Betting on Hubdub technology
By Davey Winder in Editorial
I like a wager, perhaps unsurprisingly as in a former life one of my jobs included working for a large horse racing outfit. File under not a lot of people know that. Not a lot of people know how the news is going to play out in the technology sector either, but that doesn’t stop them thinking that they do. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could bet on such things, just for fun of course? A bit like popping down the bookies to bet on who would be the Xmas number one in the pop charts in the days before the X-Factor ruined all that.
Over the weekend, in-between celebrating my 13th wedding anniversary by not eating a meal that was so bad the restaurant agreed we should not pay anything towards the bill and falling out of a tree while rescuing a kitten and breaking a rib in the process, I discovered Hubdub. This brilliantly addictive service manages to bring together like-minded news junkies with the will to bet pretend money on the outcome of breaking technology news stories.
You sign up, you get 1000 Hudub Dollars to play with, and you start betting. Head over to the technology section and you can pit your obviously vastly superior wits against the assorted plebs to predict the outcome of such news inspired questions as:
- Will Mark Zuckerberg still be CEO of Facebook by end of 2008? (currently 84% say yes)
- What will happen to Scrabulous? (53% reckon it will be sold to Electronic Arts)
- How many lay offs will Yahoo! announce by end of January? (38% reckon around 10%)
- Will Google’s fourth quarter revenue exceed $4.5bn? (66% say yes)
- What will be the Firefox web brower’s market share percentage by the end of March? (26% think between 18.50 and 18.99%)
I love this ‘think you know better’ mentality thing, but then I would being a journalist, blogger, consultant and ego-maniac. Mind you, even I wouldn’t like to bet on Hubdub not have being copied and done bigger and better by this time next year
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
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CAPTCHA, HACKEDCHA, GOTCHA
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart security system, thankfully better known by the pseudo-acronym of CAPTCHA, has been well and truly cracked according to reports online. The system uses a set of alpha-numeric characters presented against a background which when combined make it all but impossible for a machine to decipher but easy enough for the human brain to be able to deal with. Or at least that was up until now if these reports are to be believed.
A Russian security ‘researcher’ going by the pseudonym of John Wane has claimed success in bypassing one of the toughest of CAPTCHA implementations, the one to be found at Yahoo! Wane has posted decoder system code online which is said to be accurate to around 35 percent. Now that might not sound significant, but when you are trying to keep the spammer bots at bay I can assure you that it is. As Wane himself says “It’s not necessary to achieve a high degree of accuracy when designing automated recognition software” especially when a spammer can easily hit a rate in excess of 100,000 attempts per day. If they were to manage anything like 30,000 successful account creations then the spam problem, for blogs, forums and the general email population, would rocket overnight.
Application vulnerability software specialists Fortify has warned us all to be vigilant, especially as far as message received from webmail systems are concerned in the light of this possible breach. Fortify Chief Scientist Brian Chess has gone on record to say that “any free email service that is using the CAPTCHA system - or a similar approach to prevent automated sign-ups - is engaged in a never-ending arms race with its attackers.”
It isn’t all bad news though, as CAPTCHA represents just the main gate as it were in the fight against spammers, and the likes of Yahoo! and Google have plenty of other tricks up their collective spam fighting sleeves to prevent an all out flood of malicious mail.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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The 6.5 billion quid hello
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Facebook, Security, Internet on
According to a poll conducted by Global Secure Systems and Infosecurity Europe 2008, the cost to UK corporations in terms of lost productivity as a result of staff being all sociable online is as high as
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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Digital carbon copying of books begins
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Many years ago, around 20 to be precise. Frank and Sylvia Thornley established what would become quite possibly the most important business with regard to the future of the Internet in the UK. The Compulink Information eXchange, better known as CIX, started life as a back bedroom BBS which allowed users to download public domain software sourced from trips to the US and chat with other techie types. It quickly went on to become the first commercial online conferencing system in the UK as well as the most influential, what with its membership of journalists and technological innovators. As for why it was so important in the whole Internet scheme of things, considering that for the first ten years of its life it was a dial-up proprietary and private system which hardly scraped the very boundaries of the emerging Internet, well that is simple: it was where UK consumer Internet service provision was born.
One CIXen as we like to call ourselves (and yes, I remain a loyal CIXen to this day) was a chap named Cliff Stanford. One of his claims to fame is as the founder of probably the first online auction system, which operated as a conference on Cix and predates eBay by many years. However, his main achievement and the one that he will surely be remembered for was as founder of Demon Internet, the very first consumer dial-up Internet Service Provider in the UK and one of the first in the world to successfully market an affordable service for your everyday punter. Demon started, funnily enough, on CIX. It was there that Cliff set up a conference called tenner-a-month with the simple aim of getting enough people to pledge to pay ten quid every month, with a year
Rated: 95% (4 votes)
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Crimeware toolkit targets 10,000 trusted sites
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, Spyware, Security, Internet on
The Finjan Malicious Code Research Center is reporting that a crimeware Trojan named ‘random js toolkit’ is threatening to turn highly trusted websites into lucrative money making traps for the online underworld. It has identified in excess of 10,000 sites in the US which have been infected by the toolkit Trojan in December alone, and the actual figure is likely to be much higher as it is an extremely elusive little bugger which can avoid detection unless some kind of real-time code inspection technology is being used.
The payload, unsurprisingly, is the theft of data from the machines of those unlucky enough to get infected. Data such as documents, passwords, surfing habitats, pretty much anything and everything required to do the identity theft thing.
Finjan has published an in-depth report covering a random js toolkit attack, but the basics are as follows:
The random js attack is performed by dynamic embedding of scripts into a webpage.
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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Home workers are sick
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog on
I have been enjoying, although that is not always the right word, living the home working lifestyle for nearly 20 years now. I became a telecommuter out of necessity rather than choice, 20 years ago I was stuck in a wheelchair too big to get through the front door of my flat at the time courtesy of viral encephalitis and so kind of fell into a writing career where my clients could be met within the realm of cyberspace (using that word kind of dates things nicely, doesn
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
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The new currency of online consumerism
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Internet, e-commerce on
According to Will Beresford, the strategy director at social web experts Beyond Analysis 2008 could well be the year of social media for business. He predicts that the traditional models which consumers use to research products and services will not only start to change but will fundamentally so courtesy of social media. Think social networking sites, think user feedback and review sites, think consumers that are ready and willing to interact with each other in order to get the best deal. “Traditional search engines will become increasingly less relevant to the consumer and businesses will need to re-think their online strategies” Beresford insists.
Certainly it would appear that social media as a content creation genre will impact upon the way that search engines do business, thanks to the growth in the amount of data available. Beresford suggests that “search engine providers will look to introduce tiered services providing more accurate results to those willing to pay” which could mean tiered search services bundled into ISP packages as well as the more obvious provision of search services to the business sphere. Businesses looking to research consumers could also find themselves having to reappraise their strategies. “As more businesses realise the value inherent in their customer data and the strategic role it plays for the future, reliance on traditional qualitative research will fall into terminal decline” says Beresford. With customer data being enriched by that to be found on the social web, traditional research tools such as focus groups and questionnaires could find themselves in danger of extinction.
However, the greatest change looks like being firmly in that ‘how consumers make their purchasing decisions’ camp with feedback and influence from immediate social networks playing a much more important role than branding or advertising reach. Personal recommendations could become the new currency of consumerism online…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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One million Facebook users exposed to Zango worm
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spyware, Facebook, Security, Internet on
Given the popularity of Facebook applications, those annoying widgets which people in your network naturally assume you will be interested in (even though most are banal even by widget standards), it was only a matter of time before the trend was exploited by those with a less than social motive. And so it is that security threat researchers at Fortinet have uncovered a malicious widget which has already found its way onto the computers of 3% of Facebook users - or a million people if your prefer.
The Secret Crush application spreads by Facebook users getting a notification from someone in their network who has already installed the widget, which informs them that one of their friends has the hots for them. The wording is such that suggests it might be the friend who sent the invitation, but the only way to find out is to install the application itself. At this point the plot thickens, because using an escalation of commitment strategy Secret Crush the widget once installed will only reveal the identity of your secret admirer once you have invited another 5 of your friends to install it. According to Fortinet, even after inviting those 5 friends there is no revelation other than an invitation to download a ‘crush calculator’.
Fortinet has examined the page source of the advertising frame that is displayed and discovered it is hosted at zango.com, within the affiliates section. Downloading the application actually leads directly to a copy of Zango, the in famous adware/spyware that used to be known as 180Solutions. Download this and rather than a secret crush you will find yourself being courted by adverts.
Although there is no way of knowing the exact figures, the authors of Secret Crush are likely to be getting a few pence for every download, which multiplied by a million or two clicks soon adds up.
Fortinet CMO Richard Stiennon included “malicious Facebook widgets” in his list of security threat predictions for 2008, and it looks like he was right on the money. There seems to be no mechanism in place at Facebook to protect users from this kind of malicious application. Hackers could implement a similar scheme but replacing the Zango IFrame with a drive-by install engine instead.
“Keep in mind that, given the odds, people are likely developing Facebook “Platform Applications” for profit rather than just for fun. Now, this does not mean that all widgets are going to be malicious. As in every business frame, honest ways to generate profits surely exist on Facebook, in exchange for providing a service to users who subscribe to it. However, users must be aware of this, and resort to a blend of common sense and protection gear to avoid being scammed and abused” advises Fortinet EMEA Threat Response Team Manager Guillaume Lovet.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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