The Guardian has posted an interesting article online about the geo-location app FourSquare.

Journalist Leo Hickman reveals how easy it is to uncover the intimate details of a complete stranger’s life…

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Foursquare is the latest social networking tool to generate online buzz. The story has become very familiar in recent years: a bright young thing develops an internet app that connects people and allows them instantly to communicate with each other; within months, a million or more people around the planet are using it; investors queue up expressing an interest and speculation begins about how much Google, Yahoo!, Apple or Microsoft is willing to throw down to snap it up. (To date, the speculative figure in the media has reached $100m.)

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have all come before it, but Foursquare promises something new. After a decade of false dawns for the industry, it leads the way in a wave of new “geolocative” social networking tools. Unofficially, at least, 2010 has been labelled by many within the technology world as the “year of location”.

In addition to offering the communal connectivity of Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare also uses your smartphone’s global positioning system (GPS) to broadcast your precise location to your “friends” and, should you so wish, to the wider world. Users are encouraged to “check in” on their phone whenever they arrive at a point of interest – a shop, a cafe, a museum, a nightclub, an office – so that fellow users know where they are.

A great way supposedly to see if any of your friends are around and about. Glance down at your phone and – as I did with Louise – see the names of all the other users around you within a mile or so and, crucially, exactly where they are and which fellow users they are with. (I was drawn to Louise because she was in a cluster of Foursquare users – albeit still rare, even somewhere such as London – and she was the user allowing a stranger such as myself access to the most personal information – photograph, full name, Twitter feed etc.)

Visit somewhere a lot and you can even vie with other users to become its virtual “mayor”. If you feel so inclined, you can also leave a tip or review in the digital ether – “hey, order the bacon burger, it’s great!” – so others following can benefit from your experience.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/23/foursquare

The BBC reports that one of the killers of toddler James Bulger is due in court on charges of accessing indecent images of children.

Venables is expected to appear at the Old Bailey via video-link from prison and will be asked to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.

He is charged with two offences under the 1978 Protection of Children Act. It is alleged that he downloaded 57 indecent images of children between February 2009 and February 2010.

He is also accused of distributing seven images between 1 and 23 February this year by allowing files on his computer to be available through a peer-to-peer network.

After eight years in custody for the murder of two-year-old James, Venables was given a new identity on his release in 2001.

He was then on licence for nine years, under probation supervision, before being sent back to jail in February over the latest allegations.

Venables’ former solicitor, Lawrence Lee, said the court’s decision to reveal the date of Friday’s hearing has undermined Venables’ anonymity and jeopardised his safety.

Access the original article online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10735857

The Telegraph discusses a new report reveals that cybercriminals are attacking millions of computers every month – and infecting approximately 10 %.

Cybercriminals are increasingly focussing on money, a new report suggests, and improved organisation means that “toolkits” have been developed to methodically infect PCs so that illegally obtained information can be bought and sold.

In a survey by security firm AVG, 165 internet domains were found to have attacked 12 million visitors over the course of two months. More than 1.2 million computers were subsequently infected.

The research looked at criminals using the so called “Eleonore toolkit”, which aims to use malware contained on specially created websites to steal information such as credit card details, emails and national insurance numbers.

The software targets known vulnerabilites, primarily in older versions of Microsoft’s web browser. Internet Explorer 6 alone accounted for one-third of all infections. Apple Browser Safari proved the most resistant to Eleonore attacks, allowing just 2.78 per cent of machines using it to be infected. Adobe Acrobat and Sun Javascript also accounted for a significant number of infections.

Criminal servers were typically hosted in the Ukraine, where more than a quarter were found, the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. Hackers appeared to target the Russian Federation, too: 8,906,025 attacks were recorded, and 916,430 (10.3%) were successful. The United States and Britain attracted approximately half a million attacks each, which met with a similar level of success.

AVG encouraged users to ensure they were using security software to protect their computers.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7904216/Cybercrime-one-in-10-computers-vulnerable-to-attack.html

Marketing Week reports that social networking site Bebo is to re-introduce product-placement themed original content on its site, as part of a major revival push.

The website’s new owners are keen to revive the teenager-oriented social media website and compete against services such as Facebook, which hit the 500 million members mark yesterday.

Speaking to Marketing Week, Adam Levin, the new head of Bebo, says he wants to revive the social media site in the US and “re-engage with the core 14-24 year old demographic who rely on the site by creating content purely for them.”

Levin says Bebo is creating a new video homepage where old episodes of product-placement based series, such as Kate Modern, will be screened. This will be complemented by a new series of productions, which will allow product placement in similar ways.

“We definitely want to see more original productions come back to Bebo and create an array of premium content which will allow brands to take part and engage with these core demographics. The opportunities here have worked brilliantly in the past, and we want to experiment with this once more and gauge as much interest as possible.”

Levin says the site has been on “life support of late”, but is now “living and breathing” again, with a worldwide user base of 117 million members.

The social media site is now experimenting with new advertising units, designed to “engage with users better in richer ways”. These are currently being beta tested on 25% of traffic on the site, and are due to be launched fully “imminently”. It is moving offices in the UK and will begin a “major” agency and client roadshow in the next few months.

“We need to bring new life into the site with rich new advertising options, like homepage takeovers, and better access for users. We will be marketing to try and bring people back to Bebo, but what’s been great is since we took over, initiatives such as “Free Love Day” have seen users requesting to reactivate memberships.”

The site is also focusing on mobile and is working on a more optimised version of the site to work on smartphones, and allow better interaction, as well as videos and games – and opportunities for brands to advertise on handsets.

The move comes as Facebook celebrates hitting the 500 million member mark, claiming it is helping “to make the world more open and connect”. Levin acknowledges Facebook’s progress and deems it “untouchable”.

He says Bebo “is for a different generation without all the family” and referring to the recent Dr Pepper scandal to hit Facebook adds “We are learning lessons from Facebook’s mistakes all the time and troubles like this make us all the more determined to ensure we have the most stringent privacy settings possible to avoid errors like this.”

Access the original article online at: http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/digital/bebo-to-offer-brands-chance-to-reach-teens/3016173.article

The Telegraph reports that MySpace has halved its UK audience within the last 12 months, according to new ComScore data.

The new figures reveal that MySpace’s audience numbers dropped by 49 per cent over the last year, falling from 6.5 million visitors in May 2009, to just 3.3 million in May 2010.

The news comes hot on the heels of the site’s major rival, Facebook, hitting 500 million registered users. MySpace, founded in 2003, at its peak had more than 100 million registered members, but its audience has been declining since the rise of Facebook in 2008.

ComScore’s latest set of data also revealed that nine out of ten of the 38.2 million UK internet users over the age of 15 used social media in May 2010. Twitter was found to have 4.3 million users in the UK but unlike MySpace, has grown its audience by 62 per cent over the last 12 months.

Facebook is used by 30.4 million people in the UK, which worked out as 79 % of the country’s online population.

MySpace’s decline is in spite of a revamp of the site’s functionality and renewed focus on music and entertainment content. The site also launched MySpace Music in May 2010, a new streaming and subscription service, which has faced stiff competition from the likes of Spotify and We7.

The site, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million (£351 million) in 2005, has also lost two chiefs executives in the last six months. First Owen Van Natta stunned staff with his departure after a mere nine months at the helm of the company in February, and then Jason Hirschhorn, one of Van Natta’s replacements, followed suit four months later.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/myspace/7904282/MySpace-halves-UK-audience.html

At the beginning of the week we reported on Coca Cola making a pretty big mistake – posting pornographic material on young Facebook users’ profiles for a Dr Pepper advertising campaign.

Coca Cola is now reported to be considering cutting ties with the agency that created the campaign, which led to parents accusing them of targeting children by referencing a notorious pornographic film.

The soft-drinks giant has told the agency that it must stop all advertising work on Coca-Cola brands until a decision is reached on whether to terminate the relationship.

“We have stopped all our ongoing work with [digital agency] Lean Mean Fighting Machine and are currently reviewing our relationship with the agency,” said a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola GB.

The company was forced to pull the Facebook campaign for its Dr Pepper brand, in which users allowed their Facebook status box to be taken over by the company. Users could choose from three levels of “embarrassingness”, and the contract with Facebook stipulated that all content had to be moderated by Coke before going live.

However, the promotion backfired when a Mumsnet user saw her 14-year-old daughter’s Facebook page – or rather the Dr Pepper campaign she had joined – had been updated with a message that made direct reference to a hardcore pornographic film. Coca-Cola apologised and announced an investigation into its promotion procedures.

It said the offending line had been approved by them, without them realising its true meaning.

Dr Pepper is no stranger to flirting with social media controversy in its marketing activity, which uses the strapline “What’s the worst that can happen?”. For April Fool’s Day the brand launched a push on Chatroulette featuring a cheerleader.

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/21/facebook-dr-pepper-coca-cola

Social networking giant Facebook now has 500 million registered users, just six years after it launched back in 2004. The news is all over the press at the moment, but we’ve pulled together a few key facts from across the headlines…

• The UK currently has around 26 million Facebook users

• The site has dramatically overtaken competitors such as MySpace and Bebo. Up to 2008, MySpace was in the lead, until Facebook rapidly overtook. MySpace now currently has around 65 million unique users. Bebo was also sold by AOL last month.

• If Facebook were a country, it would have the third largest population in the world.

• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site.

• An average user has 130 friends.

• Twitter seems to be the only site that could possibly rival Facebook. Although its difficult to track its users as many use the service through means other than the website, its estimated to have around 200 million.

• One in 14 people around the globe uses Facebook.

• More than 30 billion pieces of content, like photos, web links and news stories, are shared each month.

• It took five months for Facebook to attract an extra 100 million users, from 400 million to 500 million.

• Last January Facebook only had 150 million members.

• The site has yet to become the leading social network in Russia, China, Japan or Korea.

• Facebook was valued at $11.5 billion according to Sharespost’s March 2010 Index.

Facebook's chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg

A web hosting company has said it shut down a blogging platform that was home to over 70,000 bloggers because a “link to terrorist material” and an al-Qaeda “hit list” was posted to the site. BurstNet said Blogetery.com also posted “bomb-making instructions”.

The company said it acted after receiving “a notice of a critical nature from law enforcement officials”. But the move has angered bloggers who use the platform and say they were given no notice of the shutdown.

In response Blogetery.com said its server had been “terminated without any notification or explanation.” The site added that it is trying to resolve the situation.

“The posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNet acceptable use policy” said the web host firm.

BurstNet also claimed that the site had a history of previous abuse. The news blog Cnet.com reported that officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told BurstNet on 9 July that al-Qaeda materials had been found on Blogetery’s servers.

It also claimed that material allegedly found on the server included “the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda” as well as messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organisation.

BurstNet’s chief technology officer, Joe Marr, said that the FBI sent a “Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information” request to the firm.

Sources have confirmed to the BBC that this was the case but FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the bureau does not comment on active investigations. However he did say that the FBI had not asked for any websites to be shut down.

The FBI does not have the power to remove content from websites or to take them down. That can only be done with the authority of a judge.

Calls to BurstNet were not returned.

Access the original article online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10692501

The Daily Mail reports on the latest craze sweeping the US: i-Dosing. The phenomenon involves teenagers putting on their headphones and drifting off into the world of ‘digital highs’.

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress.

This is the world of ‘i-Dosing’, the new craze sweeping the internet in which teenagers used so-called ‘digital drugs’ to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics. They believe the repetitive drone-like music will give them a ‘high’ that takes them out of reality, only legally available and downloadable on the Internet.

The craze has so far been popular among teenagers in the U.S. but given how easily available the videos are, it is just a matter of time before it catches on in Britain. Those who come up with the ‘doses’ claim different tracks mimic different sensations you can feel by taking drugs such as Ecstasy or smoking cannabis.

The reactions have been partially sceptical but some songs have become wildly popular, receiving nearly half a million hits on YouTube.

Under one called ‘Shroom’, Berecz wrote: ‘just listened to this… at the beginning I began to see some blinking light (while eyes closed), then the pitch went up and I began to feel that Im sinking into my chair…as the pitch went down I began to feel confident, and very relaxed, and I dont want to stand up from my chair and I dont want to say any words…’

Not everyone is taking i-Dosing seriously – some YouTube videos show young adults ‘i-Dosing’ on Neil Diamond and mocking the whole phenomenon. But there has been such alarm in the U.S. that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

‘Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, spokesman Mark Woodward said. He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs. ‘So that’s why we want parents to be aware of what sites their kids are visiting and not just dismiss this as something harmless on the computer. If you want to reach these kids, save these kids and keep these kids safe, parents have to be aware. They’ve got to take action.’

He added that another concern is that many of these I-dosing sites lure visitors to actual drug and drug paraphernalia sites.

Access the original article online at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296282/I-dosing-How-teenagers-getting-digitally-high-music-download-internet.html#ixzz0uJ3VB6cX