Youtube kills original RickRolling video

RIP, Rickrolling: YouTube Kills Original Video

That sound you hear? It's the spirit of the Internet being crushed, after YouTube removed the original Rickrolling video over a terms-of-use violation.

Are you sitting down? I have some horrible news for you. YouTube has removed the original "Rickrolling" video from its site due to a terms-of-use violation. Though there are other avenues in which to get a Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" fix, the original, the one that captured the nation's attention, the video that spurned over 30 million hits, is dead.

In case you weren't one of the lucky many to experience it, to be "Rickrolled" is to be baited by a contextually relevant Web link and then get smacked with Astley's official YouTube music video. "Rickrolling" started in early 2007 on the 4chan imageboard, and a year later spread like wildfire, becoming an unavoidable meme. The use of "Never Gonna Give You Up" stemmed from a 4chan prank called "duckrolling," in which people would be sent to an image of a duck on wheels. SurveyUSA estimated that at least 18 million Americans were "Rickrolled."

It's hard to believe, but "Rickrolling" extended way beyond simple Internet pranks. It was used during protests against the Church of Scientology, touched upon the First Lady, and even gave name to an iPhone virus that changed jailbroken iPhone backgrounds into images of Astley.

As it is wont to do, the Internet leapt upon the meme and tried turning it into something more expansive than it ought to be. Many Geocities-esque sites were born devoted to the cause, including a database and a dubious phone service.

But it's all over now

Google trial could lead to new restrictions on sharing videos online

Testimony begins Tuesday in the Italian trial of four Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for allowing a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused.

All four deny wrongdoing. The case could set the tone for new limits on sharing videos and other content on the web.

Google says the case violates European Union rules by trying to place responsibility on providers for content uploaded by users.

The Mountain View, Calif., company also considers the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers into an impossible task - prescreening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day onto websites like the Google-owned YouTube.

Prosecutors and civil plaintiffs insist they don't want to censor the Internet, and maintain the case is about enforcing Italy's privacy rules as well as ensuring large corporations do their utmost to block inappropriate content, or quickly delete it.

"It's the first case of this kind in Italy and Europe," said Alessandro del Ninno, a lawyer and expert on Internet law. "The risk is that it will force providers to preventively control the content, something that goes against the very nature of the Internet."

The defendants, who are being tried in absentia in Milan, are Google's senior vice-president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes, senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer.

The investigation was sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, which alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being beaten and insulted by bullies at school. In the footage, the youth is being mistreated while one of the teenagers puts in a mock telephone call to Vivi Down.

The events shortly preceded Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube.

Google Italia, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the video, though the two sides disagree on how fast the company reacted to complaints. Thanks to the footage and Google's co-operation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced to community service by a juvenile court.

But prosecutors also sought trial for the Google executives, who could face up to three years in jail, for failing to protect the youth's privacy by allowing the video to be uploaded.

"We feel that bringing this case to court is totally wrong," Google said in a statement ahead of Tuesday's session. "It's akin to prosecuting mail service employees for hate speech letters sent in the post."

"Seeking to hold neutral platforms liable for content posted on them is a direct attack on a free, open Internet," it said.

The trial opened in February, with the court so far dealing with procedural matters. In Tuesday's session a company technician is expected to take the stand to explain how Google Video works.

A ruling is expected in July or after a summer break.

The family of the youth withdrew from the trial when it opened, leaving Vivi Down as the main plaintiff in a civil lawsuit attached to the case.

"It is not correct to talk about censorship, this is not our goal," said Guido Camera, a lawyer for the group. "We ask that at least users be made aware of their responsibilities."

Prosecutors say they are aware Google cannot screen all videos, but maintain the company didn't have enough automatic filters in place as well as warnings to users on privacy and copyright laws. They also say Google didn't have enough workers assigned to its Italian service in order to react quickly to videos flagged as inappropriate by viewers.

The 'Wikipedia for Porn' launches, should parents worry?

Carnalpedia aims to be the definitive online resource for all things related to sex, including the porn industry. They also claim that innocent eyes will not be able to visit thanks to their Restricted to Adults rating.

I suppose it was just a matter of time before a site like this was created. The sex and porn industry has had an enormous influence on the development of the Internet and remains one of its most popular albeit controversial topics.

Carnalpedia will remind visitors immediately of Wikipedia, the site that has become the web's favourite destination for finding facts on just about every imaginable topic. The layout is identical, as is navigation and organization of content within article pages. It also maintains the wiki convention of being free to access and open to anyone to create and/or edit submissions.

Although the site has only been online for a few weeks, it already contains more than 120,000 articles, including a growing list of adult movie titles, which currently sits at about 76,000.

When asked about why the web needs a Wikipedia for sex, Carnalpedia creator Jeremy Haddock said "The fact that Wikipedia has a certain type of audience leaves a lot of information about sex and the adult industry either blocked or censored."

Haddock notes that all of Carnalpedia's article pages will be labeled with the Restricted To Adults (RTA) tag which will prevent them from being accessed on computers equipped with services like NetNanny which only allow age-appropriate content to be viewed.

The site is trying to avoid being a resource for people who simply want to swap adult material: only "authorized individuals from approved sources" are allowed to upload images, in order to comply with copyright laws.

Hmmmm, Well my first reaction is... Do we REALLY need a site like Carnalpedia? and although I'm not a parent, what disturbed me, is the relative ease at which I am still able to view any and all sorts of content (some of it really "kinky" lets just say to put it lightly) without any filter, password, request for age confirmation, or anything of the sort on the website... Is this be something that parents should be (if not worried) at least a little concerned about? the site is relatively new, but already has over 120,000 articles as mentioned above.. all of which can be viewed by just about anyone visiting the site... To make any changes, or additions to the articles in the database, you'd need to sign up/in, at which time you'd have to prove your age.. but is that enough? what about those not wanting to make additions? those simply wanting to "check things out"? I am sure there are a lot more people wanting to view things, then there would be wanting to add things... I feel as though there should be at least some sort of safeguard on the site to ensure inappropriate content can not be viewed by minors, software, and parental vigilance can only go so far.. I think the site also has some responsibilities in ensuring that pornography can not be viewed by persons not old enough to do so.

Thoughts?

Twitter looks to start making some money

Twitter Inc.’s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it’s unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.

“There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money,” said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

“We’re working on it right now,” Williams said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don’t send messages under its name.

Still, after nearly one hour of questions from journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and from the audience, the co-founders gave no clear picture of Twitter’s business model. Stone demurred when asked what would be the company’s key revenue driver in two years.

Williams said he wasn’t opposed to banner advertising but was unenthusiastic.

“I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we could do,” he said.

Williams said one of his top priorities was hiring more people to help grow the company but he didn’t give a headcount target. San Francisco-based Twitter has 43 employees, he said, double its count in January.

Twitter allows anyone to write about what they’re doing or what’s on their mind in messages sent through the Web or cell phones, also known as “tweets,” which are limited to 140 characters. The unconventional, free service has attracted millions of users.

The co-founders said they know the hype surrounding Twitter won’t last forever.

“If you pay attention to it too much, you can run yourself off the rails,” Stone said. He added, “Pretty soon, everybody’s going to hate us.”

The privately held company has been a subject of buyout speculation by a big technology company, but Williams said he believed Twitter would remain independent.

There are plenty of ways, what about looking into the business models of the other websites that allow free access for its users? like Facebook, Myspace or Shareapic

Twitter proposes TV competition series

Twitter, the Web site that asks what everybody's doing, says it wants to be doing a TV series.

The social-networking service said Monday it has teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site, which invites 140-character postings from members around the world.

The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.

The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen.

"Twitter is transforming the way people communicate, especially celebrities and their fans," said Reveille managing director Howard T. Owens, who expects the new project to "unlock Twitter's potential on TV."

No further details were made available on the show's format or when it might hit the air.

Reveille's scripted entertainment includes "The Office" (NBC), "Ugly Betty" (ABC) and "The Tudors" (Showtime), plus reality programming that includes "The Biggest Loser" and "American Gladiators" (both NBC).

Brillstein Entertainment's credits include "Real Time with Bill Maher" (HBO), "The Sopranos" (HBO), "According to Jim" (ABC) and "NewsRadio" (NBC).

The San Francisco-based Twitter, which was founded in 2007, is one of the Internet's fastest-growing sites. A recent Nielsen report found that unique visitors to Twitter skyrocketed from 475,000 during February 2008 to 7 million a year later.

Twitter gone to the cats

500,000 follow cat on Twitter comic

He's one of the most popular users on Twitter. More than 500,000 follow his growing celebrity, his every adventure and, well, his cat naps.

Meet Sockington. Twitter's latest star is a microblogging cat who regales more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.

Sockington, or "Socks" for short, is the cat of Jason Scott, a 38-year-old computer historian and computer administrator from Waltham, Mass. Since late 2007, Scott has been tweeting from Sockington's perspective — and finding a "Socks Army" of followers. (Many of his followers are pets, too.)

Dogs and cats in social media isn't anything new. Many have made Facebook pages (there are applications for both "Dogbook" and "Catbook") and Web sites for their pets.

The difference on Twitter is that the running thread of Sockington's feline commentary takes on the dimension of a comic strip. Scott has created a character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from Sockington's point of view like: "I must say no comment to the whole dining room incident. No questions please."

"He's kind of functioning like a 'Garfield' comic," Scott says. "He's like the 21st-century Garfield."

There's the risk that a tweeting cat will only further the impression that Twitter is a flash-in-the-pan success in a sea of online time-wasters. But in a way, Sockington is a parody of Twitter, where even a kitty cat's life — his daily trips to the litter box, his insignificant household travails — is beamed out to the world.

"Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we're all chattering so much that we all get rich," Scott says. "And this cat makes everybody look like fools because he's got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn't tend to follow anyone but other animals."

Scott's Sockington feed has benefited from being one of the accounts recommended to new Twitter users when they sign up. But the growth of the Socks Army has been gradual over the last year and a half.

Now, it's starting to potentially generate revenue. T-shirts are for sale with Sockington wisdom printed on them and Scott acknowledges he may one day accept larger, impossible-to-refuse offers to offset his credit-card debt.

"I'm happy that at the heart of it all is a funny little cat, and that's why all the attention is happening," Scott says. "There are much worse reasons to get this kind of national attention."

If you'd like to become a follower, Sockington's Twitter link is located here

Clickjacking: Hijacking clicks on the Internet

What if you reached to grab a newspaper out of a news stand and you found a rock in your hand instead? How about opening the front door to a grocery store and ending up on a boat?

This sounds like a Matrix movie, but the virtual equivalent of this is real and poses one of the most serious new risks on the Internet, according to Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer and co-founder of Whitehat Security.

"Most exploits (like worms and attacks that take advantage of holes in software) can be patched, but clickjacking is a design flaw in the way the Web is supposed to work," Grossman said. "The bad guy is superimposing an invisible button over something the user wants to click on...It can be any button on any Web page on any Web site."

The technique was used in a series of prank attacks launched on Twitter in February. In that case, users clicked on links next to tweets that said "Don't Click" and then clicked on a button that said "Don't Click" on a separate Web page. That second click distributed the original tweet to all of the Twitter user's followers, thus propagating itself rather quickly.

At the time, Grossman called it a "harmless experiment," but the potential for harm by an attacker who isn't just having fun is huge.

In a demo at CNET offices, Grossman showed how someone could launch a clickjacking attack using Flash to spy on someone by getting them to turn on their computer Web cam without knowing it. (Grossman also appeared on CNET Live to talk about clickjacking.)

Like the name suggests, clickjacking is the hijacking of your click, unbeknownst to you. A victim may not even know that the click has been redirected, which means there could be clickjacking attacks going on that no one knows about yet.

Clickjacking attacks are accomplished by creating something called an iFrame that allows a browser window to be split into segments so that different items can be shown on each. This code is inserted into the target Web page and is invisible to the end user. When the end user's cursor clicks on the section of the page where the malicious iFrame is hiding, the attack is launched to do whatever the attacker desires.

An attacker could hide an iFrame under any innocent link on any Web page--a headline on The New York Times or a "digg this" button on Digg, for instance--and when the victim clicks on the link, the cursor is actually clicking on the hidden iFrame.

In the Web cam demo, the iFrame created contains a Flash pop-up window that asks the user to grant permission to have the Web cam turned on. When the victim clicks the link, the Web cam is turned on and secretly begins recording everything the user does in front of the computer.

One of the scariest things about clickjacking is the potential for abuse. An attacker could spy on you by turning on your Web cam or microphone, direct you to a Web page with malicious content that is downloaded onto your computer, or even rig it up so you end up clicking "buy" instead of "cancel" on an e-commerce site.

Another thing that makes clickjacking so serious is that there really is very little that end users can do to protect themselves, Grossman said.

In the Web cam scenario, the best defense is probably to put a post-it note or other item over the Web cam lens and to disable the microphone in the software, he said. Flash Player 10 provides some protection by preventing anything from obscuring the security permissions dialogue box, he said.

Web site owners optimizing their sites for Internet Explorer 8 have the ability to prevent pages from being framed in, which means visitors to their site will be safe, only on that site and only if they are using IE8, Grossman said.

People using Windows and IE should disable JavaScript to help protect against clickjacking, he said. Firefox is safer; the NoScript add-on for Firefox not only lets people selectively block scripts, but it has a ClearClick feature designed specifically to protect against clickjacking, he added.

People should also log out of Web sites, like Facebook and Twitter, when they are done using them for the time being. "You can't be forced to do something on the site if you are not logged in," Grossman said.

More details are in a white paper on the technique, written by Grossman and Robert Hansen of SecTheory and published in September 2008. Grossman and Hansen coined the term in that document.

The authors canceled their talk on the subject at the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) conference that month at Adobe's request because their proof of concept revealed a bug in Adobe's software, according to IDG News Service.

Did the internet predict Swine Flu before it happened??

Weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization alerted the public to a growing number of swine flu cases, a startup out of Seattle's suburbs already had a hunch something was up.

Veratect Inc., a 2-year-old company with fewer than 50 employees, combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and off-line sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. It tracks thousands of "events" each month - an odd case of respiratory illness, or a run on over-the-counter medicines, for example - then ranks them for severity and posts them on a subscription-only Web portal for clients who want early warnings.

The idea fueling Veratect and similar companies is that blogs, online chat rooms, Twitter feeds and news media and government Web sites are full of data that public health agencies could use to respond faster to problems like outbreaks of swine flu.

Veratect attracted attention in recent days by publicly posting a timeline of the outbreak and publishing short reports on there Twitter page, where more than 4,000 people signed up to receive updates.

But skeptics question whether these companies can reliably detect meaningful signals from all the noise online or whether they are mainly good at spotting patterns in hindsight. Complicating the picture, the companies are reluctant to disclose their sources and methods.

Veratect's chief executive, Robert Hart, says the company alerted clients to a potentially severe outbreak before the general public learned of swine flu. Veratect's computer systems, which troll the Web for reports that seem out of the ordinary, unearthed clues, and a team of about 30 analysts, many of them multilingual holders of public health degrees, chased down the ones that seemed most alarming.

Veratect says it posted a report to clients on April 6 describing an unusual number of respiratory illnesses in the Mexican state of Veracruz, then sent an e-mail on April 16 to the Centers for Disease Control pointing to an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Oaxaca state, after officials there issued an alert.

A key clue came in Mexican media reports on April 6 indicating a Veracruz community called La Gloria - now considered a swine flu hot spot - was starting to point fingers. Local residents blamed waste from a nearby pig breeding farm for the respiratory illness, while health officials pinned it on a fly.

"Playing the blame game is one of those indicators" that something unusual is going on, said Dr. James Wilson, Veratect's chief scientist. When the company posted the La Gloria information, it treated the incident as a matter of "moderate severity."

To be sure, not everything Veratect turned up was related to the outbreak. Veratect told its clients of a Canadian lawyer hospitalized in late March after a trip to Mexico, but on Tuesday the company said he has since tested negative for swine flu.

Even with the flaws, clients like World Vision, the large Christian humanitarian organization based in Federal Way, Wash., pay Veratect for its intelligence.

Recently, World Vision shifted resources - water purification tablets and education staffers - to areas Veratect thinks might see cholera outbreaks, said Brian Carlson, the head of technology for World Vision's global relief efforts.

A 10-year-old Veratect rival, Annapolis, Md.-based iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, also tracks Web reports and uses analysts to interpret the data. Marty Pfinsgraff, iJet's chief operating officer, said it monitors emerging health risks, civil unrest and issues such as telecommunications outages. He said iJet advised clients to cancel unnecessary travel to Mexico and to activate pandemic plans last Friday, before health officials weighed in. Pfinsgraff said the CDC is among iJet's paying clients.

Other efforts focus more narrowly on disease. ProMed, a system designed by the Federation of American Scientists, lets human, animal and plant specialists share infectious disease information. A site called HealthMap compiles data from ProMed, the CDC, the World Health Organization and other sources. A volunteer-built site called FluWiki has tracked bird flu since 2005, and last year Google Inc. launched Flu Trends, which gauges U.S. flu conditions based on increases in flu-themed Web searches.

Specialists in disease outbreaks acknowledge that unscientific, community-level information can be valuable. For example, when a parasite slipped through Milwaukee's water treatment system in 1993, the first sign of trouble came in reports to city health officials that drugstores were selling out of diarrhea medicines.

But some public health experts say it's not possible to draw firm conclusions from online tools or reports from companies like Veratect.

"They are considered interesting, unofficial, instructive, imaginative, and then I would go back and emphasize unofficial," said Dr. William Schaffner, a public health expert at Vanderbilt University and a spokesman for the Infectious Disease Society of America.

Dr. Scott Dowell, who heads the CDC's international swine flu team, said the agency looks at reports from Veratect and other companies in the course of monitoring outbreaks around the world. Veratect is often useful, Dowell said, and can be very sensitive to emerging threats.

"It also generates a lot of noise," he said.

Others add that it's risky to act on early signals. Without positive lab tests, reports of new cases are unreliable, in part because mystery illnesses prompt uninfected people to think they have the symptoms.

Even now, when some of Veratect's findings appear to be bearing fruit, the focus on La Gloria as a disease epicenter may turn out to be off-base.

Dr. Philip Brachman, an Emory University professor who for years led the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, said the scapegoating of the pig farm Veratect detected might stem from an existing local grudge.

"The town probably doesn't like the pig farm," Brachman said, "because of the odor."

R.I.P. Geocities

Maybe you’ve already heard by now that, But Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. Yes, the same Geocities it paid $3 billion dollars for a mere 10 years ago for.

Yahoo has shut down the Geocities website. Geocities was a free website service and online community. It was one of the hottest properties on the internet during the late 90s. Yahoo overpaid for the service in 1999, paying a whopping $4.9 BILLION for it in a stock deal.

CNET calls Geocities a "relic of Web's early days." PC World says "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed."

The Geocities website now contains the following message.

After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.

Yahoo has also posted a faq about the closing. "Yahoo will be closing Geocities accounts by the end of the year". The faq states, "Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We'll send you more details this summer."

It remains to be seen whether the failure of Geocities is a lesson for today's ultra hot web communities like MySpace and Facebook.

The first thing I thought about when I heard this news was MySpace.

Before you laugh out loud, I’m not talking MySpace the darling amongst teens and music artists today, I’m talking about MySpace 10 years from now. Take a ride in your time machine to the year 2019 because it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if by then MySpace has met the same grim fate. A lot of MySpace pages are nothing more than Geocities type over-busy pages with sound. The major difference is MySpace is more ‘social’ whatever that means.

There will be something cooler than MySpace within the next 10 years and the inevitable shut down will follow. That’s not to say MySpace is a complete waste of time today so don’t think I’m trolling here but I think the sobering news about Geocities being here today gone tomorrow within 10 years – a lifetime on the internet, BTW – should be a wake-up call for MySpace users.

What do you think, am I wrong? Will MySpace have more longevity than Geocities? If you need another example of a waning giant, look at eBay vs. Craigslist. It’s tough staying relevant, popular and cool online. For that matter, what about Facebook? it's not really all that hot as it was back just a few years ago is it? (I still don't get what the big deal is) or for that matter, Twitter, whats THAT all about? will we be reading about these in the cyber obituaries a decade from now? remembering back to what life was like when these "giants" were around?

Thoughts?

Pillow Fight Lands Man In Court

South Burlington Vt. Man Charged For Inciting Pillow Fight


The man police say organized an impromptu pillow fight in front of a Vermont mall is being dragged into court to face charges.

Darin Cassler, 21, of South Burlington, Vt., was charged Friday by city police after he allegedly incited a pillow fight at the town center on Church Street. Police said his actions warranted a disorderly conduct charge.

The feathery fracas was organized by Cassler, police say, and included about 50 participants. A video of the pillow pounding appears on several Internet sites and shows about a two-minute scrum that began and ended with a whistle being blown.

Not long after the whistle sounded ending the puffy clash, Cassler can be seen in video footage of the event being taken away by a police officer.

The pillow fight was organized on the social networking site Facebook, which listed the following rules:

- Bring a pillow and a container in which to conceal it.

- Assemble on the street as if you were loitering, do not acknowledge anyone else participating.

- Our host will shout 'pillow fight' and we will all spontaneously break into a big miasma of feathers and pillows.

- Soft pillows only!

- Swing lightly, many people will be swinging at once.

- Do not swing at people without pillows or with cameras.

- Remove glasses beforehand!

- The event is free and appropriate for all ages.

- Wait until the signal to begin.

- This event is more fun with feathers!

Click For Facebook Post On Event

Courtesy of WPTZ.com

Is Facebook losing its glow?

The following was a pretty good read I found in (on? it was online...hmmm) Fortune magazine, that I thought i'd share:

Is Facebook losing its glow?
The social networking site is still growing -- but that also means serious growing pains.

It's been a busy couple of months for social networking site Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the cover of FORTUNE (dressed in a tie, no less) and shared with us his plans to turn Facebook into the next digital communications platform. Soon thereafter he landed on Oprah Winfrey's couch to offer a tutorial on the site he'd initially built four years ago. In March the company launched a redesign that a vocal group of users roundly criticized. A few weeks after that chief financial officer Gideon Yu resigned unexpectedly, prompting bloggers to speculate that the company must be readying itself for a public offering.

Meanwhile the site has kept adding users at a rapid clip (the redesign has not kept newcomers away), and analysts are starting to raise questions about just how much Facebook is spending on infrastructure to maintain the large site.

It is hard to know much about Facebook's financial situation, because the company is privately held, and its management team has long been reluctant to address the issue of profits. Until now, executives and investors alike have said they place a priority on adding users and getting them to spend more time on the site. In my February interview with operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, she made it clear that the company was very focused on making money specifically so that it could continue to fund its user growth. And early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and $12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, told me he wasn't demanding or even expecting immediate economic returns, saying profitability is "a key focus but there has never been a very specific time table."

Indeed, the company has a deep well of capital to fund its business. It has raised more than $400 million in financing so far. Its largest investor is Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), which paid $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in the company, giving Facebook a valuation of about $15 billion. Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing also invested $120 million at the same valuation. (The company's internal valuation as of last June was $3.7 billion.)

But analysts posit that the business itself is becoming increasingly expensive to run. Facebook reports users are uploading more than 850 million photos each day and more than eight million videos. That's a lot of server space.

(And Facebook may not be able to make a return on all those new users. Some 70% of the site's members come from overseas, and many of them hail from countries where there is no real potential for drumming up advertising dollars.)

Will Facebook's 2009 revenues be enough to fund this growth? In 2008, the company brought in an estimated $280 milion. Most of that came directly from banner ads, and a substantial chunk was still coming from a deal with Microsoft in which the Internet behemoth sold traditional banner ads, which cost as little as $0.15 cents per one thousand ads shown to users.

But the company has said that it is on track to beat revenue projections and make 70% more than it did in 2008. In the past year, Facebook has doubled its sales team to more than 130. And a quick scan of the source code for the site's ads would confirm Facebook's assertion that the Microsoft deal accounts for an ever smaller number of the ads the site serves up.

Facebook is in fact seeing positive results with a new ad format it launched last fall, the engagement ad. A good case study comes from Vancouver, Wash.-based pizza restaurant Papa Murphy's, which ran an ad offering a free pizza to anyone who "became a fan" of the restaurant on the Facebook page it created. Users received notifications in their newsfeed and then were directed to the Papa Murphy's Web site to get their pie.

More than 131,000 users became a fan of the national pizza franchise saw traffic to its site jump 253%. And within two weeks, 1,200 people had posted to the site's wall. As Facebook's user base grows, advertisers continue to experiment with these types of ads even as they're pulling back in other areas.

Facebook's popularity seems not to have diminished: the company says more than half of its 200 million active users log on every day. And users spent 178 minutes on the site last month on average, according to Comscore, up 5 % from the previous month.

With so much momentum, will Zuckerberg look to go publlic soon? When Yu left the company, the Wall Street Journal quoted Zuckerberg in an internal memo saying the company would look for a new chief financial officer "with public company experience who can help take us to the next stage in our growth." Indeed, Zuckerberg has always alluded to an IPO, turning down early acquisition offers from large Internet companies. But Zuckerberg isn't revealing his plan. Any speculation as to whether Yu's departure suggests Facebook is hastening its plans is just that: speculation.

Cybercriminals create botnet using Mac computers

A piece of malicious software unwittingly shared over a peer-to-peer network in January was the key tool in what security researchers are saying was the first known attempt to create a botnet of Mac computers.


Researchers at Symantec say the Trojan, called OSX.Iservice, hid itself in pirated versions of the Apple application iWork '09 and the Mac version of Adobe Photoshop CS4 that were shared on a popular peer-to-peer bittorrent network.

Once downloaded, the applications themselves worked normally, but the Trojan opens a "back door" on the compromised computer that allows it to begin contacting other hosts in its peer-to-peer network for commands.

Researchers Mario Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli of Symantec Ireland, writing in the April 2009 issue of the Virus Bulletin, say the network of infected computers attempted to initiate a denial of service attack on a website in January.

"OSX.Iservice is an interesting piece of malware - not only does it make use of Mac OS internals, but it is also the first Mac botnet that we are aware of," they wrote.

A botnet, or robot network, is a group of linked computers - sometimes called zombies - that have been commandeered, in some instances by criminals, to perform a host of actions, from connecting and infecting other computers to sending out spam or launching distributed denial of service attacks to bring down websites or web servers.

But traditionally, botnets have spread through PCs running Windows, and not Macs, in part because of the low market share of Macs worldwide.

Apple had 7.2 per cent of personal computer market share in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to technology analyst IDC, but was not among the top five PC makers worldwide, as ranked by shipments.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, said cybercriminals who want to create a botnet of computers traditionally attack machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system because the goal is to have the biggest network possible.

"It's a numbers game," said Haley. "If you're going to go after the largest market, you have to go after the largest target."

An example of a particularly successful botnet is the one created by the Conficker worm, which by some estimates is believed to have spread to as many as 12 million machines.

By comparison, the iBotnet, as the Symantec researchers have dubbed it, spread to only a few thousand computers before it was identified. A number of security firms say removal of the Trojan is simple once it has been identified.

The method used to infiltrate the computers - tricking users to install a Trojan hiding in a free version of software - is also a fairly basic way to access a computer, said Haley, and is not a technique exclusive to Macs or any particular vulnerability inherent in the computer's operating system.

Haley said downloading any file from an unknown source is a potentially dangerous practice, no matter what computer a person uses.

The malicious software, or malware, is unique, however in that it only clearly targeted Mac users and also included a variation - found in the corrupted Adobe Photoshop CS4 file - that used some of the functions on the Mac OS that relate to its own authorization services interface, according to the Symantec Ireland authors.

"With malware authors showing an increasing interest in the Mac platform, we believe that more advanced [user interface] spoofing tricks may be seen in the future," they wrote.

Ryan Naraine, the security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, said that while a Mac botnet may not be practical for criminals, the discovery of the Trojan is proof that no operating system is inherently safe....Sorry Mac users.

It's alive!! Conficker wakes up

Computer worm updates via P2P, drops payload

The Conficker worm is finally doing something--updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday.

Researchers were analyzing the code of the software that is being dropped onto infected computers but suspect that it is a keystroke logger or some other program designed to steal sensitive data off the machine, said David Perry, global director of security education at Trend Micro.

The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, according to Trend Micro. The software is heavily encrypted, which makes code analysis difficult, the researchers said.

The worm also tries to connect to MySpace.com, MSN.com, eBay.com, CNN.com and AOL.com as a way to test that the computer has Internet connectivity, deletes all traces of itself in the host machine, and is set to shut down on May 3, according to the TrendLabs Malware Blog.

Because infected computers are receiving the new component in a staggered manner rather than all at once there should be no disruption to the Web sites the computers visit, said Paul Ferguson, advanced threats researcher for Trend Micro.

"After May 3, it shuts down and won't do any replication," Perry said. However, infected computers could still be remotely controlled to do something else, he added.

On Tuesday night Trend Micro researchers noticed a new file in the Windows Temp folder and a huge encrypted TCP response from a known Conficker P2P IP node hosted in Korea.

"As expected, the P2P communications of the Downad/Conficker botnet may have just been used to serve an update, and not via HTTP," the blog post says. "The Conficker/Downad P2P communications is now running in full swing!"

In addition to adding the new propagation functionality, Conficker communicates with servers that are associated with the Waledac family of malware and its Storm botnet, according to a separate blog post by Trend Micro security researcher Rik Ferguson.

The worm tries to access a known Waledac domain and download another encrypted file, the researchers said.

Conficker.C failed to make a splash a week ago despite the fact that it was programmed to activate on April 1. It has infected between 3 million and 12 million computers, according to Perry.

Initially, researchers thought they were seeing a new variant of the Conficker worm, but now they believe it is merely a new component of the worm.

The worm spreads via a hole in Windows that Microsoft patched in October, as well as through removable storage devices and network shares with weak passwords.

The worm disables security software and blocks access to security Web sites.

'X-Men Origins: Wolverine' leaked online

X-Men Origins: Wolverine isn't due in theatres until next month, but the prequel has already found its way online. A high-quality, full-length work print of the 20th Century Fox film, which is set for release May 1, appeared online Tuesday. The film focuses on the beginnings of Hugh Jackman's clawed Marvel superhero Wolverine.

The studio said it had the file removed, but copies quickly propagated and continue to appear on several file-sharing Web sites.

Fox said in a statement Wednesday that the source of the "stolen, incomplete and early version" of the movie would be prosecuted and said the FBI and MPAA are investigating.

The studio also insisted that the version of the film posted online was "was without many effects, had missing and unedited scenes and temporary sound and music."

Fox said in a statement Wednesday, That the version of the film posted online was not complete and vowed that the source would be prosecuted to the fullest extent. It said the FBI and MPAA are currently investigating.

Anyone, With any information should contact the MPAA the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FOX Studios.

Great looking X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie posters

Best to check things twice

no,no, no!!! They meant the OTHER kind of stimulus!

The Liberals launched a new website today to provide their own assessment of the government's attempts to stimulate the economy.

But future visitors to the site are only a small, common typo away from getting something far... uh... less partisan, let's just say.

OnProbation.ca promises that "you can help us keep the government on track."

OnProbation.COM promises... lets put it this way, there keyword description on Google is : "OnProbation .com - Black Asian Interracial Porn Videos & Movies. "

Liberals say they weren't aware of that other site when choosing their name. (geeze, you'd think someone would have checked for availabilities and checked the sites for the names that were taken... who was sleeping on the job here??)

It remains to be seen which site will get more traffic in the coming months.... Not that i'll be going to them ;-)

The Conficker Worm: April Fool’s Joke or Digital Armegeddon?

The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, for those of you who are long time readers, you'll know that I have been warning you about this virus for a few months now, back on January 16 2009 with the first virus alert, then again on February 14th 2009 when Microsoft announced the reward leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the chaotic virus.

The remaining unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is this virus as bad as some experts believe it to be?

Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the world since October 2008, mostly outside the United States because there are more computers overseas running unpatched, pirated Windows. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)

An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.

It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial antivirus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a significantly improved capacity to remove commercial antivirus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service. It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers.

Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created.

Speculation about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day joke — to far darker notions. One likely possibility is that the program will be used in the “rent-a-rogue-computer” business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. Just like Amazon.com offers computing time on its network for rent, the Conficker team might rent access to its “network” for devious purposes like spamming.

The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode.

According to a research addendum to be added Thursday to an earlier paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, the infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. The peer-to-peer design is also highly distributed, making it extremely difficult for security teams to defeat the system by disabling so-called super-nodes.

Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible.

Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, by the name of Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the idea of a “Dark Google.” His theory is, What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers? Malware already does this on a focused basis using a variety of schemes that are referred to as “spear phishing,” in a reference to the widespread use of social engineering tricks on the Net.

But to do something like that on such a huge scale? That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.

What's going to happen on April 1st 2009? will most of the internet come crashing down? will millions of computers be wiped out? Or is this like the so-called Millenium Bug? lots of sizzle, very little steak.. (oh great, now i'm hungry, should have had a bigger breakfast) We'll have to wait and see......

Hollywood couldn't write this script....

Thoughts? what do you think will happen a week from today?

Movie site hopes to add streaming for its 1.3 million titles

IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.

Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.

Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.

Apparently, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb -- from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com.

But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.

It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."

But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.

Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the lecture, that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.

Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September 2008. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.

He said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.

At that rate, however, it's sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham said he imagined a time frame of three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we'll shake our heads at where we were at.

"We'll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work," Needham said.

As the Star Trek quote goes (I'm not a Star Trek fan, so I don't really know what character was the first to use the quote, so I'm not going to attribute it to any one) :

"Resistance is futile"

Is the end drawing near for Facebook?

Back in the 1870s, the town of Deadwood, South Dakota experienced a gold rush and quickly became home to gunfighters, gamblers, cussing and plenty of women woman "of poor reputation". Today, Deadwood is just a tourist trap in boring old South Dakota (No offence to anyone FROM South Dakota, but come on, even you'd have to agree!).

In many ways, that's exactly what's happened to the social-networking website Facebook.

Facebook's formative years (2003-2006) started out much like the Wild West had. Open, kind of barren, but people were free to do as they pleased without much worry of repercussions.

With ridiculous status updates, embarrassing photos, nasty late-night wall postings on an ex's wall following a "user is now single" update. With the creation of the news feed in September 2006, which allows a user to see what other users are doing, it was like picking up a newspaper in the morning and every article was a gossip story about someone you knew.

It was awesome!

But slowly, Facebook has evolved into something else. Something that managed to take up much more of my time, yet bores me in a way it never did before.

Here's how it happened....

Phase 1: Fear your neighbours! Then improvise!

When the media first discovered Facebook (scholars suggest this was sometime in late 2006 after it got a mention on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"), there was one nearly homogenous response in reporting - "lock your doors, hide your face, evildoers want your information!"

After being scared about their privacy, users started clamping down on the way they allowed their information to be seen. The news feed has slowly been reduced to a shadow of its former self, with many users choosing to severely limit the feature.

At the same time, the website skyrocketed in popularity to the point where both your mom and your boss (and even your bosses mom) were on it. Suddenly, those pictures of you being held by the ankles while you're performing a keg stand didn't seem like such a smart thing to post.

Worst of all, were all the reported cases of employers scouting out Facebook for dirt on potential employees. While Facebook profiles are always an idealized version of a person, soon people began setting their profiles to look like a bland virtual-resume...just in case.

This is not to say there's not some fun, risqué stuff on Facebook. There is. But with the tent growing larger and larger, it's no surprise that people have become more tentative and conservative with what they post and how they act.

Phase 2: Every day is exactly the same

Every Facebook user over 25 knows (but won't necessarily admit to it) that the best part of Facebook is "catching up" with someone you haven't seen in years.

Seeing their profile for the first time, with its orgy of photos (are they still hot? what?? they're hotter??), information on marital status, jobs and children (oh damn, i'm too late, she's married and has children) -- well, that's as good as Facebook gets.

Eventually though, you are going to run out of people that you will want to glean your years apart with a check of their profile.

But after that initial "catch-up", you are left with the day-to-day boring minutiae. A sample:

- Tom is going to the shower, then bed.
- Amy is tanning.
- Sarah is loving her new red kitchenaid mixer!
- Jenna is without power and cable at home.

I already have my own perfectly mundane life to deal with, I don't need to know yours.

Dr. Robin Dunbar, an Oxford University anthropologist has said that the brain's cognitive power limits the size of a person's (real-life) social network to about 150 people. That sounds reasonable.

Yet, There are people with over 500 Facebook friends (at last count). I've also seen others that have nearly 1,000 "friends". This is data Malcolm Gladwell should write a book about.

A lot of people on Facebook have massive networks, but must be inundated with so much data it's utterly pointless for them. They might as well be logged into someone else's account because there's no way they are interested in the majority of people on their account, Do they even remember when they added most of those people, or when that person added them? or who the heck most of those people even are?

You just can't care about your massive amount of Facebook friends, your brain won't do it.

Phase 3: Useful to the point it's work

It was reported that social networking has surpassed email in terms of worldwide popularity, with Facebook being the most popular of the social networking sites.

This is not surprising, as Facebook has an email system that simplifies getting in touch with people, as well as a built-in instant messenger.

Facebook has also become the go-to planning calendar for social groups of a certain age, with its Event interface making it easier than ever to plan a social gathering.

Add in socially-conscious groups to join, bands and TV shows I "need" to become a "fan" to promote, too many applications to count (I'm especially looking at you Scrabble!), birthday wishes to give and a quick log-in to Facebook can feel like the start of a marathon.

You know when you put off logging in to Facebook, the same way you put off taking out the trash, that's not a good sign for something that's supposed to be entertainment.

Somewhere along the line, Facebook stopped being a place to "creep" your ex-girlfriend's profile and became a semi-useful technology you can't live without.

The wild Deadwood of U.S. history eventually became Deadwood, the town that's a National Historic Landmark. Prettier, more useful and a lot less crazy - truly, the inverse of the mores of its founding.

That's the same fate awaiting Facebook. A place where people will stop by to say, "I remember that...It used to be fun here."

Google starts tracking browsers to target ads

Google is getting to know you a little better in order to send you ads you'll more likely like.

The Mountain-View, Calif.-based internet company is starting to gather information about the websites people visit using an individual web browser in order to target ads to their interests, Google has announced on its blog.

"By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone," the company said. "Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers."

"Interest-based" advertising was launched Wednesday as a beta test on third-party sites that carry Google ads, as well as the YouTube video site that Google owns.
Demand from partners

The blog entry called advertising "the lifeblood of the digital economy" and said Google's advertising and publishing partners have been asking it for a long time to offer interest-based advertising, which is already used by some other companies.

Google's system will be able to infer users' interests based on the sites they visit, which will be associated with their browsers using a tracking file called a "cookie."

For example, each time a user visits an adventure travel site that carries Google advertising, a cookie will be placed in the browser. If the user visits many such sites, he or she will be flagged as someone with a strong interest in adventure travel and more ads for activities like hiking trips to Patagonia or African safaris will show up in the browser even when:

- The user is on a Google partner site that doesn't involve adventure travel.
- When someone else is using the browser.

"This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy — questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer," Google acknowledged, adding that other companies that provide interest-based advertising deal with this in different ways.
Won't add 'sensitive' interest categories

However, the company promised that:

- It will not collect the user's name or any other personal information.
- It will not use sensitive interest categories such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health or "sensitive financial categories."
-Users will be able to view, delete and add interest categories associated with their browser.
- Users can opt not to accept advertising cookies from Google partners.

In addition, users will be able to clear the cookies used by Google's targeted advertising the way they usually clear cookies from their browser.

Until now, Google's ads have been targeted based only on the site that the user is currently viewing. For example, the user would receive adventure travel ads only while on an adventure travel site or reading an email about adventure travel.

However, other companies have been offering personalized advertising for some time. For example, social networking sites MySpace and Facebook have targeted ads to individual users based on their profiles since 2007.

YouTube blocks music videos in Britain

YouTube is blocking thousands of music videos to British users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Rights Society (PRS), which collects royalties for songwriters.

The move on Monday has angered the PRS, which says YouTube — bought by Google in 2006 — is "punishing British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent."

Steve Porter, head of the PRS, said he is "outraged" and "shocked" by the move.

His group released a statement condemning YouTube's tactics:

"Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing. This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS … and in the middle of negotiations between the two parties."

Patrick Walker, the director of video partnerships at YouTube, said the action was "regrettable" but added the PRS is seeking much higher fees, which were "prohibitive."

YouTube pays a licence to the PRS, which allows the site to stream music videos from three major music labels and several independent ones.

"We feel so far apart that we have to remove content while we negotiate with the PRS," Walker said on BBC News.

He said the rates that the PRS was seeking would result in YouTube losing "significant amounts of money on every stream of video."

YouTube is the world's most popular video sharing website.

The dispute between YouTube and the Performing Rights Society for Music that prompted the website to remove music videos could spread to MySpace UK and other music sites, industry sources said.

MySpace UK and other sites are struggling to renegotiate their own licences with PRS, which pays royalties to artists.

One source close to the negotiations said that the launch of MySpace UK's comprehensive music service later this year could be thrown into jeopardy unless it secured an economically viable licence with PRS.

"A lot of service providers are negotiating and renewing licences with PRS right now, but the rates are widely known to be uneconomical," said the source. "Nobody could run an online business on those terms."

The streaming service Pandora was forced to cut off its service for UK users on 15 January after it failed to renegotiate its licence with PRS. Imeem, which reportedly received $15m in funding from Warner Music last year, and RealNetworks are also understood to be renegotiating.

Meanwhile, YouTube and PRS are due to meet in London this afternoon and both say they are determined to resolve the deadlock.

PRS is understood to be basing its royalty claims on the results of the 2007 UK Copyright Tribunal, but the source said the rates PRS were demanding were so high that a free-to-view, advertising-based service would not be able to charge advertisers enough to cover the royalty payment on each video.

YouTube, which started to remove videos last night, repeated its claim that the rates are not sustainable except for sites that charge subscription access.

"However, we want to share the revenue generated from music videos on YouTube with the music industry," said a spokesman. "But at the rate set by the Copyright Tribunal - which is the rate PRS is seeking - YouTube would be losing money with each stream.

"It's simply unsustainable for our business."

A PRS spokeswoman said the ultimate aim of the talks were to come to an agreement, while YouTube said withdrawing videos from UK users was "not a breakdown in talks, but something that had to happen for talks to continue".