Displaying items by tag: Facebook

Leveraging the hype around the 2012 Olympics in London cyber criminals are pushing out malware via spam emails claiming that Gabrielle Douglas, who won a gold medal in Women's  Gymnastics All Around, will face lifetime ban from sport.  Obviously they are expecting that false news about doping scandals will help a lot in spreading the malware. The email is suggesting a link that will open up a false youtube page and prompt you to download  Adobe Flash plugin to view the content. Sophos, which first reported on this spam, detects the malware as Troj/Agent-XIK and Troj/JSRedir-IA.

Digg is officially back online and already it is off to a bad start. The newly reinvented page has decided that instead of using their own login procedure they are going to require people to log in with Facebook. This is probably one of the worst things that Digg could have done. Almost anything would have been preferable to using Facebook for the login path. Digg’s excuse of doing this to limit spam is not going to fly with many people either as there are a number of methods to prevent spam and still allow people to setup their own accounts.

Although Facebook is a social networking giant with hundreds of millions of users there are two things that it has been unable to do so far. One if make a working mobile app for either iOS or Android and the other is to figure out how to make advertising work for them. Now the concept of social advertising is very old. It goes waaaayyyyy back to the days of daytime TV when advertisers would market their products to their perceived audiences. In fact because of the tendency to advertise washing powder during mid-day dramas the term Soap Opera was coined. So pushing the right ads to your audience is nothing new.

So Digg will be re-launching on Wednesday August 1st with a completely new design and a more image friendly interface (according to the developers at Betaworks). Right now the question on everyone’s mind is will the new redesign and focus make any difference? A reinvented Digg faces massive competition from sites like Reddit, Facebook and even Google+ so how will this new social sharing site fare?

Well looks like we were close to the mark with our comments this morning about a Facephone. If you remember we had talked about the rumors that continually popup about this legendary device and some of the “indicators” that have had analysts and journalists even claiming to know when one would launch. So far we have heard everything from it will be Nokia/Microsoft effort to an HTC/Android product. The problem was that most guesses about this were based on the simple fact that Facebook hired people from Apple and Palm. What they did not do was really look at what those people did and what they are doing at Facebook.

As we near the launch of two new phones the rumors are building again around a Facebook phone (dubbed the Facephone by many). This is a rumor is something we have covered on more than one occasion and while we still think that it would be a flop (for many reasons) the rumors are interesting when we take a look at their origins and the companies they involve. The latest one involves HTC as the potential partner with Android as the base OS. It comes on the heels of new information about the team of developers that Facebook has picked up from Apple and Palm.

If you have been around computers for long you might remember the “I Love You” malware or the Nimda malware. Both of these relied on our habits of opening up links and attachments without out considering the email or subject. What made Nimda and I Love You even more dangerous is that they came from people we know. Now it looks like there is a new Facebook malware running around the internet. The new malware that was caught by Sophos Labs takes advantage of user trust of links claiming to have posts about them. It is an often used form of social engineering that has been effective ever since some of the first Spam malware hit the net.

It looks like Facebook has already begun sharing user information with Law Enforcement; possibly without consent and in violation of some wiretapping laws. The news comes on the heels of a Reuters Interview with an investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In this interview Jeffrey Duncan said that Facebook contacts law enforcement when they find a post or conversation (through the Facebook messaging system) that contains possible criminal activity.

There are a few laws that govern a modern market. One of the most basic is the law of supply and demand. If there is a short supply and a high demand prices will tend to go up. This is because the people that want these products are willing to pay more to get them. Apple is a master of this and calculates their launches to take advantage of this. On the other side of this coin is plentiful supply and low demand. Here, well you can imagine that people will do whatever they can to clear inventory.

Google has agreed to settle with the FTC over accusations that they bypassed security features in Safari to track users’ internet habits. Although Google often comments that they maintain the highest privacy and security standards for its users they have been repeatedly in the news for violations of privacy. Let’s face it, Google wants and needs data they really do not care so much about how they get it as long as they do. They have been in trouble over street view, Google Maps, Google Docs, Chrome, and now for tracking people when they specifically use features to prevent them from being tracked.