Researchers from the University of Toronto have discovered an online spying operation that has infiltrated in excess of 1,200 computers in over 100 countries according to a report today in The New York Times.
Dubbed GhostNet, the operation is notable. Not only can it phish for information, it has remote access capabilities that can quickly and easily turn any computer into a giant listening device.
Conficker a.k.a. Downadup, is causing global concern as we move closer to D-Day; April 1st, when the latest version of the worm, Conficker.C is due to be activated.
While some news outlets are causing panic with their fear mongering, others are downplaying the upcoming event, and the net effect of course is FUD. But according to security experts, the bottom line is if you're not infected now, you don't have anything to fear come April Fools Day. If you're interested in knowing more about Conficker and how to search for and destroy it, take a look at the seven resources below.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we discuss web apps that have stood the '30 day test' for our writers, analyze the past, present and future uses of the Twitter platform, look into the phenomenon of "ghost twittering", review the latest changes to the Facebook homepage, check out the latest online TV trends, and more. Also we look at featured stories from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media, and our Enterprise channel.
The U.S. newspaper industry was already facing numerous challenges before the economy took a nosedive, but the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.
People have been whispering about a new web application in development called Hunch. Today, Flickr co-founder and Hunch head honcho Caterina Fake divulged some more details about the new project on her blog.
The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we see hundreds of new apps, scripts, plug-ins and doo-das every week. We review some portion of those. Many we get excited about. But few stand the test of time for even 30 days. Here are 23 apps we're still using a month or more after discovering them.
We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30-day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for a while. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!
Netflix, the popular online DVD rental service, just announced a number of new features that will allow users to personalize their Netflix homepage to a greater extent than currently possible. Netflix users can now also create their own genres by mixing and matching different categories, and a number of new taste preference settings will allow users to fine-tune Netflix's personalized movie recommendations.
Even though online video is clearly making its mark in the media landscape, TV is still the predominant means of media consumption for the average American. Indeed, according to a new study sponsored by Nielsen, even among young adults 18-24, Internet video only represents less than 1% of their total media consumption. In total, the average American adult spends about 8 1/2 hours a day in front of a TV, computer, or mobile phone screen. On average, these adults also watched about 72 minutes of TV ads per day.
If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.
Facebook is a phenomenal success (at growing its network of users) and a miserable failure (at making money). Its attempts to make money have been mired in the Madison Avenue school of selling mass market stuff to consumers. This is fundamentally at odds with the trust-based, peer-to-peer ethos of social networking. If Facebook continues down this path, then the more it monetizes, the more it will drive users away. Luckily, Facebook has been handed a screamingly big and obvious opportunity that meets a massive need, will be welcomed by users, and is suited to the current economic crisis: Uncrunch America.
