Feedky is a new RSS based video mashup tool which allows you to receive all the videos of your interest which are uploaded everyday in such pages as YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vpod, Google Video, Yahoo Video and Flickr. Just write tags or key words of what you are interested in and Feedky creates a personal address automatically which you can use as RSS Feed or look at the results on a webpage. You don’t have to register, but if you do, it enables you to organize & edit all the tags.
Just write a list of tags on Feedky’s homepage and it helps you to be up to date with all videos which are uploaded in the above mentioned video services.
Feedky keeps you posted and saves you time. Feedky sends you a notice everytime there is a new related video.
YouTube announced a new personalized homepage and improved email notifications based on user feedback.
Facebookannounced that it opened 55 new languages this week for translation by the community. Facebook is available in 20 languages today. They five months ago, we launched the first translated version of Facebook in Spanish
According to Reuters, the world's top cellphone maker Nokia agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services. Plazes provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities.
24/06/2008 – Tuesday
According to Reuters, Nokia will pay USD 410 million for the remaining shares in UK-based Symbian and make its software royalty-free to boost phone sales and respond to new rivals such as Google. Symbian's software is used in two-thirds of smartphones -- handsets with computer-like capabilities -- and 6 percent of all cellphones, but new platforms such as Google's Android and Apple's iPhone could challenge its dominance.
BBC wrote that Visa, the world's largest credit card network, is paying $2m (£1m) to promote its small business service on popular social networking site Facebook. The company is giving $100 (£51) advertising credits to the first 20,000 US business start-ups that download its service via Facebook.
ZDNet Blog: The Social Web - Twitter, has confirmed its much rumored third round of funding, which includes two new investors: Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions.
Animoto, the web application that allows users to quickly and easily create personalized, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music, is announcing their first commercial-use service called Animoto for Business, according to TechCrunch.
25/06/2008 – Wednesday
According to Mashable, Live radio social network BlogTalkRadio has just closed on a $4.6 million Series A round of financing, led by Scott Sipprelle and The Kraft Group. Having launched nearly two years ago, BlogTalkRadio simplifies the act of self-broadcasting by providing individual radio stations where users can have a live show using just their phones.
ReadWriteWeb wrote that Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon. With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.
TechCrunch reported that Digg competitor Mixx launched an extension to its groups feature that founder Chris McGill describes as “Ning for social media”. Users can now set up Mixx community sites on their own subdomains. Administrators have the power to brand them visually, post editorial content, and even make some revenue off advertisements. Others can join as members and begin submitting items as they would regularly on Mixx. All submissions (stories, images, and videos) can be made just to a particular community, or to the Mixx site as a whole as well.
26/06/2008 – Thursday
According to Ars Technica, MySpace announced to let users take their data with them to other websites and even competing social networks. The social network will offer a rich set of tools for third-party developers and enforce strict standards to protect users' data and privacy.
Mashable wrote that the latest update to iGoogle’s sandbox promised more social capabilities for developers, with the biggest enhancement being the support for Open Social applications in activity streams. This version of iGoogle is now available for limited testing, pushing the social capabilities of the start page even further.
Mashable also reported that the much-hyped natural language search engine Powerset has been acquired by Microsoft for north of $100 million according to VentureBeat. The search engine, which presently only lets you search Wikipedia articles, works by allowing users to enter in queries the way they would speak them, for example, searching for “what is the numeric value of pi?” as opposed to typing “pi numeric value” on Google or Yahoo. Hence, the name “natural search.”
Reuters: Microsoft has agreed to buy Portuguese mobile software company MobiComp in the U.S. software giant's biggest-ever investment in Portugal, Microsoft's chief in Portugal said on Thursday. Microsoft's head in Portugal, Nuno Duarte, said Microsoft intends to turn MobiComp into a research and development unit in Portugal after the acquisition.
27/06/2008 – Friday
The chairman of Microsoft and one of the world's richest men, Bill Gates, is stepping down from his job running the world's largest software company, BBC reported.
According to last100, Google today made its own contribution to solving the PC to TV problem with the release of Google Media Server. The Windows-only software works in conjunction with Google’s desktop search application - Google Desktop - to locate various media (photos, music and video) stored on your PC and make it available for streaming over a home network to any UPnP compatible or DLNA ‘certified’ device, such as a PlayStation 3.
Wired reported that a Turkish hacking group calling itself NetDevilz temporarily took control of the websites of two of the world's leading internet regulatory bodies, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
29/06/2008 – Sunday
TechCrunch: Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning and the former CTO of AOL, has joined the board of directors of Facebook.
I stumbled upon this slide of Dutch internet strategy adviser Freek Bijl at theNEXTweb.com. The aim of this presentation is to help to understand the meaning of a complex yet very popular web related buzzword: Web 3.0 (aka Semantic Web).
According to Wikipedia, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was asked to define Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 at the Seoul Digital Forum in May 2007. He responded: “Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think you've just invented Web 3.0. But if I were to guess what Web 3.0 is, I would tell you that it's a different way of building applications... My prediction would be that Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as applications which are pieced together. There are a number of characteristics: the applications are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone, the applications are very fast and they're very customizable. Furthermore, the applications are distributed virally: literally by social networks, by email. You won't go to the store and purchase them... That's a very different application model than we've ever seen in computing.” (You can also find this interview at YouTube.)
Freek Bijlgives a relatively simple explanation using the analogy of a stamp collection…
According to StopBadware.org, with 52% of identified badware sites, China hosts far more sites than any other country. The U.S. is second with 21%. No other country hosts more than 4% of the world’s badware sites, though a total of 106 countries host at least one infected site and 38 countries host at least a hundred.
Using data from Google’s Safe Browsing initiative, StopBadware.org analyzed over 200,000 websites found to engage in badware behavior. StopBadware.org maintains in its Badware Website Clearinghouse an updated copy of the list of active badware websites generated by Google’s Safe Browsing initiative.
StopBadware.org calculated the badware sites per million Internet users for the world which is 210 sites per million: It is clear that further research is needed to identify the parties that are most likely to be willing and able to take action against badware sites, especially in China, and to engage in conversation with these parties.
The data from Google limit the analysis in two ways. First, the methods Google uses to identify badware websites are limited to capturing certain common varieties of badware behavior. Second, while Google has an extensive cache representing much of the web, it is unlikely to be completely comprehensive. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the case that Google scans all web content for badware with the same frequency.
Since 2001, the US has fallen from 4th in the world in broadband penetration down to 15th in the world today. While American consumers face high prices and few choices, many of our European and Asian counterparts have achieved the goals of universal deployment and competitive markets. Returning to the top of international rankings would translate into millions of new jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in increased economic activity for the US. While the US is the birthplace of the Internet, and home to many of its greatest ideas and innovators, in the short time since Internet access became publicly available, the US has failed to deliver Internet’s benefits to everyone.
InternetforEveryone.org would like to make a change: InternetforEveryone.org is a national initiative of public interest, civic and industry groups that are working to see that the Internet continues to drive U.S. economic growth and prosperity. nlip.tv, eBay.com, Google, Skype, Vuze are among the numerous member organizations.
Why change is needed High-speed Internet access is revolutionizing the ways we do business, participate in government, and connect with the world. Yet in the US only 35 percent of homes with less than USD 50,000 in annual income have a high-speed Internet connection. Moreover, nearly 20 million Americans live in areas that are not served by a single broadband provider; tens of millions more live in places where there is just a single choice for high-speed Internet service.
High-speed Internet access can connect people and communities that might not otherwise interact. Unfortunately, broadband's promise is not being realized equally across all racial and ethnic groups in our country. Only 40 percent of racial and ethnic minority households have access to broadband, while 55 percent of non-Hispanic white households are connected. We have the potential to deliver abundant broadband capacity at prices we all can afford. Yet US consumers pay far too much for far too little compared to citizens in other countries. We have the eighth-highest monthly rates for broadband service among leading developed nations In real terms, this means Internet users in Japan pay about half the price for an Internet connection that's 20 times faster than what's commonly available to people in the United States.
Open Internet access makes free speech a reality for everyone. Freedom of the press extends only to those who own one -- or so the saying goes. It once rang true in a world of newspapers, radio and television stations, and cable networks. But the Internet has changed all that, delivering the press -- and in theory its freedoms -- to any person with a good idea and a connection. Yet powerful political and economic interests are exploring new ways to filter or block user information on the free-flowing Web.
America's digital decline is a troubling problem that must be faced now. There is no single right answer. Putting America back on top and bringing open, high-quality, affordable Internet connections into every home will require a comprehensive and innovative approach. It will require input from federal, state and local governments, businesses large and small, nonprofit organizations and public advocates, civic groups, churches and schools. Everyone must play a role.
Key principles of action The InternetforEveryone.org initiative calls on Congress and the president to act in the public interest by enacting a plan for the wired and wireless Internet built upon the following principles: Access / Every home and business in America must have access to a high-speed, world class communications infrastructure. Choice / Every consumer must enjoy real competition in online content as well as among high-speed Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds. Openness / Every Internet user should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce online in an open market without gatekeepers or discrimination. Innovation / The Internet should continue to create good jobs, foster entrepreneurship, spread new ideas and serve as a leading engine of economic growth.
According to a new press release published by the European Commission, the EU has invested over EUR 4 billion in Information Society research complementing the €100 billion invested by Member States and private companies, according to an independent expert report, chaired by former Finnish Prime Minister Esko Aho, which analyzed the effectiveness of Information Society research under the EU's 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development between 2003 and 2006.
Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding’s first reaction to the report: "The Aho Report should be a wake-up call for all policy makers responsible for economic policy, research and budgetary rules. The €4 billion spent on high-tech research is a considerable amount of taxpayer's money. However, Europe does not get the most out of it in terms of growth, jobs and innovation. The Aho Report has rightly concluded that the effectiveness of Europe's high-tech research is too often stifled by red tape, a lack of venture capital and a risk-averse mentality in both national and European administrations."
Two important and urgent measures will be proposed by Reding: “One measure for the Commission to explore is to centralize and focus EU research in one department. We should also better exploit public-private partnerships allowing for more flexibility under the EU's rules.”
Main recommendations of the report:
It is recommended that efforts are made to continue to consolidate public-private partnerships of a more permanent nature, such as Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) from the 7th Framework Programme.
It is recommended to continue the effort to ensure that support for SMEs and for large firms is not “compartmentalised” into different measures or tools.
A platform should be created within the scope of the 7th Framework Programme for new and high-growth companies to meet venture capital investors.
Encourage participation from outside Europe in all projects. Participation from both developing and industrialised non-European countries should be promoted.
Internationalise the advisory system – e.g. the IST Advisory Group – by including top scientists and engineers from around the world
Reflect the latest international developments and challenges in the work programme. A more flexible approach may be needed to integrate new, interesting developments in the field faster.
Focus the research effort on creating and sustaining world leadership where Europe already has a comparative advantage and where Europe has a new opportunity to take the lead. Europe should be selective and not attempt to become a world leader in every area.
The eInfrastructures approach should be expanded to more application-oriented and user-oriented platforms in other sectors.
The Panel recommends that accounting control in JTIs is carried out by Member States and participating companies, with a minimum of intervention at the Community level.
According to a press release of the European Commission, a Commission plan was approved yesterday to make Europe a hub for developing digital technologies designed to help older people to continue living independently at home.The proposal will provide some additional EUR 150 million funding to a new European Joint Research Programme, resulting in a total investment of over EUR 600 million. The program will fund important development projects since by 2020, 25% of the EU's population will be over 65.
Through this new program companies will be able to develop highly innovative digital products and services to improve the lives of older people at home, in the workplace and in society in general. Smart devices for improving security at home, mobile solutions for vital sign monitoring and user friendly interfaces for those with impaired vision or hearing – all of which will improve the quality of life of elderly people, their careers and families. 20 EU Member States, as well as Israel, Norway and Switzerland will participate in this Joint Research Programme.
Between now and 2013, the Commission, the EU Member States and the private sector will together invest more than EUR 1 billion in research and innovation for ageing well, including EUR 600 million from the new Joint Research Programme and EUR 400 million from the EU's seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.
EU research and innovation in this area has already a successful track record in creating innovative ICT solutions for elderly people. Two good examples are MobilAlarm, a tracking service allowing older persons to initiate an alarm call and get support whenever and wherever they need or want to do so and I2HOME, the world's first standardized remote control for domestic appliances, making televisions, heating systems, microwaves and washing machines more accessible for people with physical or cognitive impairments.
Ars Technica – More bloggers than ever are being arrested around the world, highlighting the dangers of citizen journalism, according to a new report from the University of Washington.
NYT Bits Blog – Some bloggers call for a boycott of the Associated Press over its plan to help define how much of its content can be used on other Web sites. The anger misses more than 100 years of legal fights over whether paraphrasing the A.P.'s news articles constitutes unfair competition.
17/06/2008 – Tuesday
Mashable - MySpace has just released a statement saying that it has won its lawsuit against Media Breakaway and its founder Scott Richter, for their spam attacks on MySpace. Last Friday, the American Arbitration Association awarded MySpace over $6 million in damages and attorney fees, as well as the entering of a permanent injunction against Scott Richter and Media Breakaway.
TechCrunch reported that Google App Engine, which launched in April to compete with Amazon’s web services unit, has been having major problems over the last day. They said last Tuesday that the application directory and, more importantly, all third party applications (here’s our test application), were offline. Developers couldn’t even log in to the management console.
18/06/2008 – Wednesday
BBC – A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep is thought to be the oldest known recording of computer generated music. The songs were captured by the BBC in the autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester. The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers.
NYT Bits Blog – Microsoft buys TV advertising specialist Navic Networks in the latest in a string of acquisitions aimed at expanding its digital advertising services. Navic, which is based in Waltham, Mass., and has about 80 employees, makes technology to create interactive ads. It also runs an advertising network that helps media buyers place ads on television shows. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CMS Wire - Microsoft Tests Its Own Social Network Solution: it’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.
Ars Technica reported that reddit announced that it is open-sourcing almost all the code that powers its site and community. As one of the first social news sites to appear in 2005, reddit now sports over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors who generate 120 million pageviews a month.
TechCrunch – The MySpace redesign is now live to all of its users. The design is much cleaner, with fewer tabs across the top of the homepage and drop-down menus for everything else. Navigation in general, has been completely revamped to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to what members want.
19/06/2008 – Thursday
Reuters – Google and Yahoo face intense U.S. Justice Department scrutiny of their deal to share some advertising revenue, and the heat will likely increase under a new administration, antitrust experts said. Google, with more than 60 percent of the Web search market, and Yahoo, with 16.6 percent, announced a deal last week that would allow Yahoo to place Google ads on its site and collect the revenue.
Reuters – Chinese authorities gave the green light to 247 firms to run online video-sharing services, after ordering dozens of firms to halt operations earlier this year.
20/06/2008 – Friday
Reuters –Facebook.com has launched a version targeting mainland Chinese Web surfers to compete with local and overseas rivals in the world's largest Internet market. Facebook is playing catch-up to News Corp's MySpace, which established a Chinese-language Web site in April 2007 and has tapped into over 20 countries globally.
NYT The Lead Blog – The Russian-language version of Facebook was launched last week, taking on a host of home-grown and successful social networking sites, including VKontakte, a Facebook-like site on the Russian Internet. Google has floundered. So has MySpace. Now Facebook is trying to gain a toehold in Russia. The experts don’t give it much of a chance.
21/06/2008 – Saturday
TechCrunch published a list of 114 executives who left Yahoo since January 2007.
According to EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, who announced the results of a new EU wide survey on e-commerce and cross border trade, even though e-commerce is taking off at national level, cross-border e-commerce is failing to keep pace within the European Union.
From 2006 to 2008, the share of all EU consumers that have bought at least one item over the internet has increased significantly from 27% to 33%, whilst cross border e-commerce is stagnating at 6% to 7%. The pattern is similar for those with internet access at home: 56% of consumers with internet at home have made a purchase (in any country including their own) by e-commerce compared to 50% in 2006, while only 13% of them made a cross-border e-commerce purchase compared to 12% in 2006.
Key figures of the report:
In 2006 27% of European consumers had made a purchase over the internet - 33% had done so in 2008.
In 2006 6% had made a cross border purchase over the internet – this figure is stable as 7% had done so in 2007.
13% of consumers with internet access had traded cross border via the internet compared to only 7 % in the general population. The corresponding figure for 2006 was 12% of those with internet access as opposed to 6% of those in the general population.
37% of respondents that said they would be more confident making online purchases from sellers/providers located in their own country. This figure is down 8 % since the 2006 survey.
57% said they are equally or even more confident making purchases online from sellers in another EU country. This figure is up by 8% compared to the 2006 survey.
51% of EU27 retailers sell via the internet – this figure is however down from 2006 where 57% of retailers reported to use e-commerce.
Retailers estimate that 17 % of their e-commerce revenue stems from cross border sales – the corresponding figure for 2006 was 16%.
The report published last Friday was compiled from two Eurobarometer surveys on Businesses and Consumer attitudes to cross border trade. Data gathering was carried out in February – March 2008 amongst more than 26.000 consumers and 7.200 businesses in the 27 EU-countries and Norway.
According to the Los Angles Times, a federal appeals court Wednesday sharply limited the ability of employers to obtain e-mails and text messages sent by employees on company-financed accounts. The ruling also gives all government workers 4th Amendment protection against searches of text and e-mail communications by their bosses, lawyers said.
Lawyers said this ruling would require police to obtain a warrant before they could access someone's e-mail or text messages.
"This ruling is a tremendous victory for your online privacy, helping ensure that the 4th Amendment applies to your communications online just as strongly as it does to your letters and packages," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates civil liberties in the digital world, said in an online posting.
According to Wikipedia, the Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and was designed as a response to the controversial writs of assistance (a type of general search warrant), which were a significant factor behind the American Revolution. Toward that end, the amendment specifies that judicially sanctioned search and arrest warrants must be supported by probable cause and be limited in scope according to specific information supplied by a person (usually a peace officer) who has sworn by it and is therefore accountable to the issuing court.
The Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
According to comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, released the results of a study of the use of social networking sites by French Internet users, showing that French property Skyrock Network led the category in April 2008 with 11.5 million visitors.
French social networking sites have shown rapid growth during the past year, with the total audience for the category rising 36 percent to 16.6 million visitors in April 2008. More than 54 percent of all French Internet users visited a social networking site during April, up from 48 percent in the same month in 2007. The most popular property was Skyrock Network, followed by Facebook.com with 3.2 million visitors, MySpace.com with 3 million visitors, and Trombi.com with 1.3 million visitors.
As a practicing father I am pretty concerned about the risks of internet usage to children of which one risk is internet initiated child abuse. Last week there were two good news in connection with this topic which show that more and more legislative and technical steps are taken to fight internet related child abuse.
Reuters reported that France plans to use the help of Internet service providers to block websites which disseminate child pornography. In a speech on fighting cybercrime, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said Internet users would from September be able to flag sites which carried child pornography, incitement to terrorism and racial hatred, or attempted fraud.
The US is one step ahead: New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has reached an agreement with several major Internet service providers that will see them block subscriber access to newsgroups that distribute child pornography, and act to purge any images from them that are stored on their servers. The agreement brings to a close an investigation that targeted Sprint, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, includes provisions under which the ISPs will pay $1.125 million to the Attorney General's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to fund further efforts.
Back in April 2008 Google announced that it has completed development of a software suite that will improve NCMEC's (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) ability to quickly and accurately match children in its database with images or videos of children it obtained from the black market.
According to an article published in the American Psychologist in Feb-March 2008, “Online “Predators” and Their Victims -- Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment”, the stereotype of the Internet “predator” who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.
The article is aiming to provide an accurate, research-based description of the characteristics and prevalence of this high-profile social problem; make recommendations for effective responses; indicate needs for future research; and give professionals basic resources to help manage issues that arise in practice and other contexts.
According to this article, most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who use the Internet to meet and seduce young adolescents into sexual encounters. Most such offenders are charged with crimes, such as statutory rape, that involve nonforcible sexual activity with victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults. Numbers suggest that Internet-initiated sex crimes account for a salient but small proportion of all statutory rape offenses and a relatively low number of the sexual offenses committed against minors overall.
Although online molesters take advantage of developmentally normal adolescent interests in romance and sex, some youths may be particularly at risk. This group includes boys who are gay or questioning their sexual orientations; youths with histories of sexual or physical abuse; and those who frequent chatrooms, talk online to unknown people about sex, or engage in patterns of risky off- or online behavior. Although there is little research about online child molesters, they appear to occupy a restricted range on the spectrum of the sex offender population and include few true pedophiles or violent or sadistic offenders.
There are some myths busted in this article regarding child abuse conducted via the internet:
Posting personal information online does not, by itself, appear to be a particularly risky behavior.
Social networking sites such as MySpace do not appear to have increased the risk of victimization by online molesters.
Online child molesters are generally not pedophiles. The offenders in undercover “sting” operations are somewhat different from those arrested for victimizing actual youths.
Online child molesters are rarely violent.
Sex crimes against youths have not increased.
The authors of this article think that we need frank, accurate prevention programs for youths, thoughtful treatment for victims, and continued research. As access to interactive Internet technologies broadens with the introduction and spread of wireless and handheld technologies, such as cell phones and personal organizers, youth Internet use could become harder to monitor, and accurate descriptions of and education about risks to youths will become even more important.
This article was written by Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, and Kimberly J. Mitchell from the University of New Hampshire, and Michele L. YbarraInternet Solutions for Kids, Inc. Michele L. Ybarra gave a presentation at the Berkman Center on this topic:
If you are looking for a new dance club in town or if you would like to have a beer with your friends, Nightfeed, a Facebook and Google Maps mashup helps you to find the right place. Nightfeed has user-written content: you can either submit a new place and describe it, or you can rate and review your favorite hangout. You can search by city, state, Zip, or place name. You can also hook up to your Facebook account, and find out where your friends are partying at! Want to let your friends know where to find you tonight? Look up your favorite place and use the I'm going here soon! link to send a Facebook notification to the people you choose. This can be done in 4 simple steps:
Log into Nightfeed and enable Facebook
Navigate to any place and click “I’m going here”
Pick the time and date you plan to go
Pick which of your Facebook friends you would like to share this event with (invite)
The “Scorecard” of a nightlife place has the following information:
Most popular nights
Age ranges
Girl/Guy ratio
Drink prices
Hook-up potential
Type of music
Ethnic presence
Breathing room (is the place crowded or not)
Door policy
Ambiance
Good date spot?
Then you can read the user comments, and you can also find some other information about the place (neighborhood, parking and accessibility, drink specials, etc.). The places are also tagged, which theoretically helps to find similar places choosing a given tag.
The only “disadvantage” of Nightfeed that it is a new service, and since it is a user-content driven service, it has only 24 places (cities) on their list. But this relatively poor content will surely increase with the increase of the number of users of this service. Currently they have the following places/cities listed in the service: Addison, Austin, Beverly Hills, Chicago, Dallas, Frisco, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Madison, McAllen, Miami, Miami Beach, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Pharr, Raleigh, San Antonio, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Vienna, Washington.
Paul Otlet, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, pacifist and entrepreneur imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an "electric telescope" connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.
Alex Wright, information architect for the New York Times published an interesting article on boxesandarrows.com about Paul Otlet. His latest article on Otlet was published in the New York Times. "In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards. ... Otlet also recognized the practical importance of “search and retrieval performed by an appropriately qualified permanent staff.” Substitute the word “Google” for “permanent staff,” and Otlet’s vision starts sounding a lot like the World Wide Web."
Otlet's vision in his own words: "Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, as a whole or in certain of its parts."
According to a new PEW report, "The internet and the 2008 election", in total, 46% of all adults in the US are using the internet, email, or phone text messaging for political purposes in this election, of which 40% of all Americans (internet users and non-users alike) have gotten news and information about this year’s campaign via the internet.
Much more Americans have gone online to get political news and campaign information so far than during all of 2004.
Two new internet activities have stormed the political stage: 35% of Americans have watched online videos related to the campaign, and 10% have used social networking sites to engage in political activity.
At this point in the campaign, 8% of internet users (representing 6% of all adults) have donated money to a candidate online.
Democrats vs Republicans Online Democrats outpace Republicans in their consumption of online video (51% vs. 42%). Furthermore, Democrats are significantly ahead among social networking site profile creators: 36% of online Democrats have such profiles, compared with 21% of Republicans and 28% of independents. Among Democrats, 74% of wired Obama supporters have gotten political news and information online, compared with 57% of online Clinton supporters.
Wired Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have negative views about the internet, while online Democrats and young voters are more likely to agree with positive assertions about the impact of the internet.
This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 8 to May 11, 2008, among a sample of 2,251 adults, age 18 and older.
You can browse through Argentina, Germany, Greece, Grenada, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the US if you want to see the top 10 webcams of the world, according to EarthCam.com:
Bruce's Critter-Cams (Indiana County, PA, US) – Catch a glimpse at what's going on in this local neighborhood and watch the wildlife cams, located in Indiana County, Pa. These three cameras are online 24/7 and update every second.
Olympia Park (Munich, Germany) – See the Olympia Park in Germany! Check out the Stadium Cam, Olympic Hall Cam, Ice Sport Center Cam & Olympic Tower Cam. Image updates every minute.
StarCam (Roanoke, VA, US) – Check out the StarCam and see the spectacular scenic view from Mill Mountain in Roanoke, Virginia. Image auto-refreshes every 15 seconds.
Volissos Village Cams (Chios Island, Greece) – Get a glimpse at the Municipality of AMANIS, a magical place with a lot of ancient monuments, with perfect clean beaches, and more. Two webcams of the area and the skyline. Images update every minute.
Webcam Grenada (St.George's, Grenada) – Three unique webcams located throughout Grenada. These cams focus on the Lagoon, facing towards St.George's on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean and the Grand Anse Beach at Native Spirit Scuba. Images update every minute.
According to Wikipedia, started in 1991, the first webcam was pointed at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University. This webcam is now defunct, as it was finally switched off on August 22, 2001. The oldest webcam still operating is FogCam at San Francisco State University, which has been running continuously since 1994.
EarthCam is the recognized leader in providing webcam content, technology, and software. Commencing in 1996, EarthCam began developing the proprietary software, network infrastructure and technical expertise which now allows it to deliver millions of live images from thousands of cameras each day. EarthCam's acknowledged leadership in webcam technology, brand awareness, and increasing visibility in the live image market provides the company with opportunities to market its software capabilities, solutions and back-end support to corporate customers. EarthCam's proprietary webcam solutions have led to many strategic alliances with companies such as MSN, Yahoo!, AOL/Time Warner, ESPN, NASCAR, Ford, CNN, NFL, Weather.com, Discovery.com, Panasonic, Sprint / Nextel, and Microsoft.
NYT: Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes of the European Union delivered an unusually blunt snub to Microsoft by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on open standards. Ms. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the past four years, accusing the U.S. software giant of defying her orders and fining the company nearly $2.68 billion for violating European competition rules. But the speech was her strongest recommendation yet to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.
BBC: Three of the biggest US internet service providers have agreed to block access to bulletin boards and websites that carry images of child sex abuse. The firms - Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable - will also provide more than $1m (£500,000) to fund efforts to remove child sex sites.
Google Blog: The latest version of Google Trends is now live. If you've used it in the past, you know that Google Trends can be used to see how popular certain search terms are across geographic regions, cities, and languages. With Google’s latest update, you can now see numbers on the graph download to a spreadsheet. (Note: Both these functions are available after you've signed in to your Google Account.)
NYT: AOL is revamping its popular online radio service, adding streams from all 140 CBS Corp.-owned radio stations and upgrading its player to add more functions and expand the service's reach. Much is at stake for AOL, which is looking for new ways to boost revenues from online music streaming a year after a panel of copyright judges sharply increased the royalties that online radio providers pay to record labels and artists.
Reuters: France plans to use the help of Internet service providers to block websites which disseminate child pornography, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said on Tuesday. In a speech on fighting cybercrime, Alliot-Marie said Internet users would from September be able to flag sites which carried child pornography, incitement to terrorism and racial hatred, or attempted fraud.
11/06/2008 – Wednesday
AP News: Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt said that the Internet search leader hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue. "It's a huge moral imperative to help here," Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session at an event hosted in San Francisco by Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.
12/06/2008 – Thursday
Google Blog: Google announced a non-exclusive advertising agreement that will provide Yahoo! with access to their AdSense for search and AdSense for content advertising programs on Yahoo’s U.S. and Canadian web properties. In addition, Google will work to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services allowing users better, broader communication online.
BBC: A hacker who hijacked hundreds of PCs to create a botnet has been sentenced to 41 months in jail by a US court. Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida also faces $65,000 (£33,000) in fines and will be under supervision for three years on his release. The hijacked PCs were used to attack other computers and install programs that plagued users with pop-up adverts.
13/06/2008 – Friday
Reuters: Microsoft launched a campaign on Friday to enlist supporters in its opposition to a new advertising collaboration deal between Google and Yahoo, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. One day after the companies announced an agreement allowing Google to sell search ads on Yahoo's Web site, Microsoft contacted advocacy groups that work to influence policy in Washington. According to one source who was contacted by Microsoft, the software company said in an e-mail that the Google-Yahoo agreement would "limit choices for advertisers and publishers" and "destroy a competitive alternative."
Reuters: When Yahoo Inc turned down the latest offer from Microsoft Corp this week, it walked away from $9 billion in cash and $1 billion a year in additional operating profit, Microsoft said on Friday.
14/06/2008 – Saturday
TechCrunch: It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.
In his talk, Zittrain discusses themes from his new book, "The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It." In the book, he warns of the new legal and regulatory challenges to the future growth of the net.
If you are interested in his book, you can buy it e.g. on Amazon or downloaded it at his site.
Twitter was down a couple of times in the past and many users even left the service feeling screwed up. From now on you do not have to bother (so much), you can use Twiddict, a free mashup service. Just type in your Twitter username and Password and you can start Twiddicting. They promise to send your Twiddicts to Twitter as soon as Twitter is on again. A kind of automated message forwarding service.
According to myfinances.co.uk, cases of identity fraud referred to credit reference agency Experian rose 66 per cent in the UK in 2007.
With your personal and financial information easily available on the internet, companies can use this data to market to you, decide whether to employ you or do business with you, and criminals can access this to steal identities or commit financial fraud. Garlik, UK based company selected as 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, promises to:
Keep you one step ahead, so you can find out what they know and to give you the power to take back control of your information.
Give you the best advice on how to take the action they recommend.
Take care to only provide your information to you and to protect your information from other people.
Give you insight into what information is easily available online, how it is used and what you can do about it.
As the first company to develop a web-scale commercial application of semantic technology, Garlik enables consumers to find and understand what personal information is in the public domain about them and manage how their identities appear online. You will have visibility of where your information appears online so there's less chance of it being abused or stolen by fraudsters. They provide ongoing help and advice around what to do if any of your information is found online so you can take the appropriate action to prevent identity theft or financial fraud before it happens. They have to products: DataPatrol for businesses and DataPatrol for individuals.
Key features of DataPatrol:
24/7 monitoring to protect your personal and sensitive financial information
Daily and weekly report updates with easy to use tools to manage your results
Alerts if we find your personal, sensitive and financial information exposed online
Expert support & advice if your personal information is at risk
Quarterly report on your local area
Royal Mail Postal Redirect check
DataPatrol is currently only available to UK residents. It has opened a New York office in May 2008 securing an additional $5m in funding and signing a major distribution deal with CPP North America which provides life assistance products and has over 11.3 million customers across North America, Europe and Asia.
Garlik has appointed a panel of world-class ID protection and technology experts to advise the business including Professor Wendy Hall CBE from the University of Southampton, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the Web, Simon Davies, director of Privacy International and Daniel Cooper, renowned privacy lawyer with Covington & Burling.
If you are in a position where you have to decide what kind of web content management system (CMS) you will have to purchase for your company and from which vendor and you would like to make a well-grounded decision, you may find CMS Watch’s almost 900 page report, “The Web CMS Report 2008” really useful. CMS Watch evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions.
Now in its 14th Edition, the Web CMS Report 2008 provides a comprehensive overview of Web Content Management products and best practices, including updated, 10- to 20-page comparative surveys of 30 Web CMS packages, as well as short descriptions of 15 other products across 7 vendor categories. Special European Standard and European Enterprise Editions cover major vendors in that region as well as international players.
The report offers an analytically and visually rich primer with: 115 descriptive charts; More than 175 product screens; 15 custom diagrams and illustrations, and a 30-term glossary.
To help you compare and evaluate products based on your requirements, they use the following terms:
Technology
Standards
Development
Templating
Page Rendering
Access Control
Usability
Internationalization
Content Production
Authoring & Transformation
Aggregation
Tagging
Workflow
Repository Services
Globalization
Deployment
System Reporting
Content Delivery
Personalization
Site Search
Scaling & Performance
Multichannel & Syndication
Micro-applications
Retention
Site Analytics
Vendor Intangibles
Maintenance & Support
Services & Channel
Integration & Partnerships
Strategy & Roadmap
Viability & Stability
The report is ideal for organizations who wish to develop a business-driven content management strategy, or who are considering selecting a CMS product and need unbiased technical assessments, or who simply need a clearly-written guide to this confusing, fast-changing landscape.
For a review you can download their 67 page free sample excerpt.
inSuggest is a recommendation service with which you can get recommendations for three different input types: images, website URLs, and new sites analyzing your del.iciou.us bookmarks.
Images inSuggest is a Flickr based image recommendation service. You can find images by simply typing a keyword in the search box or you can get random images by selecting this section. Then you can select a couple of images you like and by drag and dropping them on the upper blank image spaces you will instantly get recommendations from like-minded people.
With Web inSuggest you can get website recommendations almost the same way as getting image recommendations. You can either enter the URL of a website you like, or enter a keyword, or get random recommendation, or drag and drop website images of the recommended websites and narrow your recommendation.
Their new service, Bookmarks inSuggest, was launched on the 9th of June. It helps you find new web sites by analyzing your del.iciou.us bookmarks. You can even filter specific tags to narrow the results.
According to eMarketer, a BIGresearch study found that an average adult blogger in the US is
37.6 years old,
has USD 55,819 average yearly income (which is higher than the real median household income as in 2002 which was $42,409),
has an above the average education with an average of 14.3 years of education (average of the entire population is 12 years).
The ethnicity of US bloggers: 69.7% white, 20% Hispanic, 12.2% African-American and 3.7% Asian. Hispanic bloggers are over represented (compared to their representation in the society, which was 12.5%, according to the 2000 Census), whites are less keen on blogging (compared to their representation in the society, which was 75,1%, according to the 2000 Census). African Americans and Asians seem to proportionally represent themselves among bloggers, compared to their proportion in the 2000 Census: 12.3% were African Americans, 3.6% were Asians.
A Deloitte & Touche study of blog usage by age found that the younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis. 35% of people aged 13-24, 25% of people aged 25-41 and 19% of people above 61 keep a blog. Baby boomers (aged 42-60) have the least time or will to keep a blog: they represent only 7% of the blog owners. (Click on image below to enlarge.)
The “Digital Natives” session of the Berkman's 10th Anniversary Conference and Celebration at Harvard University in May explored recent research at the Berkman Center and elsewhere on the way that some young people use technologies differently – or the same as – those who are older. The session organizers, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser busted nine myths about digital natives, persons who have grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet and mobile phones.
Myth #1 The online world presents a wholly new and completely different set of issues for youth we must address. Many of the issues cropping up with children and young people playing, being, and living online – from cyberbullying, to information evaluation, to online civic engagement - are the same as age-old offline issues, however filtered through a new medium with new possibilities, and new considerations.
Myth #2 Digital Natives are wasting time online. Young people are learning, gaining skills, and becoming collaborative, critical and informed members of society through their online and digital engagements.
Myth #3 Young people online are hugely susceptible to falling victim to sexual predators. Digital natives are very aware of the issue of predators sexual online, and even more aware of how to avoid this danger. In fact, one of our most consistent findings among young people across ages and socio-economic groups was their ability in using a variety of strategies to avoid unwanted contact with strangers online.
Myth #4 Digital Natives don’t care about privacy. New technological affordances have meant that for most digital natives, sharing via digital tools has become the norm – but this does not mean they don’t care about privacy. Privacy concerns vary largely among young people based on age, education, and if repercussions of privacy compromise have been experienced. “Privacy from whom?” is an important question here – hugely differing attitudes are prevalent in regards to sharing with friends, strangers, service providers, and government entities.
Myth # 5 Digital Natives don’t care about copyright. Copyright is a complicated and scary word – for most digital natives, a notion just vaguely related to something illegal. Young people are hugely lacking in knowledge regarding issues of legality concerning copyrighted content online. While for sure the norm among young people is access for free, many are not indifferent to the rights of creators.
Myth #6 All digital natives are experts at navigating online spaces and tech-savy creators. While the vast majority of young Americans have access to technologies, the knowledge of digital tools, online spaces, and skills in this arena widely vary. While socio-economic and access to education are strong factors in determining digital natives’ skill level, so is their social group: a major motivator for young people to create online is to do so as part of a online or offline community.
Myth #7 Digital Natives are all politically engaged on the internet. Most digital natives are not politically engaged, online or off. We did not meet many young people taking part in civic activities online. But the potentials for engagement are great in the digital space due to two major factors: (1) digital natives understand their active role in society, and that their voices are and will be heard (2) online spaces are extremely fluid – based on networks, a single space accommodates for entertainment, socializing, learning, and political engagement - in doing so, networks readily draw those young people who may otherwise be uninspired politically to begin to engage.
Myth #8 Digital Natives behavior is outside the realm of understanding for parents, teachers, and other digital immigrants. Promises and perils online are often rooted in the same core issues and causes as their offline equivalents. Parents and teachers have much knowledge and wisdom to help guide young people as they move about digital space. However, the medium is different, and it is important for those in the Digital Natives’ lives to learn about the online spaces young people are living in, just as they do about the real-life spaces.
Myth #9 Digital Natives are a homogeneous body. Current initiatives on online child safety assume that digital natives are a homogeneous body - accordingly, we rely on benchmarks of 'competency' based on the 'ideal prudent child.' Recognizing that digital natives have significant implications for the way we educate, engage and empower young people. More importantly, we need to rethink whether the best interests principle or competency rhetoric continues to be relevant in the digital environment.
John Palfrey, as Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, focuses on Internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.
Urs Gasser is a Berkman Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen, where he serves as the director of the Research Center for Information Law.
AP News: Adobe Systems Inc. is launching a new version of its document sharing software Acrobat, and this time it can package videos. Acrobat allows users to package documents so they can be read across different hardware and operating systems. Acrobat 9 comes with Adobe's video-enabling software Flash. Users can include Flash-based videos when they create and share documents with the portable document format, commonly known as PDF.
Wired: Canada's federal privacy commissioner begins an investigation into Facebook after four students complain that it violates Canadian law by disclosing personal information to advertisers without proper consent.
Mashable: Social news site Reddit launched a re-design – its first major UI change since debuting back in 2005 and being acquired by Wired Digital in late 2006. The upgrade is mostly about usability.
BBC: Microsoft's live search will be the default search engine on all PCs made by Hewlett Packard for the US and Canadian markets from January 2009.
Google Blog: Google announced that real-time quotes on NASDAQ securities are now available on Google Finance.
NYT Blog: In a bid to counter Google, Facebook is going open-source. A year after its launched its much-heralded Facebook Platform – a way for third party developers to write programs that work inside the social network – the Palo Alto, Calif., company says it is making a “significant part” of its platform code open-source.
03/06/2008 – Tuesday
BBC: Privacy groups are accusing Google of violating California law in its reluctance to provide a direct link to its privacy policy on its homepage. The search engine giant is being asked to write the word "privacy" alongside other information links.
Google Blog: Google announced Google Site Search with enhanced index coverage. Previously known as Custom Search Business Edition, this service gives any website the same relevance, ease of use and familiar search experience you get on Google.com. It takes just minutes to set up, and is hosted entirely by Google, so site owners can have great search capabilities with little or no maintenance and technical resources needed.
Reuters: Internet media firm Yahoo Inc expects to increase its online advertising revenues in emerging markets above the industry's 30 percent growth rate over the next three years, an executive told Reuters.
Ars Technica: ABI Research has issued a report about smart phones in which the analyst group notes the rapid growth of mobile Linux adoption. They say that this trend will enable Linux to take 23 percent market share within five years.
04/06/2008 – Wednesday
Facebook Blog: Facebook built "Friend Suggestor", a way for people to find others they didn't know were on Facebook. Use it to help friends find each other.
YouTube Blog: YouTube announced a new way to add interactive commentary to your videos with Video Annotations. With this feature, you can add background information, create branching ("choose your own adventure" style) stories or add links to any YouTube video, channel, or search results page at any point in your video.
ZDNet: Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use. For example, a programmer starting up a social-networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.
TechCrunch: TechCrunch found out that with the names of competing social networks “MySpace,” “Friendster,” “Hi5,” , or “Orkut" ads are automatically blocked on Facebook. (Curiously, “Bebo” and “OpenSocial” go through just fine, as does “Microsoft,” “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “AOL”).
NYT Blog: Google inks a development agreement with NASA's Ames Research Center that includes a 42-acre lease that will allow it to grow the Googleplex by 50 percent.
05/06/2008 – Thursday
Ars Technica: Famed luxury retailer Louis Vuitton previously won a lawsuit in a lower court over Google's AdWords after the search giant allowed retailers selling fake LB wares to buy keywords like "Louis Vuitton replicas" and "Louis Vuitton fakes." The design house alleged that Google didn't have the right to sell the keywords using their brand name (even though they were very clear that they represented fakes, and not the real thing), and the court agreed. Unsurprisingly, Google appealed the ruling, and the case is now before Europe's highest court.
06/06/2008 – Friday
Google Blog: Google launched transit directions in Google Maps for mobiles so that you can get transit directions while you're out and about in more than 50 cities worldwide. Right now transit directions are available on the latest Google Maps for mobile release on BlackBerry and many Java-based phones. They'll be adding support for other phones shortly.
07/06/2008 – Saturday
Mashable: Google, Netvibes Help Football Fans Follow Euro 2008
StopBadware.org seeks to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers.They aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.
The Badware Website Clearinghouse currently has more than 182 thousand reported URLs. You can search the URLs that have been reported to them by their partners and view statistics from their top clearinghouse pages. If you are a site owner and you are flagged by Google and you would like StopBadware.org to review the inclusion of your website in the Badware Website Clearinghouse, you can request a review by filling out their form.
John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center and Harvard Clinical Professor of Law, and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law Visiting Professor and Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University (who not long ago wrote his best seller “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It”), are StopBadware.org co-directors. The Advisory Board also has some “big names” like for example Vinton G. Cerf, who is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. But he is more known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," he is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
How to get involved in fighting badware?
The simplest way to get involved is to tell your badware horror story. StopBadware.org will use these to raise awareness of badware and guide their researchers. You can give them more detail with their technical form. Their researchers will use this more concrete data to find and spotlight the most aggressive and abusive badware.
You can join the community of concerned users that are ready to regain control of their computers and are not willing to allow badware makers to intimidate us. This broader community will complement their in-house experts as they seek broad feedback on their investigative process and their long-term plans. You can join this community by signing up for their low-traffic announcement mailing list, or by joining their discussion group, which will be a way for extremely interested people to give feedback and participate in their plans. They expect this list to be high-traffic and generally unmoderated.
What is badware?
According to StopBadware.org, there are several commonly recognized terms for specific kinds of badware - spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. Badware is malicious software that tracks your moves online and feeds that information back to shady marketing groups so that they can ambush you with targeted ads. If your every move online is checked by a pop-up ad, it's highly likely that you, like 59 million Americans, have spyware or other malicious badware on your computer.
Why do badware providers make the effort? Because it is big business, amounting to a $2 billion-a-year industry. It's the Wild West of aggressive marketing and an industry supported by shadowy online marketers, small application vendors, and website operators.
If you are interested in their efforts and want to participate, visit StopBadware.org.
TotSpot is a new and free online service for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends. It is an online babybook, a parent journal, and a social network. Tell the story of your kids: capture every first, every memory, and every favorite. Easily and privately share pictures and videos - all the content about your child in one safe place. Gather content from family and friends who help create shared memories.
They have two types of accounts: Child Account is for parents or guardians who are creating pages about their kids (in this case you also have to choose how many kids, expectant included, are you adding to TotSpot); a Grownup Account is for friends and family who are not creating a page for their kids. (Just a remark when signing-in: when adding your kid’s information you are obliged to give middle name. If she/he does not have one, just type a.)
After registering, confirming registration and logging in, you get to your kid’s space which has three main sections:
Dashboard is the section where you can start to fill up your kid’s profile with information: a profile picture, a bio, choose a template, add photos and/or videos, update her/his journal, record your kid’s firsts, update her/his favorites, or growth chart. You can also add a Twitter like maximum 160 character long idea of what is she/he doing right now. Dashboard is also the place where you can find and invite friends and family from your address book elsewhere (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, AOL, and Hotmail/MSN). You can see your profile statistics here as well.
My Profile is the section where you can edit your profile, your theme and picture. You can find your kid’s photos, timeline, firsts, favorites, uploaded videos, journal, message wall, and list of friends here.
The third section is Friends, where you can see the invited friends or family of your kid on TotSpot.
If you are interested in such services you can read my earlier review on Kidmondo.
Two passionate people, Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever, are running Common Craft, a site where they use video and paper “to make complex ideas easy to understand” for the masses. They present subjects "in plain English" using short, unique and understandable videos in a format they call “Paperworks”.
They where distinguished with the Official Honoree award of the 2008 Webby Awards for their work.
Their most viewed explanatory video is “RSS in Plain English” which was viewed more than 422 thousand times.
They have worked for some great names of the Internet industry, like Google and Microsoft. There client video, “Using Google Apps with Salesforce.com”, focuses on how Google Apps tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Talk are integrated into Salesforce CRM. Another Google related video, “Google Docs in Plain English” shows for example that email attachments are a poor way of sharing digital documents.
A more tech savvy video is about Enerjy which is a software too that looks at Java code and produces the Enerjy Index - a 1-10 scale of integrity. This helps developers understand what parts of the code are likely to produce bugs - and why.
The 36 page paper of ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, outlines the 15 most important threats to users and providers of Social Network Services (SNSs).
Online Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are one of the most remarkable technological phenomena of these days. In addition to the benefits to members, SNSs have significant business value because of the marketing applications they offer. On SNSs, people profile themselves for free, and voluntarily disclose detailed maps of their social relationships. According to the ENISA paper, MySpace was sold in 2005 for a price that corresponded approximately to USD 35 per user profile. In 2006 Facebook sources suggested a valuation for their network of USD 2 billion (which would translate to USD 286 per user profile) and, by September 2007, this figure had risen far higher.
Since the success of an SNS depends on the number of users it attracts, there is pressure on SNS providers to encourage design and behavior which increase the number of users and their connections. As with every fast-growing technology, however, security and privacy have not been the first priority in the development of SNSs. As a result, along with the above benefits, significant privacy and security risks have also emerged
Main threats to users and providers of Social Network Services
Digital dossier aggregation: profiles on online SNSs can be downloaded and stored by third parties, creating a digital dossier of personal data.
Secondary data collection: as well as data knowingly disclosed in a profile, SN members disclose personal information using the network itself: e.g. length of connections, other users’ profiles visited and messages sent. SNSs provide a central repository accessible to a single provider. The high value of SNSs suggests that such data is being used to considerable financial gain.
Face recognition: user-provided digital images are a very popular part of profiles on SNSs. The photograph is, in effect, a binary identifier for the user, enabling linking across profiles, e.g. a fully identified Bebo profile and a pseudo-anonymous dating profile.
Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR): this is an emerging technology which can match features, such as identifying aspects of a room (e.g. a painting) in very large databases, increasing the possibilities for locating users.
Linkability from image metadata: many SNSs now allow users to tag images with metadata, such as links to SNS profiles (even if they are not the owner/controller of that profile), or even e-mail addresses. This leads to greater possibilities for unwanted linkage to personal data.
Difficulty of complete account deletion: users wishing to delete accounts from SNSs find that it is almost impossible to remove secondary information linked to their profile such as public comments on other profiles.
SNS spam: unsolicited messages propagated using SNSs. This is a growing phenomenon with several SNS-specific features.
Cross site scripting (XSS), viruses and worms: SNSs are vulnerable to XSS attacks and threats due to ‘widgets’ produced by weakly verified third parties.
SN aggregators: these ‘SNS portals’ integrate several SNSs which multiply vulnerabilities by giving read/write access to several SNS accounts using a single weak authentication.
Spear phishing using SNSs and SN-specific phishing: highly targeted phishing attacks, facilitated by the self-created ‘profiles’ easily accessible on SNSs. SNSs are also vulnerable to social engineering techniques which exploit low entry thresholds to trust networks and to scripting attacks which allow the automated injection of phishing links.
Infiltration of networks: some information is only available to a restricted group or network of friends, which should provide the first line of defense in protecting privacy on SNSs. However, since it is often easy to become someone's ‘friend’ under false pretences, this mechanism is not effective. On many SNSs it is even possible to use scripts to invite friends.
Profile-squatting and reputation slander through ID theft: fake profiles are created in the name of well-known personalities or brands or within a particular network, such as a school class, in order to slander people or profit from their reputation.
Stalking: cyberstalking is threatening behaviour in which a perpetrator repeatedly contacts a victim by electronic means such as e-mail, Instant Messenger and messaging on SNSs. Statistics suggest that stalking using SNSs is increasing.
Bullying: SNSs can offer an array of tools which facilitate cyberbullying (i.e. repeated and purposeful acts of harm such as harassment, humiliation and secret sharing).
Corporate espionage: social engineering attacks using SNSs are a growing and often underrated risk to corporate IT infrastructure.
Yesterday (June/03/08) Bill Gates gave his last speech as a full-time chairman of Microsoft at Microsoft Tech•Ed 2008 for Developers, Microsoft’s premier technical education conference for developers inviting several invited speakers who spoke about some nL Server 2008 and other web based services.
Some extracts of his and invited speakers’ speech…
Gates on changes in technology: hardware and software advances
… Developers can write applications that were not possible before. What's the reason for this? Well, there's really two key things, one is the advance in hardware, and the second is the advance in the software platform. And we can't underestimate the important role that hardware improvement plays here. After all, we can add exponential improvement in the performance of the microprocessor itself. The increasing clock speed has allowed it to do applications that simply wouldn't have been possible in the past. The unbelievable amounts of storage we have today, meaning that databases that record every click for millions of customers, and get data mined for deep patterns, those are now feasible on fairly low-cost systems. And so the sky is the limit in terms of empowering people, and writing very rich applications.
… Now one of the big changes coming that I think is most underestimated is the change in interaction. Throughout all these improvements, the way we interact with the computer has hardly changed. We had the graphics revolution that took us from the keyboard to the keyboard and the mouse, and it took the screen from character mode to graphics mode. But still it's that one person sitting there, primarily using the keyboard, and the pointing device to interact with the application.
… There's a number of technologies that our research group and others have been working on for these decades that are now moving into the mainstream. It's a combination of software advances, and hardware power that allow us to bring new interaction techniques to a mainstream world. We collectively refer to these as natural user interface, but it's several different things. It's the idea of touch panel, and we gave a glimpse just last week of some of Windows 7, and the thing we chose to highlight there was this touch support, and how we built that in and made that easy for developers, and how end users will like that.
We've also got the pen capability that we're taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition, and how that is implemented in the hardware. I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It will be superior in every way, and yet it can't be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.
We also have the speech recognition. On the phone today, if you call up information, that is a piece of software from a Microsoft group called TellMe that's taking those information calls, and we're building up the database, the speech model, of people in general, and people specifically to allow that speech interaction to be very rich. And as so we look out over the next decade, the way you interact with that cell phone, speech will be a major part of it.
The final natural interface piece, one that I think is perhaps the most important of all, is vision. A camera is very inexpensive, and putting software behind it that can tell what it's seeing allows you to have gestures, and movements, things that will be used in a variety of settings. We put out our Microsoft Surface product that actually uses a camera to project up onto a table surface, and there you can point with your hands, or put objects on the table, and the software sees them. It's being used in retail stores, and as that price comes down, that would be in every office, it will be in every home. Your desk won't just have a computer on it, it will have a computer in it. And your whiteboard will be intelligent. You can walk up, take information, expand it, point to somebody's name, start a teleconference with them, sit there and exchange information. And so natural interface really has a pretty dramatic impact on making these tools of empowerment, the personal computer, making them pervasive, and looking at them in new ways.
The Future of Application Development: Presentation, Business Logic, Data Access and Web Services
… That idea of quick 3D rendering to create virtual worlds, that is another thing that I expect will be fully mainstream over this next decade. There's been a lot of times people have said that was ripe, but really the performance and the tools were not there to make that happen. It's partly due to the graphics chip work that's come from games support that we now have in all of these personal computer devices, even somewhat in the phones, that let us be more ambitious in all presentations, including even 3D.
… We're hard at work on a new version of that, so-called IE8, a very creative name that we've come up with. And you're going to see the beta for this coming out in August of this year. Actually, that's Beta 2, it will come out within a month of that with support for over 20 different languages, and it's got some very interesting things that I'll just mention briefly here. It's got activities where you can take a set of things you do on the Web and group them together. And so that will be very important. And then it's got what are called slices, which are essentially small Web pages where you can highlight the portion of your page that should appear when somebody has not got it in a full-size window. It lets you get at the snippet type things, and provide a persistent presence in a very simple way, and we've made that extremely straightforward. It's, I think, a very neat new idea. So, we're going to be going through these developer features in the breakouts here. I encourage you to take a look at that.
A Silverlight Application Demo by Soma Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division
So the first thing I'm going to show you all today is an application that is going to be under development, which is a Silverlight-based application. Now, this app is called Crossfader, and it is a social networking app that you can use to share your digital content, it could be music, could be videos, could be whatever, pictures. You want to be able create and then share it with your friends and family, and more importantly, with other members in the online community that you choose to be a part of.
… the team is putting the finishing touches on beta 2 of Silverlight 2, and we are on track to delivering that to you all by the end of this week. And this beta 2 is going to have a Go Live license, so that if you want to use this and deploy it in your production environment, you can do that. In fact, we have a deal with the Olympics guys this summer, with NBC and MSN, where they are going to have over 3,000 hours of content that can be streamed either on demand, or live, all the Olympic content, that's going to be using Silverlight beta 2. So we are very excited about what we are going show you all in the coming months here.
… So to summarize, we think about client development, and user experience across the whole spectrum, starting from standards-based programming, all the way to rich client programming with WPF. And at Microsoft we strive to give you a set of tools, and the runtime technologies that enable you as a developer to be able to learn once and then apply your skills, your expertise, and frankly, your code, anywhere you choose to go in this continuum.
Visual Studio Team System Demo by Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow
We've got a new tool called the Architecture Explorer. Actually what it does is it goes through your solution, parses all of the code and visualizes that to allow you to see your application. … you can take an application that you've never worked on before. You can use the modeling tool to parse that application, and show you a visual representation of it. You can then go in and understand how that application compares to the architecture as it was designed. And you can make your changes and validate that your changes conform to your design.
SQL demo by Dave Campbell, Microsoft Technical Fellow
I'm going to show today a new SQL Server 2008 capabilities for spatial data, and also file integration, so doing a great job of integrating files into the database. And then if you look at what we've done with what you can do with the data nowadays, we've gone from just select, insert, update, delete to being able to analyze, visualize, be able to replicate and synchronize data across a variety of sources. So really the richness of what you can do with the data has increased tremendously as well. … when we talk software plus services, I think this is a great example where we're using the data services as the data hub, the data is protected and backed up there. We use a very rich application to get the power out of the clients, a local database, all synchronized to make sure that we've got the most up to date content in all places at all times. So great advances toward SQL Server 2008, and that will be available for you in the next month or two.
Bill Gates on Web-based Services
… Now to make these services reliable, to make it easy to call them, to provide the kind of security that you want, there are a lot of new developments that have had to take place, things like identity federation. Things like the protocols that you see in the WS* standards, and that we've made easy to get to through the Communication Framework libraries. We're taking everything we do at the server level, and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly. The simplest one of those is to say, okay, I can run Exchange on premise, or I can connect up to it as a service. But even at the BizTalk level, we'll have BizTalk Services. For SQL, we'll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically. This is kind of fascinating because it's getting us to think about data centers at a scale that never existed before. Literally today we have, in our data center, many hundreds of thousands of servers, and in the future we'll have many millions of those servers.
ENISA*, the European Network and Information Security Agency, has issued recommendations on four levels aimed at improving the security level of Social Networking Services (SNS).
Recommended user actions
Users of SNS can take actions to ensure protection of personal data. They should always consider the consequences of material, particularly images, before posting online. Imagine the audience which might realistically access the data and learn about (and use) the privacy settings available on social networks. Accepting default settings is not enough.
Recommended actions for enterprises
ENISA recommends enterprises to develop a SNS usage policy for staff which takes into account the possible uses of SNS data for social engineering attacks. Firms should also educate employees about so-called ”spear-phishing” attacks.
Promote stronger authentication and access-control where appropriate
Implement countermeasures against corporate espionage using SNSs
Recommended government actions
ENISA urges governments to review legislation and its interpretation in the context of social networking. There are many issues which need clarification including, for example, deletion of user-generated content or image-tagging by third parties.
Governments should promote awareness raising programs for safer social networking. Banning SNS in schools is not a solution as this policy deters children from seeking help in case of problems. SNS also offer adults the means to learn the skills needed to mentor and monitor young people in this area. SNS can be a valuable educational resource. Governments’ role should be, therefore, to promote transparency about the handling of data collected via SNS and support research and initiatives which encourage recent innovations on secure portability on SNS which discourage so-called „lock-in”.
Encourage awareness-raising and educational campaigns
Review and reinterpret regulatory framework
Increase transparency of data-handling practices
Discourage the banning of SNSs in schools
Recommended SNS actions
SNS providers play a critical role in ensuring security on their sites. They should promote safer usage in real-time by posting security information on SNS. They also need to increase transparency of data handling practices. Abuse of data should be straightforward to report and data easy to delete completely. These actions are not comprehensive, however. There are numerous other issues which providers must address to improve the SNS environment.
Promote stronger authentication and access-control where appropriate
Implement countermeasures against corporate espionage using SNSs
Maximise possibilities for reporting and detecting abuse
Set appropriate defaults
Providers should offer convenient means to delete data completely
The following main technical recommendations are given for the SNS providers in their paper:
Encourage the use of reputation techniques
Build in automated filters
Require the consent of the data subject to include profile tags or e-mail address tags in images
Restrict spidering and bulk downloads
Provide more privacy control over search results
Recommendations for addressing SNS spam
Recommendations for addressing SNS phishing
ENISA also has some recommendations for the research community:
Promote and research image-anonymisation techniques and best practices
Promote portable networks
Research into emerging trends in SNSs
*ENISA is as a body set up by the EU to carry out a very specific technical, scientific or management task within the "Community domain" of the EU. ENISA is helping the European Commission, the Member States and the business community to address, respond and especially to prevent Network and Information Security problems. Also assists the European Commission in the technical preparatory work for updating and developing Community legislation in the field of Network and Information Security.
You can download the 36 page paper (it is free of charge).
Forbes.com released a comprehensive set of articles written by more than a dozen IT executives to assess how the two titanic competitors, Google and Microsoft measure up on many different fronts.
Cloud computing related articles:
Disruption Alert / Peter O'Kelly, vice president and research director for Burton Group Data Management Strategies
Ground War Goes to the Clouds / Jim Jones, managing director at Scale Venture Partners, which is an investor in many companies, including Omniture, Frontbridge, Placeware and NComputing
History Revisited / Mark Stuart Day, chief scientist at Riverbed Computing and was formerly with Cisco
Making Big Clouds from Little Ones / Bruce MacNaughton, a partner at Crosslink Capital, focusing on communications services, infrastructure and software. He also served as general manager of Internet operations at Microsoft. He spent 20 years at CompuServe.
Meshy Worlds / Steve Gillmor, a longtime tech industry columnist and creator of the pioneering IT podcast "The Gillmor Gang
Threatening Clouds Over Redmond / Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite and has spent 20 years in technology companies. He has held executive jobs at such companies as Oracle, Sun Microsystems and McAfee/Network Associates.
Searching for answers
Searching The Enterprise / Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder and chief executive of the enterprise search company Vivisimo. He is also a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
May Your Enemy Be Worthy / Anthony Rodio, executive vice president at SupportSoft, was formerly senior director of brand communication at Microsoft for MSN
Online Video: Stay Tuned / Amir Ashkenazi, CEO of Adap.tv, a provider of online video advertising solutions for media publishers and advertisers. Ashkenazi also founded Shopping.com, acquired by eBay in 2005.
The Vertical Ad Network Wars / Russ Fradin, president of Adify, a vertical ad network management company recently bought by Cox Enterprises, one of the nation’s leading media companies.
To buy or not to buy Yahoo!
Buying Time / Kip Sheeline, a managing partner with Levensohn Venture Partners and is a director of Broadlogic and Capella. Until recently, he was a director of Rapt.
He's Just Not That Into You / Richard Moran, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock in Menlo Park, Calif.; a former Accenture partner; and the author of Nuts, Bolts and Jolts.
Two Empty Vessels / Andrew Rocklin, a principal in the health care practice of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants
The bottom line
Awakening A Sleeping Giant / Allan Krans, a senior analyst with Technology Business Review, covering emerging trends in the computing industry
Be Attila, Not Mother Teresa / Arthur Marks, co-founder and general partner at Valhalla Partners, a venture capital firm based in the Washington, D,C. He spent 15 years at Baxter Labs and GE.
Yesterday I had a comment on my post “EU projects concerning security, privacy and trust in the Future Internet” by a member of the development team of RetroShare, a service which combines Chatting and Instant Messaging to your friends with file sharing, enabling you to have only connections to your trusted friends, not to every peer. So it is a secure and safe way for connections and sharing information. All is serverless, open source and encrypted. And you can search for files, which all your friends share. With turtle hopping even the friends of your friends while staying connected only to your trusted direct neighbor friends. Channels allow sending messages and recommending files to all your friends.
The idea of this service is to create direct Peer-2-Peer connections between users removing the need of a central storage, or the need to trust a corporate entity. Everything remains private! A decentralized Web-Of-Trust (like PGP) is used to authenticate users - meaning that you don't rely on web servers. It supports chat and private file-sharing at the moment and they are in the process of building further SocialNet applications (Calendar sharing, blogs, forums, groups etc).
This direct P2P connection is also called Friend to Friend (F2F). While P2P connected you for sharing with neighbors all over the world, F2F maintains connections only to your trusted friends as neighbors.
Features:
Graphical User Interface written with Qt4.2
UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding support
OpenSSL Encryption
Encrypted Chat & Filetransfer
Multiple simultaneous downloads / uploads
Search Friends
DHT support
Instant Chat Messaging
How safe is RetroShare? Because RetroShare is a private network only you and your peers can see which files you are sharing. Every peer must be authenticated and approved before a connection takes place, and all communication is also encrypted using standard openSSL techniques. RetroShare is, however, not an anonymous file-sharing network. Your friends know who you are, and what you are sharing. No one else on the network can see this information. The friends of your peers also know of your existence, and can attempt to connect to you through the Auto-Discovery system. Your security is primarily dependent on the reliability of the people you connect to. Connect to trustworthy people and your files will be safe. Allow anyone to connect… who knows what will happen. Surely a F2F connection increases security.
You can download Windows and MacOS X versions as well.
European Commission: Titled, “The Future of the Internet” the European Commission issued a report on 70 projects, worth nearly EUR 300 million of EU research investment, with an additional EUR 200 million from the academia and industry involved in them, represent international public-private partnerships addressing the key challenges for the development of the Future Internet.
27/05/2008 – Tuesday
European Commission: The European Commission set Europe a target of getting 25% of EU industry, public authorities and households to use IPv6 by 2010, calling for concerted action at European level to get all actors prepared for a timely, efficient change to avoid extra costs for consumers and give innovative European companies a competitive advantage. Encouraging internet users and providers to adopt the latest Internet Protocol (IP version 6 or IPv6) will provide a massive increase in address space, much in the same way as telephone numbers were lengthened in the 20th century.
USA Today: Belgian French-language newspapers said Tuesday they want Google to pay up to EUR 49 million ($77 million) in damages for publishing and storing their content without permission. The newspaper copyright group Copiepresse said it had summoned Google to appear again before a Brussels court in September that will decide on their claim that they suffered damages of between EUR 32.8 million ($51.7 million) and EUR 49.2 million ($77.5 million). The group called on Google to pay a provisional amount of EUR 4 million ($6.3 million).
28/05/2008 – Wednesday
Google Lat Long Blog: Google released the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet. In fact, you can even overlay your content over different planets, stars, and galaxies by toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3D Google Sky mashups. You can also enable 3D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML data from the web, and more. Our goal is to open up the entire core of Google Earth to developers in the hopes that you'll build the next great geo-based 3D application, and change (yet again) how we view the world.
Forbes.com: Facebook is working on a redesign that will allow popular applications to become more accessible to users, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "We're moving the system away from box-based [layout] to applications that are more engaging, that people trust more, moving through the system," said Zuckerberg, who was speaking at the Dow Jones "All Things Digital" conference. Zuckerberg did not say what the redesign might look like, but indicated that Facebook might eventually have functions similar to search. "As the amount of content [on Facebook] gets bigger, we'll have to get better at filtering," he said.
Reuters: Amazon.com Inc, the largest Internet retailer, will launch a streaming video service in the next few weeks to augment its digital offerings, the company's chief executive said on Wednesday. Jeff Bezos, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's three-day D: All Things Digital conference taking place north of San Diego, did not elaborate, and a company spokeswoman would not provide more information.
Skyfire Labs Inc., makers of the Skyfire mobile browser, which allows users to experience the PC Web on their handsets, today announced $13 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a leading global venture capital firm. Founded in April 2006, Skyfire is a venture-backed innovator in mobile web browsing with a mission to dramatically improve your browsing experience on mobile phones. They created the only mobile browser that delivers both the speed and media-rich experience similar to the PC browser.
29/05/2008 – Thursday
Mashable: During this week’s Google I/O conference of developers, AOL announced their future support of OpenSocial with AOL services. The first integration point will be seen during the next “few months” at myAOL.com, where Google’s Gadgets will soon be available. That is only the beginning, though, as OpenSocial support is planned for “all AOL products and platforms.”
paidContetnt.org: Twitter is in the process of closing its $15 million round, and the investor is Spark Capital, we have confirmed through sources. Previous investor Union Square Ventures is also re-upping in this round, our sources say. Spark is the digital media-focused investment firm based in Boston, and has invested in companies such as Veoh, Kickapps, NextNewNetworks and others. In total, the company will have raised about $20 million after this round closes.
30/05/2008 – Friday
Wired: Cable giant Comcast was the victim of a DNS hijacking beginning late Wednesday and into early Thursday. The hacker group Kryogeniks claimed responsibility for the stunt, which blocked Comcast customers from accessing their webmail service. Customers were redirected to a page in which the hijackers boasted of the ploy.
31/05/2008 – Saturday
BBC: A Canadian privacy group has filed a complaint against Facebook accusing it of violating privacy laws. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has listed 22 separate breaches of privacy law in its country. Clinic director Phillipa Lawson told the BBC that, with more than seven million users in Canada, "Facebook needs to be held publicly accountable". Facebook rejects the charge, claiming some of the highest standards around. The complaint, filed with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, states that Facebook collects sensitive information about its users and shares it without their permission.
AP News: The Phoenix Mars Lander mission public Web site was taken over by a hacker during the night and changed its lead news story. Spokeswoman Sara Hammond says a mission update posted Friday was replaced with a hacker's signature and a link redirecting visitors to an overseas Web site. Hammond says the site hosted by the University of Arizona has been taken off line while computer experts work to correct the problem.
The 162 page study released by the European Commission this week on the future of the Internet has a 29 page summary of 14 EU funded or co-funded research projects in relation with security, privacy and trust in the Future Internet. The question of security on the Internet is undoubtedly important: the latest security breach news is that the Web site for Phoenix Mars Lander was invaded by a hacker: news story was changed and outside links were added.
The Information Society has become a reality with polymorphic fixed and wireless broadband networks deployed almost pervasively. Together with emerging service oriented architectures, they facilitate the composition and provision of interactive and personalized services and drive participative web technologies and web communities.
In recent years we have witnessed a growing series of accidents and attacks on the Internet and on applications and databases. Through denial of service attacks, viruses, phishing, spyware and other malware, criminals disrupt service provisioning and steal personal or confidential business data for financial gain or other purposes. An increasingly organized and efficient though disruptive e-market is thus taking shape on an international scale. Massive data gathering on individual behavior for surveillance and service personalization (though packaged as “enhanced functionality”) may lead to the erosion of civil liberties through loss of privacy and personal freedom. These negative developments threaten to undermine the potential highly beneficial opportunities of the Future Internet.
Research initiatives have therefore been launched in Europe and other industrialized countries on the design and development principles of the Future Internet. This term encompasses, in fact, the emergence of future large heterogeneous and interconnected networked ICT infrastructures, as for example: the future evolution of the current Internet, the Internet of “Things”, future wireless and mobile systems and sensor/actuator networks (post-IP, post 3G), mixed-mode environments consisting of diverse computing, communication and storage capacities, and service-centric, evolving and adaptive ambient environments. It also encompasses the emergence of millions of different networked virtual constructs and entities. Examples here include enriched, dynamically evolving overlaid infrastructures (like virtual private or overlay networks, dynamic service soft ware coalitions and interconnects, semantic P2P grids, etc.) and “virtual worlds” based on highly-distributed, virtualized communication, computing and storage resources.
Integrated projects
MASTER - Managing Assurance, Security and Trust for Services This is an Integrated Project that aims at providing manageable assurance of the security and trust levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic Service Oriented Architectures that deal with business processes.
PRIMELIFE - Bringing Life-Long Privacy to the Internet More and more personal data is exchanged and stored on the Internet. Little assurance is given to the users that their privacy is sufficiently protected. PRIMELIFE is an Integrated Project that aims at bringing sustainable privacy and identity management to Future Networks and Services, with users retaining control of their own personal data.
TAS3 - Securely Managing Personal Information Services In today’s ever-increasing computerized society, users are often required to make available their personal data at a third party (e.g. at a hospital) without being able to retain control of such data. TAS3 – Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services – is an Integrated Project that will develop a generic architecture with trusted services to manage personal information and will substantiate it into two concrete healthcare and employability platforms.
TECOM - Trusted Embedded Computing As there are many more embedded computing platforms than PCs in the production and in the field, it has become necessary to adapt the current Trusted Computing security standard also to embedded computing platforms. This is the main goal of the Integrated Project TECOM.
Specific targeted research projects
AVANTSSAR - Validating Security Properties of Software Services The dynamic composition of soft ware services in future network infrastructures entails a wide range of trust and security issues. AVANTSSAR will develop the first computer language for specifying trust and security properties of services and their dynamic composition into secure service architectures. The language will be integrated in a new soft ware platform with algorithms and tools to validate those properties.
AWISSENET - Ad-hoc personal area network and WIreless Sensor SEcure NETwork This project aims to implement and validate a scalable, secure, trusted networking protocol stack, able to offer self configuration and secure roaming of data and services over multiple administrative domains and across insecure infrastructures of heterogeneous ad-hoc personal area networks and wireless tiny sensor networks.
INTERSECTION - INfrastructure for heTErogeneous, Resilient, SEcure, Complex, Tightly Inter-Operating Networks This project aims at enhancing the European potential in the field of security by assuring the protection of heterogeneous networks and infrastructures. The project will focus on vulnerabilities at the intersection points between different interoperating network providers.
PICOS - Privacy and Identity Management for Community Services PICOS will develop and build a state-of-the-art platform for providing the trust, privacy and identity management aspects of community services and applications on the Internet and in mobile communication networks.
PRISM - Privacy-aware Secure Monitoring The goal of the project PRISM is to set a new de-facto standard for privacy-preserving traffic monitoring and deliver a tool that is guaranteed (and possibly certifi ed) for legal compliance.
SWIFT - Secure Widespread Identities for Federated Telecommunications The project aims to leverage identity technology as a key to integrate service and transport infrastructures for the benefit of users and the providers, thereby extending identity functions and federation to the network and addressing usability and privacy concerns. The project will develop a standards aligned model for user data linked to identities or personae with the user in control of the information exchanged.
WOMBAT - Worldwide Observatory of Malicious Behaviours and Attack Threats The aim of WOMBAT is to provide new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and the net citizens.
Networks of Excellence Co-ordination Actions
eCRYPT II - Fundamental enabler for secure, dependable and trusted infrastructures The highly successful Network of Excellence ECRYPT on cryptology – the science that studies mathematical techniques in order to provide secrecy, authenticity and related properties for digital information - continues into FP7 as ECRYPT-II.
FORWARD - Managing Emerging Threats in ICT Infrastructures This is a coordination action that aims at promoting collaboration and partnership between researchers from academia and industry involved in the protection of ICT infrastructures against cyber threats such as malicious code (viruses, botnets, spyware), spam and phishing.
THINK-TRUST - Think Tank for Converging Consumer Needs in ICT Trust, Security and Dependability Think-Trust is a Coordination Action that will set up an ICT Security Research Advisory Board bringing together the opinions and requirements of a comprehensive range of stakeholders with regard to trust, security and dependability issues in emerging ICT environments.
I worked 5 years at Pannon (Hungary's 2nd biggest GSM Service Provider) in PR and 9 years at Pannon and Népszabadság (Hungary's biggest political daily) in Internet communication (web and service development and management).
Feedky is a new RSS based video mashup tool which allows you to receive all the videos of your interest which are uploaded everyday in such pages as YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vpod, Google Video, Yahoo Video and Flickr. Just write tags or key words of what you are interested in and Feedky creates a personal address automatically which you can use as RSS Feed or look at the results on a webpage. You don’t have to register, but if you do, it enables you to organize & edit all the tags.
