The PC Informant » Social sites

More Facebook scams

Vic Laurie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:03:03 +0000

Some new Facebook scams are circulating. gHacks reports:

According to several reports on websites like Computerworld a new phishing scam is currently in the wild that is trying to get the Facebook login data of Facebook users. Pandalabs, who uncovered the phishing scam, did not release lots of details about the attack other than it mimicked the Facebook login page and displayed an error message after the user entered the Facebook login information. They also mentioned that the fraudulent url would most likely be spread by email but also Blackhat SEO techniques which could mean that the attackers have placed their website in prominent positions in some search engines making users believe that they visit the right Facebook website when in fact they visit the manipulated website.

Pandalabs did release in depth details about a Facebook hacking scam as well. They discovered a website which claimed to hack any Facebook account for $100 payable through Western Union. A user who wants a Facebook account hacked has to register at the website. The Facebook Id of the account that the user wants hacked needs to be entered into the form on the website. A script will then pull the username from that account and mimic a hacking attempt.

Social networking changing the language

Vic Laurie — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:12:09 +0000

I guess it’s a sign of the times. Terms from social networking are quickly changing status from being specialized slang to becoming recognized in general language reference works. The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen “unfriend” as 2009 Word of the Year.

It may be descriptive but I still think it’s a clumsy term.

Is the Internet killing story telling?

Vic Laurie — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:21:08 +0000

Writing at the the Times (UK), Ben Macintyre bemoans the effect of the Internet’s communication methods on our attention span and our ability to concentrate. He says that the constant flow of small snippets of information is changing our capacity to stick with anything for long and that narratives are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

Another Facebook phish

Vic Laurie — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:13:50 +0000

The popularity of Facebook means it’s an inviting target for the cybercrooks. Another phishing attack is going around. TrendMicro describes the exploit:

Trend Micro security experts received email messages that supposedly came from Facebook. It asks recipients to update their login credentials for security purposes. It then instructs them to click the URL provided in the email message. When the user clicks the URL, it points them to a spoofed Facebook website where they are required to input their password only as their email address has been automatically filled up.

An appliance just for tweets

Vic Laurie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:47:13 +0000

Are you a devoted tweeter? Then there’s an appliance just for you. Its sole function is tweeting. It’s called TwitterPeek and CNET describes it:

A new gadget designed specifically for people who want to tweet on the go was launched Tuesday by gadget maker Peek.

The device, dubbed TwitterPeek, does one thing and one thing only: it lets people tweet. It doesn’t access e-mail. It doesn’t make phone calls. It tweets. That’s it.

TwitterPeek, which looks like a smartphone, features a QWERTY keyboard and comes in black or aqua blue.

The idea behind TwitterPeek is simple. After buying the device, users need only to input their Twitter credentials to get going. The gadget lets them tweet, reply, retweet, send direct messages, and download followers. It supports one account at a time. Users can also view TwitPics by clicking the “view content” option from the TwitterPeek menu. The company claims its battery lasts three to four days with average usage.

Not everybody thinks this is a good idea. At PC World, David Coursey says:

Who needs this device? That’s a fair question. Smartphones already have Twitter applications, so this is not a great second or third device to carry around.

Another skeptic is Colin Gibbs at GigaOm:

For those who thought its email-only device targeted too broad a market, Peek Inc. has gone even more niche — and more absurd — with the first mobile device dedicated entirely to Twitter.

For a hands-on review, there is John Biggs at CrunchGear. He seems to like it.

About Facebook and other social sites

Vic Laurie — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:26:18 +0000

I am not personally involved with social sites but a lot of people are. Recently, I have run across a number of articles and posts about Facebook and other social sites and they seemed worth passing on:

An Application to Help Scrub Those Regrettable Photos From Facebook
An article in the New York Times about a Facebook application called “Wisk-It”
How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession
At TechCrunch, the CEO of an advertising agency reveals spam techniques
Facebook 101
Search Engine Watch article on how to set up and use a Facebook account
In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC?
TechCrunch discusses the role of two premier social sites and the future of the social Web
Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches
New York Times article on problems caused by the death of owners of online sites

Social searching from Google

Vic Laurie — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:25:10 +0000

Google has unveiled another form of search. It’s social searching.

More easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other public content from your social circle.

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

To see even more social content you can click the “Show options” link at the top of the results page and then click on the “Social” link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed).

More about Google Social Search is at Search Engine Watch. Also, Danny Sullivan discusses the service at Search Engine Land.

Adjust your mindset for social networks

Vic Laurie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:32:41 +0000

Most of us are pretty decent folk; we don’t go around trying to be malicious or looking for ways to cheat our neighbors. In our day-to-day life we encounter a fairly limited number of people and we tend to assume they are straightforward until proven otherwise. Human society as we know it would be unworkable if we had to regard everybody we met as potential thieves or worse. So we are accustomed to extending a certain amount of trust to others. In some situations- for example, buying a used car- we know we should be wary but ordinarily we give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not out to get us.

Unfortunately, the Internet has no resemblance to the ordinary environment we are used to. The rules are different. Our ordinary life experience doesn’t hold. The Internet exposes us to hundreds of millions of people all at once. Most of them may be just like us but any very large group contains criminals and other sociopaths. It only takes a small percentage of bad actors to make the Internet a place where precautions must be used.

In fact, using the Internet requires a change of mindset. We cannot rely on strangers to be trustworthy. Instead of trusting, we must approach Internet activities with the assumption that what we do can be exploited in undesirable ways. Personally, I am surprised at how careless people are with what they put on social sites. In their minds they are sharing with a few friends and relatives. Actually, they may be revealing personal information and pictures to a lot of strangers in far off countries who will not hesitate to use what is posted for shady purposes. Even if the purposes are not shady, the information may be used in ways that are disagreeable.

Sunday’s New York Times has an article discussing the consequences of posting pictures of your children. It begins with the experience of one mother who put up pictures of her children on Flickr for relatives to see:

Then a friend sent her an e-mail message with the kind of subject line no parent cares to read: “Oh no — it’s Gracie.”

The message contained a link to Orkut, a social networking site popular in Brazil. Someone had created a fake profile, using headshots of Mrs. Gwozdz’s 4-year-old daughter.

“They gave her a fake name, Melodie Cuthbert, and a relationship status that said she was interested in making friends and dating men,” Mrs. Gwozdz recalled in a recent telephone interview. Other Orkut members had given the profile a “sexy” rating of two and a half hearts.

Unless a social site has strict privacy controls, remember that you are not just sharing with friends and relatives. You are providing material for any one of hundreds of millions of people to do with as they wish. And the Internet is a perpetual archive. What’s “cute” today may look very foolish in ten years time. And even privacy controls are no guarantee. So adjust your mindset and think twice about what you post.

Is Twitter overloaded?

Vic Laurie — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:17:33 +0000

On the heels of the Pew study reported in the previous post comes Harry McCracken asking in his Technologizer blog, Is Twitter Basically Broken? Lately, Twitter has been reporting a lot of errors due to an overload of traffic and McCracken complains:

For the moment, I lump Twitter in with my cell-phone service–it works most of the time, but I’m not the least bit startled when it doesn’t….

Social networking keeps growing

Vic Laurie — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:04:55 +0000

The social networking sites just keep growing. The Pew Internet & American Life Project claims that 19 percent of the people who use the Internet also use one or more social networking sites:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

The Pew survey also gives a demographical breakdown of social networking users. One interesting statistic is that more women (21%) than men (17%) use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others.