Officer Pulls Gun at Twitter Snowball Fight

Three amazing things at work here:

1. A police officer actually pulling a gun on people throwing snowballs at his car.
2. Hundreds of people attended a snowball fight organized on Twitter.
3. A viral video on YouTube resulted in the near suspension on this officer.

Never underestimate the power of the social media.

Nielsen: Consumers Trust Online Opinions

When you research a product on the internet, do you put more weight on what people who bought the product have said about it?

When it comes to trust, personal recommendations and consumer opinions posted online are most valued by consumers worldwide. So says the latest twice-yearly Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, which gauged opinions from 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. In fact, 90 percent of the respondents said they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent said they trusted consumer opinions posted online.

Shopping online is a largely solitary experience. You can’t talk to other customers in the store, you can’t talk to a salesperson, and yet this is tremendous pressure on e-commerce to convert clicks to buys. Even though having these reviews attached to a product can be a comfort to consumers, keep in mind that these reviews can also be faked as well.

Giving Up Your Friends’ E-Mail Addresses

If you’ve ever logged in to Facebook and wondered why you get certain “friends” suggested to you, a major reason why has to do with when you created your account.

One of the things you’re asked is to hand over your e-mail address book, whether from Yahoo! or GMail or wherever. Facebook then uses an index of email addresses to see if anyone you know is using Facebook. It seems like a good service, but the problem is they hold onto that information in case anyone you know who’s not on Facebook creates an account later. So, they continue to hold on to that data that you may have forgotten about turning over.

Fast forward now to this story, where the writer was inadvertently turned into a spammer for a social media photo sharing service because she clicked on an email from one of her “friends”.

I thought it was a little strange when I received separate e-mail messages from two people I knew only slightly asking me to click and see their photos on a social networking site called Tagged. I ignored them at first, but then thought maybe I should check it out. After all, I should keep up on what’s hot in the social networking world, right? This could be the new Twitter.

That’s when I started doing everything wrong. I obligingly typed in my e-mail address and a password to see those photos. Well, the photos didn’t exist, but I had unwittingly given the site “permission” to go through my entire e-mail contact list and send a message to everyone, inviting them to see my “photos.” I found this out only when I started receiving e-mail back from people agreeing to be my friend. I quickly realized what had happened and shot off an apologetic message explaining why I inadvertently spammed them.

As friends’ responses started rolling in, I heard from some who had received similar e-mail. Others told me about the same problems with Web sites like MyLife.com and desktopdating.net. This wasn’t along the lines of someone stealing my bank account information or Social Security number, but I was annoyed and embarrassed…

So what’s going on here? I turned to Michael Argast, a security analyst with Sophos, an Internet security company based in Boston, to find out. He told me that this kind of thing has been happening for quite a long time in various forms, but has really caught on in the last three to six months. It’s not the same as what’s known as phishing — fake Web sites masquerading as real ones to get personal information. These Web sites really exist.

Instead, this is generally called contact scraping. Once you enter your credentials, like your user name or password, the company sweeps through your contact list and sends everyone an invitation to join the site. How do the companies benefit? They are expanding their user population, Mr. Argast said, which they can use to attract potential investors or advertisers. Whether those users are willing participants, or people like me, is another question.

“There are multiple shades of gray,” Mr. Argast said. “Some social networking sites, like Facebook, are pretty straightforward in asking if you want to share information about your friends. Others are far less scrupulous.”

In the case of Tagged, my friends received a perky e-mail saying: “Alina has added you as a friend on Tagged. Is Alina your friend?” Then you click on yes or no. Even more insidiously, it adds, “Please respond or Alina may think you said no,” with a sad-face icon next to it… “It’s using the chain mail psychology,” Mr. Argast said. And he’s right. My friends got guilt-tripped into signing on.

Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

When you understand how the credit card processing system in this country works, you probably will be a little bit alarmed with the number of channels your private information have to go through when you make a purchase. Here’s a simplified explanation.

First, your card number goes through the point-of-sale. Most retailers now have electronic terminals at the POS register that allow you to directly swipe your card and enter your PIN or signature on the screen. In most restaurants and bars, though, you have to hand your card over to another person to be swiped through the computer. Unknown to you, they may be writing down your card information or using a skimmer device to copy the magnetic information off your card to be transferred later to a dummy card.

Even if you’re dealing with an honest food server, bartender, or sales associate that isn’t stealing your information, you might have an issue with the credit card processing vendor that the business is using. You see, your transaction doesn’t go directly to Visa, MasterCard, or AMEX or the particular bank who owns your account. With as many real-time electronic transactions as there are on a daily basis, there is no way they could keep up with the demand on their servers.

Instead, there are intermediary firms who do the real-time processing throughout the day with the POS equipment to verify that there are funds to complete the transaction. Then, at night, these firms send all the transactions for the day out to the various card companies and banks that hold those accounts and run one big batch processing job. So, your card information touches two or three different entities before it even gets to the bank, and hackers know the weak points in the system to exploit this data.

So, when you hear about stories like this one or the big Heartland Payment Systems hack that stole 100 million numbers (the largest in history) or the TJ Maxx hack that stole 45 million numbers (was the largest until the Heartland hack this year), you might tend to be nervous about the security of your card processor, whether you’re a customer at the POS terminal or a business protecting the good will you have with your customers.

Seven restaurants have sued the maker of a bank card-processing system for failing to secure the product from a Romanian hacker who breached their systems. The restaurants, located in Louisiana and Mississippi, filed a class-action suit against Georgia-based Radiant Systems for producing a point-of-sale (POS) system that they say was not compliant with payment card industry security standards and resulted in an undetermined number of customers having their debit and credit card numbers stolen. The suit alleges that the system stored all the data embedded on the bank card magnetic stripe after the transaction was completed — a violation of industry security standards that made it a high-risk target for hackers.

Also named in the suit is Computer World, a Louisiana-based retailer, which sold and maintained Radiant’s Aloha POS system. According to plaintiffs, Computer World’s technicians allegedly installed the remote-access program PCAnywhere on the systems to allow its technicians to fix technical problems from off-site. The only problem is, the company failed to secure the program. The suit alleges that the system was not up to date with software patches, and the PCAnywhere remote log-in and password that technicians used to access the POS systems was the same at every one of the 200 Louisiana locations where the system was installed. According to one of the plaintiffs who spoke with Threat Level, the default login was “administrator” and the password was “computer.”

As a result, a hacker, believed to be based in Romania, accessed the systems of at least 19 businesses through the PCAnywhere software, and possibly others plaintiffs say. Once inside, the hacker installed malware to grab card data as it was swiped and send it to an e-mail address in Romania. The hack follows a wave of similar attacks that targeted point-of-sale systems at other national retailers and restaurant chains between 2005 and early 2009, including Dave & Busters restaurants, Hannaford Brothers, TJX, Wal-Mart and others.

“We want other restaurants nationally to be aware of the hidden dangers posed by these technology companies and the unfair penalties imposed by the credit card companies,” said plaintiffs attorney Shiel Gallagher in a press release. “These huge companies shouldn’t have the power to destroy these restaurants.” The restaurants are seeking millions in damages to recover their costs from the breach. These include fines levied against them from Visa and other credit card companies for failing to be PCI-compliant, the cost of forensic audits to uncover the source of the breach, chargebacks to cover fraudulent charges made on customer accounts and reimbursements to card providers who had to issue new customer cards.

iPhone Virus-Writer Building iPhone Apps

While there is a definite opinion that this hacker should not be rewarded for creating an iPhone virus, especially since he is unrepentant over the whole thing, there is precedent for this sort of thing. If you’ve ever seen the movie Catch Me If You Can, it tells the story of Frank Abagnale, a con man and check forger convicted of bank fraud who later became a security consultant. I guess I would rather have someone on the inside working on the good side and monitoring their activities than letting a hacker run loose with no supervision.

Sports Illustrated – Tablet Demo 1.5

On the heels of the post yesterday stating that Apple will be introducing a new tablet computer next year, here is a possible application of that technology: e-magazines.

The Power of the Camera Phone

Just a couple of pictures here illustrate the power of mobile technology, the internet, and the ability to photograph anyone anywhere. The People of Walmart web site captured this picture of obvious child endangerment, while the Telegraph talks about this photo where a passenger was unable to fit into his seat and the picture was posted on an aviation web site.

In one case, you could make a serious argument that a crime was committed. In another case, it seems as if a person is being unfairly held up for ridicule, despite the article mentioning safety issues and company policies for requiring a person of size to purchase an extra seat.

The internet has become cluttered with embarrassing photographs. I would argue whether or not they are necessary or contribute to society. Some would argue that they are funny, but are they really? We have millions of amateur photographers running around the world now ready to become the next internet phenomenon. It makes one want to stay at home for fear of being embarrassed in public.

Robots Play Trick on McDonald’s Advertisement

We are well past 2001, and we still don’t have a Pan Am space plane where you can walk upside down in zero-G (in fact, we don’t even have Pan Am anymore).

So, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t have the sophisticated artificial intelligence we were promised with the HAL 9000 either. Search engine robots added this digg.com story to a banner ad for a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich.

Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name

Here’s an interesting question: if you’re famous (or infamous, as in this case), does Wikipedia and other open-source internet reference sites have a duty to you to remove information that you don’t want published?

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990. Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

German media have already ceased using Werle’s full name regarding the attack. Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says German publications must also alter their online archives in a bid to comport with laws designed to provide offenders an avenue to “reintegrate back into society.” “It’s not just censorship going forward. It’s asking outlets to go back and change what is already being written,” Granick said in a telephone interview.

It’s not the first time Wikipedia, the world’s most popular online, public-driven encyclopedia, has been targeted by would-be censors. And it likely won’t be the last. The site went offline overseas for a day in December, as British censors blacklisted it over an entry on the German rock band Scorpions. The entry included the cover art of the Scorpions’ 1976 Virgin Killer album, which depicts a nude young girl.

“Our client has served 15 years of his life sentence for murdering Mr. Sedlmayr in 1990. He has been released on parole [sic] in August 2007. His rehabilitation and his future life outside the prison system is severely impacted by your unwillingness to anonymize any articles dealing with the murder of Mr. Sedlmayr with regard to our client’s involvement,” according to the Oct. 27 cease-and-desist letter, which demands legal fees and compensation for “emotional suffering.”

MPAA Wants Congress to ‘Encourage’ 3 Strikes, Filtering

Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re bored today, go rent a movie legally or buy a ticket at the theater. Don’t pirate a copy or download a torrent, because you will end up spending about 2,000 times what it is worth and maybe lose your internet in the future.

The Motion Picture Association of America wants Congress to “encourage” internet providers to filter out pirated movies, and to punish customers who repeatedly engage in piracy with a “graduated response” that might include disconnection from the net.

The FCC’s final recommendations to Capitol Hill should urge “that content creators and ISPs be encouraged to develop the best available solutions — even though it is impossible today to identify what all of those solutions may look like,” the MPAA argued. “Whether in the form of forensic tools or policies designed to discourage consumers from engaging in unlawful conduct, the government should give private industry-wide latitude to find effective strategies.”

Toward that goal, the group’s lobbying letter asks the FCC to review broadband policy of other nations, including South Korea. In April, Korean lawmakers allowed for the termination of a copyright infringer’s internet access for up to six months, and also called for shuttering websites and message boards transmitting infringing content. “South Korea ignored the problems of intellectual property crimes for far too long, but fortunately, it is no longer sitting idly by as theft ravages its creative industry,” the MPAA wrote.

The MPAA’s lobbying effort is in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the $800 billion bailout package that included a $7 billion investment in broadband. The measure requires the FCC to recommend to Congress by February how best to revamp American broadband policy. Of dozens of comments to the FCC on the topic, the MPAA’s proposal is the least consumer friendly, Brodsky says.

Honestly, if it comes to this, are we going to require a 7-day waiting period to get your internet access while the provider runs through a background check? Even better, I’m sure that if any of this is mandated, the “costs” will be passed along to the consumer as an excuse to jack up rates.

And, really… is Hollywood losing money because people are stealing movies or because they have become so expensive to make and attendance is down? Neither of the latter is the fault of the pirates.