AP Twitter hack prompts fresh look at cyber security needs
Getting hacked on Twitter is fast becoming a rite of passage for big corporations, but Tuesday's attack on the Associated Press could be a tipping point and shows that social networks must do more to keep their users safe, security experts said.
Wider use of two-factor authentication, which can involve an access code being sent to a user on a second device such as a smartphone, is one possible solution. Such a mechanism could be introduced selectively, some experts said, for high profile accounts such as celebrities and large corporations. Read more...
Who owns that Twitter account?
Noah Kravitz built up quite a following at PhoneDog, a mobile-phone news and reviews website. By late 2010 his @PhoneDog_Noah Twitter account had amassed more than 17,000 followers. That was all well and good, until Kravitz resigned and went to work for a competitor.
Kravitz took his followers with him, changing the name on his account to @noahkravitz. And that's when PhoneDog, which was unwilling to let 17,000 fans go that easily, filed a lawsuit against him.
The question of who owns an employee's social networking account when it's used for work-related posts is a legal grey area, as more companies are discovering when they wind up in court trying to keep readers, business contacts and other social connections within the fold. Read more...
Software that lies (so you don’t have to!)
Lately, I've heard a lot about a new website that shows what percentage of someone's Twitter followers are "fake," "inactive" and "good."
If the Fake Follower Check site is accurate, some of the biggest Twitter users, including President Obama, Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber, have thousands or even millions of "followers" who aren't real people.
I've been looking into this phenomenon, and I've been shocked by what I've found. There is, apparently, a massive lies-for-sale industry made up of services that either offer tools to help people lie, or tell lies directly on behalf of their customers.
Popularity lies
How much does it cost to fake popularity? On the cheap side, you can buy 1,000 Twitter followers for $14 on a site called InterTwitter; 5,000 followers cost $43; 100,000 cost $487. Read more...
Scary Apple, Twitter account hacks: How to protect your accounts
Wonder what it's like to have malicious hackers get into every corner of your digital life -- not only your Twitter account, broadcasting embarrassing tweets in your name, but also seizing control of your Apple account and remote wiping your laptop, tablet and phone? Tech journalist Mat Honan outlined in chilling detail how his digital life was hijacked, from racist tweets being sent from his account to losing 18 months of photos he hadn't backed up.
What's especially scary is that the attack didn't require any virus or other devious software; it was all social engineering. Honan managed to make contact with one of the attackers; and in return for not pressing charges, found out how it was done:
1) Hackers scouted out his Twitter account -- they liked the short 3-letter handle -- which linked to Honan's personal Web site. There, they found his Gmail address.
2) Hacker guessed that the Gmail address was also linked to his Twitter account.
3) Hacker went to Google "lost my password" page, entered Honan's email address and saw a partially obscured alternate email address: m••••n@me.com. Read more...
Meet the company that wants to destroy Twitter. It’s Twitter
For years I've marvelled at Twitter, the most commercially and technically clueless company to ever strike it big. Twitter is now hugely popular and millions of people love to use it. They use it in very creative ways. Twitter's success, in retrospect, now looks blindingly obvious. But Twitter has been uniquely inept at taking advantage of its popularity.
Where do we begin? Twitter's technical ineptitude needs little elaboration. After the official logo, the best known Twitter brand is its out-of-service logo, which has become the global emblem for failure. Right on cue, the service seized up and croaked last week.
Now let's turn to its business acumen. Read more...
Twitter crashes day before Olympics kick off
The day before the opening of the 2012 London Olympics that are expected to light up major social networks, Twitter crashed.
The micro-blogging site went down at approximately 11:45 a.m. EST Thursday, according to Twitter's Status page. The site was restored around 1:15 p.m.
Users from several different parts of the country reported that they were without Twitter service.
The crash came the day before the opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics. Read more...
Twitter explains Thursday outage
A Twitter executive last night offered an explanation for the cause of an outage that twice knocked Twitter offline around the world on Thursday.
Twitter first crashed around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. The outage affected all platforms and took down both third-party and Twitter apps on the Android and iOS platforms.
The site returned around 1:15 p.m.
In a blog post on Thursday night, Twitter's vice president of engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh, said company engineers found a cascading bug in one of Twitter's infrastructure components. That means the bug didn't just hit one particular software element, but "cascaded" across the system, he said. "This wasn't due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today," Rawashdeh added. Read more...
Twitter begins gradual rollout of new profile-centric Follower email notifications
It would appear that Twitter is gradually rolling out a new format for emails alerting you when you’ve received new followers.
Just a couple of weeks after introducing a new weekly digest email featuring a list of stories shared on Twitter, along with a sampling of the people that shared those stories. Read more...
Twitter users rally for suddenly unemployed game industry workers
After Curt Schilling's game company, 38 Studios, failed to make a payment on its business loan to Rhode Island on May 1, today's announcement that the entire 350+ person staff had been let go didn't come as much of a surprise. What has the industry talking today is how Twitter is being used to quickly snap up the suddenly available talent from the studio. Read more...
Wake up to the sound of tweets in the morning with The Listening Machine
If you fancy waking up to the sound of the world in 140 characters? Then you will be delighted to know that there’s a way to translate tweets into sound for your own dawn chorus.
Clo Willaerts at the brilliant bnox site notes that twitter in sound translates in weirdly wonderful new ways that could emulate morning activity by our feathered friends as well as our digital ones.
The Listening Machine is an automated system that creates a continuous soundscape based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the UK. Their conversations, thoughts and feelings are translated into musical patters in real time and listeners can tune in through any web-connected device. Read more...
Russia’s Twitter rival Futubra unleashes mobile apps
The Russian answer to Twitter, Futubra, just stepped up its game with the release of apps for iOS, Windows Phone and Android.
Using Futubra without being able to read Cyrillic is a bit tricky. On a desktop or laptop browser, you can rely on Google translate in chrome to help you along, on the mobile this won’t work. So, for now, best for those who can read the content to enjoy the mobile apps.
The interface for the apps is still nice and bright, with neon coloured icons show you where to upload images or follow updates. Read more...
#Campaign: How Twitter is Playing Politics in 2012
Twitter -- the next (digital) battleground state. The social media wars are already underway, just check out Twitter foes David Axelrod, of the Obama campaign, and Eric Fehrnstrom, with the Romney campaign. Axelrod tweeted this photo, saying "How loving owners transport their dogs" -- a shot at Mitt Romney, who in the 1980s transported his dog Seamus in a carrier strapped to the roof. Fehrnstrom shot back after someone realized that in his memoir Obama wrote about eating dog as a boy. Fehrnstrom re-tweeted Axelrod's photo with the message: "In hindsight, a chilling photo." It was a debate hashed out -- or hashtagged out -- entirely on Twitter. Read more...
Google warns the operators of thousands of hacked web sites
The head of Google's Webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter that Google has sent out a message to the webmasters of 20,000 sites informing them that their sites may have been hacked. In the email message, the company warns operators that the affected sites appear to be being used to redirect visitors to a malicious site. Read more...
Twitter open sources MySQL enhancements
Go get the code at GitHub Twitter has open sourced numerous tweaks it has made to MySQL, stating in a blog post that the open source database “is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves.”
The post says that “Due to our scale, we push MySQL a lot further than most companies,” and that the code it has released was developed “to improve the predictability of our services and make our lives easier.” It goes on to say that “we believe in sharing knowledge and that open source software facilitates innovation” and has therefore released a heap of code to GitHub. Read more...
School expels student for swearing on Twitter during non-school hours
From Facebook communications to tweets, you're no doubt already aware that nothing you do online is truly private. But should you have a reasonable expectation that your superiors aren't actively spying on you? That's the question a lot of people are asking after Garrett High School in Indiana expelled a high school senior for cursing over Twitter during off-school hours.
The tweet in question dropped the F-bomb a number of times, but was otherwise non-threatening. It was posted at 2:30 a.m. — a time when the student in question was most assuredly not at school. Still, despite the evidence, the school stands by its decision to expel the student. Read more...