By Ian Paul
February 8, 2009

By Carrie-Ann Skinner
January 13, 2009

LONDON - Almost four out five parents allow their children under 15 to use social networks site such as Facebook and Bebo, says MyVoucherCodes.

Research by the online discounts website revealed that 48 percent of those parents have no idea what their children get up to on social networks.

Furthermore a quarter of parents said they believed their children would keep themselves safe online.

MyVoucherCodes also said that a third of parents had no idea what privacy settings were in place on their child’s social network profile.

Safety concerns

Of the 22 percent of parents that didn’t allow their children to use social networks, only 25 percent said it was because they believed it may be unsafe, while half said it was because they believed a social network to be detrimental to their child’s education.

Facebook was voted the most popular, with 79 percent of social networkers under 15 years old admitting to having a profile on the site. It was closely followed by Bebo and MSN.

One in ten parents also admitted they had let their child lie about their age to join Facebook, as the site’s minimum age requirement is 13.

Mark Pearson, MD of MyVoucherCodes, said: “I think that it is very important for children to be able to use these sites to an extent because it is a great way for them to keep in contact with their friends.

“I do think however, that the access does need to be limited because over exposure can be bad for their health. Also, it is vital that children are monitored and privacy settings are kept in check to ensure no personal information is accessible to strangers.”

By Lexton Snol
PC Advisor
January 3, 2009

Words from the world of technology and social media are among those identified as the “Words of the Year 2009″ in a list commissioned by Oxford University Press.

The New Oxford American Dictionary had already announced the verb ‘unfriend’ (”To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook“) as its word of the year, confirming the social-networking term’s ubiquity.

The new list was chosen by Countdown dictionary expert Susie Dent, who scanned the two billion word Oxford English Corpus database, reports The Telegraph.

“Tweetups” (meetings organised via micro-blogging service Twitter) is also on the list - although the more common derivation “tweet” is not.

Also derived from Twitter is the word “Hashtag” - meaning the # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets that contain similarly tagged items.

“Tag cloud” (a visual depiction of the word content of a Web site, or of user-generated tags attached to online content) was also picked out as one of the words of the year.

And “Slashdot effect” was another tech term included in the list. It means to slow down or crash a small Web site due to a huge increase in traffic when the Web site is linked to another, much more popular one.

“Freemiums” and “Paywalls” demonstrate that the world of free internet access may be under particular attack in 2010.


Words of the Year 2009

Tweetup - noun: a meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter. [from tweet + up on the pattern of MEETUP].

Hashtag - noun: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.

Tag cloud - noun: a visual depiction of the word content of a Web site, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence or frequency of the words or tags depicted.

Slashdot effect - noun: the slowing down or crashing of a small Web site due to a huge increase in traffic when the Web site is linked to another, much more popular one.

Unfriend/defriend - verb: to remove from one’s ‘friends’ list (e.g. on a social networking Web site).

Bossnapping - noun: (in France) the prevention of senior managers from leaving company premises for a period of time by their employees, in order to protest about large-scale redundancies and cutbacks.

Zombie bank - noun: a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support.

Geoengineering/ecohacking - noun: the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.

Jeggings - plural noun: close-fitting leggings made of fabric that resembles denim in appearance [from jeans + leggings].

Minute mentoring - noun: a system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.

Phantonym - noun: a word that looks as it if means one thing but in fact means something quite different. [from 'phantom + antonym] (for example fulsome, used by President Obama to mean ‘full’, when in fact it is now chiefly used in reference to excessive flattery).

Staycation - noun: a holiday spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions.

Simples - exclamation: used to say that something is very easy to achieve [from the 'compare the meerkat' TV advert].

Great Recession - noun: term for the current recession, modelled on the Great Depression.

Freemium - noun: a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.

Paywall - noun: a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site which is only available to paying subscribers.

By David Coursey
December 13, 2009

Facebook’s new privacy controls remain a work in progress a full 24 hours after release and months after they were announced. Responding to criticism over making its users’ Friends Lists public, Facebook is rolling out a new option that allows users to protect their Friends List from viewing or searching.

When Facebook began rolling out its new privacy platform, users began noticing that their Friends List had become public and could not be hidden. The list includes the identities of everyone the user has “Friended” and some users don’t want the information made public.

Businesses and their users should exercise special caution because of the relationships–both business and personal–that may be revealed through a user’s Friend list. These could be mined by competitors or in some cases used to develop competitive intelligence about a target company.

PC World, responding to reader concerns, has spent most of Thursday afternoon and into the evening talking to Facebook representatives, who released the following statement a short time ago:

“We have heard user concerns and we will soon enable people to hide their friend lists. Those who choose to hide their friend lists will not have their lists discoverable through search engines or viewable by other users,” the company said in a prepared statement.

Readers had expressed concern that making Friends Lists public could allow businesses or repressive governments to misuse the information. They felt–with reason–that Facebook’s new privacy controls made the information easier for third parties to misuse.

Here is Facebook’s response:

“More importantly, we believe that Facebook, as demonstrated during the Iran elections and events in multiple other countries since our inception, plays a critical role in allowing people to communicate, organize and stand up against oppressive regimes and there is real value of connecting and sharing, which is what we’re trying to facilitate.”

Thank you for the flag waving, though talking to Facebook, or at least the people Facebook wants me to talk to, I am impressed that they do care and want to get things right–and are willing to change in midstream if necessary.

Facebook told me that it would still be theoretically possible for an application the user had approved for access to the Friend List to misuse the information, and this could, theoretically again, include some sort of rogue app or malware.

Not as clear is what access Facebook’s new-found best friends, Google and Bing, might have to Friend Lists and what they might do with the information they receive. It is possible there is no risk here, but given Facebook’s history of privacy flaps, there is reason to be concerned, too.

My take: I am not 100% clear on what Facebook is doing to protect users’s Friend Lists. I know the information, in the wrong hands, could be very damaging to some users in both their personal and business lives. I believe Facebook has become sensitized to the issue and expect to see changes, perhaps beyond those announced late today.

The rollout of Facebook’s new privacy options has, at a technical level, gone less than smoothly, taking more time than expected. There have also been changes made during the rollout that have added to the confusion.

Facebook users would be wise to revisit their privacy options over the next few days and make the changes they consider appropriate. Even if you have already made changes, it is important to check the options available as things remain fluid.

While I am concerned that changes announced in July and rolled out in December are still not right, Facebook probably deserves credit for responding quickly to unforeseen problems.

By David Coursey
December 10, 2009

As promised, Facebook has begun rolling out new privacy options to its 350 million users.Watch out for the “Everyone” setting.

On Wednesday morning, users began seeing a message offering a new, simplified privacy settings page and the ability to set specific options for every post made to Facebook.

The changes, first announced this summer, again promised last week, and available today, give users much tighter control of who sees what, down to the individual reader, if desired.
Especially important is the new “everyone” setting that determines whether a Facebook post will be seen on other services, such as in Google search results.

Other settings include “only friends” and “friends of friends.” A “customize” option allows users to show or hide a post from specific individuals or user-created lists.

The options are available by clicking on a new “lock” icon that appears next to the “share” button when a Facebook user updates their status. Any setting may be chosen as a default and the default option may be changed as desired.

Facebook also today updated its privacy policy to reflect the changes.
Here is how the “Everyone” setting is described (this may be important to you):

“Information set to ‘everyone’ is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations.

“The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to ‘everyone.’ You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete ‘everyone’ content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.”

As of 8 a.m. Pacific Time today, not all users have been upgraded to the new privacy options. Others were upgraded months ago when Facebook began testing the new options.

My take: Facebook should add even more granularity to the “everyone” option, giving users the ability to opt-in or out of their posts being shared with specific services. It should also include links making it easier to for users to learn what the settings mean.

The description quoted above is complete and reasonably understandable, but is not easy to find. Not difficult, but it requires some looking.

I strongly encourage all Facebook users to visit all the privacy settings pages, especially those for applications and advertising, and make desired changes.

Facebook seems candid about what it does, provides privacy options for users, but it is still up to the individual to make the changes they desire. Not surprisingly, some Facebook defaults are more “open” than many users might desire.

By JR Raphael
November 12, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Hot on the heels of a reported hijacking of hundreds of Facebook groups, a new variation on an old worm is crawling its way into the social network’s walls. Attackers have released an updated, more intelligent version of the notorious Koobface virus, security analysts say–and anyone could become its next victim.

The Facebook Hijack

First, the hijacking: An organization called “Control Your Info” apparently took control of as many as 300 Facebook groups over the past several days. Members added their own logo onto the pages, announcing they’d “hijacked” the groups and providing a link back to their own site.

(Facebook maintains no confidential information was ever exposed–the affected groups, representatives say, were abandoned and open for any member to take over.)

The “Control Your Info” Web site states that the organization’s mission was to expose security holes in social media–a fitting segue to today’s new threat.

Facebook’s New Concern

The new threat has a familiar name. Koobface–which, by the way, is an anagram of the word Facebook–first popped up in mid-2008 and has been pestering users ever since.
The worm typically works by taking over your PC, then sending messages or wall postings to your friends. The messages include links to what appear to be funny videos or risqué photos of people you and your friends know. Anyone who follows the links, however, will ultimately end up infected with the malware themselves–usually by way of a bogus software update that pops up on-screen.

The updated Koobface variation, according to the virus-fighting team at Trend Micro, takes things a step further by automating the entire process. Instead of depending solely upon real accounts to spread the malicious links, the attackers have found a way to have bots do their bidding.
Here’s how Trend Micro says it’s happening: Botnets are registering new Facebook accounts and confirming them via accompanying Gmail addresses, all without any human interaction. The zombie accounts are then joining Facebook groups, adding friends, and posting dangerous links onto those people’s walls.

“This new component behaves like a regular Internet user that starts to connect with friends in Facebook,” explains Jonell Baltazar, an advanced threats researcher with Trend Micro. “The details provided about the account are complete such as a photo, birth date, favorite music, and favorite books.”

The system is even advanced enough to monitor maximum friend levels allowed by Facebook, Baltazar says, to avoid drawing any attention to the ill-intended account.

Facebook Protection

So, what can you do to keep yourself safe from this Koob-faced villain? The steps are nothing you haven’t heard before: Keep your antivirus software up to date, and use some common sense.

Antivirus software will alert you if you click onto a site that’s known to host malware — and that’s exactly where these Koobface links want to take you. The easiest way to stay safe, then, is just to be cautious in choosing what you click.

If you see a link that looks questionable, even if it’s from someone whose name you know, don’t follow it. And if you find yourself on a Web page that’s asking you to download a software update, don’t do it. Instead, close the window and go directly to the software vendor’s own Web page to see if the update is the real deal.

Otherwise, you might end up with Koob smeared all over your face–and, suffice it to say, that’s one fate you’d be better off avoiding.

By Ian Paul
November 9, 2009

Twitter made its new retweet function available to a limited number of users on Thursday, as it tests the new feature before rolling it out across its entire network. Retweets are just one part of what looks like a larger push by the self-proclaimed “information network” to make Twitter.com just as usable as the multitude of free Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, HootSuite and Seesmic. In addition to Retweets, the company also announced on Thursday that it would start editing its trending topics to make the feature more relevant, and last month Twitter launched a Lists feature allowing users to organize their Twitter streams.

Retweets
Retweeting is just a fancy way of saying that one user has re-posted the message of another user. If you were following PC World on Twitter, for example, a typical retweet would look something like this: “PC World: RT @ianpaul trying out Twitter.com.”

Twitter is aiming to improve retweets by highlighting the message creator as opposed to the user who is re-posting the message. So instead of seeing a tweet from the person you follow, the original tweet would show up in your Twitter stream with a small credit at the bottom to let you know who, among the people you follow, retweeted the message.

The new format will look something like this: “Ian Paul: trying out Twitter.com.–retweeted by @pcworld and three others.” This is a great format since it will make it easier for you to discover other interesting people to follow based on what appears in your Twitter stream.

Curating Trending Topics and Lists
Trending topics allows you to see the ten most popular discussion topics on Twitter in real time. The problem is, this list can easily be overtaken by useless memes or pranks–remember the gorilla penis fiasco? Twitter wants to take a little more control over what can get onto its trending topics list by cutting out the noise and highlighting particularly useful or timely discussions. The company says you won’t really notice anything at first, but it hopes to improve the relevance of this feature over time.

Another feature that recently became available to most users is Twitter Lists. This allows you to organize your incoming Tweets into categories like profession, subject matter, family members, and so on.

Twitter Wants You Back
While Twitter’s new features like retweeting and the newly added lists feature are being made available to developers of third-party applications, Twitter’s newest improvements also look like a serious effort to convince users to use Twitter.com instead.

Metrics firm ComScore consistently reports that about 20 million users visit Twitter every month. Add to that information from Tweet Stats (a third-party Twitter metrics site), which typically reports Twitter’s Web traffic hovering around 30% of all Twitter usage, and you can see there’s a huge base of regular Twitter users out there that never, or rarely, visit Twitter.com.   If Twitter’s future plans for monetization include increasing its Web traffic, it’s not hard to see why the company has been so busy tweaking its own user interface in recent months.

The denial-of-service attack that left Twitter inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning is just the latest in a string of problems for the rising star of social media. As the service grows and matures, it’s run into its share of problems, and discontent is easy to find. But today’s DDoS attack goes far beyond fake backlash.

Twitter outages were first reported on Thursday morning, and Twitter confirmed that it had been hit by a denial-of-service attack in a post on its company blog. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” the company said.

In a status report about an hour following its acknowledgement of the attack, Twitter reported that the site was back up, but users still were having trouble reaching it. Twitter users have reported slowness and intermittent outages.

As Twitter tries to restore uninterrupted service, the attack is a reminder of how far external forces will go to cast the company and its service in a negative light.

It was less than a month ago that French hacker stole massive amounts of sensitive information on Twitter, including exhaustive business notes and personal information on employees. This wasn’t a benign “I did it to prove there’s a vulnerability” scenario; the hacker leaked the documents to TechCrunch, which in turn posted much of the site’s business-related documents.

The attack wasn’t the first on Twitter. In April, a cyberattacker by the same alias, Hacker Croll, guessed an employee’s Yahoo Mail password and then gained access to the accounts of actor Ashton Kutcher and singer Britney Spears. A similar attack happened in January.

I bring up these points not to illustrate security issues — though it’s clear that Twitter has them — but to show how Twitter has become a target, as proven again by today’s attack. That’s what happens when you’re a rapidly-growing service, loved by the technology world, but loathed by people who don’t care or don’t understand it.

The backlash is evident elsewhere, too. This week, ESPNcracked down on employee tweeting, effectively ruining for its staff what makes the service so enjoyable in the first place. Earlier, a tool was released that allows people to make money by Tweeting advertisements. Even if Sponsored Tweets doesn’t directly involve the Twitter company itself, it gives the sense that Twitter is a place for selling out.

There are little things, too, such as worm attacks onseveral occasions, spammers increasing in numbers and the general sluggishness that occasionally prevents the site from loading as it should.

If Twitter can’t maintain a hospitable environment for its users, it’ll never achieve its goal of becoming the Web’s pulse. For some individuals, that’d be just fine.