Twitter Adds Email Security to Ward Off Cybercriminals (Mashable)
To cut down on fake email scams and ploys to steal your passwords, Twitter has added an email authentication security measure to prevent malicious attacks on user accounts. The company announced on Thursday it has started using a new technology DMARC, which aims to prevent cybercriminals from sending emails to users with a fake Twitter.com address.
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At last night’s Social Media Week panel at Viacom headquarters, reality stars and super fans gathered to discuss the crumbling divide between celebrities and the public.
LinkedIn Remakes Job Search Feature (SocialTimes)
LinkedIn will roll out a streamlined version of its job posting feature over the next few weeks that will include more granular search options, the company said on Friday. The move follows remakes of the social network’s homepage and profiles last year.
(Boston's not on the list, but check out the view from the MIT Media Lab.)
Every year, Social Media Week draws participants from around the world to discover new trends in mobile and social media. If you’d like a free vacation out of the deal, get out your smartphone. Social Media Week is celebrating its sixth anniversary this fall with a photography contest to highlight this year’s trend of sharing and curating photos.
Nokia looks to be one of the first location-based technology and vending machines working together. You may think that it seems to be a cool match, but will the connection last beyond its introduction at Social Media Week?
The next Social Media Week is set for Sept. 19-23, and Los Angeles will return to the list of event cities, along with new entries Vancouver, British Columbia; Beirut, Lebanon; and Glasgow, Scotland.
Social Media Week organizer Crowdcentric is looking for contributors for a global editorial platform covering worldwide social and mobile media.
Crowdcentric said it expects two to three posts weekly, in English, covering news, analysis, or commentary on social and mobile media developments from contributors’ native countries, adding that interested parties can sign up here, and questions can be emailed to sara@socialmediaweek.org.
The next Social Media Week will be held Sept. 19-13 in 12 cities.
foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was the subject of a keynote interview as part of Social Media Week New York, conducted by Fast Company‘s Austin Carr at JWT’s Media & Communications Hub in Manhattan.
Crowley mentioned that the company has grown from four employees and 100,000 users to 50 employees and some 6.5 million users, saying, “Going from 100,000 users to 6.5 million users, a lot of things break in the middle.”
Describing how the foursquare platform evolved, he said, “You can get 10 random foursquare users in a room and ask them what drew them to the platform, and you’d get 10 different answers. What should I eat? Can I get a special? We threw 10 things at the wall to see what sticks, and all 10 of them stuck. It’s a good thing, because it shows how rich the platform is and how rich it could be. How do you boil everything that foursquare does down to one sentence? I don’t think we want to tell people how to use the product. We want people to teach us how they’re using it. The initial design was, ‘I go out for happy hour, I broadcast my location, and a bunch of people show up.’ ”
Crowley continued, “Can you use game mechanics to incentivize and encourage people to go out and enrich their lives? I think there’s something good about software that can get you to try new experiences. No matter where I’m standing in Manhattan, there’s 1,000 options of things I could be doing right now. foursquare can help me filter those options.”
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were the hot topic at WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, a Social Media Week New York panel hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum and moderated by its editor and curator, Micah Sifry.
Speakers at the event, in order, were Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking; Evgeny Morozov, author of new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The event was held at Hearst’s Art & Culture Hub in Manhattan.
Zandt made it a point to differentiate between DDoS attacks and hacking, saying, “Denial-of-service attacks are not hacking. Hacking tends to be where systems are broken into and data are compromised. None of the business data or practices was compromised in any way. I do feel that DDOS is a civil form of disobedience.”
Speaking specifically about Anonymous, the group responsible for attacking several corporate Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, she said, “In the past, Anonymous hasn’t done anything in this scale that was explicitly, overtly, hugely political,” adding that the group was made up of “chaos enthusiasts — they’re interested in the drama of chaos unfolding. It’s not as if there was this sleeper cell of people who were ready to attack this big, bad corporation.”
On digital activism in general, Zandt concluded, “I’m often very, very frustrated with what the face of actual digital activism looks like. We have the ability and the freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who don’t. We can’t ultimately rely on these digital tools to do our dirty work. If governments and corporations can easily collude to disable our ability to communicate with one another, what is our response?”
The Science and Technology Hub at Google’s New York outpost was the site of Monday afternoon’s The Internet and Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already in a Post-Social-Media World?, hosted by Wired and moderated by its New York bureau chief, John C. Abell.
Ease of use and access was a point that came up often, as Abell said, “With electricity and an Internet connection, you can whisper in Times Square and be heard anywhere else in the world,” and panelist Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, added, “The fact that it’s free and easy and cool sort of underlines the need for people to see what’s happening in Egypt and get people together for an advocacy campaign.” Panelist Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, pointed to how quickly people in parts of the Middle East are getting mobile phones, adding, “In the past few years, the number of people with mobile phones in Egypt has soared, something like 60 percent — same thing in Tunisia.” Adam Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at New York University, added, “During the civil-rights movement, if they had cell phones, they would have used them. Now we can reach many more people There’s nothing really new here: These are just tools that are amplifying the message we can connect and spread People are more connected: It helps in bringing people together.”
Sifry cautioned against generalizing and jumping to conclusions, saying, “I don’t think we know almost diddly about what’s actually going on. I think we have to be extremely careful before making judgments about the role of social media in Tunisia, Egypt, the rest of the Mideast, or anywhere else. We use the word ‘movement’ too easily. The language of revolution and movements is instead what we hear rather than the reality.”
