Computing@NC State - Fall 2009

Page 10

Social Networking On and Beyond Campus

“Friend me.” “Follow me.” “Join my Flickr group.” “Digg
it!” “That’s del.icio.us.” As a “digital native,” you are
most likely using various types of social media, and
you’re probably well aware of the bright side of it all.

Take a moment here to delve into the dark side. A few
minutes invested now could provide a huge return on
investment in the days and months ahead—in terms of
your reputation, litigation, and security.

Reputation considerations
“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the
utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to
San Jose and hating the work.” You may have seen the
news item about the person who said this on Twitter,
and which made its way back to Cisco—not to mention
all over the Internet and news stations across the
country under headlines such as, “How to tweet your
way out of a job.”

Is there anything more important to you than your
good name? If you haven’t already done it, sign up for
Google Alerts.

Legal considerations
Imagine yourself tweeting about how infuriated you are
about poor customer service you recently received. Boudoir
Queen, a clothes designer whose real name is Dawn
Simorangkir has filed a lawsuit against Courtney Love for
defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional
distress, because Courtney tweeted a rant about how she was
billed for custom clothing from the designer.

“The Sun News reports that a South Carolina state court
has awarded Scott Brandon $1.8 million in damages for
defamation arising out of statements published on the Myrtle
Beach Insider blog,” according to the headline on www.
citmedialaw.org. The laws are catching up on the exponential
growth of social media. Don’t give them anything to catch up
to you on.

Security considerations
Those handy URL shortening sites, such as tinyurl.com,
are great, aren’t they? Twitter phishers and other scammers
think so, too! They’re exploiting URL-shortening utilities
that can conceal the identity of links to potentially harmful
sites. Trojans use the same approach sending shortened
URLs in instant messages to buddy lists. Don’t click on
any link in any email, instant message, blog, or tweet
if you are unsure of its URL authenticity. OIT advises
campus Internet users to use a Firefox add-on called
LongURL Mobile Expander, which expands shortened
URLs for visual validation when you hover over them.

Did you view a video via any social media today?
Many social networking scams begin by teasing you
into watching a video. For the most part, videos use a
common format, so if you can see videos on sites like
youtube.com, then you shouldn’t have to download
additional plug-ins or “codecs.” Codecs, which come in
the form of an executable setup file in these instances,
are often Trojans.

Finally, you should never use a computer that isn’t
protected by some type of antivirus product, and
as a user of NC State computing resources, you’re
provided one free of charge—even for your personally owned
machine that you’re going to use to connect to
University systems. See “Keep Your Computer Secure.”