Yahoo Partners With Twitter To Further Personalize Homepage Newsfeed
Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design.
The Twitter partnership expands upon this earlier mission involving personalization – a key focus for Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer – noting that Yahoo will now ”seamlessly include relevant and personalized tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources.”
These tweets will now appear directly in the Yahoo news feed, which offers an endlessly scrollable stream of content, divided into sections like “All Stories,” “News,” “Local,” “Entertainment,” “Sports” and more. The headlines that come from Twitter accounts will be indicated by referencing the source by its Twitter handle (e.g. “@ABCWorldNews” as opposed to “ABC News”) and there will be “Follow” buttons to the right of the stories, allowing users to click to add the news organization to their Twitter feeds.
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Man Sells Access to Personal Browsing Data on Kickstarter
The data generated from our online activity is worth a lot to companies like Facebook and Google, but individual Web surfers don’t get paid for it. Federico Zannier doesn’t think that makes a lot of sense, so about a week ago he started offering access to his own browsing activity for $2 a day.
The Brooklyn resident launched a Kickstarter project on May 5 with a simple proposal. Zannier says he is willing to “give away a lifelong, international, sub-licensable right to use [his] personal data” as part of an experiment to see if there might be a market for such data sold by the individual Internet users who actually generate it.
“In 2012, advertising revenue in the United States was around $30 billion. That same year, I made exactly $0 from my own data. But what if I tracked everything myself? Could I at least make a couple bucks back?” Zannier asks on his Kickstarter page.
Dubbed “A Bit(e) of Me,” the project had raised $1,185 from 103 backers as of Monday afternoon. The minimum pledge for the project is $1 and it’s scheduled to end its initial Kickstarter funding on June 5.
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GeekDad prescribes a weekend free from mobile data (Wired UK)
Being out of the country with the family last month meant I had to forgo my usual feeding loop of Twitter, Facebook and email. Having tried purchasing a local Sim card, Wi-Fi access or even sniffing out the local McDonalds for free connectivity I finally decided to give up and switch the data off on my iPhone.
Back in the UK it took us a week or so to get over the jetlag and back into our usual routine of school, work and home life. When we did, things felt more relaxed and somehow we seemed to have more time.
Then I realised that I hadn’t switched my iPhone’s data back on and that my usual social media habits were still on a break. I decided to leave it off for the rest of the week and see how it went. I was surprised how few times I actually had to go and turn on data to check something essential — usually the weather or school website, and was quite happy to lock things down again afterwards.
Now, of course it is overkill to turn off all the data permanently on our smartphones but taking a regular break from all that inbound traffic seems like a good idea. I’ve currently settled on the idea of having things off on the weekends to get some home/work separation.
I had thought about just turning the phone off, but because friends and family use the mobile rather than landline to contact and arrange meeting up it seemed sensible to leave the SMS and voice-calls on. It’s also meant that I’ve got back in touch with some old friends who are only on text — with my fingers looking for something non-data related to do on the phone.
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Bing more malicious than Google
According to a new study, Bing searches deliver five times as many malicious website links than a Google search for the same phrase.
An 18-month study by a German independent testing lab called AV-Test has shown that Bing searches are five times more likely to offer links to malicious websites than Google searches, despite both sites working to suppress such results.
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The study analysed nearly 40 million websites delivered by seven different search engines globally, with Google and Bing accounting for around 10 million results each. Approximately 13 million sites came from Russian search engine Yandex, whilst the remaining results were emitted from Faroo, Teoma, Baidu and Blekko.
Best free antivirus software: 8 internet security programs we recommend
Viruses, spyware, hackers, phishing sites - the web is a dangerous place, and every PC owner needs effective, reliable antivirus software to keep them safe. But this can be expensive, especially as you’ll pay again to update the package, each and every year.
Fortunately there is plenty of free antivirus software, many of which are just as capable as their commercial cousins. So if you’re tired of annual subscriptions, read on - we’ve picked out eight of the best free internet security tools to deliver great security at no cost at all.
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The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet
The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we’ve seen.
Growth Spurt
On Monday, March 18, 2013 Spamhaus contacted CloudFlare regarding an attack they were seeing against their website spamhaus.org. They signed up for CloudFlare and we quickly mitigated the attack. The attack, initially, was approximately 10Gbps generated largely from open DNS recursors. On March 19, the attack increased in size, peaking at approximately 90Gbps. The attack fluctuated between 90Gbps and 30Gbps until 01:15 UTC on on March 21.
The attackers were quiet for a day. Then, on March 22 at 18:00 UTC, the attack resumed, peaking at 120Gbps of traffic hitting our network. As we discussed in the previous blog post, CloudFlare uses Anycast technology which spreads the load of a distributed attack across all our data centers. This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers. The attackers ceased their attack against the Spamhaus website four hours after it started.
Other than the scale, which was already among the largest DDoS attacks we’ve seen, there was nothing particularly unusual about the attack to this point. Then the attackers changed their tactics. Rather than attacking our customers directly, they started going after the network providers CloudFlare uses for bandwidth. More on that in a second, first a bit about how the Internet works.
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Yontoo Trojan tries to lure Mac users with movie trailers
Trojan.Yontoo.1 is a nasty bit of software. Already known to security researchers, it has begun sneaking onto computers running OS X by installing an adware plugin via the Chrome, Firefox and Safari Web browsers.
The toxic plugin brings additional ads to the user, part of a money-making scheme if you click on them — but more importantly gives outsiders access to track your Web surfing.
Russian security firm Dr. Web reported the problem, noting that “adware for Mac OS X has been increasing in number since the beginning of 2013. Trojan.Yontoo.1 is the most prominent of them: It can download and install an adware browser plugin in an infected system.”
Symantec, too, has taken note of the Trojan for Windows users, where it installs a Web browser extension that displays ads that “appear to be from Facebook.”
NBC News asked Apple about Trojan.Yontoo.1, but the company declined to comment.
Dr. Web says there are “several ways” for the Trojan to get onto a computer. Among them are movie trailer pages that ask users to install a browser plugin. In fact, “the prompt only imitates a common dialogue displayed when a plugin needs to be installed or additional configuration is necessary. After clicking on ‘Install the plug-in,’ the user is redirected to another site from which Trojan.Yontoo.1 is downloaded.”
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Hotmail and Outlook hit by ongoing fault, Microsoft confirms
Users of Outlook and Hotmail webmail services have been hit by a lengthy fault, Microsoft has confirmed.
A status message informed users on Wednesday morning about the issues, with the company adding it was “working to restore service right now”.
Users reported not seeing emails that should have reached their accounts.
Microsoft is in the process of migrating millions of users from Hotmail, which launched in 1998, to new Outlook.com accounts.
Problems began to hit the services on Tuesday evening, with Microsoft acknowledging it had a problem at 21:35 GMT.
According to reports, some users noted being unable to see certain emails in the accounts, while others reported email was simply inaccessible altogether.
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Soundtrackat6 @FleetwoodMac - Everywhere
From @ThreeUK ‘s #danceponydance ad
How to Safely Keep Java in Your Web Browser
For the last year or so, Java seems to have spawned a never-ending flow of security bugs, partly because of the software environment’s invisibility to end users and partly because of the system access it allows.
In January alone, two different Java vulnerabilities were attacked by widespread browser exploit kits. At least one of those Java flaws led to the recently disclosed network penetrations of Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and may have also been involved in the compromise of 250,000 Twitter accounts.
Because of these dangers, many security experts recommend that users disable Java browser plug-ins, or even to take the more drastic step of uninstalling the underlying Java Runtime Environment (JRE) entirely.
Those recommendations may make sense for many, but they are not blanket solutions for all users with Java installed on their machines.
Caffeinated World
The problem is that Java, in one form or another, is still used for a lot of things that people want and need to do. It might be an essential element of running programs that you never considered.
If, for example, you are one of the millions of people who enjoy playing Minecraft or RuneScape, you’ll need Java installed on your machine. If you play “World of Warcraft,” getting rid of Java might leave you without the use of the game’s launcher.
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