Klandwehr soundtracked "Up Around the Bend" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Cybercrooks take shine to Apple lineup - washingtonpost.com. Mac geeks estimate that Apple presold 120,000 iPads on March 12, but it's not just aficionados who are gearing up for Cupertino's next big thing: The iPad is expected to be a target for credit-card thieves and online scammers of all types. Antivirus software company McAfee is already warning consumers not to fall for e-mails or ads promising a free or reduced-price iPad if they enter an address . . . and a credit card number. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, online fraud of all kinds rose 22.3 percent between 2008 and 2009. Credit-card fraud made up about 10 percent of the total number of complaints referred to law enforcement. Last year, companies and individuals lost more than half a billion dollars to cyberthieves, and a disproportionate share of that was Apple-related.
Why is Apple so popular with scammers? Of course, Apple isn't the only company that makes or sells hardware; electronics retailers and big-box stores are also targeted by thieves. -- The Big Money. Technology Review: Mapping the Malicious Web. Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they’ve done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.
Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. “When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content,” Chenette says. Trouble with Yelp. Yelp is a social media review site. User of Yelp write reviews on business that they use and go to. It is an application that I use occasionally myself especially if I go to a new business. This can be a win for both businesses and the consumer.
However, I have seen several articles about businesses “who are suing Yelp for unfair and unethical conduct in promoting, marketing and advertising its website as maintaining unbiased reviews” is unlawful.” . The lawsuits, indicate that businesses who do not agree to pay Yelp to advertise on their websites have had favorable reviews removed from Yelp. If this was just one report, I would toss it off as sour grapes. As a user I hope this is not true. Yelp, says its simply a misunderstanding how the process is done. 03/21/2010 | FoxTrot.com. Dinah Washington: What Difference A Day Makes. Not Being Evil Has To Be More Than A Marketing Slogan. Google’s Matt Cutts takes issue with my post yesterday expressing mild outrage that Facebook puts its application developers in a position of having to choose between “user experience” and “monetization.”
I called that choice the “Evil Dial” – more evil, more money, and Facebook gets their cut because all of these guys plow that money back into Facebook advertising. Cutts’ issue is the apparent contradiction with an earlier post where I criticize Twitter for saying that they want to “be a force for good.” “Let others use Twitter to do good things. Twitter should stay goodness-neutral and self righteous free,” I say in that post. The reason these two posts don’t contradict each other is the last sentence of my Twitter post, where I say this: “Or alternatively try to be a force for good.
But it’s a lot harder to actually be good than it is to simply say you are good. Like others, I am becoming increasingly skeptical of the original Don’t Be Evil company (the one Cutts works for, in fact). Google's Sergey Brin Talks About China Gamble. Where the Lamb. Facebook To Pay $9.5 Million in Privacy Settlement. Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks' disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today. The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook's Beacon program that published what users were buying.
The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a "digital trust fund" that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision: Over the objections of privacy advocates, Facebook will have a seat on the fund's three-member board. It consists of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who heads the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Tim Sparapani, Facebook's public policy director; and writer Larry Magid.
"We have a lot of confidence they'll make wise awards of the money," he said. "They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out. " It Happen One Night.