Ah Devil’s Night, you’ve come again. Does any other holiday inspire such poor decision making as Halloween? New Years is a close second (who among us can deny a glass of the bubbly?), but Halloween has to take the cake. Just take a walk around a Halloween costume shop. Would you find half of the adult costumes appropriate for any event other than Halloween? On second thought, don’t answer that question. We don’t need to hear the saucy details of your personal life here at the Reputation.com Blog.

Despite the fact that most people realize how inappropriate their costumes are, they will still buy them and, worse yet, take dozens of pictures in them. Before they know it, the pictures are tagged with their name and shared on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Uh-oh. In retrospect, that ironic Michael Jackson costume doesn’t look so good, does it?

From the salacious to the politically incorrect to the just plain dumb, here is our list of the five halloween you do not
want shared online.

Department of Erections

Because nothing says “Hire Me” quite like a sexually aroused convict! Seriously, this costume is not only unfunny and inappropriate, but also awkward. It certainly wouldn’t be easy to walk around a crowded party, you know what I mean?

Hot Dog Vendor

What is about men’s costumes and exposed genitals? Are we men really that immature? Wait, scratch that. I already know the answer. Also, the title of this costume is not descriptive enough. Instead of “Hot Dog Vendor,” it should be called “Future Sex Offender Regisrant.” The model’s expression doesn’t do much to help salvage the costume, either. “Hey ladies! There’s a box of hot dogs on my crotch. Get it?”

Poo Poo Platter

If you think this costume is funny, think of this possible exchange.

YOU: Hi…Mary, right? I met you at the Halloween party?

MARY: Oh, Hi! That was so much fun! I don’t remember, what did you go as?

YOU: (deep breath) Um… Well… I went as a plate of poop.

MARY: Oh…right.

YOU: So, want to have coffee sometime?

MARY: (walks away)

Sexy (insert word here)

It’s hard to pick one women’s costume that is especially inappropriate since they all have the same desired effect: turning regular women into strippers. Ladies, don’t pander to the chauvinistic costume industry! Buck the trend this year. Instead of being a sexy witch, be an ugly witch. Instead of being a sexy police officer, be a regular police officer (like the one that knocks on your door at 3:00AM to shut down your party). The possibilities are endless.

Toilet Child

What do you do if you don’t want to dress up yourself, but you still want to bring shame on to your family’s good name? Hmm. I know! Dress your child up like a toilet! That way, when people check out pictures of your fun family halloween party on Facebook, they’ll always remember that you’re the family everyone else in the neighorhood craps on.

By now, everyone should know how important it is to be careful about what you share online. Not only can you be fired for what you post on the web, but you can hurt your chances of getting into school too. Despite countless stern warnings, however, many Internet users do not take the time to consider the long-term effects of what they post on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

If you’ve already made the mistake of buying one of the above costumes, and you’re planning to rock it at the bar on Saturday night, we beg of you, return it now. You might get some inebritated chuckles from friends, but the laughs will stop when you head to your next job interview. If you choose not to heed our warning, however, we won’t hold it against you. Heck, we’ll even help you find the pictures and take them down. Why? That’s just how we roll around here. Now go ahead and start planning next year’s costume.

As if being unemployed weren’t bad enough, thousands of Californians who posted their resumes to the official state job website, CalJobs, have had their identities compromised through a massive security breach in the system. According to a report from San Francisco’s CBS5, the breach was first noticed by Tom Diederich, a former reporter for Computer World Magazine.

“I filled out my employment history and I saved it,” said Diederich, who bookmarked it for future reference.

But the next day when he clicked back in he said, “I saw someone else’s information. I saw their name, where they live, their email, their phone number. I was shocked, really.

And the next time, again? “I got a different person’s information,” said Diederich. “There was probably about 5 or 6 different times that I have seen it. It was more frightening because I said ‘Who’s seeing my information?’”

After alerting the state, and receiving no response, Diederich still noticed the problems, so CBS5 began their own investigation. The results were eye-opening.

CBS 5 asked UC Berkeley computer science professor and privacy expert, Doug Tygar to take a look at Diederich’s problem. He said, “I consider that to be a serious security breach.”

But it turns out, not the only one. Because just moments after beginning his examination of that website, using Diederich’s web link, Tygar was able to get into the site, and look at other applicants’ supposedly private data. “I was able to access other people’s personal information including their address, their phone numbers, email, personal details,” Tygar said

All by just changing a few numbers in the URL. In fact, Tygar even found he was able to go in and change information on peoples’ resumes. “I would in fact have been able to go through and change that if i were a malicious attacker,” he said.

Can you imagine the field day that cybercriminals could have with the kind of information available on a resume? There are phone numbers, e-mail addresses, home addresses; it would be like hitting the jackpot for identity thieves.

While it’s disappointing that the California state government would allow such a glaring security breach in their website, it’s not exactly surprising. Any system that grows to the size of CalJobs, which hosts hundreds of thousands of resumes, is bound to have some security issues. The real problems come when the administrators of the site are either unable or to slow to resolve the problems when they are brought to their attention. According to the CBS article, the original glitch Diederich found has been fixed, but their team is still actively searching for other loopholes.

Today’s guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation was author, academic, and privacy expert Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. Mayer-Schonberger came on the program to discuss his latest book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The book focuses on how the long memory of the Internet hinders individuals from dealing with past mistakes and moving on with their lives. Mayer-Schonberger cites the example of Stacy Snyder, a Pennsylvania teacher who was fired for a picture on MySpace labeled “Drunk Pirate,” as an example.

I have included a small excerpt of Delete below. For the full excerpt, and to listen to the entire NPR segment, go here.

Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because it is unforgetting? “Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their records for the rest of their lives,” comments Catherine Davis, a PTA co-president. If we had to worry that any information about us would be remembered for longer than we live, would we still express our views on matters of trivial gossip, share personal experiences, make various political comments, or would we self-censor? The chilling effect of perfect memory alters our behavior.

[...]

If all our past activities, transgressions or not, are always present, how can we disentangle ourselves from them in our thinking and decision-making? Might perfect remembering make us as unforgiving to ourselves as to others?

Mayer-Schonberger’s parting questions are compelling. Should a person be forever judged by something foolish they did years ago? All but the most vindictive of us would agree the answer is no. And yet, thanks to the Internet, we can’t help but see these past transgressions and make judgments based on them. In doing so, we are perpetuating the abusrd notion that mistakes are unforgivable, and we are scaring people out of joining conversations for fear that they might say something that will wind up on their “permanent records.”

Hot on the heels of news that Microsoft had struck a deal with Twitter and Facebook to incorporate status updates into search results, Google has swept in and stolen the show by announing their own Twitter partnership. According to the Official Google Blog,

We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

While this news doesn’t completely take the wind out of Bing’s sails (Microsoft was still able to secure a deal with Facebook), it certainly takes away their limited competitive advantage. Perhaps more importantly, the news further validates Twitter as a website that is here to stay.

Early this morning, Kara Swisher posted some major news to the AllThingsD blog. According to Swisher, Microsoft has signed “separate nonexclusive deals today with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate their real-time feed of status updates into the Bing search service.” Microsoft will make an announcement about the plans sometime later today during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

While Swisher takes care to note that Twitter and Facebook have both also talked to Google about a similar arrangement, the fact that Bing inked the deals first is pretty major news. For years, Google has been the undisputed king of search. In fact, the company still is, earning more than 70% of web searches. However, in the technology industry, it’s all about what’s hot now, and that’s real time search. With a possible Yahoo/Microsoft merger on the horizon, Bing is being positioned to present a genuinely formidable challenge to Google’s search supremacy.

It is assumed that Facebook and Twitter will receive millions of dollars in the deal as well as a portion of the search revenue that comes from their real-time content. For Twitter, the Microsoft deal will surely provide some vindication for the company who has struggled to answer criticism about its long-term profitability.

As more news comes out on this emerging partnership, we will share it here on the Reputation.com Blog.