Displaying items by tag: Twitter

Twitter celebrated their sixth anniversary back in March. During the celebration the company announced that they had reached over 140 million active users per month and that there are around 340 million tweets made daily. [This is not a bad achievement, but it does make use wonder about the sheer amount of inane information that gets broadcast around the globe every day; 140 words at a time. –Ed]

By now, everyone has heard of Hurricane Sandy, dubbed by some a “Franken-storm”, which has plunged much of the East coast into chaos. Millions upon millions of civilians lost access to power, and as NYC flooded, many were forced to evacuate. There were hundreds of thousands of calls, round the clock, to emergency lines like 911. Too many calls for many people to get through without waiting for a long period of time, so, some citizens took a less common approach to getting help.

After a New York court decided to request account information and tweets from Occupy Wall Street protester, Malcom Harris, Twitter responded with filling an appeal. Unlike Facebook, who has been accused of giving up their users’ data to legal institutions like it was something meaningless, Twitter has decided to stand their ground and defend their users’ privacy. Harris is being prosecuted for allegations of disorderly conduct during protests on Wall Street and information on his two accounts @destructuremal and @getsworse is being asked for by the court.  For @getsworse they requested all public tweets and “[t]he following subscriber information: name; address; records of session times and durations; length of service (including creation date); types of service utilized; telephone or instrument number or any other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address.”

“What @daltonc (Dalton Caldwell) is doing is pretty forward. If this succeeds it will be one for the history books, for sure". Is a statement made by Kristy Tillman, Designer at Ideo. This is just one of the feeds talking about a promising project called App.net. App.net is an alternative social network that users will have to pay to use. It is imagined to be a social service where users and developers are in the spotlight instead of advertisers. Its functions are much like Twitter, you are able to follow other users and see their updates.

Remember the Faceboook malware we warned you about? You remember the one that relied on the fact that people love to see pictures of themselves on the internet? Well it looks like either the same group that was behind that malware or another equally clever group has moved from Faceboook to Twitter. We have heard multiple reports of tweets showing up that claim to have a link to a picture of the user. Unfortunately due to the widespread use of shortened links it is hard to spot many malicious payloads. Fortunately in this case you can identify the bad link by the .ru at the end… for now.

Today was a bad day for the cloud as first Google Talk, then Microsoft Azure, and finally Twitter all faced outages that ran into hours of downtime or intermittent problems. The incident highlights one of the problems that companies face in putting their eggs in very large baskets. The outages began with Google talk and kicked off around 4am this morning (7-26-2012). This was not a simple issue with being able to connect to the servers though, it was something more widespread.

About two weeks ago we saw a random tweet that seemed to indicate that Microsoft had added in technology that would allow for easier spying on Skype conversations. Right after this a tweet on the YourAnonNews feed seemed to indicate that the “bug” that was accidentally sending some conversations to random members of your contact list was related to the new “feature”. There was a much more ominous tweet about an hour later that claimed Skype had been hacked and the source code downloaded. Although we never were able to confirm the relationship to the bug and the reworking of supernodes to switch to Microsoft run servers, we did find out that the released code was not the official source code, but a posting of a decompiled version of the Skype application; still useful if you wanted to look for an exploit, but not the original source code to be sure.

With all that is going on in the “hacker” world there is more drama today as someone is possibly claiming to maybe know who The Jester is. The catch, well it might be The Jester himself. To fill you in on a little background information; The Jester (also known as th3j35t3r) has made something of a name for himself in his activities against WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and other sites that do not agree with his politics. He has styled himself as a vigilante hacker and one that has the “power” to take down sites single handedly (with the right DDoS tools).

We missed this one on the 8th, but it is an important step for privacy right and the ability of the government to ask for everything they want. We had told you not that long ago how prosecutors were demanding information from Blogs, Twitter and other Social Media about people involved in the Occupy movement. This demand raised quite a storm as most felt it was an outlandish request (well actually prosecuting people for protesting is ridiculous as well) considering what they were after.