from Wired Top Stories by Marcus Wohlsen
Amazon looked back to its roots in bookselling and forward to its future as the global overlord of all human literary output by announcing its plan today to purchase social reading site GoodReads.
from The Next Web by Josh Ong
from social media vb by blaisegv
Google Plus recently overtook Twitter in terms of the number of active users. How? Google Plus has a number of killer features which are driving its growth and helping it steal precious attention away from the established social networks. Here’s a look at several of them.
from EFF.org Updates by Daniel Nazer and Daniel Nazer
The flood of software patents has created an environment where companies are afraid that innovation leads to being hit by patent lawsuits. Every dollar spent fighting patent trolls and or waging patent wars is a dollar not spent researching, developing, and creating jobs. The situation is so bad that, in 2011, Apple and Google spentmore on patent litigation and buying patents than they did on research. So it’s no surprise that some companies are looking for new ways to navigate the patent system while promoting openness and innovation.
from Wired Top Stories by Cade Metz
Behind the scenes, just about all of the web’s biggest names are mimicking Google. That includes Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and so many more.
from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski
from Mashable! by Christina Warren
from Mashable! by Alex Fitzpatrick
from The Meta-Activism Project by Mary
The data scientists at Facebook – particularly Eytan Bakshy – have produced an excellent set of public analytics on Human Rights Campaign‘s equality avatar initiative, which some have called slacktivism. Facebook’s full report is here. Of the many graphics Facebook produced, the one below particularly caught my eye:
from The Meta-Activism Project by Mary
What’s the effect of changing your profile image?
On Tuesday the LGBT rights group Human Rights Campaign began encouraging supporters to change their Facebook avatars to a pink and red equals sign, their (temporary?) logo. In true generative fashion they have also adopted remixes of the logo, which they are displaying on their own site (see left) and they are using the increased awareness brought by the campaign, and by the gay marriage cases currently in the Supreme Court, to raise money for their organization. They’re a savvy bunch.
from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility, a Nature Scientific Reports paper by MIT researchers and colleagues at Belgium’s Universite Catholique de Louvain, documents that 95% of “anonymous” location data from cellphone towers can be de-anonymized to the individual level. That is, given data from a region’s cellular towers, the researchers can ascribe individuals to 95% of the data-points.
from Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Sam Biddle writes that this week’s epic, internet-shaking DDOS was a lie. Spamhaus was indeed under a record-size denial-of-service attack, but the protection company it hired, Cloudfront, turns out to be the only source of the bigger story that went with it: that the internet at large was significantly affected.
from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
from Mashable! by Alex Fitzpatrick
from The Next Web by Nick Summers
from Mashable! by Stan Schroeder
from Mashable! by Matt Petronzio
from Mashable! by Alex Fitzpatrick
from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
The Internet has been groaning under the weight of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Domain Name Service, apparently aimed at anti-spam vigilantes Spamhaus, in retaliation for their blacklisting of Dutch free speech hosting provider Cyberbunker. At 300 mbps, the DDoS is the worst in public Internet history.
from Hurriyet Daily News
The Internet may have been slowed by one of the largest cyber attacks ever seen, which targeted a group that patrols the Web for spam, security experts said.
from EFF.org Updates by Trevor Timm
Law professor and historian Tim Wu has called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) the “worst law in technology.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has described the government’s interpretation of it “expansive,” “broad,” and “sweeping.” And Orin Kerr, former federal prosecutor and law professor, has detailed how the government could use it to put “any Internet user they want .”
from Mashable!
from EFF.org Updates by Adi Kamdar and Adi KamdarLast Monday, a number of organizations, companies, and individuals came together for a Week of Action against the dangerous cybersecurity bill, CISPA. Though thousands of people answered our call to action, the fight is far from over.
Southeast Europe countries enhance protection measures after a surge in cyber …
Southeast European Times
In Turkey, government websites have been an ever-growing subject of cyber attacks from groups including RedHack, Anonymous and local hacker groups, which are reportedly targeting the country’s domestic and foreign policy moves. Last year the foreign
from social media vb by bobbymarhamat
Social media is without a doubt a pivotal part of helping any new business grow. But in the maelstrom of social media options, many businesses are overlooking one of the most basic and important options at their disposal: blogging. Here are three key ways blogging is still a powerful tool.
from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
from Mashable! by NowThisNews
from Hurriyet Daily News
The Language Council of Sweden said Tuesday it had removed the word “ungoogleable”
from iRevolution by Patrick Meier
GeoFeedia was not originally designed to support humanitarian operations. But last year’s blog post on the potential of GeoFeedia for crisis mapping caught the interest of CEO Phil Harris. So he kindly granted the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) free access to the platform. In return, we provided his team with feedback on what features (listed here) would make GeoFeedia more useful for digital disaster response. This was back in summer 2012. I recently learned that they’ve been quite busy since. Indeed, I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the stage with Phil and his team at this superb conference on social media for emergency management. After listening to their talk, I realized it was high time to publish an update on GeoFeedia, especially since we hadused the tool just two months earlier in response to Typhoon Pablo, one of the worst disasters to hit the Philippines in the past 100 years.
from Mashable! by Geekosystem
from EFF.org Updates by Eva Galperin
EFF has long called on companies to publish the number and type of government demands they receive for user data. We think it’s important enough to be one of the stars we award in our Who Has Your Back? campaign started in 2010. Users make decisions every day about which companies they entrust with their thoughts, photos, contacts, identities and location data. In order to make informed decisions users — especially those at risk from repressive governments or engaging in political activism — need to know how often the government is seeking that information from their providers.
from Wired Top Stories by Wired Opinion
Cyber-savvy folks are arguing for such new etiquette rules because in an information-overloaded world, time-wasting communication is not just outdated ? it?s rude. Living according to the gospel of technological efficiency and frictionless sharing is fine as a Silicon Valley innovation ethos. But etiquette norms aren?t just about efficiency: they?re actually about building thoughtful and pro-social character.
from Global Voices Online by Baran Mavzer
A group of Turkish hackers who call themselves Redhack have published the cell phone numbers of Melih Gökçek, the mayor of Turkey’s capital city Ankara, and his security guard on Twitter in retaliation against the mayor for publicizing the cell phone number of a college student.
from BBC News | Europe | World Edition
What can and can’t be found with a search engine?
Deregulating manholes represents the latest creative approach to the concept of ‘unbundling’ – forcing network companies to rent infrastructure
Erkan's Field Diary 