in April 2014, main purpose is to invite people to tweet pictures of their dealings with ‘New York’s finest’ in Twitter.

However, rather posting good selfies with New York Police Officers, people used this hashtag to post about violence caused by New York Police Officers. The Guardian report that on April 23, 2014 there are more than 70,000 people tweeted about brutality including recalling the names of people shot dead by police.

NYPD tried their best to make the best of a botched job by retweeting all the favourable photos.

From my point of view although this hashtag had gone viral in a wrong way and in the end, became a bashtag, it stills reflects a problem of the society.

Hashtag is something that can’t be stop or shutdown as it had already become a culture and will constantly be spreading once it is founded.

Share with me your thought, do you agree hashtag campaign can be success? Or one bashtag you know and do you think bashtag or hashtag will cause social impact?

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Protection of Social Media

 

Now a day social media had become the middle man of connecting people it also present new opportunities for the way people share personal information. Sharing personal information is the key of interacting with other people in social media.

So Share with me What you Share

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram play a major role in our day to day lives. We like to take photo before we eat and post them on social media, we like to share our best moment with our friends and family through social media, we even use social media to know and ‘stalk’ what our friends and family are doing. But do you know these could cause some privacy risks that threaten your personal information?

I personally don’t like to take photo of my food before I eat, even though if I do I usually keep them in my photo album rather than posting them online. I like to spend great time with my friends and family too, I post some of these meaningful and memorable photos on my social media account to record and show my other family members and friends. You sometimes need to post something online to prove that you are not ‘dead’ (LOL!).

But are these all personal information I share? Unfortunately, no. I still remember the moment I clicked sign-up with submitted an application form that contains my password, contact information such as e-mail, contact number, birthday, gender, and even ‘What’s my mother name’.

Where they keep my personal information, did they protect them or…

Social media company keep your personal information in big databases and ‘pull’ them out when needed. Interesting heh, have you ever wonder if these databases were compromised or these personal information we share were used for company’s revenue? Social Media did not protect your personal information, user should take responsibility of what we share, but social media’s company like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram does.

I personally do trust security implemented by these social media platforms company. Take a look on this article on how Facebook protect their user from hacker and also this about Instagram security implementation. These social media platforms not only implement security on their side but also educate their user about how to protect themselves from identity thefts. However, technologies, algorithm or encryption they use to protect user personal data are mean to be secret.

‘Security is just an illusion’ – is a widely used term in hacker’s community. So no matter how many security were implemented there’s always exception, for example the incident that happened on Twitter that nearly 32 million of Twitter account might be hacked, data breached of Facebook about 50 million that affected United States voters and also Instagram Data Breach incident. These attacks aim to take over user’s personal information for hacker’s profit and also politic influence.

Take a look on privacy policy

Back in my old days when I was taking CAB230 ‘Information Security’ unit in QUT, I did researches on social media privacy policies. An interesting fact that I found out on these three social media platforms is that by default they turned on the ‘sharing’ option that allow them to save user personal information for further usage such as providing advertisement that suits user’s interest also sell or share this information to cooperate third-party for analytical and marketing purpose. Think again, if the product or services is free than probably you are the product. Although these social media’s companies always mention they only use information that user authorized to share, all usage of personal information are actually included in privacy policy.

There’s a research conducted by Pew Research Centre about public knowledge of technology and the web that actually half of online Americans don’t know what privacy policy is. “52% of internet users believe that privacy policies actually ensure the confidentiality of their personal information. (In fact, a privacy policy is simply a legal document that discloses how customer data is managed and used.)” – Aaron Smith. Australian Government website mention that “information you share online may be permanently recorded. Even when you deactivate your account, the information you shared may remain in archived or old versions of websites, or in comments you’ve made on other people’s pages”. The guidance provided by Australian Government is to read the privacy policies of the social networking sites user use and choose the privacy settings that best suit user’s needs.

It’s creepy, but it’s true your personal data actually have a lot of values, in this Big Data era. Be responsible and considerate personal information you share doesn’t only affect you but also other people.

Protect yourself, choose what you share

If you search online about how to protect your personal information you come out with a conclusion – you have no choice and option but to trust social media’s company security since you are using their service and product but you can protect yourself, by choosing what to share. Here’s some tips I concluded to protect your personal information:

  1. Read and understand privacy policy upon or before using.
  2. Choose carefully what you want to share with the social media’s company, and also what you share online.
  3. Don’t share any sensitive information.
  4. Use different password for each social media platform, just in case if compromised your other account won’t get affected.
  5. Don’t click on unverified links, as they might be compromised or used by hacker to steal your personal information.

Take a look on this article provided by Australian Government, that talks about the definition of personal information and also how to protect them.

Not the end of the world

In my conclusion internet and social media are always dangerous, because you never know what will happen to information you share while you are sleeping and who’s on the side while you are interacting with them. However, you can minimize risk by taking steps to protect yourself rather than just overly trusting social media to protect your personal information. Everyone should be responsible to their own personal information. Tell me in comment what you think, do you trust social media to protect your personal information or you would rather trust yourself?

Lastly, I would like to provide some links to privacy policy to help understanding.

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy
Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/155833707900388
Twitter: https://twitter.com/en/privacy

Cheers.

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Social Media

 

In this information explosion era, where information explodes every minute, everyone has an easy access to all sorts of information. Internet creates an easy way for people to communicate using different medium to simplify the way people communicate, breaking down communication barriers such as distance and time which were considerations back in the old days when one tries to bring message from one side to the other.

Why Social Media…

Social media plays a very important part in this era, social media brings people together and make connection closer and easier. In the bright side, using algorithms, Facebook release a ‘six-degress of separation’ theory, determining that we are now a mere 4.74 degree away from another human anywhere on the planet, and so Facebook suggests that the social media is bringing people closer together.

However from the other side of the hand, according to a recent study by Oxford University professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Robin Dunbar, he says that ‘human brain is limited to keeping up with about 150 meaningful relationships, regardless how many Facebook friends you might have.’ But from my point of view, social media do help a lot in connecting people and maintaining relationship especially for long distance relationship, I personally do like to video call my friends and family back in my hometown. Research shows that 27 % of us regularly make video calls to conduct more personal long distance chats with friends and family. Hummmh.. interesting looks like I am one of the 27%…

I also believe that social media do brings connection to people who have the same interest closer. Some social media platform is designed for some specific interest for example: GoodReads – BookLovers, GitHub – Developers, LinkedIn – Professionals, Fleeber– Musicians. Check out this article about how social media brings connection that have the same interest.

My favourite online platform…

My favourite online platform will be Facebook. Been using Facebook since I was 8 years old, 14 years of ‘experience’. Thinking back to the design and services, function provided by Facebook compare to 14 years ago, many has changed.

In my memory, the very first reason I sign up in Facebook is because I wanted to play a game call ‘Restaurant City’ but after constantly using it, I began to make friends online and post online about my emotions, and some art work I did.

I like Facebook because the big community it provides. Today Facebook had becomes an online identity for everyone, statistic released by Facebook on February 2018 shows that there are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users. However, another interesting statistic that that catch my eye while reading this report is that 83 million are fake profiles says CNN, from this statistic we can know that making friend online can be a risk too, you will never know who is on the other side, please feel free read my another article about identity and identities online..

Facebook now also provide features like creating events, group and pages which also allows me to see my company page’s insight and do advertising, and I believe more are yet to come.

Nah, sorry not my favourite…

There are lots of article and people complaining out there about SnapChat’s UX and UI design, such as this article that talks about how SnapChat lost its user because of bad user experience and bad user interface design. This article also discuss about how SnapChat’s bad UX, affects its users, for example some features may not be discovered by user because of the bad design.

I personally don’t really like SnapChat, I feel like it’s not really user-friendly, it takes me more than 4 days to really learn and understand all the features. Although many updates had been applied to it, in the latest update it still doesn’t seems really friendly too me.

Here’s a statistic graph that shows Snapchat’s daily active users over time. You can see how dramatically the number of users drop down and goes up when the new UX and UI was implemented.

Snapchat’s Daily Active Users (2017)

Sorry SnapChat **cry..cry**.

How, why and when do I access Facebook, my favourite online platform…

Most of the time I access to Facebook using my personal computer. As average time I spend in working in front of my computer is more than 5 hours, I less likely wanted to use my mobile phone when I got off from work.

The main reason that I use Facebook is to keep myself update to ‘news’ around me, keep in contact with people, discuss and do file sharing. Sometimes I also watch some videos that people create or share as entertainment.

I agree that I use Facebook to kill time sometimes and also trying to ‘escape’ my reality, as scrolling Facebook can be a really mindless action. Recently, I was studying about how to make myself more productivity and I came across a very interesting video about how to make ones more productivity. In this video, it mentions that the biggest barrier that people met when starting a work is to begin it, because human mind will start to visualise all those hardship that might happen, and when this happens people will try to escape this by doing mindless action such as scrolling Facebook.

When I think about ‘when’ actually I access Facebook, I feel like I was one of the ‘phubber’. I scroll Facebook when I feel bored or anxious sometimes, or even like I mentioned above when I try to ‘escape’ and did mindless action. If you try to search online about ‘phubber’ you can find that that’s actually a lot of community that is raising awareness about phubbing people are trying to stop ‘phubbing’, one of the famous community is this it even has a website call http://stopphubbing.com.

My nature activity on Facebook might be also yours…

Like most of you out there, I treat Facebook as one of my entertainment source. I watch funny video, ‘like and comment’ friends’ picture, read and share article or news up there.

Back in the old days, when I was in the age of 10-14, I can rarely remember, I use to share a lot of my thoughts and emotions in Facebook by using Facebook’s ‘Post Status Function’ and hope that people will acknowledge me or give me more ‘Likes or Shares’ (Functions provided by Facebook), and spend lots of time checking this trying to a very famous people in the social media. Research shows that these actions could cause mental health which dubbed as ‘boosts in self-affirmation’ , meaning that one takes more care about online ‘attraction’ rather than in the real world, and the other one call ‘negative social comparison’ that theorize that the internet takes people away rather than in real world social engagement.

Does these happen to you all too? Do share your thought with me, about the way you use Facebook and also what do you think about Facebook.

Content I create and where I post.

Now, I don’t really share my status and emotions online. I share news on Facebook and Twitter which are officially released and also contribute to GitHub about some of my development work, also share my experience and studies in my personal blog.

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Competition – HILTI IoT Prototype International Competition

HILTI a company that began as a company that produced equipment and components on contract for the German industry during World War II and now HILTI’s HQ is at Liechtenstein. HILTI specialized in developing products for the construction, building maintenance, and mining industries, mainly to the professional end-user. It concentrates mainly on anchoring systems, hammer drills, firestops, and installation systems, but manufactures and markets an array of tools (including cordless electric drills, heavy angle drills, laser levels, power saws, and fasteners).

HILTI opened an international competition dedicated to help elevate HILTI’s digital experience to a new level. My previous university HELP University registered for this competition, and I stand a chance to team-up with students and professors in my university to participate in this competition, and later representing Malaysia for this international competition.

This competition aim to help elevate HILTI’s digital experience to a new level, we are asked develop a prototype regarding to the latest technology IoT. We decided to create a prototype that can be demonstrate as a mobile application that can connect to drill and check status of the drill as well as give command and setting.

We also develop this prototype in a sense that there’s a cloud server, which act as a centralised server that do communication and database for record and entry storage.

Everything starts with pairing the drill with bluetooth connection and login to the cloud server, after credentials are validated user can control the drill using the mobile application and this could reduce the error made by manual, and it makes user more easier to diagnose the problem as well as communicate with others, it also provide the ease of duplicating previous project work to current project. Step by step guide and shows the current status of the drill can be easy with the help of this application.

My team and I registered as TEAM(38) – LogiTrust, and was able to get into semi-final in this international competition.

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Web Development – Victory Technologies

Victory Technologies

Web development service for Victory Technologies, a Malaysia company. Victory Technologies is also known as VicTechs, a company that focus on website development. This company provide a variety of services for their customer, including: Web Development services for portfolio website, business website, E-Commerce website. Web Server Configuration services,website migration, VPN / Mail Server set-up, business consultation as well as graphic design.

I myself is both the co-founder of Victory Technologies and the web developer of Victory Technologies. After years of experience in website development freelancing job, I decided to make a startup with more developers and designer to give my client better services. After my team and I have a clear analysis about our business model. We decided to create a website that could prominence our services and what we are different from other, with a clear and attractive description of why client should choose us.
During the development process, I registered the domain name: victechs.com and we came out with a few prototypes and different marketing strategy. We implemented a direct submit form for inquiry which allow client to directly communicate with us, without opening their E-mail client.

Based on the finalize discussion notes, the aim of this website is to allow our client to understand what type of services we are providing and how we can help our client. My development team and I collaborate well with design team as well as marketing team in order to set up a website that’s not just creative and attractive but also friendly with marketing strategy.

 

Other than that, security is another important issue that we are very concern at, as our employee are coming all around from the world, it is important to have a VPN for security issue. Spam filtering and firewall are also configured well and integrated.

Services provided to this project: 

– Domain Registration.

– Server selection and scaling.

– Server scheduled backup and migration.

– DNS configuration.

– Website prototype design.

– Responsive custom CSS implementation.

– jQuery animate effect for the design.

– Custom VPN setup for employee around the world.

– Custom CentOS server configuration.

– Custom e-mail server configuration.

– CentOS server firewall setup.

– Google MAP API implemented for map.

– Google reCAPTCHA API implemented to avoid spam.

Through out the whole development process, I always update and ensure my team about the latest design and my experience about what client usually wanted to know as from my experience before as a freelancer.

I migrated all my previous projects into the new company server. So all my previous client can now enjoy the enhanced security, scheduled backup and all other great functions.

Bought domain name from GoDaddy, VPS (Server) from Tooglebox, and co-operate with data analytics service platform Hitsteps, to provide visualize data to my client. Finished this project in 13 days.

#websitedevelopment #victechs #website

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