By Owen Fletcher
IDG News Service (Beijing Bureau)
March 11, 2010

BEIJING - Twitter launched a new link-screening service on Tuesday aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service.

Part of the new service is a new Twitter tool to shorten URLs, so users will see some links in e-mail notifications and direct messages from other users written as twt.tl, Twitter said in a blog post.

“By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links,” the blog post said. “Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe,” it said without elaborating.

Phishing scams on Twitter usually involve attackers trying to obtain the login credentials of Twitter users, and then sending spam messages from the stolen accounts in a bid to make money, Twitter said on its blog last month. Twitter also fights phishing scams by watching for affected accounts and resetting passwords, it said.

Phishing attacks ballooned on Twitter last year as the service grew in popularity. Twitter’s new link-screening service comes after it last year started using Google’s Safe Browsing API to check for malicious content in links posted by users.

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By Owen Fletcher
IDG News Service (Beijing Bureau)
March 10, 2010

BEIJING - Twitter launched a new link-screening service on Tuesday aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service.

Part of the new service is a new Twitter tool to shorten URLs, so users will see some links in e-mail notifications and direct messages from other users written as twt.tl, Twitter said in a blog post.

“By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links,” the blog post said. “Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe,” it said without elaborating.

Phishing scams on Twitter usually involve attackers trying to obtain the login credentials of Twitter users, and then sending spam messages from the stolen accounts in a bid to make money, Twitter said on its blog last month. Twitter also fights phishing scams by watching for affected accounts and resetting passwords, it said.

Phishing attacks ballooned on Twitter last year as the service grew in popularity. Twitter’s new link-screening service comes after it last year started using Google’s Safe Browsing API to check for malicious content in links posted by users.

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By Peter Sayer
IDG News Service (Paris Bureau)
March 9, 2010

HANOVER - The LG GS290 Cookie Fresh isn’t yet available on planet Earth, but you can find it on Planet Reseller, the part of the Cebit trade show reserved for distributors and resellers.

LG Electronics is showing it and the similarly featured LG GS500 Cookie Plus to resellers in Hanover this week. They will go on sale in the second quarter, a company spokesman said, but he would not say at what price.

The plus, or the fresh new feature, of each compared to the original Cookie phone, the LG KP500, is social networking. The phones contain client software for Facebook and Twitter.

Both phones have a 3-inch, 400×240-pixel touch-screen display and a MicroSD Card slot that accepts cards up to 16GB in capacity. Each has a built-in FM radio, a digital music player, a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack and a Bluetooth interface that can connect to stereo Bluetooth headphones.

Neither phone has GPS (Global Positioning System) or Wi-Fi, and the Cookie Fresh, like its predecessor, lacks 3G.

The Cookie Plus, on the other hand, will work on UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) 3G networks, downloading data at up to 3.6M bps (bits per second) over HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).

The Cookie Fresh has a 2-megapixel camera, while the one in the Cookie Plus is 3 megapixels, like the original Cookie.

The original Cookie had a squarer, more sober design than the Fresh and Plus, which have rounder corners and come in colors other than black. LG has also given the new phones the option to display text in a “standard” typeface resembling the ubiquitous Arial and a “fun” one, which on the Fresh looks disturbingly similar to Comic Sans.

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By Carrie-Ann Skinner
PC Advisor (UK)
March 8, 2010

LONDON - More than 10 billion tweets have been posted on micro-blogging service Twitter.
This clearly indicates Twitter’s growing popularity, as it was only in November 2008 that the one billionth tweet was posted.

The web user behind the 10 billionth tweet and the content hasn’t been revealed.

The news comes as Virgin Media Business revealed that one in five tweets contains a reference to a product or a brand.

Furthermore, while 57 of the FTSE 100 companies have signed up to the micro-blogging service, 72 percent have not used their account to respond to consumers that enquire or make comments about their service.

“With so many people sharing their thoughts online, it’s no surprise that many are talking about companies. Clearly this presents an excellent opportunity for companies to engage with customers, but many are missing out,” said Phil Stewart from Virgin Media Business.

Virgin Media Business said it believed many signed-up to Twitter to stop cyber squatters getting their first.

“Creating a Twitter account and leaving it dormant or not responding to tweets by your customers is no better than opening a contact centre and not picking up the phone. In fact it is a lot worse as this lack of interaction can be viewed by millions.”

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
March 3, 2010

Hackers launched a one-two punch combination to Twitter users recently, recruiting hijacked accounts to launch cybercrime campaigns.

Only two days after launching the “LOL” phishing attack, hackers struck again by launching the “This you????” phishing attack, both designed to steal login details and hijack accounts, reported Sophos, an IT security and data protection firm.

Sophos said messages asking “This you????”, followed by a link to a bogus Twitter login page, have caused such a scare on the micro-blogging network that the phrase is currently a hot trending topic on the site.

The attack, which is the latest in a storm of phishing attacks that have occurred on Twitter since the weekend, is designed to steal passwords and could use hijacked accounts to spread money-making spam campaigns, steal identities, and distribute malware, Sophos added.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, explained the “This you????” messages are accompanied by clickable links which take unsuspecting users to a fake Twitter login page.  Users who are tricked into believing they might see a picture or information about themselves, may enter their username and password without thinking about the possible consequences.

“Twitter users have been battered with phishing attacks in the last few days, all taking advantage of people’s curiosity,” Cluley said.“But if you click on the link and enter your details you could be taking your online identity and handing it over on a plate to hackers.  They can then take your username, email address and password and not only use it to spread more attacks via Twitter – they can also try your credentials at many other websites – potentially opening your other online accounts to abuse. Anyone hit by this kind of attacks must change their passwords immediately.”

Cluley reported crime on social networks is on the rise.

“We saw a 43% rise in the number of people reporting being phished via such sites in the last 12 months, and the way things are looking that figure can only go up,” he said. “As the social networks grow in size and power there will be more and more hackers attracted to commit crimes through them.”

Sophos recently made a YouTube video, which journalists and bloggers are free to embed on their own websites, demonstrating the attack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFVqfgnZV6M

During the Twitter “LOL” phishing attack, thousands of accounts were compromised by hackers creating Web 2.0 botnet. Twitter users found that fellow members of the micro-blogging network had posted messages disguised as humorous inks, but actually aimed to phish passwords credentials from unsuspecting users.

Messages, which began with phrases such as “Lol. this is me??”, “lol , this is funny.”,”Lol. this you??” and “ha ha, u look funny on here”, were accompanied with clickable links which redirected users to a fake Twitter login page hosted on a website based in China.

Sophos researchers claimed to have discovered that although the main wave of poisoned messages has been via private direct messages between individual users on Twitter, dangerous links are also being posted in public feeds. This means that innocent users can stumble across the links even if they are not sent it directly, or even if they are not a signed-up user of Twitter.

“It appears what is happening is that the messages are being shared more widely because of third-party services like GroupTweet which extend the standard Twitter direct message (DM) functionality and allow private messages to be sent to multiple users and optionally made public,” Cluley said. “This has resulted in the bizarre site of Twitter accounts warning their followers about the phishing attack, only to subsequently fall victim to it themselves.”

Sophos also identified that the phishing campaign appears to be already bearing fruit for the hackers as they are now distributing spam selling herbal viagra from the compromised accounts.

“Unless the hacked Twitter users change their passwords, the intruders can continue to spread spam and other attacks from their hijacked accounts,” Cluley warned. “Cyber-attacks via social networks are becoming more and more common.  Last month Sophos published its Security Threat Report which revealed that there has been an astonishing 70% rise in the number of users reporting spam and malware attacks via social networking sites.” — Tom S. Noda

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By Carrie-Ann Skinner
PC Advisor (UK)
March 3, 2010

LONDON - Micro-blogging service Twitter is thought to be preparing to serve adverts to its users.

According to story on the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD website, the ads will be linked to Twitter searches. For example a search for ‘laptop’ may generate an ad from Dell.

AllThingsD also said the 140 characters or less adverts will only be shown in search results, or add-on services such as TweetDeck that have agreed with Twitter to display the ads.

“Everyone I’ve talked to cautions that the plans are evolving and that there are plenty of details to work out,” said Peter Kafka on the AllThingsDsite.

However, Twitter has yet to reveal pricing and a launch date.

Twitter engineer Alex Payne added to the speculation when he revealed that the Micro-blogging service is set to get some new features.

“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon),” he said in a tweet, which has since been removed.

Payne then added that the “web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives”.

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By Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service (Seattle Bureau)
March 2, 2010

SEATTLE - Following a ban on social networking by some sectors of the U.S. Department of Defense, the agency has now decided that social networking is integral to its operations and is to be encouraged.

The Department of Defense issued a memorandum on Friday that sets a new policy allowing access to social-networking services from the DoD network.

“Service members and DoD employees are welcome and encouraged to use new media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or deployed — but it’s important to do it safely,” the Department said in a blog post about the memorandum.

DoD IT workers are authorized to temporarily limit Internet access to address bandwidth constraints or preserve operations security, the new policy says. In addition, administrators will continue to prevent access to prohibited content like pornography and gambling sites, and work to ensure that the use of social networking doesn’t introduce malicious code to the network.

The new policy reflects the importance of social networking, the DoD said. “This policy recognizes that Internet based capabilities are integral to operations across the Department of Defense,” the new policy says.

In 2007, the DoD began blocking sites including YouTube and MySpace from military networks. But that was not an official policy, it said in the blog post.

“This is DoD’s first official policy on new media. Prior to today, the Services and other DoD components developed and implemented their own ad hoc policies — some banning it all together,” it said.

Last year, for instance, the Marines banned the use of social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter from its network. With the new policy, the Marines will have to reverse that ban. “Under this new policy, there will be open and consistent access across the board,” according to the DoD blog post.

Some agencies, however, have been using sites like Twitter in an official capacity to communicate with the public. In fact, the main Web site for the DoD includes links to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube pages.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

It started out as a clever tale of unintentional and spontaneous humor, but the people behind Team Manila—a local graphic design merchandise collective—didn’t expect that printing the words “Payong na Itim” (Black Umbrella) on a, well, black umbrella, would pique the curiosity of its 3,000 followers on popular microblogging site Twitter so much that they haven’t stopped producing the distinct merchandise ever since.

What was once just an experimental venture is now a mainstay offering of their store, a solid proof of the much-hyped idea that social networking sites—or social media in general—indeed has its roots planted even in the enterprise sphere, if corporate heads have the mind and will to muster its potentials.

For Team Manila, a group of young graphic designers specializing on Manila-themed merchandise and lifestyle items, their business is heavily entrenched in the tangled web of the Internet given the young demographic of their customers.

And investing heavily on this group of Internet-savvy consumers sure had its payoffs. In November 2009, a Twitter link to a promotional graphic uploaded on the team’s Flickr account garnered much interest that as much as 1,333 viewed it within a few hours after posting.

But page views are nothing if they can’t be converted to actual product sales, and Jowee Alviar, half of Team Manila’s creative team and co-founder of the collective, was only more than happy to report that “many people turned up during our Saturday sale, which was only promoted through Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and our website.”

Team Manila, however, is no stranger to the unique social aspect of their product marketing. Before Twitter and Facebook were even conceived, they were already engaging their customers regarding the products they sell. “We would upload a number of designs on our mailing list, and members get to choose which ones they like,” narrates Alviar. “The top six designs are the ones that get printed and sold in our stores.”

This democratic inclusion of the customers in the planning and production stages of their merchandise was carried over to Twitter, which only expedited the process. “Through social media, we are able to include them [in our decisions as a company], especially because we want to be accessible to them,” Alviar says.

For its more than seven month run on Twitter, engaging with the customers has been the key to Team Manila’s social media success. “We want to establish a relationship with our clients, to connect with our market,” Alviar says. This is the reason why, aside from marketing promotions, Alviar—who handles the account—posts updates ranging from the mundane to the utterly nonsensical. “We want to find ways for them to re-tweet our posts, which further increases our reach,” he adds.

Zeroing In

Yet for all intents and purposes, the audience flocking Twitter—captive as it may seem—remain to be a niche segment of any company’s market. For Pepper Lunch Philippines, a local food outlet serving do-it-yourself grilled steaks, engaging with customers via social media meant zeroing in on a particular group of customers.

“Twitter is a way to connect with a certain customer group of Pepper Lunch customers. We have a lot of different customers and Twitter is a way for us to get close to this particular group,” says Jeroen van Straten, owner of the food franchise.

Since October 2009, van Straten says they’ve been posting promotional materials, information on upcoming events and store openings, and opportunities for customers to bag free items, food, and gift checks on their Twitter account. “It is a way for us to connect with our loyal customers,” he adds.

One particular time, van Straten shares, he posted updates about a new menu dish on the store. “People immediately re-tweeted the message and many have come over to the stores ordering the item, telling the cashier that they came over because of the Tweet!” he explains, adding that Twitter offers a unique new form of instant advertising for companies.

Realizing the potentials of the Internet in promoting their offerings, van Straten decided to shift to guerilla mode and has since been hunting feedback and comments about his venture online. “We monitor and follow all traffic, posts and comments on blogs and social networking sites that write about Pepper Lunch and answer them personally,” he says. “We use Google Alerts to notify us about all Pepper Lunch related stuff going on online. “

This “turning of the tables” is the immediate product of the social networking boom, with companies keen on hunting out the dingy corners of the web for conversations that can prove beneficial for their companies.

Every day, customers are talking about products and services over the Internet. “We need to listen to that conversation. When people are talking about your products and services to their friends, how can we take that info, and do something about it for the good of the company?” says Shivanu Shukla, industry manager, ICT practice for Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, in an earlier interview.

Facing the Music

Turning into an all-seeing eye is exactly what Globe Telecom, one of the country’s three telecommunications companies, is hoping to achieve. After seeing the apparent impact of social media over the lives of Filipinos—down to even the ones who don’t have Internet access—during the calamitous period when twin typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng hit the country’s capital, the company went full throttle into the social media landscape.

“[The year] 2009 saw the rise of social media presence in the Philippines when Ondoy and Pepeng hit. Of all possible channels to reach loved ones and authorities, people turned to social media to seek help, refuge, and action,” relates Philip Caballes, social media manager of Globe Telecom. “This validates our observation that social media is no longer just a trend in the country but a reality.”

For Globe, latching on to this reality meant being present in every social media channel available. “Globe is present in all major social media channels such as Facebook, Friendster, Multiply, Twitter, Plurk and in some up and coming Web 2.0 destinations. Globe uses these channels in different ways depending on what the site is good at doing,” Caballes explains.

Globe has more than 17,000 fans on its Facebook page, over 10,000 contacts in Friendster and Multiply, and at least 2,000 followers on Twitter as of writing. Harnessing the potentials of this vast audience, however, required heavy investment on Globe’s part, which upper management was more than willing to provide. “Social media investment this year has increased from 5% to 25% of our digital marketing budget from 2008 to 2009,” Caballes says.

But even if social media in general can greatly benefit a company through marketing or PR means, the different platforms available possess unique intricacies that, when leveraged properly, can raise these benefits exponentially. “We are present and active in [most social channels available]. The most effective channels for us are Twitter for handling customer engagement issues, Facebook for topical conversations, Multiply for publishing and Friendster for broadcasting,” Caballes clarifies.

But Globe isn’t only present on these popular and public social media platforms. Caballes says they also have presence in proprietary social media assets developed internally, such as Gloo.com.ph—a collaboration tool—and Minglr.ph—a social media feed aggregator.

Establishing presence, however, is merely the first step. Globe backs this up with quick and efficient response to queries and inquiries, which Caballes says “ranges from quality issues to network inquiries and the occasional compliments.”

Globe takes no longer than 48 hours to respond to feedback, Caballes says. “Twitter interactions tend to be faster, though,” he adds.

And what does Globe get out of this? “We measure ROI for social media activities differently. It is not measured against a media buy but on the level and depth of engagement we get with our customers,” Caballes explains.

A Curious Case

But another kind of engagement got the Manila Electric Company (Meralco), the capital’s electricity provider, jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. As if jolted by the immediate and massive effects of social media, Meralco’s PR department woke up to a start during the recent typhoons when a deluge of false information being spread around washed up on their doorstep.

“We already had plans to setup a Twitter account, but mostly just as a supporting platform for our corporate blog,” narrates Kirk Campos, part of Meralco’s external communications group. “A day before Typhoon Pepeng (international codename: Parma) made landfall, a message circulated around Facebook claiming that Meralco will shut the metro’s power down by nine in the evening.”

Campos said people were already spreading the information around thinking it was accurate, which created more problems on their part. “I had to go on air and clarify the matter. We had to categorically state that there was, and there will be, no such incident,” explains Joe Zaldarriaga, the external communications group head of Meralco. “Aside from traditional media, we came up with almost a spontaneous move to go to Twitter.”

Meralco’s back-breaking crisis PR didn’t stop there. A week after the incident, a transmission facility operated by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) suddenly broke down, causing intermittent brownouts in some portions of Eastern Manila. “There was someone on Twitter—who goes by the handle of @manilaelectric— delivering a blow-by-blow account of the incident, even implying that a ‘Meralco substation exploded,’ which is not the case at all,” Zaldarriaga says.

That moment, he says, the PR team of Meralco got in touch with Nick Nichols, a power sector consultant who initially set up to reserve the Twitter handle @meralco because he “wanted Meralco to have its own Twitter account.” “After we got in touch with him, he verified our identities for due diligence, after which he turned the account over to us,” Zaldarriaga relates.

The PR Team then linked the Twitter account to the official website of Meralco, and announced subsequently the opening of the account over broadcast media, to give credence to the account. “We have around 1,500 followers right now, who mostly deliver queries and inquiries about power interruptions in their areas,” Campos says.

Evolve or Die

The massive explosion of social media reverberated throughout every aspect of society that choosing to ignore its business value can potentially spell misfortune for firms that do not harness its powers.

Analyst firm Gartner puts it boldly in saying that “resisiting social media is futile,” and that firms opting to resist or ignore it is still making a decision—of shutting their organization from a vast pool of valuable information.

Meralco, a 106 year-old company, has paid heed to this advice, and is slowly reaping the benefits. “You have to adapt to the changing environment, and keep researching, finding out, what are the new trends in the information field, what are the new channels being opened to further engage the consumers,” asserts Zaldarriaga. “Learning is a process, it’s an everyday process. You learn, and you have to adapt accordingly. You should always be in step with the development in the field.”

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By Michael Alan Hamlin

Last year was a seismic shift for online branding. Being visible got both easier and harder. Easier because new Web 2.0 tools blossomed—especially Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn—providing powerful new communication channels for communicating and distributing brands. It got harder because so many people are using them—mostly badly—and because for Web 2.0 to be effective, it takes a lot of work, patience, and risk taking.

What are the elements of online branding for this new decade? They include the place, corporation, or personal website; blogs, social media, search engine optimization, search and online brand advertising, and compelling content.

The website

Most companies maintain Web 1.0, brochureware, static websites that provide information and a (mostly unsatisfactory) means for contacting a company. There is little or no reason to ever return after checking out the company once. This is especially true for small and medium companies in the B2B space, in part because development of the website was outsourced and no one has the time or technical skills to keep it regularly updated. Failing to regularly update a website is almost as bad as not having one. Search engines provide low ranks for websites that aren’t regularly updated.

As a result, it’s increasingly common to see companies adding a news room for the occasional news release in the hopes that this somewhat regularly updated information in the form of a press statement or news release will return a better ranking. It probably makes a small difference. One way to fairly simply and quickly improve a website’s page ranking on search engines is to provide at least monthly updates, and then to send a link to the company’s networks every time information is posted to the website. There are a number of ways to do this.

First, provide a RSS feed that customers (and competitors, yes) can use to automatically download the information to a RSS reader or these days, to most e-mail clients and browsers. Non-technical marketing staff can post the information in the news room of the site for a small investment in a simple content management system.

Social networks

Most managers look with considerable disdain on social networks, grimacing at the mention of Twitter, for example, and groaning that they don’t care who someone else is having lunch with. Really? In my view, that could be very useful information. But that’s not the reason social networks are important. Social networks are important because they allow companies and individuals to position themselves as thought leaders and influencers—people who should be listened to.

When information is updated on the company website, sales executives and other managers can use social networks to send links to that information to their social networks. Of course, if the website is updated only once or twice a month, in order to build a presence on a social network, executives and managers are going to have to find something else to post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook. I’m not talking about lunch. To build an online reputation as a company or someone who exerts influence on the industry, executives need to look for information that is going to be useful to their networks, and send links to that information.

This is where RSS feeds and news alerts in search engines become useful. They can provide a heads up on interesting information that will benefit your network. Not every piece of information that comes your way should be automatically forwarded to your network. It’s important that the executive, you, actually read the information, think about it, and make a short comment to go along with the link and update. For example, before I wrote this column, I tweeted, “The Russians are here, but will they come back?” and included a link to a (brilliant) column I had written on Russian tourists in Boracay.

But I sent several more updates with comments on Google, social networks, and the state of journalism and news gathering based on information posted by other members of my networks or contained in news stories and company blogs.

Blogs

I told you that being visible takes work. Nothing comes easy, and there are serious tradeoffs to being visible, but that’s another column. If you or your company are going to be credible as an influencer, you will have to have an opinion.

Blogs are great ways to communicate an opinion or a perspective on industry developments, the economy, or the impact dof emerging technologies on business models, for example. The bottom line is content. You must have compelling content to stay visible and valuable to your network. And you need the tools—and to use them—that I’ve described to get visible.

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By Kristin Burnham
CIO.com

When Twitter launched in 2006, few people could have predicted how microblogging would change online communication. Today, microblogging, or short-form text updates posted to the Web, has exploded in popularity. As a result, a number of microblogging applications for the enterprise–Twitter alternatives that do just a bit more—have surfaced.

Read on to learn how three businesses are using microblogging successfully and four best practices for implementing it where you work.

User Case #1: St. Louis Public Radio

Why they did it: Tim Eby, general manager of St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR), was an early adopter of Twitter and “discovered the power of it in terms of communicating information, building community and sharing information,” he says. When discussions arose about building a company intranet for the radio station, Eby aimed to make microblogging a part of it.

“Even though we have a small staff–around 33 employees—there were many silos built up across the department,” he says. Microblogging, he hoped, would help get his staff talking and collaborating.

After evaluating several microblogging tools, Eby and his team decided on Socialtext’s Signals, a microblogging tool that is accessed via a browser, mobile device or an Adobe AIR desktop application and is integrated with a wiki, social networking profiles and “activity streams” (which are similar to the Facebook News Feed).

Gaining buy-in: Adoption of the application was fairly quick, Eby notes, although there was some hesitation among staff members. “Even in an age when people are on Twitter and Facebook, there are some people who haven’t embraced social media tools,” he says. “Some were hesitant about exposing too much, so this allowed them to embrace a secure, internal tool in a comfortable environment.”

To get the skeptics onboard with the project, Eby invited them to join the team responsible for choosing and testing the tools. Buy-in from upper management was just as important, he says. “Multiple departments have to buy into the project, it can’t come from the top down or the bottom up,” he says. “If you don’t have everyone on board with the project—including the organization’s leaders—the project is going to be difficult to adopt.”

How they’re using it: Eby and his staff at SLPR use Socialtext’s app partly as a “watercooler” by sharing links to articles people have found interesting and as a way to cut down on e-mail blasts and “reply-alls.”

For example, SLPR’s receptionist received a call from a listener who heard an announcement on the radio about an event at a local high school and wanted to know more about it. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to all staff members, the receptionist used Socialtext’s app to poll the staff, and received an answer in less than five minutes. “There was an immediate response, and we didn’t have to clutter e-mail inboxes to get it,” Eby says.

Eby also says microblogging has helped the radio station achieve more camaraderie and collaboration. “Our part-time staffers don’t have company e-mail addresses, so traditionally they’d miss a lot of our communications,” he says. “This tool allows us to communicate internally with them, and they can even update us on what they’re doing from the field by sending messages securely through their phone.”

User Case #2: Motorola

Why they did it: With many of its staffers interested in social media sites like Twitter, Motorola decided to look into a new, internal type of communication that would be helpful to employees for disseminating and commenting on information.

The corporate communications department, for example, relied on e-mail to make announcements, says Rami Levy, distinguished member of the technical staff with Motorola’s open-source technologies department. “Usually mass e-mails usually get deleted without people reading them, but using a microblogging tool has made people pay more attention and engage in the conversation,” he says.

Motorola sought an opensource tool, which Levy says was a challenge because there are “few stable and secure options” available right now. Ultimately they chose a tool from StatusNet, and integrated it fully with the rest of their technology tools, he says Employees can access it via their desktop, Web, mobile or e-mail.

Gaining buy-in: There were some concerns from management about the nature information that could be posted to the site and how the information would be controlled, Levy says. “This is a ‘you can’t control a crowd’ type of thing. If you clamp down too hard on restrictions, people won’t use it; but on the other hand, you need some sort of structure,” he says.

To get everyone onboard, a policy was developed and posted on their website. “We didn’t want to make it long and complicated, we wanted to encourage people to talk about things, but make everyone aware that everyone else can see it, and to self-moderate,” Levy says. They also encouraged senior management to not only join, but to actively use it during the workday. Levy says this encouraged more activity on the site and made senior management more reachable and approachable.

To spread the word about the new tool, the rollout team partnered with various internal communications groups and created presentations that explained why they might want to try it out. Motorola also integrated an icon on the website that allowed employees to post something directly that they found interesting with one click. “We wanted to keep it public and in people’s minds until it got a mind of itself,” Levy says. Today, more than 7,000 employees use the tool, he says.

How they’re using it: In addition to using microblogging as an avenue for disseminating information and encouraging communication and collaboration, Motorola also participated in a worldwide event where, on Oct. 15, employees performed community service. They publicized the event internally and encouraged staff members post to the microblogging site photos of themselves helping the local community and discussing what they were doing.

They also integrated a geomapping tool that listed where each volunteering employee was located, so others could see in real-time what was happening around them. “It was really cool because it not only showed what people were doing and where, but it encouraged people to converse about it and create new connections among themselves,” Levy says.

User Case #3: Avaya

Why they did it: Avaya, an enterprise global communications company with a distributed workforce of between 13,000 and 15,000 employees worldwide was looking to get their employees to communicate outside their groups, wanted to increase mobility of their sales associates and felt it was important for their employees to be comfortable and knowledgeable of new communication methods that their customers might be using, says Kay Beavers, a member of the worldwide sales technical operations group.

“We’re moving away from long-winded e-mails that take hours to compile and where the conversation drags along for days,” she says. “We wanted our associates to be quicker, more nimble and more efficient in how they communicate, and microblogging seemed to suit that well.”

Avaya has been using both Yammer and SocialCast for about a year, outside the firewall. Currently, they’re in the process of trialing inside the firewall.

Gaining buy-in: Beavers says that finding a solution that their IT security team and legal team were comfortable with was challenging. “Legal wanted to make sure we didn’t say anything that shouldn’t be said and security wanted to make sure it was safe,” she says. “It was really important for us to establish best practices at the start of the project.” The team initiated conversations with top execs and technical experts, then moved forward to educate employees.

Making sure that there was enough self-training available to employees was important so they could learn at their own pace, Beavers says. The rollout team posted videos demonstrating how to use certain features like tagging, personal replies and customizing their streams. Managers also sought to recognize employees who shared valuable content and comments by reposting their comments and observations. This has encouraged more employees to join, Beavers says.

How they’re using it: Because SocialCast’s and Yammer’s tools can be accessed via a mobile phone, Avaya sales associates are now more reachable, which has helped to improve the time it took to respond to customers, Beavers says. Additionally, the tool has been useful for onboarding new associates, helping them make contacts more quickly and catch up on company news by searching through past conversations, Beaver says.

“[Microblogging] is really much more of a Generation Y communication tool. We wanted to use that to attract and retain those kinds of workers and let them use the tools they’ve become used to in real life, and not just limit them to the tools their parents use,” she says.

Using the microblogging tools has also helped Avaya reduce e-mail and attachment overload; Beaver says employees are no longer afraid to delete e-mails since they can search for conversations and announcements within the microblogging sites.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
February 24, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - New numbers from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.

Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets a day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter . Today, though, that number has gone up — a lot.

Weil noted in a blog post on the Twitter site today that 50 million tweets are posted on the site every day. That’s an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.

Twitter use has been steadily climbing.

In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew by 1,400% and reached 35 million per day by the end of the year.

Weil, however, doesn’t say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets-per-day. Are the top 10% of users, for instance, accounting for 80% of all tweets? That’s not clear.

Just last month, a study from RJMetrics Inc. showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.

The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December. According to RJMetrics, only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling company with far fewer users.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.

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By Mikael Ricknäs
IDG News Service (Stockholm Bureau)
February 18, 2010

BARCELONA - Motorola released its eighth Android smartphone on Monday called the Quench or Cliq XT, which comes with a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard.

The phone is based on version 1.5 of Android and features Motorola’s own Motoblur, which, for example, syncs e-mails, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages. On the software side there is support for Adobe Flash Lite, according to Motorola.

The Quench will be available in the first quarter of 2010, according to Motorola. In the U.S. the phone will be called Cliq XT and be available next month exclusively through T-Mobile USA. Motorola didn’t provide details on other parts of the world where the Quench will become available. Pricing was not immediately available.

The Quench also features a music player that connects to the Web and social media networks, including TuneWiki and SoundHound, Motorola said.

The touchscreen on the Quench measures 3.1 inches and has a 320 x 480 pixels resolution. Other features include a 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus and a LED (Light-Emitting Diode) flash, A-GPS (Assisted-GPS), with turn-by-turn direction and voice-activated search.

It surfs the web using Wi-Fi or HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) at 7.2M bps.

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By Joan Goodchild
CSO (US)
February 16, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Earlier this month, CSO reported that cybercrime attacks on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have exploded, according to a recent survey conducted by security firm Sophos(See: Facebook, Twitter, Social Network Attacks Tripled in 2009).

Reports of malware and spam rose 70% on social networks in the last 12 months and 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites. Another 36% reveal they have been sent malware via social networking sites (See also: Social Medial Risks: The Basics). 

Also read about some of most common ways users get taken on social networks in 5 Facebook, Twitter Scams to Avoid and 5 More Facebook, Twitter Scams to Avoid The “Social Security” survey is part of Sophos’ 2010 Security Threat Report, which looks at current and emerging computer security trends and found that social networks are opening up new opportunities for cyber criminals to locate so-called “soft” targets and pull of precise and targeted attacks. We wanted to know: What makes someone look like an easy hit for the bad guys? Chet Wisniewski, Senior Security Advisor with security firm Sophos, gives us some clues.

You have access to a VIP or valuable data

Security researchers are noting two distinct kinds of attacks on social networks, according to Wisniewski. The first; the more traditional spray spamming where many users receive a message on their Facebook wall, in their inbox, or on Twitter, that contains a malicious link. But the other, more disturbing trend, said Wisniewski, is that these social networks, by nature of how they work, make it possible for criminals to cyber stalk potential victims. The bad guys watch your activity to see what you say, and then use it in an attack (Read more in Seven Deadly Sins of Social Networking Security). 

“There is definitely another network of crime where they are taking time, and closely watching in order to pull off certain things,” said Wisniewski.

Users at risk for this kind of attack might be a person who has access to something or somebody that the criminal wants. You might be the executive assistant to a corporate CEO, or a human resources representative who has access to all of your company’s employee files. You may not think anyone notices, but this makes you a desirable target, said Wisniewski.

“If you are someone’s executive assistant innocently using Facebook, and the criminals know you are associated with someone important, the can target your profile to try and get malware onto your computer,” he said.

Once they’ve installed malware onto your computer, hackers can gain access to sensitive information with keystroke logging technology, which is just one example of a way to breech sensitive data. In fact, in the recent highly-publicized China-based online attacks of Google, it was revealed the criminals looked up key employees on social networks and found out who their friends were on Facebook. They then hacked the accounts of those friends and contacted their victims pretending to be someone they were not. The employees clicked on malicious links from the so-called “friends,” and were lead to malware.

“When you do a forensic investigation after an attack, often you find they were targeting people who don’t expect to be targeted,” said Wisniewski.

Takeaway: Consider who you are and what you do. Are you privy to information that would be useful in a criminal’s hands? Best to keep your guard up, click on links judiciously, and make sure you have a network of people you know are trustworthy, which brings us to our next point….

You have lots of “friends”

So you have 1,000 friends on Facebook? Wow, you must be quite a popular guy! Of those 1,000, how many do you actually know?

Many Facebook and Twitter users like pumping up their friends list and followers numbers, but they do it at their peril said Wisniewski.

Sophos conducted a Facebook ID probe and created a fabricated Facebook profile before sending out friend requests to individuals chosen at random from across the globe.

To conduct the experiment, Sophos set up a profile page for ‘Freddi Staur’ (an anagram of ‘ID Fraudster’), a small green plastic frog who divulged minimal personal information about himself. Sophos then sent out 200 friend requests to observe how many people would respond, and how much personal information could be gleaned from the respondents. The experiment revealed that 82 users, or 41 percent, were willing to divulge personal information, such as email address, date of birth and phone number, to a complete stranger.

“When you make 400 or 500 friends, you don’t really know them,” said Wisniewski. “How can you be sure they aren’t sitting there, lurking, watching your wall for months so they can see what you say and use something that would be in line with your regular behavior in order to fit in and have a greater chance of success when it’s time to hack you?”

Wisniewski pointed to the example of a large university that was subjected to an attack on a social network. Hackers were friending university employees and watching discussions that were going on about a new IT program being rolled out at the school. The criminals eventually managed to successfully get employees to click on malicious links by sending out messages claiming to “relate to the dean’s message about the new IT program.”

Takeaway:Think again about accepting “friend” invitations from people you don’t truly know. And don’t automatically “follow” every Twitter user who follows you.

You aren’t concerned about your privacy settings

There has been a lot of press, and controversy, about Facebook’s privacy settings. Privacy options for users were most recently changed in December 2009 and now give members the opportunity to choose from three levels of privacy; friends only, friends of friends and everyone. Users can also choose to customize their settings to hide information from certain people. Some critics of the latest changes point out that Facebook now forces all users to make their friends list, fan pages and location public. Still, there are many other sensitive sections that can be hidden. The problem is people don’t enable the privacy settings.

“I don’t think people understand the changes,” said Wisniewski. “But they actually give you finer-grain control if you use them.”

Under the latest privacy-settings options, if you fail to specify what you want hidden, and from whom, it will be available for all to see by default. That includes people who find your profile in a search engine. It only takes a few minutes to access your settings under the ‘account’ section of your profile. You can decide if you want certain features, such as your wall or your personal information (IE: job, religious affiliation), to be seen by friends only, friends of friends, or everyone.

Takeaway: Take the time to update your privacy settings. If you haven’t yet, by default most of your profile can be read by people you don’t even know; which could include criminals.

You share too much information

“It’s one thing to use LinkedIn to post your professional accomplishments,” said Wisniewski, “But to post a resume with your address and phone number and other personal information goes too far.”

LinkedIn, generally seen as the lowest-risk social network, still poses a reasonable amount of danger, said Wisniewski. In addition to the obvious risks of revealing too much personal information, you can also disclose too much about your company, setting them up for an attack.

“For someone looking for information about your organization or looking for targeted bits about your company it’s fantastic,” he said. “I can go and search for your company name and three-quarters of your employees probably have profiles that tell me exactly what they do, what their position is. I can learn a lot about the company and, if I wanted to, I can then take on a social engineering attack and use that LinkedIn information for my attack through Facebook or email.”

LinkedIn, like Facebook, gives you the option to manage your privacy settings through your account. You can decide if you want your full profile, or just certain pieces of information, to be available to everyone, or connections only.

And when it comes to TMI on Facebook or Twitter, Wisniewski advises following a simple rule to avoid putting stuff out there that can be used against you.

“If you wouldn’t be comfortable disclosing this information with an acquaintance in a bar, maybe you should put it out there at all,” he said.

Takeaway: Be discreet. Check what comes up when you plug your name into a search engine and make sure what comes up is information you want to share with the world.

Read more about data protection in CSOonline’s Data Protection section.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
February 4, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - A consumer advocacy group that is critical of Facebook’s privacy practices has filed court documents objecting to a proposed settlement in which Facebook agreed to pay $9.5 million to set up a privacy foundation.

Social networking hacks: Top 10 Facebook and Twitter security stories of 2009

Public Citizen, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., filed an objection to the class action settlement Monday, arguing that it creates an unnecessary privacy organization while providing no benefit to most users affected by Facebook’s privacy practices.

“The settlement provides no damages or other relief for class members other than Facebook’s promise to disband a program that it voluntarily shut down long ago,” the Public Citizen objection states. “Rather than providing actual relief, the settlement would create an unneeded foundation over which Facebook retains unwarranted influence.”

The proposed settlement stems from Facebook’s Beacon program, which was launched in November 2007 and let third-party Web sites distribute “stories” about users to Facebook news feeds. A class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook, claiming that users were not given adequate information about the use of Beacon and collection of personal information. Facebook subsequently shut down the Beacon program and agreed to pay $9.5 million to set up a nonprofit foundation that will support online privacy, safety and security.

The proposed settlement is pending in U.S. District Court in San Jose, with a hearing scheduled for Feb. 26.

Public Citizen argued that Facebook will exert excessive control over the privacy foundation, and that there is no need for it because several nonprofit organizations dedicated to online privacy already exist. Public Citizen claimed that up to a third of the $9.5 million would go toward paying attorneys.

The settlement agreement includes $41,500 for the 19 individuals who filed the lawsuit, but no other compensation for Facebook’s general population of users. Facebook users were allowed to opt out of the proposed settlement, if they wished to pursue further legal action against Facebook. But the deadline for opting out passed on Monday.

Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

This story, “Facebook’s $9.5M privacy settlement not good enough, consumer group says,” was originally published at NetworkWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in security at Network World.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
February 3, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Twitter has apparently forced some users to reset their passwords after a phishing attack, and urged users to choose hard-to-guess passwords and be on the lookout for suspicious third-party activity.

Scottish blogger Andrew Girdwood was among those who reported receiving a message that states “Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser. … Remember to choose a strong password that is a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Do not reuse your old password.”

Twitter acknowledged the password reset, describing it as a “precautionary step,” but did not say how many users were affected or describe the nature of the phishing attack.

Twitter’s official “safety” account issued a tweet saying “Got an email from us saying we’ve reset your password? A small # of accts seemed possibly affected offsite & we took a precautionary step.” Previous tweets from this account offer advice for avoiding attacks, such as “Giving out your username & password to a 3rd party site promising you more followers: not a good idea AND a violation of the Twitter Rules.”

Twitter’s message to users urged them to remove any updates they did not post themselves; scan their computers for viruses and malware; and check the Twitter connections page and revoke access privileges for any third-party applications they do not recognize.

Twitter has become a magnet for computer hackers because of its increasing popularity, with reports of malware and spam on social networks rising 70% in the last 12 months.

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By Ian Lamont
The Industry Standard
February 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - After hitting a grand slam with the iPhone, Apple can’t be too happy with some of the early reaction to the iPad. On message boards, Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, a recurring theme has been to compare the device to a “giant iPod touch.”

Considering none of the naysayers have ever handled an iPad, the comparison may seem harsh. But viewing the demo, it’s not hard to see how people came to this conclusion. After all, the thing looks like a giant iPod touch, from the black-and-chrome exterior to the recessed start button. And, while Apple has introduced some new UI elements, such as drop-down menus, other basic features are based on the iPhone/iPod touch model, including the accelerometer, app store, some of the icons used for playing media, and, of course, the touch screen.

There are other criticisms as well. During the event, a comment left on the Industry Standard by reader David Kuan read:

“1 hr into the event … and I am heading towards snoozeville. Here are my iPad not-so-good impressions thus far ….

1. Bezel is too large
2. 1/2 in is TOO THICK Even Kindle DX is thinner at 1/3 in
3. Full size QWERTY is nice but bad ergonomics when typing iPad on a flat surface
4. No SD slot for storage portability (A BIG MISS HERE!)
5. Phenomenal email? I must have dozed off during the “phenomenal” part
6. No camera? Sigh!
7. No FLASH support (MAJOR OUCH!)
8. IPS display means more power consumption and requiring backlight. Difficulty to read outdoors due to glare. OLED would be a much better choice but at this size it is yet to be economical for mass consumer target.”

However, other people are very excited about the prospect of owning an iPad. There have been a huge number of iPad-related tweets saying “I want one,” particularly after the pricing was announced — the base $499 Wifi model seems to be within many people’s budgets.

But the true gauge of the iPad will come when the devices ship in 60 days, and Apple releases sales figures later in the year. Wall Street thus far seems undecided, if Apple’s stock price is anything to go by. It dipped to a low of about $200 during the beginning of Wednesday’s demonstration, but the price had recovered to around $208 90 minutes later.

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By Tom S. Noda
Published in the CWP December 2009 - January 2010 issue

As the population of netizens balloon, so will the number of cybercrimes. It is a challenge major security vendors vow to battle with products and strategies engineered to protect businesses and individuals alike.

In this yearend special feature of Computerworld Philippines, four security vendors—Trend Micro, Sophos, NetPlay, Inc., and Symantec—say in separate interviews, that emerging technologies such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, virtualization, and social networking have led them to intensify their efforts on curbing cybercrime.

“As more companies conduct their businesses online, and more information, transactions and communications are posted online, threats and problems increases, like loss of data due to hardware failure and theft, stealing of confidential information, bogus online transactions, account phishing and spamming, among others will continue to rise exponentially,” says Scott Gonzalo, managing director of Netplay, Inc., the Philippine distributor of Microworld Technologies Inc.’s eScan and Elitecore Technologies Ltd’s Cyberoam.

Similarly, Rob Forsyth, managing director of Sophos in Asia-Pacific, describes 2009 as the social media year for businesses globally, since more enterprises have begun to tap social networking and Web 2.0 to reach out to customers and to transform their brand and marketing strategies.

“The Internet will continue to transform the way people work and play, and its pervasiveness will continue to blur the lines between consumer and enterprise technology with the growing sophistication of an average user,” remarks Forsyth, adding that as enterprises discover new ways of integrating the social media platform in the business, employees are expected to continue initiating and implementing their own social media practices within the enterprise, which may prove unsettling to both network security and worker productivity, if a social media usage policy is not in place or adequately enforced among employees.

“Organizations will be increasingly concerned about malicious attacks originating from social networking sites, and the risks associated with users revealing sensitive and confidential corporate information online,” Forsyth says. “Other than social computing, another major enterprise technology trend is cloud computing which will gain greater prominence in 2010.”

According to Gartner, revenues from cloud computing will reach US$14 million annually by the end of 2013. Typical cloud computing services provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, with the software and data stored on the servers.

“The growing adoption of cloud computing will drive the sharing of corporate data in never-before-seen ways and result in both the immediate exchange of information and increased vulnerabilities for enterprises,” says Forsyth. Because of this, he says more powerful encryption policies and security technologies will be needed to safeguard data wherever it is stored.

Eric Hoh, vice president of Symantec, Asia South Region, tells Computerworld Philippines that attackers will continue to shift away from mass distribution of a small number of threats to micro distribution of millions of distinct threats.

He says that many of the new strains of malware consist of thousands of distinct threats that come from known, unique families through a variety of methods such as file sharing, email and removable media. “These new and emerging threats have given rise to the need for new, complementary detection methods such as heuristics, behavior blocking and reputation-based security models.”

ONLINE PROTECTION

To address online threats, NetPlay has unleashed security software from Microworld and Elitecore that are designed to support businesses that have online presence, and they are: the eScan Antivirus software, Cyberoam Endpoint Data Protection suite and Cyberoam UTM, respectively.

Gonzalo says Cyberoam UTM is a gateway security appliance that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic for threats like hacking, spamming, viruses and provides web content filtering.

He claims it to be the first UTM that is identity based wherein the appliance provides the name and the IP address of its user who has breached security regulations unlike other appliance that only provides an IP address.

Gonzalo adds that eScan antivirus is another endpoint security software that provides proactive virus monitoring of its host PC. Gonzalo reveals they will also be rolling out a Cyberoam UTM software and EPDP for the small and medium-enterprise (SME) markets as well as new versions of eScan antivirus software.

The products complement each other, he says, describing Cyberoam UTM as a gateway security solution while eScan Antivirus and Cyberoams EPDP as endpoint solutions.

INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS

Following its integration with data security solutions firm Utimaco Safeware, Sophos introduced in 2009 a portfolio of security software that includes data encryption, computer security, web security, email security, and network access control that users can manage, deploy and use.

In October 2009, Sophos fully integrated data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities into Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9, which enables businesses to have visibility and control over sensitive data without the need to deploy any additional agents or incur any additional licensing costs.

Forsyth notes that with the rise of cybercrime, breaches, accidental or intentional data leakage, and multi-faceted security threats, business critical information must be fully protected at all times.

He stresses that complexity of securing data stems from the growing popularity of virtualization and cloud computing among organizations and data centers looking to streamline the use of resources.

Accordingly, data centers must comply with enterprise service-level agreements and operating procedures before corporations entrust moving mission-critical applications under their control. To help address these concerns, Sophos has collaborated with Intel to help protect security-critical applications and contribute to compliance for regulations such as financial payments, government agencies and healthcare organizations through integrating Sophos SafeGuard Crypto-Server for cryptography with Intel SOA Expressway for XML security into a single integrated solution to help customers meet industry-specific security regulations and policies.

Forsyth says malware threats and the security landscape have evolved dramatically over the last five years, which bring about a paradigm shift in customer requirements as well.

Today, having anti-malware tools and firewalls in place is no longer enough to protect the dissolving network perimeter. He says the lack of data protection can hurt the bottom line, adding that the Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9 addresses such concerns by integrating endpoint security with comprehensive data protection to safeguard against data loss.

IT, PEOPLE, PROCESSES

Over at Symantec, the security approach for 2010 is three-pronged: technology, people, and processes.

“We understand that technology isn’t the only answer to enable businesses to secure and manage their information,” Hoh says, adding Symantec will continue to bring together an ecosystem of products, services, and partners that will help businesses secure and manage their information-based security models.

“Symantec’s new reputationbased security technology leverages the anonymous software usage patterns of Symantec’s extensive volunteer user community to automatically identify entirely new spyware, viruses and worms,” he says, noting with the increasing threats, businesses will also opt for multilayer and comprehensive protection, such as those provided by all-in-one security suites.

Hoh claims that the Symantec Protection Suites, made available earlier this year, is an all-in-one suite that protects critical business assets from complex malware and spam threats, and rapidly recovers data or computer systems.

And as businesses consider DLP in the coming year, Symantec recommends that they look beyond technology and consider strengthening policies and processes.

Effective DLP, Hoh says, establishes reputable processes and procedures that reduce the risk of data exposure throughout an enterprise. He says a comprehensive, long-term, sustainable DLP is based on: “Threat coverage, business process integration, and risk reduction measurement.”

TECH OF TOMORROW

At Trend Micro, the game plan is to develop the “technology of tomorrow,” as the level of threats in the world has vastly outrun existing technologies. “Everybody right now is unable to face the threats of tomorrow that’s why we have to go to the technology of tomorrow,” says David Perry, global director of security education.

“We just released our smart protection network over the course of last year, but we got a whole lot more product releases all through next year, starting right away, and some before Christmas this year,” he says.

Perry says Trend Micro is seeing an advancement of many web-based threats that cannot be pursued with traditional methods. “We have invented whole new ways of detecting web-based threats and blocking people from going to them.

This should protect them from Facebook, MySpace, on Twitter, and all of the different places that they’re going on the web,” he says.

Although he declined to name some of the future Trend Micro products, Perry says the company has new products in the SME space, particularly those involved with cloud computing. “We foresee security problems in the cloud so we’re looking at protecting the cloud and placing protection in it.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
January 27, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

While the rate of new user growth peaked last July at about 7.8 million a month, that number has dropped to about 6.2 million new users a month now, according to a study from RJMetrics Inc., which develops online metric analysis software. The past six months, the study also noted, have shown a steady falloff in the number of new accounts.

“When you look at new account registrations, no one can deny that Twitter is still growing like a rocket ship. That’s good,” wrote Robert J. Moore, CEO and founder of RJMetrics. “However, upon closer inspection, the rate of new user signups has dropped meaningfully from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts. That’s bad. Furthermore, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months. That’s worse.”

Actually, the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in all of last December hit an all-time low.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

However, Moore pointed out that because of Twitter’s “rapid user growth”, even with only 17% tweeting last month, that still adds up to more Twitterers than ever before.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active Twitterers.

Today’s study echoes a report released last week. HubSpot, a Web analytics company, noted in its own report that the number of users joining Twitter started to drop off dramatically last fall. While Twitter grew rapidly over the past couple of years, HubSpot said in its latest “State of the Twittersphere” report that the company’s growth rate dropped to 3.5% in October, compared to 13% just seven months earlier.

This slowing growth rate stands in stark contrast to the micro-blogging site’s staggering growth numbers just a year ago.

ComScore, Inc., a Web analytics company, reported that the number of people using Twitter in February 2009 had jumped a dramatic 700% compared to the same month in 2008.

Twitter also saw a 131% increase in U.S. visitors between February and March of last year, according to another report from comScore. Twitter had 9.3 million visitors in March of 2009 - a whopping five million more than it had the month before.

According to today’s RJMetrics report, people who have joined Twitter aren’t creating much of a presence there. The average Twitter user has 27 followers, which is down from 42 followers in August, according to the new study. About 25% of users - up from 20% last August - have no followers at all. Upwards of 40% of users only have between one and five followers.

“A third of Twitter’s user base has joined up in the past four months, and we know that users acquire more followers the longer they are on the system,” wrote Moore in the report. However, he added that it’s “impossible” to tell at this point if so many users have few followers because they’re new to the site or if they’re simply not engaged.

And a lack of engagement is showing up.

The study noted that about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, up five percentage points from just five months ago.

Moore pointed out in the report that if new Twitter users stick with the micro-blogging service through just the first week they have a much higher rate of engagement with the site over time.

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By Tony Bradley
PC World (US)
January 27, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Do you know how to guard against scareware? How about Trojan horse text messages? Or social network data harvesting? Malicious hackers are a resourceful bunch, and their methods continually evolve to target the ways we use our computers now. New attack techniques allow bad guys to stay one step ahead of security software and to get the better of even cautious and well-informed PC users.
Don’t let that happen to you. Read on for descriptions of 11 of the most recent and most malignant security threats, as well as our complete advice on how to halt them in their tracks.

Shortened URLs

Most tweets, and lots of other electronic messages, include links that have been shortened by services such as Bit.ly, Tr.im, and Goo.gl. The URL aliases are handy, but they pose a risk, too: Since short URLs give no hint of the destination, attackers can exploit them to send you to malicious sites.

Use a Twitter client: Programs such as TweetDeck in­­clude options in their settings to display previews of shortened URLs. With such a setting enabled, clicking a shortened URL within a tweet brings up a screen that shows the destination page’s title, as well as its full-length URL and a tally of how many other people have clicked that link. With this information at your disposal, you can make an in­­formed decision about whether to click through and visit the actual site.

Install a URL-preview plug-in: Several Web browser plug-ins and services perform a similar preview function. When you create a shortened address with the TinyURL service, for instance, you can choose an option to create a preview version so that recipients can see where it goes before clicking. Conversely, if you’re considering visiting a TinyURL link, you can enable its preview service to see the complete URL. For the TinyURL previews to work, though, you must have cookies enabled in your browser.

ExpandMyURL and LongURLPlease both provide Web browser plug-ins or applets that will verify the safety of the full URLs behind abbreviated links from all the major URL-shortening services. Rather than changing the shortened links to their full URLs, however, ExpandMy­URL checks destination sites in the background and marks the short URLs green if they are safe.

Goo.gl, Google’s URL-shortening service, provides security by automatically scanning the destination URL to detect and identify malicious Websites, and by warning users when the shortened URL might be a security concern. Unfortunately, Goo.gl has limited ap­­plication because it works only through other Google products and services.

Data Harvesting of Your Profile

Some of the personal details that you might share on social networks, such as your high school, hometown, or birthday, are often the same items used in “secret” security questions for banks and Websites. An attacker who collects enough of this information may be able to access your most sensitive accounts.

Check your Facebook privacy settings: After signing in to your Facebook account, click Settings on the menu bar and select Privacy Settings.

Facebook’s privacy settings allow you to choose who may see various personal details. You can hide your details from everyone but your Facebook friends (our recommendation), allow members of your networks to view your details as well, or open the floodgates and permit everyone to see your information. In addition, you can set the privacy level for each component of your profile–for example, your birthday, your religious and political views, the photos you post, and your status updates.
Don’t accept any friend requests from strangers: From time to time you may get a friend request from someone you don’t know. If you’re serious about protecting your personal information, you shouldn’t accept such requests.

Share with caution: Consider removing valuable information such as your birth date and hometown from your profile. You should also think twice before participating in Facebook quizzes and chain lists–though it seems innocent and fun to share your favorite breakfast cereal, the first concert you attended, or where you met your spouse, an attacker armed with enough of these tidbits can assume your identity.

Social Network Impostors

If you’ve connected with someone on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or another social network, it’s probably because you know and trust the person. Attackers, however, can take control of your friend’s online persona and then exploit that trust.

Beware of scams sent from ‘friends’: Attackers can hijack one of your online buddies’ social networking accounts through malware, phishing scams, and other techniques, and then use the stolen accounts to spam you, steal your personal data, or even con you out of cash. Once the thieves have locked your friend out of the account, they may send you a note saying, “Help! I’m in London and my wallet was stolen. Can you wire me some money for a plane ticket?” Or they may recommend that you click on doctored links that will allow them to infect your computer or compromise your own account.

Web Snooping

Now that so much entertainment, shopping, and socializing has shifted online, every Internet user leaves a rich digital trail of preferences. The books you read, the movies you rent, the people you interact with, the items you buy, and other details constitute a gold mine of demographic data for search en­­gines, advertisers, and anyone who might want to snoop around your computer.

Do business with companies you trust: Stay aware of the privacy policies of the Websites and services you interact with, and restrict your dealings to those that you believe you can trust to guard your sensitive information.

Use private browsing: The current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome include private-browsing modes. These features, such as IE 8’s InPrivate Browsing and Firefox 3.5’s Private Browsing, ensure that the site history, form data, searches, passwords, and other details of the current Internet session don’t remain in your browser’s cache or password manager once you shut the browser down. By protecting such information on the computer you do your surfing on, these features help you foil nosy coworkers or relatives.

Scareware

You’re probably familiar with the garden-variety phishing attack. Like a weekend angler, a phisher uses bait, such as an e-mail message designed to look as if it came from a bank or financial institution, to hook a victim. Scareware is a twist on the standard phishing attack that tricks you into installing rogue antivirus software by “alerting” you that your PC may be infected.

Don’t take the bait: Stop and think. If, for instance, you don’t have any security software installed on your PC, how did the “alert” magically appear? If you do have a security utility that identifies and blocks malicious software, why would it tell you to buy or download more software to clean the alleged infection? Become familiar with what your security software’s alerts look like so that you can recognize fake pop-ups.

Don’t panic: You should already have antimalware protection. If you don’t, and you’re concerned that your PC may in fact be infected (not an unreasonable concern, given the existence of a rogue “alert” on your screen), scan your system with Trend Micro’s free online malware scanner, HouseCall, or try running Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool; for more help, see “Additional Security Resources.” Once you complete that scan, whether it discovers anything or not, find yourself a reputable antimalware app and install it to protect your PC in the future.

Update your browser: Such fake messages will prompt you to visit the scammer’s Website, which may infect your system further. Current versions of most Web browsers and many Internet security suites have built-in phishing protection to alert you to sketchy sites. It’s important to note that while the databases these filters use are updated frequently to identify rogue sites, they aren’t fail-safe, so you should still pay attention to any URL that you consider visiting. To make this easier, both Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome highlight the real, or root, domain of the URL in bold so that you can easily tell whether you’re visiting, say, the genuine www.pcworld.com or a spoofed site like www.pcworld.com.phishing-site.ru.

Trojan Horse Texts

Some attackers will send spam text messages to your mobile phone that appear to be from your network provider or financial institution. These Trojan horse text messages may direct you to a malicious site or request permission to install an update that will change the settings on your cell phone to allow the attackers to capture usernames, passwords, and other sensitive information from your device.

Go to the source for updates and news: If you receive a text message that appears to be from a trustworthy source, but it directs you to install or update software, or if it initiates the installation and requests permission to continue, immediately exit the text-messaging app and contact the customer service department for the wireless provider or business in question to verify whether the software is legitimate.

You may receive a lot of unsolicited e-mail from companies that you do business with–e-mail that you might even regard as spam–but reputable companies will not send you unsolicited links and updates via e-mail. Similarly, reputable companies will not send unsolicited text messages to your mo­­bile device directing you to install an update or download new software.

Attackers prey on your tendency to trust your wireless provider or financial institution. Do not blindly accept software updates or download applications to your mobile phone simply because the text message appears to be official. If in any doubt, follow up with your wireless provider or with the business.

Lost Laptops, Exposed Data

The portability of laptops and cell phones is convenient, of course, but that same portability means that such devices are easily lost or stolen. If your laptop, netbook, phone, or other device falls into the wrong hands, unauthorized users may access the sensitive data that you’ve stored there.

Encrypt your data: You can use a utility such as Microsoft’s BitLocker to en­­crypt data. Unfortunately, BitLocker is available only for Windows Vista and Windows 7, and even then it’s exclusive to the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of those OSs (and is also available in Windows Server 2008); you won’t find the tool in the consumer versions of Vista and Windows 7.

Fortunately, BitLocker isn’t the only game in town. You can use another encryption program, such as TrueCrypt (available for free under open-source licensing), to protect your data from unauthorized access.

Encrypting your data is not without a pitfall or two, however. The biggest issue is to ensure that you always possess the key. If you lose your encryption key, you will quickly discover just how good encryption is at keeping out unauthorized users.

Use stronger passwords: If encrypting seems to be more of a hassle than it’s worth, at least use strong passwords to protect your PC. Longer passwords are better; more characters take longer to crack. You should also mix things up by substituting numbers and special characters for letters. For example, instead of using the plain “PCWorldMagazine”, you could use “PCW0r1dM@g@zin3″. Though that’s still a phrase you can easily remember, the character diversity makes it significantly harder to guess or crack.

You should have a secure password to log in to your user account even if you’re the only person who uses your computer. Note, however, that while strong passwords are a great deterrent, they aren’t impervious to attack: An invader who has physical possession of your computer can find ways to get around that protection.

Lock down your BIOS: By implementing a BIOS password or a hard-drive password (or both), you can ensure that no one else can even boot the computer. Getting into the BIOS varies from system to system. The initial splash screen that your PC displays usually tells you which key to press to access the BIOS settings; watch as the computer is booting, and press Del, Esc, F10, or whichever key it specifies.

Once inside, find the security settings. Again, these settings vary from vendor to vendor, but the BIOS settings are fairly rudimentary. Learn more about accessing and navigating your system’s BIOS in “Tweak Your PC’s BIOS Settings the Safe Way.”

You can set a master password that prevents other people from booting your computer or altering the BIOS settings. This op­­tion goes by different names, but it is often called an administrator password or supervisor password. If you wish, you can also set a hard-drive password, which prevents any access to the hard disk until the password is entered correctly.

Methods for circumventing these passwords exist, but having the passwords in place creates another layer of security that can help to deter all but the most dedicated attackers.

Use a recovery service: If your equipment gets lost or stolen, you’d like to recover it; but if you can’t get your hardware back, you’ll at least want to erase the data it holds. Some vendors, such as HP and Dell, offer services that try to do both for select laptop models.

Both HP’s Notebook Tracking and Re­­covery Service and Dell’s Laptop Tracking and Recovery are based on Computrace from Absolute Software. When you report that a laptop protected with one of these services has been lost or stolen, a small application running in the background on the PC waits for the computer to connect to the Internet and then contacts the monitoring center to relay location information for finding the machine. If a protected lost or stolen laptop cannot be retrieved, or if the data on a system is highly sensitive, these services allow you to remotely erase all of the data stored on it.

Though less comprehensive, free utilities such as the FireFound add-on for Firefox provide similar capabilities. You can configure FireFound to automatically delete your passwords, browsing history, and cookies following a failed login attempt.

Mobile phones can hold a significant amount of sensitive data, too. Fortunately, services such as Find My iPhone, part of Apple’s $99-per-year MobileMe service, and Mo­­bile Defense for Android-based smartphones perform similar feats of location tracking and remote data wiping for smartphones. Both MobileMe and Mobile Defense can use the built-in GPS capabilities of your smartphone to pinpoint the current location of the device and relay that information back to you.

Rogue Wi-Fi Hotspots

Free Wi-Fi networks are available almost everywhere you go. Attackers, however, sometimes set up a malicious open Wi-Fi network to lure unsuspecting users into connecting. Once you have connected to a rogue wireless network, the attacker can capture your PC’s traffic and gather any sensitive information you send, such as your usernames and passwords.

Verify the network’s name: If you want to connect to the Internet at a coffee shop or in another public place, find out the SSID of the establishment’s network. The SSID is the name of the wireless network; it is broadcast over the airwaves so that your computer can detect the network, and as a result it’s the name that appears in your system’s list of available networks.

The SSID for a network at a McDonald’s restaurant, for instance, might be “mickeyds.” An attacker could set up a rogue wireless router in the vicinity of the McDonald’s location and set its SSID to “mcdwifi” or “mickeyds2.” Your computer would then display both names on the list of available networks–and the rogue wireless network might even have a stronger signal and appear higher on the list. Make sure that you connect only to the official network.

When in doubt, don’t trust any open network. Most free wireless networks are unencrypted–and therefore unprotected. That means that the data traveling between your computer and the wireless router is susceptible to being intercepted and viewed by other parties that happen to be within range of the wireless network. Unless you have your own secure connection, such as a VPN (virtual private network) connection to the network at your office, you should avoid using public Wi-Fi for logging in to sensitive accounts (such as your e-mail or bank account); instead, limit your Internet usage in such public places to reading the news or checking for weather updates and traffic reports.

Weak Wi-Fi Security

If you’re cautious, you’ve already secured your wireless network with a password to keep outsiders from accessing it or using your Internet connection. But password protection alone may not be sufficient.
Use stronger encryption: Several types of Wi-Fi network encryption are available, and there are some important differences between them. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption is the most common variety employed on wireless networks. If you have a WEP password in place on your Wi-Fi network already, you’ve taken a significant step toward protecting it from intruders.

But WEP can be easily cracked: Tools are available that allow even unskilled attackers to crack the code and access your network in a matter of minutes. WEP is still helpful, since most aspiring wireless-network hijackers are not dedicated enough to take the time to break in, but to be safe you should use WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) or its successor, WPA2. These encryption types re­­solve the weaknesses of WEP and provide much stronger protection.

Log in to your router’s console and find the wireless-security settings. There, enable encryption and select either WPA or WPA2. Enter a password, save the settings, and restart your router–and you’ll start surfing more safely.

Endangered Data Backups

You know that you should back up your data, especially files of irreplaceable items such as family photos, regularly. But while storing backups on an external hard drive or burning them to blank CDs or DVDs and keeping them in the closet will enable you to restore files easily if your hard drive crashes or corrupts, that approach also creates a portable–and thus easily lost or stolen–archive of your sensitive data.

Encrypt your backup data: Be sure to use a backup utility that allows you to protect your data with encryption, or at least a password, to prevent unauthorized access. If you want to take things a step farther, you can put your backup files on an encrypted external USB drive such as the Seagate Maxtor BlackArmor, a PCWorld Best Buy. You can also find external drives with biometric fingerprint scanners, such as the Apricorn Aegis Bio or the LaCie d2 Safe. (For reviews of these drives and others, see “Encrypted Drives Keep Your Files Safe.”)

Use an online backup service: If you prefer, you can use an online storage service such as Microsoft Windows Live SkyDrive, which provides 25GB of storage space for free and offers a measure of security by re­­quiring a username and password for access. Unfortunately, copying 25GB of data and keeping it updated via SkyDrive can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process. For a small fee, though, you can use a service such as Mozy, which includes tools to automate the process and to ensure that your data is backed up regularly.

Unpatched Software (Not Just Windows)

Microsoft’s products have long been favorite targets for malware, but the company has stepped up its game, forcing attackers to seek other weak links in the security chain. These days, third-party products such as Adobe Reader provide attackers with alternative options for hitting your PC.

Install all security updates: You should have both a firewall and an antimalware utility protecting your system, but one of the simplest–and most effective–ways to guard against attack is to make sure that you keep your operating system and applications up-to-date.

Attackers have discovered that a considerable number of third-party applications such as Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash are present on virtually every computer and contain exploitable weaknesses. To guard against threats, you can use a program such as the Secunia Personal Software Inspector to scan your system, identify applications that have known vulnerabilities, and install the necessary updates.

Do your best to stay informed of ex­­isting flaws for the various applications you use, and apply appropriate patches as soon as possible. The About.com Antivirus Software site is a good resource to use in collecting such information. You can also check sites such as McAfee’s Avert Labs Threat Library for the latest news on emerging threats.

Though attacking third-party products may be a path of least resistance, bad guys haven’t given up entirely on Microsoft products. Windows users should have Automatic Updates (or Windows Update) enabled and set to download and install important security updates automatically. The automatic updates will keep the Windows operating system–as well as other Microsoft software such as Internet Explorer and the various Office applications–patched and current.

5 Security Myths

Think you’re doing everything you need to do to be safe? Think again. Here are five common myths about digital security.

I don’t have anything an attacker would want.

Average users commonly believe that the data on their computers is valuable only to them or has no intrinsic value at all, and that therefore they have nothing to protect and no need to worry. There are three problems with this way of thinking. First, instead of pilfering data, attackers often want to take control of the computer itself, as they can employ a compromised PC to host malware or to distribute spam. Second, you may not think that your PC has any important or sensitive information, but an attacker may be able to use seemingly trivial information such as your name, address, and birth date to steal your identity. And third, most attacks are automated and simply seek out and compromise all vulnerable systems; they do not discriminate based on a target’s value.
I have antivirus software installed, so I am safe.

Antivirus software is an absolute necessity, and it’s a great start, but installing it won’t protect against everything. Some antivirus products are just that–they don’t detect or block spam, phishing attempts, spyware, and other malware attacks. Even if you have a comprehensive security software product that protects against more than just viruses, you still must update it regularly: New malware threats are discovered daily, and antimalware protection is only as good as its last update. Keep in mind, as well, that security vendors need time to add protection against emerging threats, so your antimalware software will not guard you from zero-day or newly launched attacks.
Security is a concern only if I use Windows.

Microsoft certainly has had its share of security issues over the years, but that doesn’t mean that other operating systems or applications are immune from assault. Though Microsoft products are the biggest target, Linux and Mac OS X have vulnerabilities and flaws, too. As alternative OSs and Web browsers gain users, they become more attractive targets, as well. Increasingly, attackers are targeting widely used third-party products that span operating systems, such as Adobe Reader.
My router has a firewall, so my PC is protected.

A firewall is great for blocking random, unauthorized access to your network, and it will protect your computer from a variety of threats; but attackers long ago figured out that the quickest way through the firewall is to attack you via ports that commonly allow data to pass unfettered. By default your firewall won’t block normal traffic such as Web data and e-mail, and few users are comfortable reviewing firewall settings and determining which traffic to permit or block. In addition, many attacks today are Web-based or originate from a phishing attack that lures you into visiting a malicious Website; your firewall cannot protect against such threats.
Since I visit only major, reputable sites, I have nothing to worry about.

You certainly increase your system’s odds of being infected or compromised when you visit the shady side of the Web, but even well-known Websites are occasionally infiltrated. Sites such as those for Apple, CNN, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even the FBI have been compromised by attackers running cross-site scripting attacks to gather information about users or to install malicious software on visitors’ computers.
Additional Security Resources

Many sites and services on the Web can help you learn more about computer security threats or can analyze your machine to make sure it is clean and safe.

Hoax Encyclopedia: The About.com Antivirus site has a comprehensive database of e-mail and virus hoax messages. Before you forward the next “urgent” alert to your family and friends, check for it on this list.

McAfee Virus Information Library: McAfee maintains a complete listing of malware threats, including details on how they spread and how you can protect your computer against them.

Microsoft Consumer Security Support Center: On this page you can find solutions to common security problems, as well as links to other information and resources for Microsoft’s security products.
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool: This tool is designed to scan for and remove current, pervasive threats. Its scan is smaller and faster than a complete antimalware scan, but it identifies only a handful of threats. Microsoft releases a new version of the tool–along with regular security fixes–on the second Tuesday of each month (”Patch Tuesday”).

Microsoft Security Essentials: This free antivirus application provides real-time protection for Windows PCs against viruses, worms, spyware, and other malicious software.
PhishTank: A community project, PhishTank is a database of known phishing sites. You can search the database to identify phishing sites, and you can add to the list any new sites you’ve encountered.

Trend Micro Housecall: Trend Micro’s free HouseCall service scans your computer online to discover and remove any viruses, worms, or other malware that may be residing on it.

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By Owen Fletcher
IDG News Service (Beijing Bureau)
January 26, 2010

BEIJING - The Internet has loosened the control Chinese authorities hold over information in the country, but censorship there will remain strong despite Google’s threat to leave China.

Chinese authorities say the Internet could be used to threaten social stability, a vague but paramount concern voiced by officials, and they have launched a range of campaigns in the past year to eradicate online content seen as “harmful.” Twitter-style Web sites and others in China have helped Internet users post their thoughts — and grievances — directly and publicly online. But recent cases show that it remains off-limits and sometimes dangerous for Chinese citizens to criticize the government through blogs, message forums or even e-mail.

“In the last year … the liberal elements, the forces for change on the Internet have become more vocal and better at using tools like Twitter than they ever were,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei.org, a blog about Chinese media and urban life. “But this has been met with sort of the biggest sustained clampdown on the Internet that we’ve seen for years.”

Google this month threw a spotlight on Chinese government censorship by saying it plans to stop filtering search results on its Chinese search engine, even if that means shutting down its China offices. One reason Google cited for the move was cyberattacks launched on the company from China, partly aimed at gaining access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google did not blame China for the attacks and the country’s government has denied involvement.

But dissidents including human rights lawyer Teng Biao have since said their Gmail accounts were recently hacked and set to copy all messages to another e-mail address. Chinese dissidents are often monitored or harassed by state security agents.

Another recent show of China’s heavy-handed treatment of dissidents came when a Beijing court last month gave an 11-year prison sentence to Liu Xiaobo, a well-known human rights activist. Liu was charged with inciting subversion of state power for helping organize “Charter 08,” an online petition calling for major political reforms.

Others who signed the petition starting in late 2008 were questioned by authorities in the following months. Liu was previously well-known for his participation in the 1989 democracy protests that were suppressed by the military in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

China has also arrested dozens of people and shut down thousands of Web sites in the past year in a string of crackdowns on online porn. Web sites that provide services like blogs are required by authorities to remove pornographic and certain political content when it is posted by users. Internet access in the western, largely Muslim region of Xinjiang has been almost totally cut off since ethnic riots there six months ago claimed nearly 200 lives.

Internet access has spread quickly in China and growing numbers of people use it to read news and chat with friends or in public forums. China reported having 384 million Internet users at the end of last month, the most in any country.

Authorities use a set of technical measures known as the “Great Firewall” to block access to certain content, such as the Web sites of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Those Web sites can still be accessed with a circumvention tool like a proxy server, but few Internet users are savvy enough to use such tools and the government appeared to step up efforts to block them last year.

But inevitably, authorities have failed to fully stifle the spread of politically sensitive information online. Room has grown for people to air complaints about the government on the Web, partly because complaints can help the country’s central leadership keep watch over local governments, said Goldkorn. Internet users who didn’t care about censorship before are also beginning to notice it, he said.

The Internet can also help sway public opinion and create pressure on the government, said Li Baiguang, a Beijing-based human rights lawyer. It did so in one court case two months ago in the central province of Shaanxi, where a man was sentenced to a year in prison for online defamation of an official, Li said. Han Xingchang, the head of a construction company, had told his staff to post messages in online forums criticizing the official, who was both a member of the provincial legislature and the chairman of a development company, after a dispute over payment for a contract, according to a copy of the ruling seen by IDG News Service.

Han likely would have received a longer sentence without public support for him online that was fueled by media reports, according to Li. One journalist opened a Web site dedicated to the case that also drove support, an employee at Han’s company said.

But the case remains one of many examples in China of apparent abuse of power by local officials. The court ruling left vague why public investigators had taken on the case against Han at the request of the official, after refusing it on technical grounds when he first asked.

“From this case we can see that criticizing the government online is still dangerous,” Li said. “The government is not used to it.”

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By Tony Bradley
PC World (US)
January 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Google didn’t invent the Web search engine, but anyone who just joined the Web-surfing world in the past five years or so might think so. Google has established itself as a trusted and reliable source of information on the Web, and now wants to extend its search dominance and make sure that you “Google it” from your smartphone as well.

Google’s recent acquisitions, namely AdMob and Teracent, position Google to raise the bar for Web-based search advertising, and extend its search advertising empire to the exploding mobile search arena. Google gambled $750 million on the AdMob purchase, which is facing antitrust scrutiny, but will provide Google with a lucrative mobile advertising platform if approved.

Apple has upped the ante on its growing feud with Google by following suit with a mobile advertising acquisition of its own. Apple’s purchase of Quattro will pit it head-to-head against Google in the mobile search advertising market.

On the Web search front, Google captured almost 70 percent of the total search traffic for December 2009, accounting for about 88 million searches out of a total 131 million searches conducted, according to comScore. What is more impressive is that the 88 million searches represent a 58 percent increase from the previous year.

What that means is that, not only does Google have a dominant piece of the pie, but that the pie keeps growing. Google’s 58 percent growth did not eat into its competitor’s shares. Yahoo is up 13 percent, Baidu is up 7 percent, and Bing increased a whopping 70 percent over the previous year.

Google and Bing have both aggressively pursued agreements with social networking providers–primarily Facebook and Twitter–to incorporate real-time status updates within search results. Instead of conducting a search of the Web with Google, and another search of public Facebook status updates, and another search of Twitter tweets, users can perform one-stop-shopping searches the way they always have–just Google it.

Google’s foray into mobile advertising–assuming the AdMob purchase goes through, combined with expanded Web search advertising from the Teracent purchase, and the inclusion of social networking updates within the search results set Google up to not only retain, but extend its dominance of both search and search advertising.

There are a couple obstacles which could get in the way. First, Google’s threat to shut down its operations in China, or to stop censoring its China search results which would result in China shutting it down, could lead to Google surrendering millions of potential searches, and possibly billions in search advertising revenue.

While it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact, Google may also soon be replaced as the default search provider on the most popular smartphone in the world–the iPhone. Apple and Google have had a very public falling out as their “bromance” fell apart, and that has led to the possibility that Apple may partner with Microsoft and make Bing the default search on the iPhone.

Google also faces increasing competition from Bing in general. Microsoft has made innovative strides with Bing which have led to increasing market share. But, even with a 70 percent increase in search traffic from 2008, Bing is still in fourth place with less than four percent of the global search market. Regardless of how successful Bing is, it will be some time before it really poses a threat to Google.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
January 21, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - It’s been a big week for social networking.

First, President Obama sent his first Twitter message on Monday. And now Bill Gates, philanthropist and former chairman of Microsoft , has joined the microblogging site, sending out his first tweet Tuesday.

“Hello World,” twittered Gates. “Hard at work on my foundation letter - publishing on 1/25.”

Since that first tweet Tuesday afternoon, Gates has twittered four more times and quickly amassed a following of more than 188,600 people. He’s also made it onto more than 6,000 Twitter lists.

“I’ve got a lot to learn about Twitter but look forward to sharing more,” he wrote Tuesday night.

And when Gates decides to get into social networking, he dives right in.

After publicly saying last summer that being on Facebook was more trouble than it was worth, he quit the site. Well, Tuesday he was back on Facebook with a new page. To avoid being crushed with friend requests this time around, Gates has opted to let people become “fans” of his page instead.

So far, on Facebook, Gates has posted pictures of his trips to Africa and India, as well as information about his philanthropic organization, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

After a day back on Facebook, he has more than 50,000 fans.

Meanwhile, the presidential tweet didn’t go up on the @barackobama Twitter account, which is handled by a ghost Twitterer. Obama’s first message, which was about the president and first lady visiting the Red Cross’ disaster operation center in Washington, was posted on the @redcross page.

The tweet itself was in the third person: “President Obama and the First Lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now.”

It appears that someone else may have written the tweet, then the president pushed the “update” button to send it out. The next tweet on the @redcross page was: “President Obama pushed the button on the last tweet. It was his first ever tweet!”

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld . Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin , send e-mail to sgaudin@computerworld.com or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
January 18, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Google and proponents of cloud computing were quick to say that this week’s Google hack should not raise questions about the inherent security of the cloud, but the incident is fueling debate about the safety of storing data in facilities accessed over the Internet.

Google’s stance on China shatters security inhibitions

Google said “this was not an assault on cloud computing.” Meanwhile, the founder of cloud vendor Elastic Vapor, Reuven Cohen, asserted that “the Google Hack proves the cloud is more secure than traditional desktop software, not less,” apparently because systems were “compromised through phishing scams or malware, not through holes in Google’s computing infrastructure.”

Others disputed this idea, such as Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan, who wondered if the security breach “will develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing.”

Pund-IT analyst Charles King cautioned that we still don’t know all the details of the breach, but said it should raise concerns about the security of cloud computing services. All IT systems, whether in the cloud or not, have some inherent flaws, but “any time a data center is open to the public Internet, there is the opportunity that it can be hacked in a number of ways,” he says.

“Every system has some inherent flaw or weakness. People do break into supposedly impregnable bank vaults, tunnel through walls,” King says. “No house is burglar proof and the same can be said of data centers. The bottom line here for me is some of the people who have been promoting cloud as … the future of IT have really been overstating the case. I think we will continue to see events like Google and the [T-Mobile] Sidekick failure over time.”

Google on Tuesday said that in mid-December it faced “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” Attackers were apparently attempting to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and also launched attacks against more than 30 other companies.

Later in the week, it was reported that a flaw in Internet Explorer had been exploited to hack into Google’s corporate networks, and Microsoft said it is working on a patch.

On Twitter and in blog postings, industry observers debated whether the attack is proof of security problems specific to cloud computing, a phrase that generally refers to computing resources made publicly available through the Internet.

“This was not an assault on cloud computing,” Google asserted in its official blog. “It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.”

Google’s main business is delivering advertising-supported Web search results, of course, but the company has also become a custodian of enterprise data because of services such as Google Apps, a Web-hosted alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

It is thus important for Google to convince businesses that storing data in Google facilities is safe, despite the events of last month.

Sullivan, in his blog post, noted that he has been moving more and more data into Google services but is rethinking that strategy in the wake of Google’s security troubles. He criticized Google’s insistence that the attack was not an assault on cloud computing.

“It was very much an attack on cloud computing, as Google’s main blog post made clear,” Sullivan wrote. “Hackers went after Gmail accounts, not just through malware-infected computers but directly by targeting Google, that post told us. Gmail — your e-mail, stored in the cloud. That’s an attack on cloud computing.”

Cohen disagreed in his own blog post, saying the attack doesn’t reveal any deficiency in cloud security because hackers used social engineering techniques to gain access to private systems.

“What this hack really proves is that people are easier to hack then networks,” Cohen writes. “The weakest links are the people who are stupid enough to open an attachment they don’t recognize, even if it appeared to be from someone they trusted. That’s the beauty of social engineering based hacks. The e-mail appears to be from your mother, father, friend or colleague. The lesson we must learn is one of education, don’t open attachments you don’t recognize.”

Regardless of how the attack was executed, it did happen and consumers of cloud-based services should remember that there are risks when storing data with a third party, King says.

“Just because you’re using a cloud service doesn’t obviate the need for backing up data to a local hard drive,” King says. “Like anything else the online data repositories are not infallible, and it’s critical for consumers and businesses to protect their data and protect themselves in multiple ways.”

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By Kristin Burnham
CIO (US)
January 15, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - How influential are you on Twitter? That’s what several sites are now promising to judge, labeling you by doing everything from calculating your “social capital” to knocking you for a “low Twitter efficiency.”

These Twitter ranking sites vary in how calculations are made–some basic sites rely solely on the number of tweets, retweets and followers, while others use more complicated algorithms to determine results.

Many Twitter users flock to these sites for an ego boost, or to gauge how they compare with their peers, says Dan Schawbel, a personal branding expert and author of Me 2.0. But these rankings also offer an interesting peek into what you can do to be more present on the microblogging site, he says. Be careful not to focus too much on your rankings, though, Schawbel says. “You will lose the opportunity to build real relationships with people.”

Here are my picks for five useful Twitter ranking sites, and a look at how each one determines your worth, rank and influence. Even if you’re not into rankings, these tools deserve your attention–your peers and potential future employers may use them to judge you.

1. Buzzom.

Buzzom’s statistic feature analyzes your Twitter information and displays a number of charts and graphs depicting your top profile matches and your influence in the Twittersphere. Your “influence” score, for example, is calculated by determining the ratio of number of people you are following to the number of people who are following you (your score is higher if people are willing to follow you even if you don’t follow them back). Your “retweet” score is determined by how often others retweet you, and your “tweet efficiency” score is determined by comparing your tweet rate to your followers–if you tweet often and you have few followers, it deems your tweets “wasted” and you receive a low score. Finally, your overall score (which Buzzom calls the “InRev TwitIn Score”) is calculated by taking all these scores into consideration.

2. Topsy.

Topsy functions primarily as a Twitter search engine, but also categorizes top Twitter users as “influential” or “highly influential” based on a few factors, including: how often you’re cited in tweets and how influential the people are who tweet about you or the links you post. For example, the site states: “If Alice retweets a tweet from Bob, and Carol retweets Alice, Bob’s tweet has not only reached his and Alice’s followers, but also Carol’s.” The more frequently influential people retweet you, the higher your influence will be. Topsy awards the “highly influential” title to roughly 0.2 percent of its users, while 0.5 percent earn the “influential” title.

3. Twinfluence.

Twinfluence gives you four rankings, after entering your username and allowing access to your Twitter account. The “reach ranking” is your overall rank compared to other tweeters that have been analyzed by Twinfluence. The percentage next to it is your grade; Twinfluence says that a grade of 75 percent indicates you have a higher “reach” (which is the number of followers a Twitterer has, plus all of their followers) than three-quarters of the other Twitter users it analyzed.

The next set of statistics analyzes your “velocity,” “social capital” and “centralization.” Velocity averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since you first established your account. The larger the number is, the faster you have accumulated your influence. Social capital measures how influential your followers are. A high value indicates that most of your followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social capital is scored from “very low” to “very high,” relative to others at your network size. Lastly, centralization measures how much of your influence is invested in a small number of followers, and is scored from “very fragile” to “very resilient.” If you had a low centrality network, you would not have your reach greatly reduced if a few high-profile people stopped following you, for example.

4. Twitter Grader.

Twitter Grader takes six factors into consideration when ranking and “grading” you as a Twitter user: the number of followers you have (more followers = higher grade), the power of your followers (if you have people with a high Twitter grade following you, it counts more), updates (more generally equals a higher grade), update frequency (a recent date on your last update gets you higher grades) and follower/following ratio (the higher the ratio the better). These six factors determine your score. The “grade” calculation is the approximate percentage of other users that have an equal or lower score. Your rank is based on how all other users scored; that’s your position in that list. By the way, Schawbel calls Twitter Grader his favorite tool for rating Twitter influence.

5. TwitterScore.

TwitterScore is a basic tool that judges your Twitter “popularity.” Type in your username and allow the site access to your account. Your “Twitter Score Report” will appear, denoting your rank of close to 90,000 users. The report will also display the number of followers, friends (which it considers people you follow, who also follow you) and the number of updates you’ve posted. TwitterScore considers this info (or, as it says, “We look at your followers and their popularity, the amount of people you’re following and the amount of updates you have and other few things…”), to determine your Twitter score, out of 10.

Which tools do you use?

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
January 14, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The Linux Foundation is launching Thursday an online jobs board for employers looking for Linux talent and job seekers looking to provide it.

The foundation’s Linux Jobs Board is available on Linux.com. It features two options for posting: Jobs can be posted on Linux.com only, with prices starting at $99 for 15 days, or jobs can be posted on both Linux.com and with JobThread Network, which reaches more than 50 additional publishing sites with a combined total of 9.8 million visitors per month. The Linux.com and JobThread Network option costs 49 cents per matching view.

[ Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

“Linux’s increasing use across industries is building high demand for Linux jobs despite national unemployment stats,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the foundation, in a statement released by the foundation. “Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a jobs board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters, and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow’s IT industry.”

Job postings can be submitted on Linux.com.

JobThread Network, according to the foundation, has found that demand for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent since 2005.

Job seekers, meanwhile, can include LinkedIn details on their Linux.com profile, including resumes. They also can subscribe to the Linux.com Jobs Board RSS feed and receive e-mail alerts. Additionally, they can follow Linux-related job opportunities on Twitter.

This story, “Linux Foundation launches jobs board,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Linux at InfoWorld.com.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
January 8, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Will 2010 be the year Facebook and Twitter take over the business world? The social networks are growing in popularity by the day, both for personal and business use, yet many IT and business executives remain wary of the risks posed by the online services and skeptical about potential benefits.

A number of Web-savvy CIOs are using Twitter to spread their views, engage with colleagues and discuss technology, yet a survey shows that more than half of CIOs in the United States do not allow employees to log onto social networking sites “for any reason” while they’re at work. Another survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that nearly three-quarters of the top brands had no official presence on Twitter, despite the service’s potential for reaching customers. (See related story, 12 CIOs who Tweet.)

Business users are logging onto public social networking sites far more often than social networks sponsored by their employers, but attempts to block such activity simply will not work, says IDC analyst Caroline Dangson, who researches enterprise collaboration and social technologies.

As workforces become more distributed, and even office workers spend time working at home, people will use personal devices for business use and it will be difficult for IT to make blanket proclamations banning tools as widely used as Facebook and Twitter.

“This concept of trying to control or block [social media usage], it is not going to work,” Dangson says. “There’s going to be a divide, with some companies that shun public social networks and are fearful of using them, and some who embrace it and take the risk.”

An IDC survey of 4,710 U.S. workers in October found that 34% use consumer social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, and 9% use microblogging sites like Twitter for business purposes.

Yet many of their employers are trying to stop them from doing so.

A Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies with at least 100 employees found that 54% completely prohibit use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work. Nineteen percent allow social networking sites for business purposes only, while another 16% allow “limited personal use.” Just 10% permit use of social networking sites “for any type of personal use.”

Some brands have begun using Facebook and Twitter to reach consumers, both to promote themselves and communicate about company failures. Rackspace, for example, has used Twitter extensively to communicate with users after several power outages knocked customer services offline.

But large companies are also avoiding social networking sites in droves. New Media Age, a United Kingdom publication, analyzed the top 500 U.K. brands and found that 74% have no presence at all on Twitter, and just 10% use the site daily.

Dangson believes Facebook is a good setting for businesses to reach consumers, but that there is a greater business opportunity in Twitter, particularly in business-to-business markets, because “everything is public and open.”

Twitter “is a fantastic direct marketing tool,” she says. “People have opted in to follow you and follow your messages.”

Others tout the potential of LinkedIn, another major social network that is business-oriented, and often used to build business relationships and find new jobs.

Users of Facebook and Twitter likely care only about the sites’ usefulness, but many financial analysts have wondered how these social networks can create a compelling business model. Out of all of them, LinkedIn may have the greatest financial future, and potential to be acquired by a larger company, says Robert Armstrong, a financial analyst and senior columnist at Dow Jones Investment Banker.

Major Web properties like Google and eBay have been successful because their business model is based upon transactions, he notes. Facebook and Twitter seem to lack that advantage, but LinkedIn is centered around a pretty major type of transaction – the hiring of a new employee.

Even if you’re not seeking a new job, LinkedIn may be the best place for IT folks looking to exchange information with colleagues. An IDC survey of 204 IT decision-makers found that LinkedIn is the best social network for finding information to support IT purchases. Twitter was ranked second, followed by Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

Clearly, use of social networks will continue to increase in 2010. Company executives need to accept this reality – they don’t have to take a hands-off, anything-goes approach, but they do need policies governing employee use and a strategy for corporate use, analysts say.

In the next year, CIOs will get more involved, and “we’ll see companies writing policies and guidelines,” partly to protect workers, Dangson says. Businesses will also increase use of Facebook and Twitter for CRM, she predicts, saying CRM is “the most compelling business case for public social media sites where customers frequently voice their opinions on matters of everyday life, including the brands in which they interact.”

Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who studies social marketing, says companies like Best Buy and Comcast are have done a good job interacting with customers on social sites. This is necessary in part because consumers’ attention has been distracted from traditional forms of advertising.

“They’re embracing it because they have to,” Ray says. “Brands that do get it, understand that they can engage with and have a two-way dialogue with consumers.”

Companies need a strategy that takes into account who their audience is and how they prefer to be reached, Ray says. Social media efforts can’t be half-baked. Starting a company Facebook page, putting a lot of effort into it up-front and then never updating it again is not effective marketing.

Businesses should also have a plan for how to use social media in times of crisis, because Facebook and Twitter are often the most direct ways of reaching customers. The moment a public relations crisis happens is not the time you want to be asking the question “how will we respond?” Ray says.

Companies looking to improve brand image via social marketing also need to be wary of the legitimate privacy concerns their customers may have. Marketers need to be transparent about what data they collect and how they are using it, Ray says.

“As individuals become more concerned about information they’re giving up and how they’re using it, that’s going to have a big impact on companies,” he says. “There’s certainly some concern in the marketplace and government entities about use of marketing data. … Marketers just want to be fully transparent, which they haven’t always been.”

Privacy and security concerns also have businesses wondering how they can use social networking to improve collaboration among internal employees, without exposing themselves to risk. Companies are wary of employees releasing sensitive information like layoffs and acquisitions.

“The risk that comes with social media is how viral it is,” Dangson says. “It’s the risk of scale that can work both ways.”

That’s why many businesses will opt to create their own internal social networks, which can be controlled and open only to employees, and perhaps to business partners.

In 2010, you’re likely to hear the phrase “Facebook for the enterprise.” Salesforce.com recently announced “Chatter,” a social-networking application that is designed for internal business use but can also incorporate content from public social networking sites by taking advantage of the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Therefore, employees can receive in the same feed a mix of private content from their bosses and fellow employees, and public content from Facebook and Twitter that is related to their jobs.

Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy for Salesforce, says he doesn’t know anyone without a Facebook account. Eventually, he thinks employees will develop extensive corporate profiles as well, and relationships between the public and corporate profiles will develop.

“The question we are asking everyone is ‘why is it you know more about strangers on Facebook than you do about your colleagues and employees?’” Francis says. “You know who has gone to the movies, but you don’t necessarily know about when one of your key sales reps has just visited a major account.”

Even though many CIOs seem wary of social networking in the workplace, Francis is confident that IT executives will ultimately embrace the trend.

“I think that every CIO is looking at what’s been going on with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” Francis says. “Companies are wondering, ‘how can I capture that energy, that relevance, that better way of managing all the information that’s important to me, how can I capture that for my company?’”

Just as in Facebook, Chatter allows people and applications to send users news in real time, but the security model will allow IT to determine what types of information employees can see. Salesforce believes this granular privacy control will help assuage concerns businesses have about the security of public social networking sites.

There are also private alternatives to Twitter, such as a service called Yammer, which lets companies create streams available only to their own employees. New privacy controls for Facebook, which have been criticized by many users for making too much information public, may ultimately make it easier for people to present different information to business colleagues and personal contacts.

“What companies are really asking for is a better way to collaborate,” Francis says.

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By Carrie-Ann Skinner
PC Advisor (UK)
January 7, 2010

LONDON - More than 25 million new strains of malware were created last year, says PandaLabs. According to the security vendor’s Annual Malware Report, the number of new versions of malware identified has topped the 15 million identified throughout the company’s 20-year history.

PandaLabs said that 66 percent of the new malware identified were banking Trojans, and the next popular type was scareware, also known as fake antivirus software that encourages web users to part with their hard-earned cash to download hoax security software that serves no purpose.

The security vendor predicts that the amount of malware in circulation will continue to grow during 2010.

“Windows 7 will surely attract the interest of hackers when it comes to designing new malware, and attacks on Mac will increase. While we are likely to witness more politically motivated attacks the report concludes that, once again, this will not be the year of the mobile phone virus,” said PandaLabs.

The report also revealed that 92 percent of all emails sent in 2009 were classed as spam, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter became popular with cybercriminals as a distribution channel for malware.

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By Michael Alan Hamlin

Last month, Facebook emerged as the top website in the Philip­pines on Alexa, hav­ing grown more than 1,000% from January to September 10 this year. Other social media sites in the top 15 websites in­cluded Friendster (3), YouTube (5), Blogger (6), Multiply (9), Twitter (11), Photobucket (12) and WordPress (15). The latest ranking was further evidence that social network marketing is increasingly relevant in the Philippines.

Another indicator was the use of social networks to coordinate relief efforts in the aftermath of two devastating typhoons, Ondoy and Pepeng. On Facebook and Twitter—the two social networks I admit to using—“friends” and “follow­ers” feverishly posted informa­tion indicating where help was needed, and how volunteers could get involved. Of course, the social networks were also a popular channel for venting frustrations over poorly main­tained flood control infrastruc­ture, the lack of preparedness of disaster response teams, and the seeming irrelevance of government as private citizens took responsibility for much of the relief effort.

As social networking mar­keting has become more of an obviously tier-one communica­tion channel, educational in­stitutions and self-made gurus have sprung up to offer insights, advice, and tools for leveraging them. The Asian Institute of Management has introduced an elective to its degree programs, I understand, focusing on social networks for business. The Ateneo de Manila University of­fers a 16-week certificate course. A number of online advertising “experts” offer one- and two-day seminars.

This interest is a sign that B2B and B2C marketers are moving past the test concept phase of their social network marketing programs to imple­ment serious strategic cam­paigns. These marketers rely on digital agencies to design and implement search and display advertising campaigns. But when it comes to digial PR, while the agency continues to advise and help clients design campaigns, much and often all of the content generation is done by the client.

The reasons vary, but boil down to the reality that even highly specialized digital PR agencies don’t have the domain expertise and inside knowledge to be credible or exert thought leadership for their clients. Clients are therefore forced to dedicate intellectual resources to their digital PR campaigns, and to become an active participant in generating visibility for their personal and corporate brands.

This presents a number of issues for the company and for the CIO. For the com­pany, who just participates in digital PR is an issue. Having employees authorized to post status updates on Facebook or blog during working hours is likely to encourage other employees to spend much of their time online during the day, reducing productivity, gobbling up bandwidth, and creating security breaches. For this reason, over half of US. CIOs completely ban visit­ing social networking sites at work, according to the results of a recent survey conducted by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm for technol­ogy professionals.

Just 19% of respondents to that survey said they allow employees to access social networks for business purposes only. Sixteen percent of respon­dents said they allow limited access. Whether companies allow access to social networks at work, another potentially prickly issue is how employees identified with the company conduct themselves on social networks, and whether their conduct supports or under­mines brand image.

To address these concerns, consultants and agencies alike increasingly advise their clients to adopt a formal policy setting out the ground rules for social networking. Typically, such a policy will include sections of the company’s philoso­phy towards social networks; information on the issuing authority; definition of social networks and their role in society in general and for the organization and its employees in particular; responsibility of employees; topic matter guide­lines, use of company assets; examples of acceptable use of social networks; inaccurate and defamatory content; and, off-limits material.

In my firm, our policy en­courages employees to have an online presence, but limits ac­cess during work hours except for employees who access social networks for business purposes, such as our marketing manager. The policy requires employees, whether they access at work or not, to: 1) Be relevant to your area of expertise; 2) Do not be anonymous; 3) Maintain professionalism, honesty, and respect; 4) Apply a “good judg­ment” test for every activity related in any way to the firm. The test involves asking, “Am I guilty of leaking information, trade secrets, customer data, or upcoming announcements? Is it negative commentary regard­ing my employer?”

Penalties for violating these policies are also provided, and are aligned with relevant labor laws and conventions.

Social networking market­ing is a real force, and it is grow­ing stronger. Like anything, it can be abused, and it’s impor­tant for companies to make sure it isn’t, and that it contributes to enhanced brand visibility.

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By Ian Paul
PC World (US)
December 28, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter’s acquisition of Mixer Labs , a service that helps developers build location-aware applications, shows that the company hopes to make location broadcasting an important part of its service. And the micro-blogging service isn’t alone either: Google is getting into location-based services with its work on Google Maps and features like My Location, and Facebook recently adjusted its privacy policy to make way for opt-in location-based features.

That’s why I think 2010 will be a big year for location-based services. Sure, 2010 is likely to be all about tablets and the looming showdown between Google and Microsoft , but it may also be the year when people become more comfortable with broadcasting their location to the rest of the world.

There are many location-based services available today, but here’s a look at five that you’ll want to keep your eye on as we approach the new year.

Foursquare

One of the more popular location-based services among early adopters is foursquare. Part game, part recommendation service for local hangouts, foursquare works by having you check-in at locations as you move about a city, airport, or wherever else you might be.

Once you check-in, your Foursquare friends will know where you are and you’ll receive automated recommendations for nearby restaurants, cafes, and other locations from previous foursquare visitors. You can also leave your own tips about a place that will be picked up by other foursquare users when they check-in to that location.

Foursquare is also a game where you earn points every time you check-in, which in turn earns you virtual badges. But you can also earn freebies and coupon offers by checking-in at participating locations. To get these offers you have to become the mayor of a particular location, which means you have checked-in at a location more times than any other foursquare user. The mayor of the Bowery Wine Company in New York, for example, gets their first drink of the night free, while the mayor of San Francisco Symphony-Davies Symphony Hall currently gets fifty percent off tickets for the symphony’s January 15 concert and access to the post-concert party. Check out foursquare’s complete list of freebie offers.

You can access foursquare on your mobile phone by downloading the iPhone or Android application, visiting foursquare’s mobile Website , or via SMS (U.S. only) at 50500. Foursquare says a Blackberry app is in development.

Gowalla

Gowalla is a location-based game similar to foursquare, where you check-in to locations using an iPhone app. The gaming aspect is a little different though, since you participate in a game of virtual geocaching and you don’t connect with friends as you do in foursquare.

When you visit a location you’ll be presented with a list of virtual goods, called icons, that you can pick up. You can only carry 10 icons at once (although you can archive them for safe keeping), so you may have to drop some of the icons you already have at the new location.

You can check-in at any location in the world called spots, for each spot you visit you receive a stamp in your virtual passport. If you create your a new spot on Gowalla you become the commissioner for that location, and the first 10 people to leave virtual goods at the new spot become its founders. Spot commissioners can edit details about a spot, and Gowalla says it will be giving special privileges to founders in the future.

You can also use Gowalla to go on trips, which are basically guided tours using Google Maps. There are many trips available including a University of Arkansas tour , a pub crawl on Oklahoma City’s Western Avenue and a ghost tour in Pleasanton, California . For every trip you complete you earn a Pin of Glory, which Gowalla says are the “ultimate measure of Gowalla Greatness.”
Gowalla requires a GPS-enabled iPhone for optimal results.

Google

If you just want to share your location with your friends without the gaming aspect, then Google Latitude is for you. Latitude is available on your smartphone or your laptop, and displays your location on Google Maps using your Google profile picture as an icon. Any of your Google contacts that have also opted into Latitude will be displayed on your map, and clicking on their icon allows you to send them an e-mail or instant message. Check out Google’s Latitude page for a complete list of supported smartphones.
If you need to figure out your location in unfamiliar surroundings, Google has another service called My Location that can help. My Location also works on your desktop or smartphone, and displays a little dot on Google Maps to show your location. From there it’s easy to find directions, a business or just explore your surroundings. To get My Location to work on your desktop you must be using a Web browser that supports the W3C Geolocation API such as Firefox or Google Chrome. My Location does not work with the most recent beta version of Google Chrome for Mac.
Nightlife

There are many location-based services that can help you find where the next great party or event is going to be such as buzzd and Hot Potato. With buzzd, you can track what other users are saying about a particular place on Twitter to get a feel for the hottest places in your area on any given night. You can download buzzd applications for the iPhone , Blackberry and Android devices or through the mobile Web at buzzd.com/m.
Hot Potato is a social networking application where you can create private or public events, and upload notes and photos of the event to share with others. When you attend an event you check-in just like foursquare and Gowalla, but checking in only tells others whether you’re attending the event in-person, watching a broadcast or following along on Hot Potato’s Website . You can use Hot Potato through an iPhone application or through the Website.

Twitter

Twitter recently launched its location-based service that allows you to embed your location in the meta data of a tweet on a case-by-case basis. Your location doesn’t appear in the tweet, but underneath it along with other information like the time you sent the message and which Twitter client you were using (twitter client, Website, iPhone app, etc.).

These are just a few of the many location-based services and games available today. Do you have a favorite location-based application or does the whole idea just creep you out?

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By Agam Shah
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 25, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter has enhanced geolocation services provided on its messaging service by buying Mixer Labs, the company said on Wednesday.

Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI is a service that helps developers build geolocation-aware applications for the Twitter service, a Twitter official wrote in a blog entry. Software using the service will allow Twitter users to tag the location where a message was written.

Developers will be able to harness the GeoAPI engine to add relevant location information to Twitter messages. Such a service could help audiences receive Twitter messages based on location, the company wrote.

Adding location-based references could also enhance services like finding friends or local businesses, the company wrote. Users will also be able to search where an event is happening.

In August the company previewed expanded location support for developers, and last month the company launched a geotagging API for its service.

Twitter did not immediately respond to comment on how much it paid for Mixer Labs.

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