Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

February 12, 2010

Facebook Gearing Up To Take On Gmail

If there is anything that people haven’t stopped complaining about since the inception of Facebook – Nope, it’s not the new goats and farms that keep popping up on your home page – it would be the messaging service on Facebook. Things as simple as deleting messages is as grueling as grating your own finger. While it has been given some face-lifts over time, like adding a search functionality that only somewhat works and organizing series of messages in a single thread but it is still a far cry from being anything but a necessary evil.

Ask any Facebook user and you will find out how they have hundreds upon hundreds of unread messages that they don’t even bother to read or even delete.

Facebook New Homepage

Facebook New Homepage

The latest Face-lift that Facebook received on its 6th birthday was really telling about how they intend to  handle their notifications and messages. They have streamlined their design and created an area that has all your notifications instead of splattering it all over the screen.

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Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , — M. Bamieh @ 9:30 pm

December 20, 2009

Twitter hacked again. Is it really the Iranians?

There have been a series of security compromises on the internet this year, and it has become apparent that no one is safe. Twitter with its <sarcasm>stellar</sarcasm> record of security has been hit again last Friday by what seems like the work of a group calling themselves “The Iranian Cyber Army“.

Twitter has been affected by a DNS redirection attack in which their homepage got defaced. The hackers replaced the homepage with the following image and text:

Twitter Hacked by Iranians

Twitter Hacked by Iranians

The rest of the text:

"Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;)

Take Care."

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Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , — M. Bamieh @ 9:30 pm

December 3, 2009

Google Dashboard: Google’s Answer To Privacy Concerns?

Google has consistently tried to battle privacy concerns regarding their tools and services. Users naturally are always skeptical about how the information that Google stores about them is being used. We, at Thoughtpick, raised the issue of privacy concerns that users have and most recently tackled this issue in the article discussing Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5.

To counteract this seasonal hailstorm of concerns, this time, Google has introduced the Google Dashboard. The Dashboard will include all the information they have about your Google accounts and offer one central location for you to manage the settings of all your Google services and accounts.

So does the dashboard deliver?

I was actually really looking forward to the Dashboard and interested in the features they will include in it: What kind of dirty little secrets does Google know about me? So when it was open for use, I excitedly went to google.com/dashboard and entered my account information to log into it and discover the much outed and unprecedented privacy central that Google is giving to me.

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October 12, 2009

HOW TO: Protect Your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook from Hackers!

Hotmail

Hotmail

Note: If you have a Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL account, it’s advisable to change your password now!

Last week, about 10,000 Hotmail user accounts and passwords were posted on a developer’s forum. The accounts listed were the ones starting with the letters A and B hinting that this is just a snippet from a bigger list of accounts that have been compromised.

To further freak out webmail users, another list containing a cocktail of about 30,000 Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL user’s accounts was leaked later on during the week.

So how did they do it?

Apparently, people are still not able to tell the difference between an authentic website and a phishing website. Most of the compromised accounts on the list were obtained using fake websites that ask for your login and password to authenticate your account. While campaigns educating the user on how to better protect himself or herself from phishing scams have been running nonstop for the past 5 years, they can’t be blamed for falling for such scams.

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October 7, 2009

Law & Lawsuits: Legal Systems Limiting Freedom on the Internet!

“When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws”. GK Chesterton

The small laws, the big laws, the rightful laws, the new laws, the old laws and so on; the wide list of law descriptive terms is endless! Yet, when it comes to freedom, especially over a loose medium such as the Internet, there is but one question one should ask: Are the laws unlawfully limiting the freedom of individuals using the Internet?

The answer is a definite YES!

Using the Law to Limit Cyber Freedom…

Order!!!

Order!!!

Hundreds of reported stories and news articles, dated back to the past 5 years and leading up to this day, demonstrate how the law has been negatively influencing our overall freedom of thought and expression. Furthermore, and in many cases, it was reported that the law was manipulated to sue individuals who might not even be involved in the alleged accusations in efforts to reap financial gains or shield big corporations!

I would like to ask you to accompany me through a list of stories I have found online, and which perfectly illustrate how our freedom is being constricted, slowly but surely, over the Internet and its channels:

1. Judge orders Google to deactivate Gmail account

August 12, 2009, a Gmail user mistakenly receives confidential financial information from “a bank”. September 24, 2009, U.S. District Court Judge James Ware orders Google to deactivate the user’s account!

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