Facebook to introduce live streaming, video chats to Messenger games

Facebook to introduce live streaming, video chats to Messenger games

  12:33:00 PM    Science Lover

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More than a year after launching "Instant Games" -- a new platform for gaming with friends on the Messenger chat app, Facebook has announced support for live streaming via Facebook Live and video chatting with fellow gamers.

"First, we're launching live streaming, which will start to roll out today, to gamers who love to share their playthroughs and engage in a little smack talk," Facebook wrote in a blog post late Thursday.

The users will be able to record these live streams so that they can be posted to the profile afterwards.

"Over 245 million people video chat every month on Messenger. We're excited to begin a test soon that will enable people to play games with each other while video chatting," the company added.

Meanwhile, the social media giant also announced additions to "Instant Games" with a handful of big-name mobile titles that will be "re-imagined" for the platform.

"Launching globally in early 2018 is none other than Angry Birds, a new game built for Messenger that will feature classic gameplay with an exciting new way to challenge friends," Facebook said.

The immensely popular game will join the recently launched Tetris which includes beloved features like marathon mode and the ability to play with friends in Messenger group chats.

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The Law of Online Sharing

The Law of Online Sharing

  10:21:00 AM    Science Lover

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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg will eventually have to deal with the fact that all growth has limits.

Credit: Technology Review

The idea of limitless growth gives sleepless nights to environmentalists, but not to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He espouses a law of social sharing, which predicts that every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double.

That rule of thumb can be visualized mathematically as a rapidly growing exponential curve. More simply, our online social lives are set to get significantly busier. As for Facebook, more personal data means better ad targeting. If things work out, Zuckerberg's net worth will follow a similar trajectory to that described in his law of social sharing.

That law is said to be mathematically derived from data inside Facebook. In ambition, it is closely modeled on Moore's Law, which was conceived by the computer-processor pioneer Gordon Moore in 1965 and has been at work in every advance in computing since. Also an exponential curve, it states that every two years twice as many transistors can be fitted onto a chip of any given area for the same price, allowing processing power to get cheaper and more capable.

There's a hint of vanity in Zuckerberg's attempt to ape Moore. But it makes sense to try to describe the mechanisms that have raised Facebook and other social-Web companies to power. The Web defines our time and is being rapidly reshaped by social content—from dumb viral videos to earnest pleas on serious issues. Facebook's success has left older companies like Google scrambling to add social features to their own products. Zuckerberg's Law can help us understand such a sudden change of tack from a seemingly dominant company, just as Moore's Law has long been used to plan and explain new strategies and technologies.

Inasmuch as Facebook is the company most invested in ­Zuckerberg's Law, its every move can be understood as an effort to sustain the graceful upward curve of its founder's formula. The short-term prospects look good for Zuckerberg. The original Moore's Law is on his side; faster, cheaper computers and mobile devices have made sharing easier and allowed us to do it wherever we go. Just as important, we are willing to play along, embracing new features from Facebook and others that lead us to share things today that we wouldn't or couldn't have yesterday.

Facebook's most recent major product launch, last September, is clearly aimed at validating Zuckerberg's prophecy and may provide its first real test. An upgrade to the Open Graph platform that unleashed the now ubiquitous Like button onto the Web , it added a feature that allows apps and Web sites to automatically share your activity via Facebook as you go about your business. Users must first give a service permission to share automatically on their behalf. After that, frictionless sharing, as it has become known, makes sharing happen without your needing to click a Like button, or to even think about sharing. The most prominent early implementation was the music-streaming service Spotify, which can now automatically post on Facebook the details of every song you listen to. In the first two months of frictionless sharing, more than 1.5 billion "listens" were shared through Spotify and other music apps. News organizations like the Washington Post use the feature, making it possible for them to share every article a person reads on their sites or in a dedicated app. Frictionless sharing is also helping Facebook drag formerly offline activities onto the Web. An app for runners can now automatically post the time, distance, and path of a person's morning run.

Frictionless sharing sustains ­Zuckerberg's Law by automating what used to be a manual task, thus removing a brake on the rate at which we can share. It also shows that we are willing to compromise our previous positions on how much sharing is too much. Facebook introduced a form of automatic sharing four years ago with a feature called Beacon, but it retreated after a strong backlash from users. Beacon automatically shared purchases that Facebook members made through affiliated online retailers, such as eBay. Frictionless sharing reintroduces the same basic model with the difference that it is opt-in rather than opt-out. Carl ­Sjogreen, a computer scientist who is a product director overseeing Open Graph, says it hasn't elicited anything like the rage that met Beacon's debut. "Everyone has a different idea of what they want to share, and what they want to see," says Sjogreen. Moreover, judging by the number of Spotify updates from my Facebook friends, frictionless sharing is pretty popular.

Privacy concerns will surely arise again as Facebook and others become able to ingest and process more of our personal data. Yet our urge to share always seems to win out. The potential for GPS-equipped cell phones to become location trackers, should the government demand access to our data, has long concerned some people. A South Park episode last year even portrayed an evil caricature of Apple boss Steve Jobs standing before a wall-sized map labeled "Where Everybody in the World Is Right Now." Six months later, to a mostly positive reception, Apple debuted a new iPhone feature called Find My Friends, which encourages users to let Apple track their location and share it.

It's not hard to explain why we seem eager to do our bit to maintain the march of Zuckerberg's Law. Social sites are like Skinner boxes: we press the Like button and are rewarded with attention and interaction from our friends. It doesn't take long to get conditioned to that reward. Frictionless sharing can now push the lever for us day and night, in hopes of drawing even more attention from others.

Unfortunately for Zuckerberg and his law, not every part of that feedback loop can be so easily boosted. Frictionless sharing helps, but getting others to care is the bigger challenge. In 2009 a new social site called Blippy was launched; it connected with your credit card to create a Twitter-style online feed of everything you bought. That stream could be made public or shared with particular contacts. Blippy got a lot of press but not the wide adoption its cofounder Philip Kaplan had hoped for. "Most people thought Blippy's biggest challenge would be getting users to share their purchases," he says. "Turns out the hard part was getting users to look at other people's purchases. Getting people to share is a small hump. Getting them to obsess over the data—making it fun, interesting, or useful—is the big hump."

Sjogreen has that problem in his sights. He says he is working on ways to turn the impending flood of daily trivialities coming from frictionless sharing into something fun, interesting, and useful. Repackaging the raw information to make it more compelling to others is one tactic. "It's the patterns and anomalies that matter to us," he says. For example, if you notice that a friend just watched 23 episodes of Breaking Bad in a row, you may decide you should check out that show after all. Or if he sets a new personal record on his morning run, the app in the phone strapped to his arm could automatically tout it to friends. Perhaps Blippy would have thrived if it highlighted significant purchases like vacations, instead of simply blasting people with everything from grocery lists to fuel bills.

We can only guess at the effectiveness of Sjogreen's future tactics, but it is certain that they can sustain Zuckerberg's Law for only so long. Gordon Moore put it well in 2005 when reflecting on the success of his own law: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens."

Facebook's impending problem is that even if the company enables future pacemakers to share our every heartbeat, the company cannot automate caring—the most important part of the feedback loop that has driven the social Web's ascent. Nothing can support exponential growth for long. No matter how cleverly our friends' social output is summarized and highlighted for us, there are only so many hours in the day for us to express that we care. Today, the law of social sharing is a useful way to think about the rise of social computing, but eventually, reality will make it obsolete.

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Have We Met Before? Direct Connections Found Between Areas of Brain Responsible for Voice and Face Recognition

Have We Met Before? Direct Connections Found Between Areas of Brain Responsible for Voice and Face Recognition

  12:11:00 AM    Science Lover

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Face and voice are the two main features by which we recognise other people. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have now discovered that there is a direct structural connection consisting of fibre pathways between voice- and face-recognition areas in the human brain. The exchange of information, which is assumed to take place between these areas via this connection, could help us to quickly identify familiar people in everyday situations and also under adverse conditions.

Direct structural connections exist between the two voice recognition areas (blue and red spheres) and the face recognition area (yellow sphere). In comparison, the connection to the area responsible for more general acoustic information (green sphere) is less strong. The connections appear to be part of larger fibre bundles (shown in grey). (Credit: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences)

Theories differ as to what happens in the brain when we recognise familiar persons. Conventionally, it is assumed that voice and face recognition are separate processes which are only combined on a higher processing level. However, recent findings indicate that voice and face recognition are much more closely related. Katharina von Kriegstein, Leader of the Max Planck Research Group "Neural Mechanisms of Human Communication," found in previous research that areas of the brain which are responsible for the identification of faces also become active when we hear a familiar voice. These activations were accompanied by better voice recognition.

"We now assume that areas in the brain which are involved in voice and face recognition interact directly and influence each other," says Helen Blank, a member of von Kriegstein's research group. In a new study, Blank could show that a structural connection between voice and face recognition areas exists. She used diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging, a method with which the course of white matter tracts in the brain can be reconstructed when combined with tractography, a mathematical modelling technique. Blank had located the areas responsible for voice and face recognition in her study participants by measuring the reactions of the brain to different voices and faces using magnetic resonance imaging.

Blank discovered a direct connection consisting of fibre pathways between the voice- and the face-recognition area. "It is particularly interesting that the face recognition area appears to be more strongly connected with the areas involved in voice identification, despite the fact that these areas are further away than areas which process information from voices on a more general level," says the researcher.



This direct connection in our brains could be used in everyday contexts to simulate the faces of our conversation partners, e.g. when we speak on the telephone to a familiar person. However, the precise nature of the information that is exchanged between the voice- and face-recognition areas remains unclear. A forthcoming study which Blank is currently preparing aims to clarify this issue.

Obtaining a more detailed understanding of how the brain works in relation to the processing of such basic tasks as person recognition could be of benefit in many different areas. "The finding is of interest for research on unusual neurological conditions, such as prosopagnosia and phonagnosia, which prevent people from being able to recognise others from their faces or voices," says Blank. The new insights could also stimulate innovations in computer technology and improve person recognition by machines.

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Neuroscientists Find Famous Optical Illusion Surprisingly Potent

Neuroscientists Find Famous Optical Illusion Surprisingly Potent

  10:56:00 PM    Science Lover

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The yellow jacket (Rocky, the mascot of the University of Rochester) appears to be expanding. But he is not. He is staying still. We simply think he is growing because our brains have adapted to the inward motion of the background and that has become our new status quo.

The yellow jacket (Rocky, the mascot of the University of Rochester) appears to be expanding if you have just viewed concentric circles moving inwards. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Rochester)

Similar situations arise constantly in our day-to-day lives -- jump off a moving treadmill and everything around you seems to be in motion for a moment.

This age-old illusion, first documented by Aristotle, is called the Motion Aftereffect by today's scientists. Why does it happen, though? Is it because we are consciously aware that the background is moving in one direction, causing our brains to shift their frame of reference so that we can ignore this motion? Or is it an automatic, subconscious response?

Davis Glasser, a doctoral student in the University of Rochester's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences thinks he has found the answer. The results of a study done by Glasser, along with his advisor, Professor Duje Tadin, and colleagues James Tsui and Christopher Pack of the Montreal Neurological Institute, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In their paper, the scientists show that humans experience the Motion Aftereffect even if the motion that they see in the background is so brief that they can't even tell whether it is heading to the right or the left.



Even when shown a video of a pattern that is moving for only 1/40 of a second (25 milliseconds) -- so short that the direction it is moving cannot be consciously distinguished -- a subject's brain automatically adjusts. If the subject is then shown a stationary object, it will appear to him as though it is moving in the opposite direction of the background motion. In recordings from a motion center in the brain called cortical area MT, the researchers found neurons that, following a brief exposure to motion, respond to stationary objects as if they are actually moving. It is these neurons that the researchers think are responsible for the illusory motion of stationary objects that people see during the Motion Aftereffect.

This discovery reveals that the Motion Aftereffect illusion is not just a compelling visual oddity: It is caused by neural processes that happen essentially every time we see moving objects. The next phase of the group's study will attempt to find out whether this rapid motion adaptation serves a beneficial purpose -- in other words, does this rapid adaptation actually improve your ability to estimate the speed and direction of relevant moving objects, such as a baseball flying toward you.



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How Google+ Will Balkanize Your Social Life

How Google+ Will Balkanize Your Social Life

  12:55:00 AM    Science Lover

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For many, the new service offers the chance to press "reset on Facebook."

Google launched its Facebook competitor, Google+, just over a week ago now. Even though sign-ups have so far been limited to a fraction of Facebook's 750 million users, it already appears that, for a lot of people, Google+ will become the other social network they need to use. Why? Because a significant fraction of their friends will force them to. 

It's not just that Google+ has 10-person video hangouts, or that Google+ is magically free of privacy worries. It's that Google has created the opportunity for Facebook-weary people to perform what one called "a reset on Facebook," allowing them to escape from Facebook members they've friended over the years but don't really want to interact with—and can't quite bring themselves to defriend.

The killer feature of Google+ is that, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, or most other social networks, there's no such thing as a friend request. Users can create groups of friends, called Circles in Google+ terminology. These circles can include both other Google+ users and nonusers who receive status updates via e-mail rather than via the site. As a Google+ user, you can share your status updates and favorite links with those in one or more of these easily created circles, or with everyone. And you can see what other users have shared with you, or with everyone, in a Facebook-like feed that runs down the middle of the page.

But you'll never be put in the awkward situation of receiving a friend request from someone you don't really want to be Google+ friends with. Nor will you have to face the awkward decision of whether or not to defriend a former confidant with whom you've fallen out. Just remove them from your circles, which are never revealed to other users. Other than that, Google+ looks and behaves a lot like Facebook.



Sure, Facebook has ways to filter, block, and organize other members so you don't have to share every update with, say, your parents. But on Google+, your parents can't send you a friend request, and the Circles system makes it one-click easy to share a tasteless video clip or a story of public drunkenness with your college friends without having to customize the update first. There's no way yet to share a post with everyone in your Best Buddies circle except those who are also in your Coworkers circle, but it would be easy to add to the system before Google takes Google+ out of its limited-membership trial period.

Another subtle difference from Facebook: Google+ doesn't yet have ads running down the side of the page, nor are there viral apps that spam all of one's Google+ friends with updates such as, "Jane Smith has taken a test!" Given the low-key format of Google's ads on its search engine and in its Gmail service, it seem likely that while some sort of advertising is inevitable, it won't be the kind that addles users' eyeballs and infuriates them with its intrusiveness. The most annoying ads Google sells will probably still be the ones that pop up at the bottom of Google's YouTube videos.

Having been on Google+ for a week, I'm enjoying the private-club feel of the place. The only updates I see are mostly from people I personally invited to join last week.

My feed also includes frequent posts from the usual social media early adopters, such as SoupSoup blogger Anthony de Rosa, who have an ear for the interesting. Checking two social networks instead of one is inconvenient, but the difference between Facebook and Google+ is currently like work versus play —people I feel obliged to network with (Facebook), and people I'm happy to kick back with on the other (Google+).

Google has since turned off the ability to invite others to join Google+ temporarily, blocking new sign-ups with the message, "We have temporarily exceeded our capacity." Since when does Google have capacity issues, by the way? Most likely, Google is just taking it slow, while the first few users find their way around.

Eventually, Google will open up Google+ to everyone, which means former coworkers I've forgotten, people I went to school with 30 years ago, and an army of public relations professionals trying to network with me will show up. But unlike Facebook, I won't have to approve 984 friend requests. And unlike Facebook, on Google+ I won't feel rude when I block their updates from my feed. It's time for a reset.

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Why Do We Share Stories, News, and Information With Others?

Why Do We Share Stories, News, and Information With Others?

  11:17:00 PM    Science Lover

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People often share stories, news, and information with the people around them. We forward online articles to our friends, share stories with our co-workers at the water cooler, and pass along rumors to our neighbors. Such social transmission has been going on for thousands of years, and the advent of social technologies like texting, Facebook, and other social media sites has only made it faster and easier to share content with others. But why is certain content shared more than others and what drives people to share?

Well, according to Jonah Berger, the author of a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal. When people are physiologically aroused, whether due to emotional stimuli or otherwise, the autonomic nervous is activated, which then boosts social transmission. Simply put, evoking certain emotions can help increase the chance a message is shared.

“In a prior paper, we found that emotion plays a big role in which New York Times articles make the most emailed list. But interestingly, we found that while articles evoking more positive emotions were generally more viral, some negative emotions like anxiety and anger actually increased transmission while others like sadness decreased it. In trying to understand why, it seemed like arousal might be a key factor,” says Berger, the Joseph G. Campbell Jr. Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the study, Berger suggests that feeling fearful, angry, or amused drives people to share news and information. These types of emotions are characterized by high arousal and action, as opposed to emotions like sadness or contentment, which are characterized by low arousal or inaction. “If something makes you angry as opposed to sad, for example, you’re more likely to share it with your family and friends because you’re fired up,” continues Berger.

Berger is especially interested in how social transmission leads online content to become viral. “There is so much interest in Facebook, Twitter, and other types or social media today,” he says, “but for companies and organizations to use these technologies effectively they need to understand why people talk about and share certain things.”



Two different experiments were conducted to test Berger’s theory that arousal promotes information sharing. In one experiment, which focused on specific emotions, 93 students completed what they were told were two unrelated studies. In the first study, students in different experimental groups watched video clips that made them either anxious or amused (high arousal emotions) or sad or content (low arousal emotions). In the second study, they were shown an emotionally neutral article and video and asked how willing they would be to share it with friends and family members. The results demonstrated that students who felt high arousal emotions were much more inclined to share with others.

The second experiment dealt with arousal more generally. 40 students were asked to complete what they assumed were two unrelated studies. First, they either sat still or jogged in place for about a minute – a task proven to increase arousal. Then they were asked to read a neutral online news article and told they could e-mail it to anyone they wanted. The findings showed that students who jogged in place and were aroused were more likely to e-mail the article to their friends and family, as opposed to the students that just sat still.

Berger states that the implications of this study are quite broad. “People’s behavior is heavily influenced by what others say and do. Whether you are a company trying to get people to talk more about your brand, or a public health organization trying to get people to spread your healthy eating message, these results provide insight into how to design more effective messages and communication strategies.”For more information about this study, please contact: Jonah Berger at jberger@wharton.upenn.edu.

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Facebook May Mobilize on Web Apps

Facebook May Mobilize on Web Apps

  10:14:00 AM    Science Lover

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Developers are abuzz with a rumored project that could provide a new platform for mobile apps.

Rumor has it that Facebook is trying to sidestep Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market with a neat technical trick: a Web-based platform for apps.

Facebook has yet to confirm the existence of the effort, allegedly code-named "Project Spartan." But if the rumor is true, the effort could threaten Apple and Google's dominance in mobile software, and give a boost to Web applications over native apps, by appealing to Facebook's huge and captive user base and by leveraging the social connections between users.

Facebook already lets developers build apps to run on top of its platform, and they've created thousands of games, utilities, and even business apps. But these are designed for the desktop, not the mobile or tablet platforms that are growing rapidly in popularity.

Mobile Web apps built on top of Facebook, and that run entirely in the browser, using widely supported technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, would free developers from the need to create several version of their software for different mobile platforms. Developers could also use Facebook Credits, which the company is hoping to expand into a universal micropayment system accessible across the Web. Facebook takes the same cut from Credits that Apple does from its App Store: 30 percent.

"If the rumors are true, it means that Facebook is planning to use Web technologies to create a whole new app ecosystem for iOS-based and other mobile devices," says Ron Perry, chief technology officer at Worklight, a company that provides tools for building mobile applications.

Facebook could also increase its influence in the mobile market by creating a platform for apps that Apple would never approve, or giving developers more favorable terms than the current 30 percent cut.

All this might make it seem inevitable that Facebook would undertake something like Project Spartan. But to succeed at creating an alternate Web-only app ecosystem and payment platform that spans many devices, it will need to overcome a number of challenges.



For one thing, Apple is now in the position that Microsoft was in 20 years ago: it controls the software on its devices and has little incentive to make the environment more hospitable to competing models of application delivery. Indeed, in March, some developers accused Apple of crippling native apps that use Web content on the iPhone and iPad by saddling them with a JavaScript engine only half as fast as the Nitro engine that runs in mobile Safari, the default browser on Apple's mobile devices. It's debatable whether or not this bug was intentional.

Apple may ultimately be forced offer better support for applications that reside in the browser. "At the end of the day, for platforms to be successful, they have to give consumers what they want," says David Koretz, CEO of the Web-application security firm Mykonos Software. He argues that consumer demand will push mobile companies to offer the best Web experience possible.

Another, potentially more significant issue hanging over the future of mobile apps is the fact that HTML is poorly suited to the kind of app that has so far made the most money for both Facebook and Apple: games. Long-time Apple observer John Gruber sees HTML's limitations as fundamental to the difference between Apple's App Store and Facebook's rumored effort.

"Don't think of what Facebook is reportedly attempting as a would-be rival to the iOS App Store. Think of it as the mobile equivalent of Flash games for Macs and PCs. Obviously, there would be some competitive overlap, but there's a fundamental difference in scope and quality," Gruber said in an e-mail.

Another truth that Facebook needs to confront is that previous efforts to create Web-based apps have fizzled. Apple, in fact, maintains a directory of Web apps—a holdover from the days before developers were able to create native apps for the iPhone. But it has little incentive to promote these. OpenAppMkt, another repository of mobile Web apps, has failed to make much of a dent in the App Store or Android Market. Google itself sells Web apps, through the Chrome Web Store, but these are primarily for desktops. A significant barrier each one of these efforts has run into is their lack of an easy-to-use payment system. Apple already has 200 million iTunes accounts, allowing its users a level of impulse purchasing unheard of in the history of commerce.

Whatever challenges Facebook faces, if the most-visited website in the United States does start pushing mobile Web apps, this could be huge for the penetration of applications based on open Web-browser standards. "Facebook's reach can definitely bring Web apps to the limelight and make this an attractive option for app publishers," says Worklight's Perry.

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What to Do If Your Online Account's Been Hacked

What to Do If Your Online Account's Been Hacked

  11:26:00 PM    Science Lover

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Dylan Valade owns a Web design and software business. As part of his business, he deals with Web and network security issues every day.

One day, Valade received a confirmation email from a brokerage account letting him know that a trade had been made. That would have been fine, except for one thing.

"In this case, a stock had been sold that I did not sell," Valade said.

Recognizing that the account had been compromised, Valade changed all of his passwords immediately.

"My brokerage account was closed and a new one was opened," he added. "The equities were transferred to the new account, with a new login and password."

Valade's experience happened on a brokerage site, but any online account can be a target.

"The most valuable targets are financial services like PayPal, online bank accounts and investment accounts," explained Morgan Slain of Los Gatos, Calif.-based SplashData. "Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites are increasingly common targets. Online email accounts, including Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, are often hacked too."

The most sophisticated hackers actually don't target individual accounts, but instead go after repositories of account data on servers owned by large organizations, which is why companies such as Sony and Epsilon, a major email forwarder, are targeted.



What the hackers are looking to steal depends on the type of account they are hacking into. When banks or financial services such as PayPal are targeted, the objective is to steal money.

"But often the hacker has a larger objective than attacking one individual," said Lance James, director of intelligence at New York's Vigilant. "In most cases, they're gaining access to email or social network accounts specifically to enable further distribution of their activity, or to steal information that will give them access to other places — potentially more valuable places. For example, a hacker might conduct a series of intrusions with the aim of getting into an employer's payroll system."

If one of your online accounts has been hacked, it compromises the overall integrity of your computer, James added. This comes with two primary manners of impact.

"First, if there [was] personal or confidential information on that system, the owner must assume it has been hijacked by criminals," he explained. "This could have long-lasting effects including identity theft, credit fraud, bank account theft and misplaced trust between friends and associates.

"Second — in some ways more detrimental in terms of reach — that compromised computer can be used to launch attacks against others, expanding the sphere of impact geometrically," James said. "It is therefore the responsibility of organizations and every individual to take precautions wherever they can."

The surest sign that your account has been compromised is unusual activity.

"For a financial account like PayPal, the most obvious sign that your account has been compromised are suspicious transactions," said Kevin McNamee, security architect at Kindsight of Mountain View, Calif. "You should regularly check your account to look for any unauthorized transactions and report them immediately.

"For social networking services like Facebook," McNamee added, "you may notice unusual activity on your wall, but the most likely indication that something is wrong is when your friends ask why you’ve been sending them unusual links and email messages."

Some things to look for, according to Chris Boyd, senior threat researcher at GFI Software of Cary, N.C., include:

— Friends are asking you about random requests for money or messages that you've apparently sent them, claiming that you're stranded somewhere – for example, messages saying you got mugged in London. Scammers use this tactic for financial fraud. This is an especially popular tactic where compromised Facebook accounts are concerned, due to exploiting the trust of friends and family.

— Strange messages are posted from your Twitter account promoting websites and offers that you're unaware of.

— You find you're selling items on eBay that you didn't list.

If you find that one of your accounts has been compromised, the first step is to ensure that no additional damage can be done, McNamee suggested.

If you still have access to the account, change the password immediately. And then change the passwords to other online accounts, especially for any accounts that share an email address and/or a password with the compromised account.

Also, said McNamee, contact the organization that operates the service and let them know that your account has been compromised.

"Their website will provide information on how to report a problem and regain control over your account," he said.

If the account that was compromised held any financial data or credit/debit card information, James said it's best to contact the financial institutions and cancel the cards.

Even the most vigilant computer user is at risk for an attack. But Asaf Greiner, vice president of products at Sunnyvale, Calif.'s Commtouch, provided the following tips that will keep your accounts less vulnerable to a hacker:

— Use different passwords for different accounts, so if you lose one, you don't lose them all.

— Use strong passwords (e.g. ones that are hard to guess), especially with more valuable resources, such as bank accounts. When possible, use multiple-factor authentication, as with a code-number-generating token. If you find passwords hard to remember, use a password vault application to remember them for you.

— Install all recommended software patches and updates – and anti-virus software – on machines you manage.

— Don't log into valuable accounts from public machines or from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.

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Who Controls Identity on the Web?

Who Controls Identity on the Web?

  1:55:00 AM    Science Lover

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Facebook and Mozilla have contrasting visions for the future of your online identity.

The race to own your virtual identity is on. In announcements made just days apart at the end of April, Facebook and the Mozilla Foundation launched parallel efforts to extend the way users are identified and connected on the Web.

Identity parade: A concept browser
designed by Mozilla would let users
control a single identity for logging
in to different websites.
Credit: Mozilla Foundation

The two approaches are fundamentally different. Facebook's Open Graph Protocol uses the oAuth standard, which lets a website identify a user via a third-party site without exchanging sensitive information. Facebook--whose 400 million active users make it the world's largest social network in the world--stands to benefit as other sites come to rely on the information it holds about users and their social connections.

The approach taken by the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, comes in the form of a suite of browser extensions. One of the extensions, called Account Manager, can replace all of a user's online passwords with secure, computer-generated strings that are encrypted and protected with a single master password. Mozilla's identity extensions can interact with other identity standards, including OpenGraph, oAuth, and OpenID, a standard that allows any website or Web service provider to host a social network-style profile of a user. The goal of the Mozilla Foundation's efforts is to establish a set of open standards and protocols that could be implemented in any browser or website.

As much as possible, identity would be moved out of the webpage itself and into the "chrome" of the browser--the parts around of the webpage. Logging in and out of sites would be accomplished through buttons at the top of the browser that would activate secure protocols--rendering the process of creating and memorizing usernames and passwords obsolete.

"Every user of the Internet today is expected to describe themselves to every site they go to," says Mike Hanson, principal engineer at Mozilla Labs. Inevitably, Hanson says, this leads to confusion and security holes, such as passwords that are identical across multiple sites.

The solution, according to Hanson, is to let the browser itself manage user identity. Weave Sync, another Mozilla extension, is designed to enable that vision. It stores encrypted versions of a growing list of data on a Mozilla-hosted server (or any user-specified server), including a person's history, preferences, bookmarks, and even open tabs, which can be synced across two or more browsers. This allows users to have the same browser workspace on any device that supports Firefox or its mobile equivalent, Fennec. There's even a prototype for the iPhone, built on top of Apple's Safari browser.

Last fall Mozilla Labs also commissioned Chris Messina, at the time a researcher in residence at Mozilla Labs, to design a Web browser that would manage the other half of online identity--a user's social graph. In Messina's mock-ups, a user can interact with people on the Web in ways that go beyond what OpenID or Facebook's OpenGraph currently offer. "The idea of a social browser is important to me because it's the single point of integration for all websites," says Messina. "It's the one thing that knows who you are across all social experiences."

Messina's designs envision a browser that lets users "follow" other users by viewing all of their relevant information streams--Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.--collected into a single browser tab stamped with that user's profile picture. A similar interface could also be used to control exactly what personal information other people and websites have access to. This could allow, for instance, a user to change her shipping address across any number of sites at once, or to control which version of their identity a particular groups of friends can access. "I'm not interested in the [Mark] Zuckerberg approach, where privacy doesn't exist anymore," says Messina, referring to the CEO of Facebook.

Both Facebook and the Mozilla Foundation will face challenges in pushing their own vision of online identity. John Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Stanford, says the most significant barrier will be the adoption of suitable protocols. Before such protocols can be standardized and rolled into, for instance, the next version of HTML, Web developers are going to have to be willing to experiment.

"What I've seen from a lot of companies is an attempt to guess the end solution and build that only," says Mitchell. "It would be better if, instead, we had an open architecture where people could try many different approaches."

If the new Mozilla software and Messina's designs are sufficiently popular with users and developers (not to mention the influencers who sit on the boards of standards committees like the World Wide Web Consortium), then the foundation's technology could find its way into the regular release of Firefox and perhaps, ultimately, into other browsers.

To Messina, just drawing up the blueprints for such technology was an important first step. "We're further away from the death of the password than I'd like to be, but it's a nice goal to aim for," he says.

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Spammers Turn to Social Networks : They get results by exploiting a social network's trusting environment

Spammers Turn to Social Networks : They get results by exploiting a social network's trusting environment

  5:49:00 PM    Science Lover

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As users have flocked to social networks, so, inevitably, have spammers. And according to a recent experiment, users are much more receptive to spam sent via a social network than over e-mail.

A group led by George Petre at BitDefender, an antivirus software company based in Bucharest, Romania, performed an experiment to test the effectiveness of spamming techniques geared toward a social networking site. They found it surprisingly easy to entice Facebook users to "friend" people they didn't know; they also found that many users were willing to click on links without knowing who sent them or where they led.

Fake friends: This screenshot shows real
users who befriended a bogus Facebook
user created by George Petre and colleagues.
Credit: BitDefender

Speaking last week at the MIT Spam Conference in Cambridge, MA, Petre described how spammers exploit social networks via messaging systems by enticing users to click on links, and by gathering personal information to target mail-outs.

Most social networks have internal messaging systems for communication between members. Petre's group examined that of Facebook, which boasts 5 percent of the world's population as its users. While Facebook has an antispam engine, the group found that it was better at filtering out phishing e-mails than preventing spam messages from getting through.

The group started by creating fake profiles to trick users into friending them. They created three profiles, one containing almost no information about the user, one with some information, and one with detailed information. They used those profiles to join popular groups and began sending out friend requests.

Within 24 hours, 85 users had accepted a request from the first profile, 108 from the second, and 111 from the third. Petre says that acceptances began to accelerate, since more than 50 percent of the time, users would accept the request if they shared a "mutual friend" with the fake profile. In some cases, he says, users would send a message asking for more information about how they knew this supposed new friend. The researchers didn't respond to these requests, but in many cases, Petre says, users accepted the request anyway.

The researchers then posted a link without any explanation to the fake profiles' walls, using a URL shortener to obscure where the link went. Almost 25 percent of the profiles' "friends" visited the link, Petre says.

To send messages to large numbers of people, Petre says, spammers often trick users into joining groups and befriending fake profiles. For example, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, fraudsters started a group on Facebook that claimed the social networking company would donate money to relief efforts for each user who joined. The group collected nearly two million members in the five days before Facebook discovered the activity and suspended the group. While active, Petre says, the group was used to send spam messages to the group's members.

Spammers can also blast messages to users who have accepted friend requests from them. Petre found that scammers use social games to make contacts with legitimate users. In many of these games, such as Farmville, users get ahead by having friends on the network who play the same game. As a result, there are lots of groups on Facebook devoted to helping users connect with others players. This provides a way for spammers to find users to connect with.

Once connected, spammers can also do more than just send spam messages. They can gather data on users, and those users' contacts, to create more targeted fraudulent messages. Scammers also post links to profiles that aim to entice users to view advertising or visit compromised phishing or malware websites. While spammers could, in theory, use scripts to harvest e-mail addresses from other users' profiles, Facebook has implemented several protections that make this difficult to do without getting caught and suspended.

"Social networking spam may be more dangerous than regular old spam because it creates a trust factor not available through blindly sending out mass e-mail," says Garth Bruen, creator of software called Knujon, which classifies and tracks spam. By mining social networks, he says, criminals can get access to personal details such as where a person lives, where they go out to drink, or what movies they like. "It is very good intel for establishing trust with strangers," he says. Though Bruen notes that working within a social network costs spammers more resources than traditional methods, he believes the payout could be much bigger.

Kathy Liszka, a professor of computer science at the University of Akron and the chair of the MIT Spam Conference, says that fighting spam is no longer just about mathematics and statistics. Spam and malware companies today are actively recruiting people with backgrounds in psychology, she says, and Petre's work shows that social networks provide fertile ground for spammers to try more sophisticated forms of manipulation. Liszka says, "If we don't get up on the psychology aspect, we're going to start losing ground again."

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Is Twitter Fretting over Google Buzz?

Is Twitter Fretting over Google Buzz?

  6:58:00 PM    Science Lover

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Well, it looks like Twitter may be getting similar comeuppance. Google just announced Google Buzz and you can learn about it in the video above or in the TechCrunch article hot off the presses.

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Fotobounce

Fotobounce

  1:09:00 AM    Science Lover

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A simple way to automatically tag all your photos and upload them to Facebook or Flickr; and an even easier way to download entire albums of your friends’ photos!

Today’s software will appeal to those who use online photo-sharing services to upload their own images or check out a friend’s photographs. Fotobounce has two major purposes: uploading pictures for your friends to see, and downloading their albums quickly and easily.

AUTO-TAGGING THROUGH FACE RECOGNITION

When it comes to online photo-sharing services like Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa, the most annoying aspect of the whole uploading process is tagging. You have to assign meaningful ‘tags’ to your images to make sure someone can share your album easily for them, throw up relevant results from other people’s albums and generally help out in the image navigation.

Now, when it comes to albums of family and friends, you generally have a handful names cropping up in over 200 photos at a time. Wouldn’t it be easier if the software just knew who was in which picture and named them accordingly?

Well, that’s exactly what Fotobounce claims to do. It boasts of having smart facial recognition algorithms that can scan your pictures for faces and tag them accordingly. And the rate is quite impressive too, with the software developers saying it can churn out 1,000 photos in approximately an hour.

And once you are done, the program automatically uploads all the images to your Flick or Facebook account. We didn’t try this out, but if it works as promised, it can’t get any better!

BULK DOWNLOADING

We’ve all been in this situation: You go on a trip with a friend or to a function and he/she had the camera. Of course, you always want a copy of the pictures for yourself. The friend uploads the photos to his/her Facebook or Flickr account and then you spend hours painfully downloading each image individually.

Next time you find yourself in such a predicament, simply fire up Fotobounce and point it to the friend’s album. The software will automatically download all the images in an album to your local hard disk and save you a lot of time and energy. Nice!

Rating: 4.5/

Download: http://fotobounce.com/index.php

Size: 15.2MB

If you like this post, buy me a Pittza at $1!

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Website : www.writeonit.org

Website : www.writeonit.org

  9:45:00 AM    Science Lover

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www.writeonit.org

This site lets you create fake pictures, signboards, and even a fake magazine cover with your photo on it! The process is simple: Choose your activity; upload a photo or choose from an existing template; write your caption.

Voila! Your custom-made image is ready to be downloaded. Alternatively, you can even post it to your blog, social network, or photo-sharing site. Good for a few laughs...

If you like this post, buy me a beer at $3!

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BBC web downloads set to launch

BBC web downloads set to launch

  1:07:00 PM    Science Lover

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The BBC's on demand TV service, the BBC iPlayer, will launch to the public on 27 July, the corporation has revealed.

UK users will be able to download popular shows over the net seven days after broadcast to watch on their PC.

Later this year, the service will also be available via links from YouTube and could also appear on other websites such as MSN, Bebo, and Facebook.

At launch the application will only work on Windows PCs but a version for the Mac could be available by autumn.

iPlayer
Shows can be watched seven days after transmission
Over time other features will be added to the iPlayer including live streaming of programmes, the BBC Radio Player and "series stacking", which will allow users to download episodes from series retrospectively.

Director General Mark Thompson said: "Forty years ago, in July 1967, BBC Television launched colour TV.

"This July we are going to launch the iPlayer and in our view, the iPlayer is at least as big a redefinition of what TV can be, what radio can be, what broadcasting can be, as what colour television was 40 years ago."

Timely launch

The iPlayer has been in development since 2003 and received final approval from the corporation's governing body, the BBC Trust, in April 2007.

In that time it has been through numerous revisions, many demanded by the Trust and the broadcast and telecoms regulator Ofcom, whilst other broadcasters, such as ITV and Channel 4, have launched their own on-demand services.

"The market badly wanted to make the BBC go through a proper due process," said Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and technology at the BBC.


BBC iPLAYER
iPlayer will allow viewers to catch up on TV programmes for seven days
Some TV series can be downloaded and stored for 30 days
Viewers will be able to watch shows streamed live over the internet
Users will not be able to download programmes from other broadcasters
Classical recordings and book-readings are excluded from iPlayer

Who else offers TV on-demand?

He added that the long process had been "frustrating" but had ultimately made the iPlayer a "better" proposition.

"Nobody wants to be the first to innovate and the last to implement but I don't think that matters," he said.

"We are right at the beginning of the video over the internet revolution, these are really early days."

At launch users will be able to download programmes seven days after their first transmission and will then have up to 30 days to watch them.

Programmes will include popular series such as Life on Mars; soap operas such as EastEnders and documentaries such as Planet Earth. Initially, 400 hours of programming will be available.

Some sporting events, such as Euro 2008, will be offered through the iPlayer as the service expands.

Mr Highfield said that over a 2MB broadband connection half an hour of programming would take approximately half an hour to download.

Once viewed in entirety, programmes will be automatically deleted.

Critical view

The lifetime of downloads is controlled by a digital rights managements system (DRM) supplied by Microsoft.

Some critics of the iPlayer, notably advocacy group the Open Source Consortium (OSC), has said that programmes should be made available without these digital locks.


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
iPlayer screengrab
Operating system: Windows XP SP2
Browser: Internet explorer 6.0 or above
Media Player: Windows Media Player 10 or above
Net connection: Broadband

However, Mr Highfield said this was not possible.

"We wouldn't be able to launch the iPlayer at all without digital rights management," he said.

"The rights holders - the people that make the programmes, from Ricky Gervais to the independent producers that account for up to a third of our programming - simply wouldn't have given us the rights to their programmes unless we could demonstrate very robust digital rights management."

The OSC has also criticised the BBC for initially releasing the iPlayer as a Windows-only system and has threatened to make a complaint to the European Commission.

The OSC argues that the system should work on all computer operating systems.

"I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer to everyone in the UK who pays their licence fee," said Mr Highfield.

"This is the approach we have always taken but we have always started with the platform that reaches the most number of people and then rolled it out from there."

Mr Highfield said that a version for Apple Macs could be available in autumn, with versions for Window's Vista and mobile devices to follow.

Versions for Freeview and cable viewers are also planned with Virgin Media expected to roll out the service later this year.

Deals with other distributors such as MSN, AOL, telegraph.co.uk, Tiscali, Yahoo, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo were also in the pipeline, whilst a commercial iPlayer for global audiences could launch in 2008 he said.

"Wherever you are on the internet you will come across BBC programmes," said Mr Highfield.

SOURCE : BBC NEWS TECHNOLOGY

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