Sandia's MegaDroid goes public. What do you call an artificial system that simulates a network of hundreds of thousands of Android devices, allowing to predict the behavior of said devices in case of new app, malware or unforeseen technological breakdown? If your answer was “The Matrix,” then somewhere the Wachowski siblings would like to thank you, but the real answer is something far more entertaining than any amount of Keanu Reeveses staring blankly at the screen. World, meet the MegaDroid. The MegaDroid is the creation of researchers at California-based Sandia National Laboratories, and virtually simulates 300,000 separate Android devices in an attempt to analyze the reactions of large-scale networks to any number of situations. Continuing, Fritz said that “It’s possible for something to go wrong on the scale of a big wireless network because of a coding mistake in an operating system or an application, and it’s very hard to diagnose and fix. Privacy in a Digital Age: When Twitter Followers Can Track a Lost Phone | PBS NewsHour | Aug. 3, 2012.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: a story about how the Web, its users and tracking technology helped recover, yes, a missing smartphone. It sounds like a story right up Hari Sreenivasan’s alley. HARI SREENIVASAN: When most people lose a cell phone, there’s not necessarily an online community of strangers to help track it down. But then New York Times technology columnist David Pogue is not most people. He has quite a few Twitter followers, 1.4 million of them. And there was quite a response. Hours later, police in Prince George’s County, Md., tweeted back, saying they had found it. David Pogue is here to help lay that out. Thanks for being with us. DAVID POGUE, The New York Times: My pleasure. HARI SREENIVASAN: So how did it happen? DAVID POGUE: Well, the great thing was that I lost the phone on Monday, when I was on this train.
And Apple has a feature called Find My iPhone. And it’s the greatest feature if you ever lose your phone. So, I said, what do I have to lose? DAVID POGUE: So… Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity [REPORT] Everyme Is The Social Network For Privacy Fans. We Don't Need a Digital Bill of Rights. Unanswered Questions About Facebook's Data-Use Policy - Even After Public Q&A. The harder Facebook tries to explain its data-use policy, the more questions it leaves unanswered.
Erin Egan, the social networking behemoth's chief privacy officer, did it again during a 30-minute video conference on May 14. Here's what she did and didn't say - and a summary of outstanding concerns about how Facebook can and can't take advantage of user data. Egan’s session was window dressing on the announcement made on the company’s blog last week. While the exec answered the general questions read to her by Andrew Noyes, Facebook's public policy communications manager, most of her answers reiterated points covered in last week’s announcement.
Even as more pointed queries piled up in the comments section beneath the streaming video, Noyes shifted the session at the 21-minute mark to answering questions not related to privacy. Mozilla’s Collusion plug-in aims to expose online tracking. Speaking at the TED conference yesterday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs demonstrated Collusion, a new add-on for Firefox that aims to reveal the complex web of connections used by Web sites, advertisers, behavioral marketers, and other third parties to track users across the Web.
Instead of users relying on a flat list of cookies and a limited set of privacy-related checkboxes, users will be able to see how particular sites are tracking them — and how some third parties can watch users move from site to site, accumulating information on their actions the whole way. And Collusion is now getting some high-profile help: the philanthropic Ford Foundation has ponied up a $300,000 grant to support Collusion’s development. “Few people realize the extent to which the tracking of our online activities is occurring, and who is doing it,” Kovacs wrote in a blog post. “At best, it would make most uncomfortable. Mozilla is the first to acknowledge that “not all tracking is bad.”
Follow Twitter's 15 Most Fascinating Employees. Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing is Wrong. Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It's called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there's a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like this with a program called Beacon. The company has done things like this time and time again. Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more.
CNet's Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. It's doubly bad because while the particular implementation of this feature has been executed so poorly, the fundamental ideas behind it have a lot of potential to deliver far more value from Facebook and the web to all of us. The Way it Works Now is Wrong Got that? A Loss of Opportunity. Who Owns Employees' Twitter Accounts? 7 Big Privacy Concerns for New Facebook and the Open Graph. It's not always clear how Facebook apps interact with the data you share on the social network. Are they allowed to broadcast it?
Sell it? Compile it in a way that you never intended? Simply, should you choose not to share with apps at all, they are taken away from you. If you want to use some, but limit their functionality, you have to carefully customize your privacy settings in order to ensure your information is used appropriately. With the Open Graph, which can push any information to your Facebook page without explicit permission each time, it becomes more of an imperative. Here are seven things you may not realize that Facebook knows, and is using to interact with your friends or advertisers. 1.
You’ve always kept your location up to date on Facebook, ensuring everyone knows when you change cities — but you’re not interested in geotagging. 2. You just downloaded Spotify and you’re really excited to get started. 3. That girl you met at the event you went to last week. 4. 5. 6. 7. Social Proof Is The New Marketing. Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Aileen Lee, Partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she focuses on investing in consumer internet ventures.
Full disclosure: some of the companies mentioned below are KPCB-backed companies, including One Kings Lane, Klout and Plum District (both of which count Lee as a board member). You can read more about Lee at KPCB.com and follow her on twitter at @aileenlee. As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet. Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth. This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention.
What is social proof? Consider the social proof of a line of people standing behind a velvet rope, waiting to get into a club. Five Types of Social Proof 2) Celebrity social proof – Up to 25% of U.S. P.S.