Author Archive
Mobile Cybercrime
01/22/2011 | 
Author In a major cybercrime turning point, scammers have begun shifting their focus away from Windows-based PCs to other operating systems and platforms, including smart phones, tablet computers, and mobile platforms in general, according to the Cisco® 2010 Annual Security Report, released today. The report also finds that 2010 was the first year in the history of the Internet that spam volume decreased, that cybercriminals are investing heavily in “money muling,” and that users continue to fall prey to myriad forms of trust exploitation.
In response to the last decade of cyber-exploits targeting PC operating systems, PC platform and application vendors have shored up security in their products and taken a more aggressive approach to patching vulnerabilities. As a result, scammers are finding it harder to exploit platforms that were once their bread and butter — in particular, the Windows platform — and are looking elsewhere to make money. Just as important in driving this trend is the widespread adoption of mobile devices and applications. Third-party mobile applications in particular are emerging as a serious threat vector.
Wherever there is profit, there is exploitation. The reason Windows gets attacked so easily is because the chances are higher to make profit on it, and so many people attempt so. When the world starts shifting towards smartphone markets, criminals need to catch up quickly, in order to make their livings. As a warning, this tells us to focus on what’s popular, not only what’s most interesting to us.
Posted in Public Records and Privacy
Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information on social networking sites.
According to the company’s marketing vice president Damon Jordan, the dating service had about 6.5 million members in the US and elsewhere, including Australia.
But that figure was set to rise exponentially in the coming weeks.
Jordan said the site would soon host some 340 million profiles after scraping information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites to create new dating profiles.
Gotham Dating Partners hoped to position itself as a dating service as well as a “public information source” for individuals and corporations needing accurate information on US citizens, Jordan said.
If Google’s selling of accounts to the government isn’t scary enough, scraping data from online records is surely alarming. When relationships are concerned, there would always be secrets that shouldn’t be shared. For people who are getting the “scoops”, this looks like a good thing, but terrible for those trying to hide unwanted information. Nonetheless, this is a novel concept that explores some very dangerous territories.
Analytics and Cloud Computing in 2011
More than half of midsize companies are planning to increase their information technology (IT) budgets over the next 12 to 18 months, according to an IBM global study of more than 2,000 midsize companies representing more than 20 countries. As a result, these companies are investing in a wide range of priorities including analytics, cloud computing, collaboration, mobility and customer relationship solutions.
“Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective,” commissioned by IBM (NYSE: IBM) and conducted independently by KS&R, Inc., found 70% of midsize companies are actively pursuing analytics technology to better understand their customers, make better decisions and become more efficient. The study also shows growing adoption of cloud computing among midsize firms, with two-thirds either planning or currently deploying cloud-based technologies to improve IT systems management while lowering costs.
The market is wide open in 2011. It is nearly time to push forward.
Game Company Strategies
Turbine has revealed that profits for Lord of the Rings Online have tripled since the game went free-to-play back in September.
Speaking in an interview with TenTonHammer, executive producer Kate Paiz and director of communications Adam Mersky revealed the good news via the site’s latest podcast.
During GDC Online, Turbine announced that both revenue and the player base grew considerably since going F2P, and that over one million new accounts were created, 20 percent of former players had returned, and the game saw a 300 percent increase in concurrent users with a 400 percent increase in active players.
The Steam strategy is proven promising even on MMO games. I do not know what the other game companies are thinking, but if AlphaCoding ever makes video games, we are going with the low-cost (free maybe), large-user-base strategy.
The Fight For Internet Freedom
Need to get around a Chinese government firewall? Burning to smuggle your samizdat writings past Iranian Internet censorship? Hoping to blog with impunity in Burma? Uncle Sam wants to help. The US government has a $30 million pot of money to spend on “Internet freedom” programs around the world, and it’s not afraid to make a few enemies.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year gave a major speech on Internet freedom and the new “Information Curtain” of censorship that has fallen in some parts of the world. In that speech, she said that State would support development of tools that can bypass Internet censorship. She also outlined a program in which State would fund mobile phone apps that allow people to rate government ministries on responsiveness and efficiency and that can ferret out corruption through crowdsourcing. The hardware is already in the wild, she said; all what’s needed is some money to make it worth developers’ time.
This is the other side of the story. If we see the Great Firewall as a defensive mechanism, the U.S. forces are only trying to cut a hole through this golden wall. I am sure political motives are behind these $30M but sadly, the over-the-wall technologies the Chinese themselves developed won’t be seeing the sunlight.
Account Mashups
There are tons of services online and taking the time to post to each one can be a pain. Pixelpipe helps to alleviate that problem by letting you make a single post that gets sent to every site you want.
PixelPipe is quick to set up. All you need to do is sign up for an account and then authorize any accounts your want to post to. You’re able to post text, photos, audio, and video to any of these various services, including your Dropbox and even an FTP server. There are so many services that Pixelpipe connects with that I couldn’t fit them all in a screenshot, so chances are you’re covered (click the left image to see what I could fit).
There are always two sides to any single story. The same thing goes with company strategies. For some type of service X, either you use mashups like PixelPipe to accomodate different providers, or you become Google (or the Chinese clone Baidu) that hosts all the services users need with the integration of ONE account. I personally prefer the latter approach but there are people out there who disagree, thus these mega-account services live on. There is nothing wrong with either side, but only how you perceive the market.
iCloud
Apple has received a patent that hints to the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a “net-booted environment.”
It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection.
Steve Jobs is smart. He does not make wrong moves – non-believers are all waiting for Chrome OS to fail, but if it even has one slight chance of succeeding, Apple is surely the last to smile with its slew of ridiculous patents. When the cloud concept is mature, big names like Apple surely won’t miss a bite of the market. Calculated plan is key.
Trashmail – Disposable Email
Trashmail offers several features, but most notably you can customize your own disposable email address, specify the number of times that address can forward to you, and set an expiration date for the address as well. Trashmail also provides a browser extension for easier disposable address creation.
Anonymous operations are prevailing among recent Internet trends. Who wants his identity exposed? Instead of registering and discarding random email addresses for “spam” purposes, this free service realizes the temporary, safe and anonymous email concept. It is in fact a step back from 4chan, the infamous anonymous chat forum – a rare find nowadays indeed.
It looks like the extremes are what people want – connected and socialized like Facebook, or anonymous and anti-law like 4chan.
VoIP Censoring in China
The Chinese regulator has declared Internet phone services other than those provided by China Telecom and China Unicom as illegal, which is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country.
The decision was criticized as a measure to protect the duopoly of state-owned telecom carriers, media reports said yesterday.
Two birds with one stone. Monitoring is now easier and the international invasion of VoIP services are gone.
Smart move. Looks like this new law will feed more anti-government services.
CityVille’s Advertising
A lot of the talk around Facebook enthuses wildly about the social graph and virality as being great drivers of engagement, but I believe these effects are being wildly over-estimated. They exist, and are a factor, but actually only a small factor in how games spread. How Facebook really works is visibility.
The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a ‘Featured in the App Store’ style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users’ eyeballs.
With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape.
Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
Leeching off bigger companies may be a good idea at times. It is not always easy when the host realizes these intentions and starts cutting off pests. Zynga’s reputation certainly helps push out new products, but its advertisement designers are one of a kind. The number of places to advertise is key but the level of visibility is of crucial concern. Eye-catchers without the annoying pop-ups are the best.
Companies like Zynga that survive on the huge-user-base-free-service model need to spend a gigantic amount of money to reach out – which is also what AlphaCoding needs. We mustn’t be stingy on these campaigns – after all, the Facebook-like social model is proven successful into the 21st century.