Technology Info

Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case. (link)

MySpace made good on a promise today to let users take their data with them to other websites and even competing social networks. The social network will offer a rich set tools for third-party developers and enforce strict standards to protect users’ data and privacy.

Last month, MySpace surprised the industry by announcing its Data Availability Initiative, a plan that MySpace’s CEO Chris DeWolfe summed up as “the walls around the garden are coming down.” Until recently, most social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, haven’t offered easy methods for users to move or share their data with other sites, let alone competing networks. Aside from some kind of hacked backdoor method or a third-party scraping utility, you couldn’t easily port the photos or all the personal information you’ve added to MySpace over to Facebook or Google’s Orkut. You would have to sign up at those other sites and reupload those photos all over again manually. (link)

Facebook has overtaken rival social network MySpace for the first time - provoking an angry outburst from the man who paid $580m for MySpace only three years ago.

Facebook had 123m unique visitors in May, an increase of 162% on May 2007, according to the latest Comscore figures.

By contrast, MySpace drew 114.6m uniques, with visitors growing by only 5% since May 2007.

It’s the first time Facebook has managed a significant lead over its chief rival, after the pair were almost level-pegging in Comscore’s April figures.

The news hasn’t gone down well with News Corp boss, Rupert Murdoch, whose company bought MySpace back in 2005. He claims Facebook has “done a great job of being flavour of the month the last six months of last year,” but that Facebook isn’t a real social network, claiming the site is “just a directory”. (link)

The 2007 rise of Storm was a harbinger – this new kind of social malware is continuing to grow and increase in sophistication. New, widespread malware botnets which share characteristics with Storm include Srizbi, Bobax and Kraken/Kracken. IronPort is tracking these botnets and implementing protective measures against their infection mechanisms. In addition, IronPort monitors and identifies new threats designed to exploit software vulnerabilities (such as those found in application like Adobe Flash Player), as well as website redirects, Google exploits, and spam attacks that take advantage of “Out of Office” autoreplies to validate email addresses and even hijack corporate mail servers.

For most of the last thirty years, spam has been an annoyance, created by individual amateurs. Those days are over. As Storm shows, today’s extremely organized, technically savvy, well funded malware efforts are comparable in scale to legitimate software vendors. Talented engineering teams have now moved to the dark side, and are a threat to every organizational network and individual with an email account and Web browser. (link)

A new study across a wide range of social networks sheds more insight into the ways men and women approach these service. As it turns out, women are more likely to be in it for the socializing, while men are more likely to use these sites for business.

Social web search company Rapleaf performed a study of over 30 million users across sites like Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, and more. Each user included in the study had at least one friend on one of these services, and Rapleaf broke its results down according to the number of connections users had: “Social Networkers” have 1-100 friends, “Connectors” have 100-1,000 friends, “Super Connectors” have 1,000-10,000 friends, and “Uber Connectors” have 10,000 friends or more.

Overall, 53.57 percent of Rapleaf’s massive study group were female, while 46.43 percent were male. Social Networkers with 1-100 friends made up about 80 percent of the study group, among which women had an average of 62 friends with men at 57. Rapleaf says women are more likely to be Social Networkers, but doesn’t offer exact numbers in that regard. (link)

Yahoo Inc. plans to make its website a social hub by hosting applications from other online services, part of the Internet pioneer’s effort to spawn more advertising opportunities.

“We are going to rewire the entire experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension,” Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer, said Thursday at a “Web 2.0″ conference that drew a crowd of more than 1,000.

The more open platform copies a concept that already has been embraced by Internet search leader Google Inc. and a variety of online social hangouts, including Facebook Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace.com. (link)

Authorities have unearthed a California woman’s plot to steal the identity of the recently deceased. She executed her alleged criminal undertaking by first employing Internet genealogy software to reap the Social Security numbers of dead individuals, and then using the numbers and other information collected on the Internet to convince credit card companies to change the mailing addresses associated with the accounts to the addresses of her rented mailboxes.

Tracy Kirkland and her cadre of fictitious aliases stand accused of mail fraud, fraudulent use of unauthorized access devices, aggravated identity theft, unauthorized possession of access devices, misuse of social security numbers, and exceeding authorized access to a protected computer to further a fraud. According to the indictment filing, the scheme began in 2005 and has since allowed Kirkland to accumulate over 100 accounts. (link)

The family of a teenage girl who says she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old man she met on MySpace.com asked a U.S. appeals court Monday to revive their lawsuit against the social networking website.

A federal judge in Austin, Texas, dismissed the US$30 million suit in February 2007, rejecting the family’s claim that MySpace has a legal duty to protect its young users from sexual predators.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks also ruled that interactive computer services like MySpace are immune from such lawsuits under the Communications Decency Act of 1996. (link)

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it was joining rival Google Inc.’s initiative for creating photo-sharing and other social tools that work across the web.

News Corp.’s MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced Tuesday that they were forming a non-profit organization, the OpenSocial Foundation, to ensure that the platform remains neutral and viable.

The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of websites. The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more.

By contrast, sites that haven’t joined OpenSocial typically rely on unique coding that has prevented widgets developed for its sites from working at other places on the web. (link)

The online social networking site Facebook says it has fixed a security loophole discovered by a Vancouver computer technician that allowed people to look at the private photos of users.

The news follows Facebook Inc.’s announcement last week that it was implementing tougher measures to allow members to restrict access to their personal profiles.

But Byron Ng, a Vancouver computer technician looking for flaws, was able to use computer coding to pull up private pictures of Facebook members and their friends. The private photos included those of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Nicholas drinking a beer with friends. (link)