Twitter's status blog this morning announced that Twitter has addressed the most recent variant of the Mikeyy worm but recommends that you still avoid viewing the profiles of users posting "uncharacteristic or otherwise suspicious tweets."
It shouldn't be this hard, Peter Soderling, founder of Stratus Security told ReadWriteWeb yesterday. "It appears Twitter is solving the problem by focusing on the input filtering, but a simpler and more effective solution would have been to focus on output escaping; encoding the script tags so they could not execute in any victim's browser."
During his weekly address this morning, President Obama named Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Chopra, who has effectively been doing much the same job at a state level in his role as Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently named Federal CIO, and Jeffrey Zients, the man Obama today named the first ever Chief Performance Officer.
Last month, two Virginia congressmen recommended Chopra for the job, saying "Chopra's public and private experience in the technology field made him the right candidate," and pointed out his focus on healthcare IT "is ideal for a position that will have responsibilities dealing both with stimulus spending on healthcare and environmental programs."
In the coming years, we will see a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process, and apply information. This revolution will emerge from three distinct areas of activity connected to the Semantic Web: the Web of Data, the Web of Services, and the Web of Identity providers. These webs aim to make semantic knowledge of data accessible, semantic services available and connectable, and semantic knowledge of individuals processable, respectively. In this post, we will look at the first of these Webs (of Data) and see how making information accessible to machines will transform how we find information.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the latest in social media monitoring tools, investigate how cloud computing is being used in scientific research projects, review some future Firefox concepts, check out the latest iPhone app usage stats, report on eBay selling off StumbleUpon and preparing for a Skype IPO, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
This data comes from the MoneyTree™ Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data provided by Thomson Reuters. Their press release sounds kind of gloomy:
The social news utility Feedly announced on its blog that it just added the ability to perform a supplemental search on content it knows about on any of a number of different sites like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon and more. Results from this parallel search appear in Feedly Mini, an unobtrusive pop-up notification area in the lower-right corner of the Firefox browser window. Search results are drawn from FriendFeed, Google Reader feeds and other sources.
In the old days, self-important people use to carry calling cards. Now we have Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to turn us all into mini-celebrities. So what's the new calling card online? That position's being jockeyed for as we speak, and different contenders are taking very different approaches.
Twitter released an important new feature to selected developers yesterday that could make it a compelling alternative to the fast growing Facebook Connect system for logging into sites around the web.
If you often send emails to multiple recipients, a new feature in Gmail Labs will now help you to ensure that you don't inadvertently forget a recipient you typically include in your group emails. After you activate it, this new feature, "Suggest more Recipients," kicks in after you add at least two recipients to your message. If you, for example, usually send out a message to your mom, dad, sister and brother together, Gmail will suggest that you add both your sister and brother to the list of recipients after you type in your mother's and father's address.
Twitter has gone mainstream. Late last night, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) became the first Twitter user with more than 1 million followers. Today, media mogul Oprah Winfrey sent out her first tweet and will dedicate a full episode of her talk show to Twitter.
While Twitter's sudden mainstream appeal might be somewhat disconcerting for early adopters who would prefer it if Twitter wasn't suddenly the cool new thing to try out for soccer moms, it will surely bring a lot of new opportunities (and challenges) for Twitter.
Today, a court in Sweden found four members of the Pirate Bay guilty of breaking Swedish copyright laws and sentenced them to a year in prison and a $3.6 million fine - a third of what the prosecution had asked for. The Pirate Bay and its lawyers will, of course, appeal the verdict, and the site will continue to function normally during the appeals procedures.
