Social Networks...Twitter, Facebook etc

From software to hardware, breakthough to disaster, it all belongs here!

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Tworting: Twitter Twits Twicked Twice...and another one makes thrice!! :shock:

A security breach...for the third time this year for the San Francisco based company.
INTERNET SECURITY
Twitter hacked after password guess for third time in '09
Attack highlights risks of easy-to-guess passwords, cloud computing.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Breaking into someone's e-mail can be child's play for a determined hacker, as Twitter Inc. has learned the hard way — again.

For the third time this year, the company was the victim of a security breach stemming from a simple end-run around its defenses. In the latest case, a hacker guessed the password for an employee's personal e-mail account and stole confidential company documents.

The techniques used by the attackers highlight the dangers of a broader trend promoted by Google Inc. and others toward storing more data online.

The shift toward doing more over the Web means that mistakes employees make in their private lives can do serious damage to their employers because a single e-mail account can tie the two worlds together.

Stealing the password for someone's Gmail account, for example, gives the hacker access to any Google applications they might use for work, such as those used to create spreadsheets or presentations.

That's apparently what happened to Twitter, which shares confidential data within the company through the Google Apps package that incorporates e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and other Google services for $50 per user per year.

Co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog Wednesday that the personal e-mail of an unnamed Twitter administrative employee was hacked about a month ago, and the attacker got access to the employee's Google Apps account.

Separately, the wife of co-founder and CEO Evan Williams also had her personal e-mail hacked around the same time, Stone wrote. Through that, the attacker got access to Williams' personal Amazon and PayPal accounts.

Stone said the attacks are "about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets."

Some of the material the hacker posted online from the Google Apps documents was more embarrassing than damaging, such as floor plans for new office space and a pitch for a TV show about the online messaging service.

Twitter says only one user account was potentially compromised because a screenshot was included among stolen documents. The value in hijacking a user's account is limited, as those attacks are mainly used to post fake messages and try to trick the victim's friends into clicking on links that will infect their computers.

But sensitive Twitter documents were accessed: The hacker claims to have employee salaries and credit card numbers, résumés from applicants, internal meeting reports and growth projections.

TechCrunch, a widely read technology blog, says it was e-mailed the documents, and subsequently published some of them, including financial projections that Twitter drew up in February.

The forecast predicted Twitter would generate its first revenue in the current quarter, with sales of about $400,000 and about 60 employees. By the end of next year, Twitter expected to employ about 345 people with annual revenue of about $140 million, according to the documents.

In his blog post, Stone said the stolen documents "are not polished or ready for prime time, and they're certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world," but said they are sensitive enough that their public release could jeopardize relationships with Twitter's partners.

Stone said the company is talking to lawyers about "what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents."

What the attacks on Twitter show is that Web sites don't need to get compromised in the traditional sense to put its users and employees at risk.

Hackers don't need to find a vulnerability in the site itself or plant a virus on an employee's computer to sneak inside.

All they need to find is an employee who uses weak passwords for his or her e-mail accounts, or has security questions that are easy to answer.

It's an old strategy that's becoming more and more valuable as people's personal and work lives merge online.

In an attack in January, a Twitter support staffer's account was compromised using a password-guessing program. The hacker got administrative access to the site, and Twitter feeds for Barack Obama, Britney Spears and other celebrities were used to send out bogus messages. A similar attack occurred in May.

The attacks on Twitter serve as a reminder of why many corporations are reluctant to adopt so-called cloud computing, in which companies pay someone else to run their software remotely, with users accessing the programs over live Internet connections.

The lesson is an old one: Use hard-to-guess passwords, which include some combination of letters and numbers, and for companies, be careful about how many accounts are linked to the same username and password combination.
http://www.statesman.com/business/conte ... itter.html
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Twitter according to this Moongirl...

Tweets = Chinese wwwhispers :wink:
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How Tweet It Is
The Royal Opera House in London typically hosts performances of classical operas such as Richard Wagner's "Das Rheingold," left, and Georges Bizet's "Carmen." Tonight, however, they will be showcasing lyrical snippets from the world's first Twitter opera.

Here’s a few lines from the Twitter opera thus far:

William awakens, and hears the tell-tale tap-tap tap of someone outside his room twittering on their phone

And with that he climbed a nearby tree and resolved to dwell amongst the leaves for the rest of his days

Hans (sword in hand, lest you forget): “how can I reach my love in a tower so high? If I was a bird, then I could fly. We aren’t meant to be apart? Oh my breaking heart”

The ginger cat sings an aria urging people never to stop feeding the pigeons, for they are his food
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovatio ... lt-tweets/
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Twitter To Add Geo-tagging
‎Aug 21, 2009‎
Micro-blogging service Twitter adds features that to allow users to add their location to their status updates, adding to speculation about how the service will make money
Twitter is bringing easy geo-tagging to the popular micro-blogging service, and it adds another possible way that the service might be able to make money.

Writing on the company's blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote:.....


As Stone mentioned in his post, third party developers like Germany's Twibble have already produced geo-location services for Twitter. They relied on information pulled from the location details in users' profiles or from location information in the form of latitude and longitude or hash tags in the tweet itself.

Twibble's mobile client was specifically designed add the location information by pulling the data from the GPS radios in smartphones. It is a relatively easy process, but it has its drawbacks. Updating my profile location took a few steps in addition to posting a tweet, which became cumbersome if I was moving a lot, and embedding my coordinates or a location hash tag in the tweet itself took up precious characters. Hopefully, the geo-location API will make the process much easier and embed the meta-data in my tweets in such a way as to leave all of my 140 characters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/200 ... ter-google
Twibble - a location aware Twitter client for Mac, Windows, Symbian...
http://www.twibble.de/
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The Longest Poem In The World
"The Longest Poem in the World" is composed by aggregating real-time
public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. It is constantly growing at ~4000 verses / day.

You can see more verses by clicking the three dots at the bottom (• • • http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/)
http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/
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Twit wits...clever!
Twitnitwits... :shock:
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Phat Tweetment
The scales that send a tweet every time you weigh in.
http://www.withings.com/
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Sarah makes a Killen' on Twitter
Conan O'Brien sparks Twitter fan craze
A Twitter fan who had just three followers on the site last week now has a staggering 25,000.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/817058-cona ... -fan-craze
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Twitterature
Twitterature is exactly what you think it is when you first hear the word: literature via Twitter. Imagine some of your favourite classics (and some less favourite ones that made you sweat in class): The Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, The Iliad, The Three Musketeers. Now strip them of all the extra fluff, and image these stories told with only the bare essentials – as well as in 20 tweets of 140 characters or less. It gives for some hilarious results.

There are also a couple of contemporary titles. Believe it or not, the seven books of the Harry Potter series were tweeted in 20 tweets. Yes, you read that right – all seven, in 20 tweets. It wasn’t one of the best efforts in the book, though for a diehard Potter fan such as myself, it did make me smile a couple of times as I read @NotoriousHP tweets.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/bo ... z0jxDU4MTi
Twitterature (2009)
Written By: Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin
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Soybeans the wonderful treat
The more you eat the more you tweet...
:wink:

May 16, 2010
You can imagine how his heart sank when @naika_tei, sitting on the toilet, reached for the toilet paper only to realize… there was none. Oh, crap. One tweet and 20 minutes later, toilet paper found its way to the Japanese man’s toilet stall at the Yodobashi Camera store in Akihabara. Smart move, @naika_tei.
http://absolutelyfobulous.com/2010/05/1 ... let-paper/
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Pretty Slick Fake Account - @BPglobalPR
May 27, 2010
Fake BP Twitter account remains shrouded in mystery

Along the beleaguered Gulf Coast, the emergency measure known as "top kill" appears to have halted the flow of oil from a ruptured offshore BP well--but the bogus Twitter sensation known as @BPGlobalPR continues to gush out black comedy gold.

"Just got the concession call from Exxon Valdez. They were great competitors and remarkably evil about everything," the account, which claims to be written by the British oil giant's public relations department, tweeted shortly after the unfortunate revelation that the recent Gulf Coast disaster had surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in volume. "They want to fine us $4,300 for every barrel of oil spilled? Umm, we're not spilling barrels, the oil is going directly into the gulf. DUH," @BPGlobalPR asserted irreverently on Wednesday.

As the follower count of @BPGlobalPR starts to edge past 60,000 people just over one week after its inaugural tweet, the identity of the author remains completely unknown.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20006199-36.html
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The Social Media Sobriety Test
Nothing good happens online after 1am. And since Webroot believes in protecting you in every aspect of your life, including your social media, we've created the Social Media Sobriety Test. Put an end to the embarrassment that follows regrettable, late night posts with 3 easy steps.
http://socialmediasobrietytest.com/

Watch The Tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy1PIgjCqRM
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Twitter 2010: Year In Review
http://yearinreview.twitter.com/
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Lost & Found
# Name Damon Lindelof
# Location Los Angeles, California
# Web http://twitter.co...
# Bio Yeah, I'm one of the idiots behind LOST. And no, I don't understand it either.
http://twitter.com/DamonLindelof
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Tweet to me only with mime eyes... :shock:
http://twitter.com/#!/themime
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