socialnetwork

 Pwnedlist.com tells you if your user name or email address has been revealed in one of the recent hacker attacks on, for instance, Gawker or Sony's gaming division. It is worth knowing, especially if you use the same details to log into a variety of sites. All you have to do is type in your email address or user name into the box on Pwnedlist.com and it will tell you if it has appeared in any of lists of data that have been dumped onto the Internet recently.

Looking at this it might make sense why some websites are seemingly so slow. For example, if you are in Indonesia accessing a site hosted in Texas in the US, you can see how many hops there are. Or do a trace-route command on a website to see the actual number of hops to get to that site.

My new use of social media is to create new things and to find others creating in similar ways. I want to know who is using the tools to build real communities, support causes, heal hurt, collaborate to make something bigger than what each of us can build alone.

Social media and mobile apps are more and more being used in emergency and disaster response solutions and initiatives.

"Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking." First up is the phone caller who claims to come from Microsoft Support warning that multiple problems have shown up on the victim's PC. They are told to look at the error log, which to the uninitiated does seem to reveal many things are seriously wrong with computer.

Summary of ASEAN Connectivity Conference and FWII's contribution to the event.

Americans spent nearly one-quarter of their time online visiting social networks and checking blogs, according to a report by Nielsen. Facebook was named the top social media destination, taking up more than 53 million minutes from 140 million visitors in the United States for the month of May. Blogger was the next most popular destination among American social media users. But the Google-owned brand's audience of more than 50 million in May was nearly three times smaller than Facebook's, according to Nielsen's quarterly social media report.

Facebook, RIM and Twitter were invited to meet the British Home Secretary, Teresa May-as well as other government ministers-and the police following the riots and looting that gripped London and other British cities earlier this month. There were accusations that social media had stoked the flames of discord which lead to calls for it to be closed down during civil disturbances. According to a person familiar with the matter the meeting had taken a different stance. "They [the authorities] recognize they are behind and were being very honest. That is very refreshing."

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows.

This is why companies are archiving and storing every tweet.

America is obsessed with its social media tools - more than half of all Americans have a social networking profile. But what does social media tell us about American society? Is our use of social tools a reflection of our interests and behaviors?

"From the horseback ride of Paul Revere-and for millennia before-people have used the latest technology available to rally others sympathetic to their cause. As ubiquitous as Twitter and Facebook have seemed lately in spreading the word for gatherings, whether benevolent or malevolent, many recent demonstrations and revolts have used a variety of primarily digital platforms to spread their message."

Families that can't afford to pay from $30 per month for Comcast's Internet access services now have a less expensive alternative. The cable provider launched a new plan dubbed Internet Essentials, which will cost low-income families only $10 per month for Web access.

A list of 11 free security and privacy utilities that shield you against malware, protect your data at Wi-Fi hotspots, encrypt your hard drive, and do everything in between.

"This new method for submitting URLs to Google is limited, so you should use it when it's important that certain pages be crawled right away. Although Google doesn't guarantee that they'll index every page that they crawl, this new feature does seem to at least escalate that evaluation process."

TED Talks Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects.

"I've been testing a service called ZoneAlarm SocialGuard that I think strikes a good balance between safety and privacy, between a parent's peace of mind and a teen's sense of freedom. Every five minutes, it monitors kids' Facebook accounts for approaches by potential predators and strangers, cyber-bullying, age fraud, account hacking, and links to inappropriate or malicious websites. It uses algorithms that look for certain types of language, profile data, or other clues that unwanted activity may be under way."

This quote sums up one of the hidden values of social integration on the web: "Twitter's value to consumers is due to the relevance of the tweet stream - we rely on our friends and contacts to curate interesting and relevant content to us, in real-time. Media and entertainment sites can replicate this experience by incorporating social content. For example, The Huffington Post curates relevant site content based upon the articles that a user's friends read or comment on, and Yelp streams business reviews, profile updates and other user-generated content to members from their friends on Facebook."

This is a great example of social media being used for a greater purpose, and some excellent tips on how to properly curate information in a responsible way online.

Google helps us think, Facebook finds us friends, and Pandora plays our own personalized soundtrack. It's hard to say whether the computer algorithms that these services use to anticipate our needs and wants are turning us into puppets or geniuses. But algorithms have a huge impact on our tastes, buying habits, and decisions about our digital lives.