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Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/taylor-swift-asks-nj-teen-on-date-to-country-music-awards-shows-in-las-vegas/2012/02/25/gIQAv9muZR_story.html
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This all sounds bad until you looks closer. The linked click is a URL shortener that points to a file – which then gets downloaded. But, what happens next is the important part.
First, lets clarify that the file is downloaded – NOT installed. Until installed, the file does nothing. By default, Android phones are set to not install applications downloaded from anywhere other than the market. So, to install the download, the user would have needed to previously checked “allow installation of non-market applications”.
Next, to install the Android system presents you with a list of permissions that the application requires and asks for the user if the accept and if it’s okay to install.
So yes, the link does download malware by just clicking the link. But, the malware is not installed and ran without user interaction. But, pointing out those pesky little facts doesn’t drive clicks to Sophos and ZDnet … best to imply that just clicking a link is a threat on Android in order to drive page views.
Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/android-malware-spreads-via-facebook-app/18506
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More precisely, someone starts a death rumor on the service — often without warning or reason, without attribution and without any truth to the claim.
As the faux-death toll has swelled — ensnaring Cher and Chris Brown, Tiger Woods and Keanu Reeves, Jackie Chan and President Obama — something resembling a formula has emerged. Condolences are expressed. Shock turns to skepticism. Barbs are traded in a search for the original culprit. Character limits are exhausted. And all parties move on to the next topic.
Recently, though, the death and funeral of Whitney Houston — combined with a persistent string of bogus “RIP Madonna” Twitter posts trending in New York last week — threatened this fragile equilibrium, exposing the dual consequences of the hoaxing scourge. One real death strips the humor from the spurious ones. And a deluge of falsehoods compromises Twitter as a go-to source for breaking news.
“Ok,” one user wrote as the Madonna hoax was realized, “we have gone tooooo far now.”
Even before the lie spread widely — during Ms. Houston’s televised funeral service in Newark, no less — the finger-pointing had begun. “Lady Gaga fans trended ‘RIP Madonna,’ ” posted @WeThinkMiley, a fan account for Miley Cyrus. “1) It’s not funny, we just recently lost Whitney. 2) Gaga is NOT the best. 3) No one likes you.”
Perhaps because of their passionate fan bases on Twitter, musicians, particularly rap or hip-hop artists, have long been the most popular targets among hoaxers in the New York area. In December, the death of the North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il made “RIP Lil Kim” — for the female rapper — a popular topic, though in this case at least some of the confusion appeared genuine.
For celebrities, there is no playbook for addressing reports of one’s own death. Most ignore the attention — easy for Madonna, who has no Twitter account.
And in this case, the singer’s fans quickly quelled the gossip for her, tagging posts with three simple words: “Madonna Is Immortal.” Others engaged in cyber-retribution, writing, “RIP Lady Gaga.”
“Why don’t you grow up?” chimed in @KingMikeJ, a fan account for Michael Jackson, defending Lady Gaga.
Of course, some stars seem to revel in the rumors. When a fan informed @snooki, from MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” that “RIP Snooki” had been a popular topic this month, she responded, “SWeet!!” And when another user commented that the “other 629 Pokemon” characters would miss the diminutive reality television star, Snooki deemed the joke the “best thing I’ve ever read.”
For the most relentless hoax, though, a typed response may be insufficient proof of one’s pulse. In December, spurred by feverish Twitter reports of his death, Jon Bon Jovi posted a link to a picture on his band’s account, @BonJovi. In it, the singer smiled as he held a sheet of paper with the day’s date and a message.
“Heaven,” it read, “looks a lot like New Jersey.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/nyregion/the-twitter-death-hoax-is-alive-and-sadly-well.html
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They are not actors with the paparazzi at their heels. They’re not politicians with their sound-bytes dominating television news. Neither are they rock stars with a new hit single on the way. They are just regular people with day jobs. Some, even students. But they have thousands of dedicated followers lapping up every character they post on Twitter – be it as mundane as what they had for lunch and web links to things they like, or as relevant as a comment on the day’s political developments. Social anthropologist Shiv Visvanathan says that with this phenomenon, “everydayness has found its heroes.”
In India, while people like Shashi Tharoor and Priyanka Chopra command an online following for being the offline personalities that they are, Tweeple like Ramesh Srivats, Priyanka Sachar, Abhishek Asthana, Kiran Manral and Surekha Pillai, or Krish Ashok attract a following purely on the basis of content they tweet. They are homegrown Twitter celebrities. Their followers may not run into millions but tweeting has earned them online acclaim.
While most win for the general wit and topicality of their microblogs, there are others who stick to a broad area of interest. Like chef @madmanweb for food and cooking, @sunnychl for gadgets and technology, @praneshprakah for cyber law and Internet advocacy or @acorn for international policy and governance. And if your sphere of influence is large enough, it’s easy to get noticed as a writer, get into the stand-up circuit, or even be picked up by savvy marketers to plug their products.
25-year-old Abhishek Asthana, whose Twitter identity is “@GabbbarSingh” (with three Bs) says online popularity came to him by chance. Back in 2010 he wanted to write a humorous blog post about the cast of Sholay tweeting at each other. The only option he saw was to create those accounts, tweet, and use screenshots. “I just created the Gabbar account and posted a couple of tweets. When I checked back after some time I already had some 50 followers – and it was 1,000 in the first couple of months,” says Asthana, whose Twitter bio reads “Leaves you with two limbs less”. He now tweets as himself rather than the terror of Ramgarh. He has over 17,500 followers now.
He’s not the only one who started out thinking an online alter ego would be fun. Mumbai-based freelance writer Utsav Chakraborty, better known as @SatanBhagat on Twitter, started out lampooning writer Chetan Bhagat. The other option he considered was “@arundhatidroid”, a parody account of writer-activist Arundhati Roy. “She stopped being in the news suddenly. So I thought I’d stick with Chetan Bhagat,” says the 21-year-old, who today has a following of over 13,000 on Twitter. But there was only so much milking the proverbial cow. “I ran out of Chetan Bhagat jokes in three months. Now I tweet about pop culture, politics – anything,” says Chakraborty, who uses his photoshop skills to create mock covers of Chetan Bhagat books (Ovulation 2020, anyone?) and indeed, Chetan Bhagat display pictures.
Though the numbers are small, getting recognized by strangers in the offline world is not a rarity. Advertising professional and author Kiran Manral has experienced another kind of popularity. Her son, frequently mentioned as “the brat” in her tweets gets recognized at airport lounges and malls. Photographer Priyanka Sachar, or “@twilightfairy” is says she is often surprised to find that people recognise her. “I never put up my own pictures online. I don’t know how they know it’s me,” says Sachar, though she adds that it could be because of her presence on WordPress and Flickr, and the fact that she has organized various bloggers’ meets and tweetups in the past.
Savvy marketers see this as a great opportunity to plug their products. Asthana has received offers in the past for promotional tweeting from corporates – something he avoids now. “I didn’t want to sell out,” explains the B-school student. Chakraborty, also did similar “random promotions for freebies”. He finally appeared on the stand up scene last year. “The remuneration was better. A lot of jokes at these events end up being Twitter-based,” he says.
Writer and stand-up comic Gursimran Khamba, who enjoys a wild popularity both on his blog and Twitter with nearly 20,000 followers, loathes the “Twitter celebrity” tag and feels its just a concept coming from journalists new to and awed by Twitter. “Any one with a basic sense of mathematics should be able to figure out that a few thousand followers out of the Indian population of 1.2 billion is nothing,” says Khamba, 25, who is a post-grad student in Mumbai.
Visvanathan says it’s about finding like-minded people. “It’s the power of conversation and enjoying each others’ company and an exchange of ideas like in the old times. They are not celebrities in the strictest sense of the term. Celebrities are people who are not themselves. Their image is bigger than their person. Here, substance is bigger than the image,” he says.
So would it make sense to equate a @RoflIndian with YouTube sensation Ray William Johnson? Not quite. Popularity functions rather differently on different online platforms. “Twitter is a more interactive medium which erodes celebrityhood to some extent. YouTube is more one way, like television,” says Asthana, adding that it is difficult for Indians to transact on a video-sharing medium like YouTube, given the state of our internet speeds, something he calls the “Hindu rate of download”.
Like a “greatest hits” compilation, some popular Twitter users have come up with Facebook pages or blogs featuring some of their best tweets. While Srivats jokes he started the blog “Short Puts” compiling his tweets because he was “narcissistic”, Asthana says he started a Facebook page as Twitter has no mechanism for archival of tweets, and also because it gives you an opportunity to reach a wider audience. Now isn’t that a lot more #win for everyone?
Article source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/Twitter-twitter-big-stars/articleshow/12037374.cms
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Matt Hinton
Matt Hinton has written and edited Yahoo! Sports’ college football blog, …
Article source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/stefon-diggs-apologizes-jeremy-lin-tweet-then-closes-174520788.html
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Just because technology can take the serendipity out of life doesn’t mean that it should.
The information technology industry is waging a largely successful and to my mind greatly misguided war against the randomness of life. The latest twist, as reported in the New York Times, is a plan by KLM Airlines to let people select seatmates using Facebook profiles.
Relative latecomers to the social media party, airlines are quickly
becoming sophisticated users of online networks, not only as marketing
tools, but as a low-cost way to learn more about their customers and
their preferences. With Facebook alone claiming nearly 500 million daily
active users — more than 60 times the eight million people who fly each
day — KLM and others are betting that many of them would be willing to
share their profiles in exchange, say, for a chance to meet someone with
a common interest or who might be going to the same event.
The idea is catching on. Last year, Malaysia Airlines introduced
MHBuddy, an application that allows users who book and check in via the
carrier’s Facebook page to see whether any of their “friends” will be on
the same flight or in their destination city at the same time. The
platform, which claims 3,000 monthly active users, also enables existing
friends to select seats together.
One glitch in KLM’s plan, at least, is already apparent. It isn’t matching people who mutually want to sit next to each other. It’s unilateral, and it puts the selectee in the potentially awkward position of rejecting the selector:
While it is not possible to “reject” a person who has chosen to sit with
you, you can select another seat as long as two days before the flight.
Those feeling awkward about moving can delete their data and select new
seats using the standard — anonymous — online platform.
The Times reporter notes some objections but I think they can be manifold. What if the selection is made within the limit, like one of those eBay sniping bids? By somebody with timeshares to unload, or worse? It’s likely that the people you’d most like to sit next to spend a lot of their time fending off people who want to get close to them, and thus are least likely to sign up in the first place. And there’s the additional downside that switching your seat on the wrong person will make a stranger an instant unfriend.
These plans are just another example of counterserendipity, trying to rationalize often irritating but potentially productive experiences by algorithms. (Emma Barrett at the Telegraph has an excellent column on the software’s downside.)
Fortunately, the airlines have been thoughtful enough to provide their own alternative. It’s called the middle seat. It doubles your chances of having an interesting neighbor, yet it’s wonderfully anonymous and private. It’s also a happy compromise, with a fair view out the window but only one seat away from the aisle.
Let’s keep this strategy a secret. If the airlines find out, they’ll start charging an extra fee.
Image: FlickrCC/MattHurst
Article source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/do-you-really-want-to-pick-your-seatmate-on-facebook/253602/
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“We do a lot with them, and our users are using Facebook a tremendous amount. It’s not like some other companies [where] we see a significant overlap in the things we do, I have always thought that the two can do more together.”
It looks like Facebook feels much the same, saying in a statement, “iOS is an important platform for Facebook and we have a good relationship with Apple.” Whatever hard feelings there might have been about the failed iTunes/Facebook integration deal must be water under the bridge.
Shareholders also wanted to know if Apple was going to distribute dividends. VentureBeat.com reports:
Apple reported a $13.06 billion profit in the first quarter of 2012, and the company is sitting on $90 million in cash. Chief executive Tim Cook explained the cash flow as “more than we need to run a company.” He also assured shareholders that the company is heavily considering how best to spend the money, though it doesn’t look like a dividend is coming any time soon.
One shareholder expressed the opinion that Apple shouldn’t administer a dividend, but rather reinvest the money in media acquisitions. Acquisitions are another way the company could use its money to create a better product and lift its stock prices, though it doesn’t provide an immediate payout to stock owners.
Another shareholder brought up the company’s deeper ties with Twitter, particular now that iOS 5 provides options to tweet right in the operating system’s user experience. Cook said that while the integration has been “great for Twitter,” it has also been “great for our users.” But where does that leave the other giant, social elephant in the room Facebook? Cook calls the social network a “friend.”
“We do a lot with them, our users use Facebook an enormous amount,” said Cook at the shareholders meeting, “I’ve always thought that the two companies could do more together.”
In other Apple news, Proview is suing the company in U.S. court over the iPad trademark. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama reports:
Proview, the Chinese electronics maker that is suing Apple over the trademark to the iPad, has apparently taken its legal battle to U.S. court. A report from the Wall Street Journal found a previously unknown lawsuit between Apple and Proview filed in California’s Santa Clara Superior Court on Feb. 17.
Apple purchased the trademark through a subsidiary called IP Application Development. According to the Journal report, Proview is accusing Apple of fraud, saying that the representatives it negotiated with claimed that they wanted the “IPAD” trademark because it was an abbreviation of the company name.
Apple and Proview could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Thursday, a Shanghai court suspended its decision in a dispute between the two companies, saying it will wait for a higher court to rule on the case. Lower courts have sided with Proview in the past, and the Guangdong High Court will begin its hearing on the matter Feb. 29. The suspension means that Apple can continue selling the iPad in area stores.
Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/does-apple-consider-facebook-a-friend-or-foe/2012/02/24/gIQAIcoSYR_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop
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The findings come a day after the Obama administration called for stronger privacy protections for people who use the Internet, mobile devices and other technologies with increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking them. Pew’s findings suggest that people not only care about their privacy online but that, given the tools, they will also try to manage it.
Along those lines is “profile pruning,’’ which Pew reports is on the rise. Nearly two-thirds of people on social networks said last year that they had deleted friends, up from 56 percent in 2009. And more people are removing their names from photos than two years ago. This practice is especially common on Facebook, where users can add names of their friends to photos they upload.
Among other findings:
— Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles. Pew found that 67 percent of women set their profiles so that only their “friends’’ can see it. Only 48 percent of men did the same.
— Think all that time in school taught you something? People with the highest levels of education reported having the most difficulty figuring out their privacy settings. That said, only 2 percent of social media users described privacy controls as “very difficult to manage.’’
— The report found no significant differences in people’s basic privacy controls by age. In other words, younger people were just as likely to use privacy controls as older people. Sixty-two percent of teens and 58 percent of adults restricted access to their profiles to friends only.
— Young adults were more likely than older people to delete unwanted comments. Fifty-six percent of social media users aged 18 to 29 said they have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with 40 percent of those aged 30 to 49 and 34 percent of people aged 50 to 64.
— Men are more likely to post something they later regret. Fifteen percent of male respondents said they posted something regrettable, compared with 8 percent of female respondents.
— Possibly proving that with age comes wisdom, young adults were more likely to post something regrettable than their older counterparts. Fifteen percent of social network users aged 18 to 29 said they have posted something regrettable. Only 5 percent of people over 50 said the same thing.
Pew’s phone survey of 2,277 adults was conducted in April and May 2011. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The data about teens came from a separate phone survey Pew conducted with teenagers and their parents.
Article source: http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-24/business/31096234_1_privacy-controls-privacy-settings-social-media-users
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Three contract lobby shops have stopped lobbying for Facebook after content providers who were also clients of the firms raised “conflict” concerns in recent weeks, POLITICO has learned.
The move signals that the gloves are coming off in the ongoing lobbying fight between content providers and Internet companies. Facebook’s lobbying spending increased about 285 percent from $351,000 in 2010 to $1.35 million in 2011.
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“They are doing everything they can to ensure that the tech industry and Facebook in particular doesn’t have any talent to go up to the Hill,” one tech lobbyist said of the content providers.
Fierce, Isakowitz Blalock, the Glover Park Group and TeleMedia Policy Group have all terminated their lobbying contracts with Facebook, according to sources familiar with the lobbying terminations.
GPG, Fierce Isakowitz and Facebook all declined to comment for this story. TeleMedia Policy Corp. did not respond to a request for comment.
Elmendorf Ryan remains as the sole outside lobbying firm Facebook has on retainer, according to Senate filings. Facebook is feeling the heat in part because some other technology companies, like Twitter and Reddit, haven’t yet built out their Washington operations, according to the tech lobbyist.
It is not unusual for such moves to occur as policy issues make their way through Congress. From the Internet companies’ perspective, it also shows that content providers haven’t learned from the SOPA/PIPA battle that the influence game has changed in favor of the tech sector.
“What happened with SOPA and PIPA had less to do with D.C. lobbyists and much more to do with a public reaction to the scope of the bill and how it was being promoted in Washington,” said Markham Erickson, executive director of the NetCoalition, whose members include Google, Amazon, and PayPal, among others. “If content’s lesson from that is to hire more lobbyists and ensure that they have exclusive relationships with lobbyists, then it’s clear that they have not learned that lesson because these issues are not going to be solved through an inside-the-Beltway solution.”
But while Internet companies are playing an outside-inside game, it doesn’t mean they are giving up on K Street.
“I don’t think there’s any lack of smart lobbyists or lawyers that tech companies can hire,” Erickson said. “These are compelling companies and in fact from a public perception standpoint they are much more highly regarded than any of the content industries.”
Other lobby shops without conflicts are already trying to represent Facebook as it ramps up its downtown presence, according to several sources.
“Fortunately for them, they are just in the process of ramping up,” one Republican consultant said. “They’re having some people taken off the table, but the prospect of working for Facebook if you are a lobbyist, it’s like working for Microsoft in the ’90s or Google in the 2000s.”
Glover Park Group, which only started representing Facebook earlier this month, represents several companies bruised in the brutal SOPA/PIPA fight, including Walt Disney Co., Viacom and Warner Music Group, among others. Joe Lockhart, co-founder of GPG, left the firm less than a year ago to join Facebook.
Fierce Isakowitz began working for Facebook in February 2011 and billed the company $180,000 last year for lobbying work, according to federal filings. Fierce Isakowitz represents CTIA-The Wireless Association and Time Warner.
TeleMedia Policy’s Justin Lilley represents the National Cable Telecommunications Association, Sony Music Entertainment and the Recording Industry of America.
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:52 p.m. on February 24, 2012.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Justin Lilley.
Article source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/73254.html
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A man who was threatened with jail time for posting comments about his estranged wife on his personal Facebook page unless he posted daily apologies for a month says the court ruling violates his freedom of speech.
Mark Byron, who is making the apology to avoid 60 days in jail,
said Friday night that he believes it’s too late for him to appeal the domestic relations court ruling as planned. But the Cincinnati man and free speech and media experts say it should concern other users of the social networking site.
With hundreds of millions of people using Facebook for communication, Byron said that “if they can do this to me, they can do it to others.”
The idea “that anybody could tell you what to say to your friends on Facebook should be scary to people,” said Cincinnati attorney Jill Meyer, who specializes in free speech and media issues.
The ruling is highly unusual and “troubling because it’s a court telling someone to say something to in some regards his chosen group of friends,” said Meyer. She noted that the comments were not directed to Byron’s wife, Elizabeth Byron, who was blocked from accessing the page.
According to the ruling, Byron posted comments on his page in November, saying in part, “If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband’s life and take your son’s father away from him completely all you need to do is say you’re scared of your husband or domestic partner and they’ll take him away.”
The Byrons are involved in ongoing divorce and child custody proceedings. Byron has said his wife and the court have prevented him from seeing his 17-month-old son many times. The court maintains he is allowed to see him on a twice-weekly basis.
Domestic Relations Magistrate Paul Meyers last month found Byron in contempt of a protective order because of his Facebook comments. Meyers said that Byron could avoid a 60-day jail sentence and a $500 fine by posting the apology written by Meyers to his wife and all of his Facebook friends and paying her attorney fees. The same apology must be posted every day no later than 9am.
The June court order prohibited Byron from causing his wife physical or mental abuse, harassment or annoyance. She asked in December that he be found in contempt after learning of the Facebook comments.
Byron’s comments expressed frustration, but they were not threats and he didn’t make them to his wife, said Cincinnati attorney Jack Greiner, who also specializes in free speech and media issues.
Greiner said he doesn’t think the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, “allows a court to find that someone has harassed or caused a person to suffer mental abuse merely by expressing one’s opinion about a court proceeding in a non-threatening way.”
Greiner said that a court compelling speech through a court-written apology raises as many free speech concerns as actions prohibiting free speech.
The statement that Byron says he has been posting since Feb. 13 has him apologizing to his wife for “casting her in an unfavorable light” and to his Facebook friends for “attempting to mislead them. Byron said the apology forces him to make false statements.
The magistrate’s assistant said Friday that Meyers cannot comment on pending court cases. Elizabeth Byron’s attorney didn’t immediately return calls.
The ruling says several of Mark Byron’s comments were “clearly intended to be mentally abusive, harassing and annoying” to his wife and “generate a negative and venomous response toward her from his Facebook friends.”
Responses by Facebook friends to his posting caused Elizabeth Byron to be “afraid and concerned,” according to court documents.
Byron and his attorney, Becky Ford, say he made his comments out of frustration and never expected his wife to see them since she couldn’t access his account.
“Once he made the comments, some of his Facebook friends started making inflammatory comments which he had no control over,” Ford said.
His comments were “nothing other than free speech communication where he was venting truthful information,” Ford said.
Bryon must appear in court March 19 and show proof that he posted the apology or face jail.
Article source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Americas/Say-sorry-on-Facebook-or-go-to-jail/Article1-816820.aspx
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