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Russian Hacker Selling 1.5 Million Facebook Accounts

It’s generally a good idea to change your password periodically. It’s also advisable to ensure that your social networking passwords are all different and to generate difficult passwords that include numbers, capital letters and special characters, if at all possible. Roboform, PassPack and KeePass are a few free or affordable resources to help you manage your online passwords in a secure fashion.

Intimacy 2.0: Privacy Rights and Privacy Responsibilities on the World Wide Web

This paper examines the idea of privacy in the world of ‘intimacy 2.0’, the use of Web 2.0 social networking technologies and multimedia for the routine posting of intimate details of users’ lives. It will argue that, although privacy is often conceived as a right with benefits that accrue to the individual, it is better seen as a public good, whose benefits accrue to the community in general. In that case, the costs of allowing invasions of one’s privacy do not solely fall on the individual who is unwise enough to do so, but also on wider society.

What do you think are the most important features a social network should have? How would you prioritize them? Do you plan to Build Less or go big? If building less, what is the minimal set of features you can get away with? We plan to “build less.” These are the features which we aim to complete first: 1. A good secure protocol, encrypted at every leg, including a specification for a lightweight, probably HTTPS, RESTful set of routes. We see all of this communication happening between two Diaspora servers, rather than strictly between peers. We realize there is the problem with polling with this model, but we think there are several tricks worth trying which all have their relative pros and cons: PubSub (fast and easy, requires some level of centralization), querying friends servers from the browser side and posting responses back (requires browser side decryption) to name a couple. Alternatively, we are considering going with XMPP altogether due to the ability to be able to push content between nodes, but we need to research it further to see if it is something we would want to implement. 2. A datastore and corresponding interface that can store all of your stuff in one place. MongoDB is what we are looking at for V1, but the redundancy of TahoeFS is intriguing(as well as serving a slightly different purpose). 3. A clear extension framework. Diaspora will be service-agnostic and we will need to make it easy to import from and export to any format/web service. It is also our goal to make Diaspora as content-agnostic as possible, by providing abstract data types and an easily extended UI so that whatever new content people want to store and share can be integrated without re-rewriting parts of the whole application stack. 4. Be your own OpenID provider. Having a single identity across lots of services is great, but why trust a web service to hold it? Once we are the keepers of our own data, we can also selectively allow services access to it through Oauth.

Free Group Texting GroupMe makes life easy for you and your groups. It's your real-life network, in your

pocket.

Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering.

scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries

Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.

One final comment, a funny one.  On Monday, in my "Twenty-First Century Literacies" class where laptops are required for a whole range of experiments and inclass collaborative work, I caught one of my students with his laptop open and with a book propped secretly inside it, reading away in his book when he should have been paying attention.   So maybe that's the next class, "Should Professors Allow Students to Use BOOKS in the Classroom Devised for Computer Learning?"   I'm being facetious but that's the point.  A book is a technology too.   How and when we use any technology and for what purpose are the questions we all need to ask.

Do you see the difference?   "Computer learning" doesn't exist.   In 2011, it exists less than it did a decade ago and, in a few years, that phrase won't exist at all.   Students learn.  Computers are tools for all kinds of things, from checking the Facebook page, to making notetaking easier, to being fact checking or calculating devices that can take a class to a more sophisticated level to interactive social networking devices that can either distract a class or allow for new forms of group collaboration.   There are many other uses as well.   The point is that most profs have (a) simply "adapted" (as a colleague told me recently) to computers without understanding the intellectual and pedagogical changes they can enable; or (b) resigned themselves to their present, gleefully or resentflly; or (c) made them into a pedagogical tool; or (d) all of the above.    

Reach together with symmetry and equality were the things that made the Internet such a radical social innovation.

The real genius of Napster was the way it made collaboration automatic. By default, a consumer of files was also a producer of files for the network.

The big challenge for many organizations is to do things in a much, much simpler and more responsive way. The sad truth is that it is easier for managers to grasp the threat of competition than the risk of simply becoming obsolete.