50 things that are being killed by the internet. Attack on Twitter Came in Two Waves - Bits Blog. Update | 8/8/09 11:45 a.m. Here’s a link to the Times story that goes into greater depth on what happened. The meltdown that left 45 million Twitter users unable to access the service on Thursday came in two waves and was directed at a single blogger who has voiced his support for the Republic of Georgia in that country’s continuing conflict with Russia. Facebook’s chief security officer, Max Kelly, told CNet that the attack was aimed at a user known as Cyxymu, who had accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and other sites affected by Thursday’s cyberassault. In an interview with The Guardian, the blogger said he believed the strike was an attempt to silence his criticism on the behavior of Russia in the conflict over the South Ossetia region in Georgia, which began a year ago on Friday.
How did a targeted attack against a single user manage to cripple Twitter for almost an entire day? Courtesy of SophosBeth Jones. Highlights from the '1984' lawsuit against Amazon | Te. "Kindling. " Credit: oskay / Flickr Justin Gawronski and Antoine J. Bruguier are suing Amazon for having deleted their copies of George Orwell books from their Kindle readers, sans permission. The potential class-action lawsuit claims harm inflicted on the parties for rendering their notes "useless" -- causing some commentators to call it the "Kindle ate my homework" case. Here are a few highlighted quotes from the complaint, filed in the U.S. -- "[Plaintiffs] bring this class action complaint against defendants Amazon.com, Inc. and AmazonDigital Services, Inc., ... for their wrongful practice of remotely deleting digital content from their customers’ Amazon Kindle electronic book (“e-book”) reading devices and Kindle for iPhone applications.
" -- "Amazon not only deleted the e-books,but also rendered useless any electronic notes and annotations that consumers had made within these e-books because the notes were no longer tied to the referenced or highlighted text. -- David Sarno. Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum Brooklyn Mu. If you’ve already downloaded the Brooklyn Museum iPhone app (link opens iTunes), you may have noticed an update (or two) for it in the app store. We are psyched to mention that version 1.3 was just released and has fixes for many of the issues you mentioned via the blog and twitter, as well as some new slickness. At this point, we hope you will download the new version and help test it out. We’d adore it if everyone would do it all at once, so we can test our server load : ) The last time we went through this, it was popular enough to crash our server and while we think that’s pretty cool, we’ve made some changes to help fix those issues and would like to test our improvements.
Here’s what’s new: Images that are displayed small due to copyright protection are no longer pixelated—the app now respects the size of the images distributed via the API, so they will still be small, but fuzzy no more! Letting Go: When we released the API, we talked a lot about letting go of data. If You’re Happy and You Know It, Tell Your Phone - Bit. Can the Apple iPhone, which supplies hours of entertainment, actually measure your happiness? Track Your Happiness application. Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University, thinks the phone might at least help researchers gather some data about it. Mr. Killingsworth, a former software developer, has helped create an application called Track Your Happiness for the iPhone to collect information to determine which factors are associated with happiness.
“The gold standard for collecting this kind of data is what is called ‘experience sampling,’ or taking a sampling from moment to moment,” Mr. Traditionally, research examining human happiness is conducted by recruiting volunteers to come into a sterile lab office and take a survey. As a result, he said, “we don’t really know very much about the causes of people’s happiness as they are going about their lives.” Another advantage of gathering data using a mobile phone is the ease of scalability. Mr. Shopping for $1,000 Shoes? There’s an App for That - B.
Net-a-Porter.com, the high-end online fashion retailer, persuaded shoppers to buy couture dresses and shoes on the Web. Now, it is betting they will buy luxury goods from their cellphones. This week, Net-a-Porter.com released its iPhone application, the Net-App. Shoppers can browse new handbags, clothes and shoes; read the weekly fashion stories that editors publish on the Web site; and make purchases. Today, some cellphone users buy virtual goods to use in mobile games or e-books to read on their phones.
But so far, people have not shown much willingness to buy physical goods — especially expensive ones — from their cellphones. But Net-a-Porter.com, which went live in 2000 and now has 1.8 million visitors a month, succeeded in getting people to buy $4,000 gowns and $1,000 stilettos on the Web. The potential for shopping on phones “is massive,” said Alison Loehnis, vice president of sales and marketing at Net-a-Porter.com. The most challenging part of building the Net-App, Ms. Get Our Tech News Any Way You Want It - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com. On Bastille Day, Let Them Read Tweets - Bits Blog.
Power.com Fights Back Against Facebook - Bits Blog. Update | 12:21 p.m. Adding comment from Facebook. Update | 12:42 p.m. Adding Facebook statement. Power.com is suing its frenemy, Facebook. On Friday, Power.com, a site that lets users sign in to several social networks from one place, plans to respond to the lawsuit that Facebook filed against it with its own suit. Power.com screen shot. Power.com’s idea was to create a portal through which people could enter various social networking sites. When Power.com opened in the United States in December, it included an option to log into Facebook, but that is no longer on the site.
After starting in Brazil, Power.com tried a big unveiling in the United States in December. But after an initial spike in traffic, Power.com fizzled. Power.com is now arguing that “Facebook is stifling competition by restricting their users and blocking access to Power.com,” according to a statement from the company. World's first ever 'self-watering' plant discover. Why PayPal Wants to Know Where Everybody Lives - Bits Blog - NYT. You may not have ever bought anything with PayPal, but it’s got a file on you anyway, just in case. The reason is that if you decide to buy something online and set up your first PayPal account, the service has three seconds to decide if it trusts you or if it will block the sale. That’s about all the time it needs. Online, people leave a long trail of digital breadcrumbs that, taken together, give a much better picture of a prospective customer than traditional bankers ever had.
“Good people on the Internet leave footprints,” explains Scott Thompson, president of PayPal. “There are e-mail accounts, I.P. addresses, things that accumulate over time that you can find on the Internet if you rummage around.” That sort of digital rummaging around typically doesn’t find any evidence of someone who just made up an identity to commit a fraud. Mr. What PayPal has learned is that the Internet actually reduces risk, Mr. “If it’s a fraudster, you can’t find footprints,” Mr. Social Networking: Facebook Looks to India. The Future of Collaborative Networks. By Guest Editor - Jun. 05, 2009Comments (22) Aaron Fulkerson is co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, which has grown from a small open source project into a very popular collaboration platform that enables users to connect and customize enterprise systems, social tools and web services.
With millions of users, MindTouch is deployed by many large companies, including Microsoft, Fujitsu, Siemens, Intel, The Washington Post, and others. We asked Aaron for a short series of guest posts here on OStatic, on the topic of where collaborative networks are headed. You'll find his first post here. The Future of Collaborative Networks By Aaron Fulkerson, Co-Founder and CEO, MindTouch Enterprise software has been on a roller coaster of innovation in recent years.
Vendors of this social software have repurposed social media tools from the consumer web by wrapping them in an enterprise message. "Social profiles: check. Now the big question is, how do you implement a Collaborative Network? Share Your Comments. Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study - Bits Blog - NYTimes.
Yahoo Is Feeling Social - Bits Blog. Facebook Finally Gives Apps Some Love - Bits Blog. A Service to Prove You are Really You - Bits Blog. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, as the New Yorker cartoon famously said. But what if, while you are surfing, you want to prove your pedigree? Equifax, the big credit agency that already knows more about your flea count than you do, wants to help. It is developing a service that will let you create an online identity that can assert various “claims” that it will back up. To an online wine merchant, it might back you up when you say you are of legal age.
If you are applying to open a bank account, the company might vouch for your entire profile, including name, address, birthday and Social Security number. Ron Carpinella, Equifax’s vice president for ID management, said the service might even be of use on a blog. Consumers won’t pay anything for this, as Equifax envisions the service. Mr. Credit bureaus like Equifax already offer sites a way to verify the identities of users. Whether the broader Information Card effort has any chance of taking off is a topic for another day. Curating the Best of the Web: Video - Bits Blog. The Internet is awash in content — and a whole lot of it is junk, spam or inane status updates.
How do you begin to navigate through the zillions of news articles, Web sites, tweets and other stuff online to find content that matters to you? You need digital curators. These are the online equivalents of the extremely savvy, clued-in friends you always turn to for new new music, and who always get an invite to your cocktail party because you know they’ve got something interesting to talk about or show off. Screen shot of Nizmlab, a site that sifts through online videos. On the Web, digital curators help you organize and manage the data deluge. Like their museum counterparts, digital curators — either individuals, communities or Web services — are adept at unearthing gems and obscure artifacts from the Web that might be of interest to a larger audience.
Let’s say you find the glut of videos on YouTube overwhelming. Screen shot of Chunnel.tv. Even in Mobile Video, the Action Is on the iPhone - Bits Blog - Chitose Suzuki/APJeremy Allaire, the founder and chief executive of Brightcove. Update | 1:33 p.m. Adding The New York Times Company’s relationship with Brightcove. The iPhone has only a tiny share of the vast market for cellphones. Even among smartphones it is still outsold by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry line and, by some counts, the aggregation of phones using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software.
But a conversation like the one I had the other day with Jeremy Allaire, the founder and chief executive of the online video technology company Brightcove, is a reminder that what Apple has created is in a different orbit than other phones. Brightcove provides video publishing tools to many big media companies, so I find Mr. Allaire a great window onto how that world is evolving. “It’s all iPhone,” he said, talking about the development work his company and its clients are doing to create more sites and especially applications for watching video over cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Mr. The ‘Face Book Fad’ Is More Than a Century O. Remember that dispute about whether it was Mark Zuckerberg or some other Harvard students who really dreamed up Facebook a few years ago? Well, it turns out that the notion of putting notes and images on a host’s “face book” was around long, long before Mr.
Zuckerberg posted anything on his Wall. Bryan Benilous, a historical newspaper specialist at the digital-archive company Proquest, said he and his colleagues came across a Boston Daily Globe article from August 24, 1902, titled, “Face Book The New Fad,” describing a party game where revelers sketch out cartoony caricatures for fun. “I think it is interesting to note the similarities with this first iteration of Face Book as a shared social experience,” said Mr.
Benilous. “It’s almost like having friends write on your wall in a much less tech-savvy way.” Drawing games and versions of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse were popular activities. The Face Book article is not the first quirky relic that Mr. Why I Am Obsessed With Twitter - Bits Blog. It’s official. The Oprah effect has worked its magic on Twitter. Since Oprah Winfrey’s first on-air tweet Friday, traffic to Twitter has jumped 43 percent, according to Hitwise, a Web tracker. And Ryan Block, former editor in chief of Engadget, estimated that more than a million new users joined after Ms. Winfrey called attention to the microblogging service. Personally, I’m obsessed with Twitter. But many people, including the Times columnist Maureen Dowd, are wondering what all the fuss is about. First of all, Twitter is much more than the collective musings of the tech-savvy elite. Tweetmeme, which aggregates a list of the most popular links shared on Twitter, doubles as a cheat sheet to tell you what hot topics are catching the collective attention span.
As one friend and longtime devotee described it, Twitter is also a self-propagating recommendation engine. You can also sneak a peek at the random snippets of the live conversations happening near your current location. Twitter Wants Distribution Deals, Not a Buyout - Bits Blog - NYT.