Facebook tells Twitter users to “Keep it to yourself!”

Yea, that’s right! Facebook was all “Hey, I know you like to share your tweets with the Facebook Community, well NO MORE!…” Well, kind of no more.

If you are like me, you may have noticed that ever since Tuesday November 3rd after 8PM Central – Your tweets have shown up on Facebook as Private “Only Me”

"Only Me" locked tweet on Facebook

However, after I took steps to figure out WTF happened, I solved it, and I’ll show you how too!

Unlocked Tweet on Facebook

Out of nowhere, Facebook decided to setup some function called “Publisher Control Default” which if yours looks like mine, it’d look like this:

Publisher Control Default - Custom - Only Me

Effectively making it so all content generated (such as Tweets) or other “Publisher Controls” were showing up as Only Me – seen above

This can be easily fixed by doing the following

After this point, all of your future Tweets will show up as your new classification, instead of being locked to "Only Me" - I haven't found a way to go back and modify past tweets from "Only Me" so, that's something you'll need to simply accept :) 

So, what this means for you is – You no longer have to worry about the loss of your visible tweets and the pure WTF-ness this was provided by Facebook (WTF Seriously!)

Also, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, feel free to send an invite :), and respectively, if you want to join my Mafia or other stuff, I love new friends!

Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

If you haven’t already read these old tutorials (FaceBook Mafia Wars (by Zynga) secrets ! :)What’s new in Zynga’s Mafia Wars)  on tips, tricks and other information around Mafia Wars, it never hurts! But this isn’t about high-level details, this is about nitty gritty cost effective decisions of how to keep your mafia outfitted and destroying the competition time and time again.   Yes, this has come out of my constant need to run statistical information of what is the best, and the most appropriate investment of my mafia wars resources (whether it be energy or otherwise)

This data was collected by fighting someone else and seeing what weapons at that point I was using, then charting them down to ATTACK, DEFENSE and relative COST to obtain said item.

Here is a breakdown of that data – distributed into their appropriate groups (Weapons, Armor, Vehicles)

Weapons        
ITEM ATTACK DEFENSE COST LOCATION
Avispa Machine Gun 54 24 BONUS  
Canonazo 42 22 69 ENERGY  
TNT 42 20 47 ENERGY El Padrino
Aguila HV .50 Sniper Rifle 40 16 55 ENERGY  
ASC45 "Conquistador" 36 18 40 ENERGY  
Dragunov 36 14 BONUS  
Para 322 34 14 45 ENERGY  
Cannon 33 7 BONUS  
BA-12 Assault Rifle 32 10 44 ENERGY  
M16A1 30 12 37 ENERGY  
RA-92 29 11 33 ENERGY  
11 Easter Egg Bombs 28 13 BONUS  
15 AA-12 Auto Shotguns 27 15    
5 Boomslang ACRs 27 16    
14 Midas’ Butterfly Knives 26 20 BONUS  
5 Gold .50 Cal Pistols 25 15 BONUS  
an IZH-35m 25 15 BONUS  
5 Muskets 25 5 BONUS  
65 Napalms 25 9 35 ENERGY  

What you may notice here, is that I call out TNT as the best item to aim for. (And yes I intentionally avoid putting the other locations of areas I don’t care about :))   As far as the cost benefit analysis and the ROI of the weapons go, TNT is far cheaper and provides JUST as much bang for the buck as the Canonazo without the extra 22 energy cost – I’d pursue Canonazo’s later on if I was hard locked in with TNT but otherwise, there really isn’t a whole lot of value of pursuing anything less than that considering the 42/20 value of TNT – So get yourself some TNT!

Armor        
ITEM ATTACK DEFENSE COST LOCATION
Che’s Beret 46 34 BONUS  
Guerrilla Commando 38 35 BONUS  
Guerrilla Squad 34 30 40 ENERGY El Padrino
Rebel Sniper 24 20 $38,000  
Davy Crockett Hat 21 9 BONUS  
Street Gang Member 20 14 46 ENERGY  
Wise Guy 20 14 $30,000  

Wow! Look at our armor options! The best energy item for your bang is the Guerilla Squad only costing a mere 40 Energy! (With a close second for the Rebel Sniper – I do continue to use my cuban dollars to buy as many of those as I can, as 24/20 sure beats anything below it) But the 34/30 value of the Guerilla Squad is the best you’re going to get at this point in time.  It’s what wins the battle and what protects your Mafia – So pursue that, and ignore any other Armor option at this time.

Vehicles        
ITEM ATTACK DEFENSE COST LOCATION
Cocodrilo APC 42 56 BONUS  
El Rey Roadster 40 34 BONUS  
Track Loaders 37 32 72 ENERGY  
Hu-9 Helicopter 36 27 51 ENERGY El Padrino
Si-14 Cargo Plane 31 31 49 ENERGY  
Mini-Sub 30 25 46 ENERGY  
Armored State Car 30 38 62 ENERGY  
Montaine 320 27 23 35 ENERGY  
Multi-Purpose Truck 26 22 44 ENERGY  
Chucho FAV 25 20 45 ENERGY  
Cigarette Boat 25 27 53 ENERGY  

We can see best from the Air, and that’s well proven with the power of the Hu-9 Helicopter! Yes I choose that bad boy, he’s essentially the same value of the Track Loader, with a 21 Energy savings to get that protection and attack strength ever so required.   While there certainly are a number of other options, look at the under/over on the energy cost differences – It is clearly negligible and well worth it to pursue the Hu-9 Helicopter of any other options that may be available.

So, as it stands these are by far the most cost effective and beneficial items you can get to protect your mafia.  This may clearly change when Moscow comes about, but until that point we’re in the clear about what it takes to defend, protect and grow our mafia’s! So take this information and if you disagree, let me know I’d love to be schooled on where I’m incorrect :)

Millions die as a result of recent Twitter Outage! OUTRAGE!

I’m sure you heard the news! Twitter was DOWN!? Denial of Service attack which crippled Twitter, LJ, Facebook and more!

re: Serious Twitter Outage Ongoing, Denial Of Service Attack (Updated)

What really affected me in this outrage are all the poor countless souls who lost their lives as a result of this dramatic service outage.

Twitter Graveyard

Yes, you know what I’m talking about.  

Poor helpless plants Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.

All the poor helpless plants which expect their owners to water them when they tweet.   What if you were on life support and the only means of informing a nurse you needed food, antibiotics or pain reducers was twitter? YOU’D BE DEAD TOO!

Next time you think about Twitter, it’s more than just a communication medium.  It is a lifeline for the very beings who provide us clean oxygen in this world! My Oak Tree out front twitters me regularly, though he keeps retweeting Guy Kawasaki so I’m not sure what’s up with that!

Twitter Phishing Scam with Blogspot – Post Mortem

What are our lessons learned so far from this little Twitter Phishing Scam?

First of all, this involved infecting a single or single groups of people.

Distribution consisted of Infect a person by sending them to a site to capture their credentials.   Once those usernames and passwords were collected, they would then use those compromised credentials to send this same message (via DM) to their followers, and continue the spread.

If Joe has 10 followers and DM’s it to those 10, and those 10 have 10 followers and DM it to the next 10, shortly you’d have thousands who are redistributing this – So long as they’ve visited the site and entered their credentials to be captured.

I see a lot of anger “I’m going to get person ‘x’ who sent me this message!”

It’s not the fault of the sender, not entirely.   They were compromised by a phishing scam, it happens, you should work towards educating them instead of castrating them.  So next time it will be part of their sense to not transmit their username/password to an untrusted site.

How could this terrible thing have happened? Now I hate (BlogSpot, Twitter, Followers)

Don’t hate the player, just be glad that it WAS done this way (a semi-safe site with only a small portion of cookies which get added to your browser)   Here is what could have happened if it were introduced in an effective ‘distribution manner’.

You visit the site, you are prompted for credentials.  Perhaps you’re prompted for credentials, though the better payload would be in the form of Malware, Spyware, Phishing-ware, Password capturers, and a number of other infection mechanisms.

Once this would be done, you’d be able to compromised on a number of fronts and able to distribute this to millions instead of just the few followers you have – Infecting Facebook, your banking account, etc so on and so forth.

What can I do about this in the future?

The universal rule of communication, especially unsolicited is ask yourself a few questions.   Would you visit this link if you were having a conversation with the person? Having established rapport with them while talking? Yes likely.

However the tip here is – Random “auto-dm’s” does not guarantee a reason to visit their link.  Yes a lot of people DO send out auto-DM’s, to the bane of all of us (SocialToo/ChrisBrogan– Thanks for helping limit that exposure!)  However, don’t bane all communication in the future.   If you think someone seriously DID write a funny blogpost about you because the person knows you, definitely do check it out! But in all seriousness, if you’ve not had some kind of established communication with this person to justify it, and let alone it brings you to not a funny blogpost, but to a fake twitter login page – Be sure to question it and use your common sense here.

Oh, and be wary of ever entering your credentials – again unless you explicitly trust the source.

Hopefully this Post-Mortem helps you deal with this situation, I’m still waiting for my self-infected account to start tweeting out to me (Controlled infection) For every problem there will be people looking to exploit it, and others trying to solve and contain it.   I’ll be there trying to find new solutions and rid the world of future exposure as well :)

Good luck, and feel free to follow me if you like :) @cxi