Newly published research from Ofcom reveals many things: 80 percent of adults in the UK will only share social networking data with friends and family, only 30 percent think that Internet information is reliable compared to 50 percent for TV and radio, and the Scottish are pretty crap when it comes to online security stuff.

The Adult Media Literacy report is encouraging in many respects, not least as it does show a trend towards security awareness amongst most UK Internet users. That 80 percent of adults being happy to share their social networking account data with friends and family only figure, for example, is way up from the 48 percent who said the same in 2007.

It’s not all good news though, with a quarter of Internet users admitting that they lacked confidence when it came to installing filtering software and configuring security features. This despite the security vendors going flat out to develop more user friendly fire-and-forget products. Obviously a lot more work needs to be done to make security solutions truly user friendly, and I suspect that much of that work needs to be at the educational rather than interface level. The trade off between usability and security is such that users have to make the defence granularity choice themselves, leaving it to software inevitably leads to a broken online experience in some way, shape or form. If the user doesn’t properly understand the implications of the choices they make then they will never get that balance right. Simply telling someone to default to ‘allow nothing’ is about as useful as scaffolding made from jelly.

However, I digress, back to the ‘it is not all good news’ thing: while the UK national trend for understanding online security issues is up nicely, one part of the country does seem to be lagging behind somewhat. Yes, I’m talking about you Scotland.

The report reveals that adults in Scotland are the least likely overall to worry about entering their personal data online, and some fifty percent of Scots are happy to enter their home address details on the Internet compared to just 23 percent in Wales and Northern Ireland for example. Yet this despite Scottish adults being the biggest home users of the Internet in the UK on 10.6 hours per week each on average, compared to 8.3 hours in England and 6.8 hours in Wales. Scottish users also account for the biggest percentage of social networking users on 49 percent with such profiles compared to 46 percent in Wales, 44 percent in England and just 31 percent in Northern Ireland.

So there you have it, proof that the Scottish are crap when it comes to online security - at least in comparison to the rest of the UK.

I guess I had better batten down the hatches now then and await a virtual Glasgow kiss or three…

File under: only in America. The ultimate in teenage sulking has to be taking your Mum to court, and that’s exactly what one 16 year old kid is doing in the US. According to court documents his Mum ‘hacked’ into his Facebook account and posted slanderous comments about him.

A report on the American KATV site that almost passed me by (ironically I only found out about it today when one of the mums on the school run asked for an opinion) the alleged hacking mother says she was just practising sensible parental online monitoring.

In an interview, Denise New insisted that she was within her “legal rights to monitor” her child and “have a conversation with your child on Facebook” no matter who’s account it was. The alleged incident happened after a friend of her sons contacted her about a posting which said he had been driving home at 95 MPH.

Her son, meanwhile, claims that mother (whom he doesn’t actually live with, instead being in the care of his grandmother) posted slanderous remarks about his private life as well as changing his password.

I’m all for parental control and care, being not only a father to four kids but grandfather to two (I know, I don’t look old enough etc) but would much rather talk to my kids about my concerns than go this far. Indeed, I’d no more hack into their social networking accounts (or simply take advantage of the fact that the account had not been logged off since the last time it was used on the family computer) than I would read their email. I certainly wouldn’t start posting messages on a personal account like that.

That said, as a 16 year old I would no more take my mum to court for something such as this as I would for her grounding me, taking away my beer or even clipping me around the ear. So are the prosecutors in this case, as has been suggested by the mother and others, taking away the right of parents to take care of and be responsible for their kids online?

Or is this simply a case of an argument gone too far down the road signposted family disfunctionality?

I am a heavily tattooed man, as in seriously heavily tattooed: full sleeves on both arms, full back piece, chest… Some of my earliest tattoos are no longer visible as they have been ‘covered up’ with better, and more appropriate, artwork. If needs be, I can cover them all up with a suit and shirt (well, one might peep over the top of my shirt collar but never mind) - getting rid of any errors in judgement in terms of online posts you may have made a few years back when drunk or just caught up in the stupidity of youth is not so easy.

I once ‘invaded’ an online forum for Morris Dance fans, along with a couple of mates, and started dancing by typing such things as ‘jingle jangle’ and ‘clackety-clack’ into messages. Very silly indeed, and it annoyed a lot of men with far too much facial hair who were harming nobody. That was probably one of the nicer things I did when drunk in charge of an Internet connection twenty years ago. Deleting my ‘digital tattoos’ is not just difficult, for the most part it is impossible.

The Internet has matured a lot during the last decade or so, and thankfully so have I. Which means I am not in the habit of leaving status updates on social networking sites which a potential client or employer might find, er, interesting enough not to become a real client or employer. I am honest and open online, but as in real life I adopt a ‘take me as is or leave me alone’ policy. Some people are not so fortunate.

Take the lads who were suspended from Wimbledon College School after a YouTube video of them mucking about on a bus came to the attention of the headmaster. Or the employee who made it clear how she felt about her boss and her job on Facebook and the boss quickly reciprocated by firing her. Then there was that chap who took a sickie after a night on the booze, and his Facebook status revealed just that to everyone, including his boss.

Now a survey by Symantec has shown that 35% of folk really don’t worry about what they are posting online, 62% of those under the age of 25 have ‘personal’ photos on the web, and 32% would like to delete parts of these digital tattoos if only they could.

“As a recruiter I cannot stress enough how important your online profile is. Whether its blogging, tweeting, facebooking or uploading videos, a fantastic CV can be dismissed in moments if the online story doesn’t match what I’m reading” commented Steve Mallison-Jones, Managing Director, Indigo Red. “When interviewing candidates I find it unbelievable that they don’t realise that all their online activity is indexed and normally traceable. That picture put up from the lad’s night out makes me ask some extra questions and I want to probe and prove I am getting the best candidates for my clients.”

Symantec recommends that people frequently check and increase their privacy settings on social networking sites to prevent unwanted visitors from seeing anything they shouldn’t.

I recommend people think about what they are Tweeting, posting to Facebook or plastering over the web. If you don’t want your work colleagues to know you are a Take That fan, then don’t start ’singing’ their lyrics on Facebook. Simples.

Security expert Graham Cluley recently described a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack as being like “15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time”.

I wonder, in the case of the attack aimed at Twitter this week, if those would be 15 fat Russian men?

Unlike the previous Twitter willy waving massacre which we reported upon, this one was not aimed at followers but the service itself and succeeded in pretty much grinding it to a halt for much of the day.

The Twitter status pages yesterday first reported that the service was “defending against a denial-of-service attack” followed by the site coming back up but “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”. Twitter head honcho Biz Stone blogged Twitter was “working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack”. As to the motivation behind the event, Stone prefers not to speculate. Others are not so shy.

Take the aforementioned Mr Cluley, for example, who has asked the question “was Twitter denial-of-service targeting anti-Russian blogger?”

Cluley bases his question around the fact that the attack happened on the first anniversary of Georgian troops moving into South Ossetia, and the military conflict which followed. Twitter ground to a halt, but it looks like Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger services were also targeted.

Amazingly, there is now what appears to be informed speculation that the attacks were not so much against the services as against a single user of those services: an unlucky blogger and anti-Russian activist by the name of Cyxymu who hails from Tbilisi.

Max Kelly, the Chief Security Officer at Facebook has even gone on the record telling CNET News that Cyxymu was the target of the DDoS attack, with all his different accounts spread across the impacted sites being attacked at the same time.

Cluley points out that “Cyxymu’s YouTube channel is still available” and “contains a number of videos, many related to skirmishes between Russians and Georgians” before asking “could these have been the webpages that the denial-of-service attack was trying to blast off the internet?”

Twitter has managed to survive the likes of Moonfruit marketing and Koobface infections but surely it should have done better in protecting itself against the fat blokes in the revolving door? After all, Facebook and Google seemed to manage OK.

Facebook likes to push the mantra that it is making the world a more open and connected place through the medium of dance. Sorry, through the medium of social networking I mean. It also likes to let slip every now and then that the software it uses to build the site and service is pretty much all open source stuff.

Now Facebook has taken that final step into the lovey dovey world of openness and is releasing that code which it has developed into the wild, so that the open source community can do with it what it will. Well, apart from producing a Facebook clone one assumes.

The process gets under way immediately as Facebook releases the Scribe cold. This critical piece of infrastructure is used to collect large amounts of data from a large number of servers, data which is then used to do stuff like track database memory consumption when delivering relationship stories directly into the News Feed. Or, as Facebook puts it “Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.”

Facebook ended up building its own system because all the open source, and proprietary ones for that matter, which it tried to perform the same task just could not cope with the massive amounts of data being generated by Facebook members. Massive as in tens of billions of pieces of information being moved around every single day.

The Scribe source can be found here.

Up until the 14th August all was calm in the land of the Brit Twitterer. Then Twitter announced it was pulling the free SMS alert for UK users. Now, a mere two weeks later, Twitterers are experiencing cold turkey withdrawal symptoms and looking for an alternative.

Which is where ISP and VoIP specialist Gradwell comes in with the newly announced Twittex service which promises to fill the void for text hungry Brit Twitterers.

Well, sort of. It ain’t free unfortunately. Instead it adopts a pre-pay service model. Gradwell MD Peter Gradwell (do you think that’s why he got the job, having the same name as the company?) explains what’s going on:

IDC would appear to think so, with new analysis that appeared in the Financial Times suggesting that as many as 36 percent of enterprise web sites are already turning to this technological strategy of using blogs, wikis and social networking to interface with customers and businesses alike. What’s more, the report also says that another 27 percent are looking to embrace Web 2.0 by this time next year.

So are you using Facebook, LinkedIn or a blog yet? In a business capacity that is? I am often accused of over hyping the business benefit of social networking, however within my own experience realm of the small business I have to say it works. My consultancy recently picked up a contract through a LinkedIn contact, which would simply not have been made any other way, which is potentially worth at least

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

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.

Talk about social networking sites and you probably think Facebook, MySpace and possibly LinkedIn. The chances are, unless you happen to be Brazilian, the Google social networking offering Orkut has managed to evade your radar altogether. Orkut is, however, hugely popular in Brazil and that