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Samsung Laptops - Now With Secret Keyloggers?

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 30 (News) - In Network World's Security Strategies Alert newsletter, Mohammed Hassan details his discovery of StarLogger keyloggers on several different Samsung laptops. Keyloggers record every keystroke on a computer's keyboard and email them to a recipient. This keylogger was hidden and pre-loaded on the computers he tested, making it a significant step beyond the "Sony BMG rootkit fiasco" from 2005. There, keyloggers were loaded onto users' computers from music CDs with the ostensible goal of limiting illegal music use....

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Why Facebook's New Groups Will Change the Way You Use Facebook

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 07 (Opinion) - People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more. Facebook's addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously available will increase the time users spend on the site, the number of different ways they use Facebook and the importance of the already very important social network in the lives of those who use it. There are three thematic reasons why this is true: the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations. The new feature runs some risk of being too complicated, though. Sponsor Signal to Noise The creation of groups in any set of subscriptions, and that's what your Facebook social graph is thanks to the News Feed, is a key way to offer users an option to change the signal to noise ratio of what they are reading moment-by-moment. Users will continue to spend some time in the bulk Live Feed, seeing the most recent updates from everyone they have added as a friend. They will spend some time in the News Feed, seeing general interest updates from the people they have interacted with the most. And now they will spend some time in their Groups pages, where they know what to expect and where there is a social price paid for posting "off topic" content. Focused conversations and collaboration in Groups will differ substantially from the old Facebook experience of undifferentiated broadcast. People will start using Facebook for new things - planning events, for example. It's not just a social network anymore. Now it's also a newsgroup, a planning tool and more. Note that this is very different from the creation of Lists on Twitter. That organizes all statements shared by particular users grouped by a topic, but not necessarily only discussing that topic. The signal to noise ratio will be far superior on Facebook, but the discovery of serendipitous content relevant only because of who it was shared by - that will be better on Twitter, or on the Facebook lists that the company says only 5% of users took the time to create. There are some things that Twitter lists will still be better at doing than Facebook Groups. Context A message posted to Facebook in general has only your friendship as context, and as Mark Zuckerberg said today - there's no clear definition of what it means to be friends with someone on Facebook. In the new Groups, messages will be written and read with several other sources of context in mind: the topic of the group, who invited a user to the group and related content in the form of shared editable documents and group chats. A simple example: people who do work in complicated fields will now be able to post more high-context content to topical Groups than they may have felt comfortable sharing in their bulk News Feed made up of non-specialist friends and family. All the sudden, Facebook is a place to have deep topical conversations, not just lowest-common-denominator bulk public conversations. That's a dramatic shift. Privacy We, and others, have been saying for 18 months that a more contemporary understanding of privacy would lead Facebook not just to respect the public/private wishes of users, but also to make it easy for the contextual integrity of communication to be respected. No photos from Friday night at the bar being shown in Church, and no audio tape of your prayers at Church being played for laughs from your friends at the bar again later. Yet that's what Facebook has pushed people towards - all content being publicly visible and shared with all people, regardless of the context. Until today. Zuckerberg spoke to this concern extensively today. The groups feature, at least in theory, will let you talk with friends about what's relevant to the groups they belong to, and not about the things that aren't relevant to them. That's a good privacy move, but it's also something Zuckerberg rightly says will encourage people to post more content. The new feature does add another layer of complication to the whole Facebook experience. "The groups work sounded promising, if they can offer something that satisfies the same needs as the little mailing lists that people either formally or informally create now," says social network data analyst Pete Warden. "I'm still worried that they're taking the same approach to privacy that Microsoft takes to security. Their space-shuttle control panel approach is like having lots of noisy popups, people are confused and learn to ignore them. Far better if you can have a really simple story. Even with something as simple as open/closed for groups, it's still too much for most people. Look at the whole 'journolist' scandal - participants obviously weren't thinking through the fact that their messages were ending up in hundreds of people's inboxes. Most people don't have developed the 'street-smarts' to navigate even comparatively simple privacy models. I still regularly reply to Twitter DMs on my phone, and forget to add 'd' to the start of the message, sending the reply to my whole world." I'm not so sure. I think people will be able to handle these changes to Facebook. The interface may require a little more work, but it's pretty good so far. I think people will find it useful, as a sub-stream of their bulk News Feed. I think they will find the signal-to-noise, context and privacy gains compelling enough that it will lead people to use Facebook more, and in new ways. Discuss

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Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Richard MacManus - Sep. 16 (Review) - One of the more interesting startup battles in recent times has been Tumblr vs. Posterous, two light blogging services that make it easy for anyone to publish 'found' things very quickly. However for all of Posterous' hard work and bluster, it's been Tumblr that has grown exponentially over the past year.

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Want to Read Good Journalism? Try NewsTrust's New Personalized Filtering Tool

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 17 (News Report) - Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

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The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Sarah Perez - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

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5 Great Ways to Contribute to Social Media

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - May. 19 (Opinion) - There's no doubt that the focus of the web is shifting to the community. At the forefront of this shift is social media. Social media can be loosely defined as the movement of community contributions in an effort to help one another. There's plenty of giving, taking, promoting, and marketing. In an effort to also contribute, here are 5 great ways to contribute to social media.

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CNN to Launch Completely User Generated News Site

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Josh Catone - Feb. 12 (Opinion) - The new site, according to Mediaweek who got an advanced look at the site, will be completely open in terms of what users can upload. Users will be in charge of deciding what constitutes news, and which submissions should be removed from the site. "The community will decide what the news is," CNN News EVP Susan Grant told Mediaweek. "We are not going to discourage or encourage anything -- iReport will be completely unvetted." (Though CNN will monitor the site for inappropriate content.)

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Google - The Ultimate Money Making Machine

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:28:26 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Alex Iskold - Apr. 11 (Special Report) - In addition to being one of the top three online destinations, Google - through its text ads strategy - has managed to weave itself into the very fabric of the Web. In doing this, the company freed itself from even Internet geography and became ubiquitous. By empowering companies and individuals to publish Google ads on their sites, Google solved the unlimited supply and demand problem in one fell swoop. So how does Google compare to Starbucks, which is a very good money making machine in the real world? The key differences between Google and Starbucks are: * Starbucks spends money on expansion, but Google ads spread themselves; * Starbucks spends a lot of money on maintenance, Google spends little; * Starbucks spends money on marketing, but businesses flock to Google because it just works; * Starbucks relies on people, Google relies on software. These differences make Google by far the more attractive business, compared to Starbucks. To put it simply, Google has almost no friction.

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Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:54:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Alex Iskold - Feb. 13 (Opinion) - One of the central concepts in Complex Systems is Emergence. It is this automagical process through which elements of a system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and chemistry becomes biology. It is how web 1.0 evolved into web 2.0, and how that, in turn, will become the next web. While the exact mechanics of emergence is complicated and far from being completely understood, scientists know that a new system emerges as a combination of its elements and their interactions. In other words, complex systems are really networks - where elements interact with each other and give rise to a new system. Perhaps today we are witnessing one of the most vivid examples of emergence - the remixing of the world wide web. The parts of the new web have crystallized - blogs, photos, video, audio, maps, RSS, social network profiles and even plain old HTML pages have formed an impressive network, that now can be mined and remixed. Mashups are really nothing new, the web has been a programmable oyster for at least a few years now.

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Nobody Knows You're A Dog 2.0

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:49:29 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Jitendra Gupta - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - On the internet it is easy to pretend to be somebody else. Don't like your name, adopt a new one. Don't like the way you look, Photoshop your picture. Think you are too young or too old, select a new age. How is anybody going to find out anyway? As the now classic cartoon goes: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.the now classic cartoon goes: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

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