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By now, those who toil in the information security industry must be thinking, "another day in cyberspace, another China-related hacking incident." The latest case, revealed by researchers in the U.S. and Canada, was announced late Monday. Eight months of investigation have dragged a Web spy ring kno...
In one of its biggest blunders ever, Google whipped up a storm of customer privacy complaints earlier this year when it launched its social networking service, Buzz. After making a series of changes to the profile set-up procedure during ensuing weeks, Google now is asking all of the earliest Buzz u...
The right-leaning Drudge Report made it a habit in November and December to trumpet any and all headlines relating to the "Climategate" controversy -- the story involving hacked emails attacking critics of global warming, which found their way onto the Internet. Those emails raised suspicions among ...
Facebook is proposing another round of changes to its privacy policy. The updates are meant to better explain certain features, said Facebook Deputy General Counsel Michael Richter in a blog post -- such as why an invitation that a non-users receives to join Facebook might include the names of perso...
When Microsoft first launched its Bing search engine less than a year ago, the company promised to map out a strategy that involved more frequent updates and feature additions. This week, the company reiterated its commitment to that road map with the announcement of some new tweaks and technology i...
After months of investigation by police and the FBI, a French hacker accused of breaking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears was arrested earlier this week. Francois Cousteix, a 25-year-old unemployed man from central France who is known online as "Hacker Cr...
Companies of all sizes now routinely field the question, "What are your sustainability practices?" What's more, the people asking that question are increasingly organizing through the use of social networks large and small. Bloggers like Sharon Astyk of Casaubon's Book, for example, have thousands o...
Twitter has announced it will be rolling out @anywhere, a new platform that will allow certain partner Web sites -- including Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg and eBay -- to link to Twitter. The new service will let Twitter users send and receive messages while they are on a partner site. It will als...
It's a good bet that when "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart spends six minutes making uber-ironic fun of a particular trend or topic, it's pretty much arrived as a legitimate Mainstream Media Phenomenon. Such was the case recently with Stewart's hilarious deconstruction of Chatroulette the Web site tha...
The U.S. Census Bureau has started mailing out its forms, so I would like to take this opportunity to announce a new demographic category for those of us who will be writing "journalist" in the "occupation" box: Old New Media Dogs. T-shirts and business cards are forthcoming. I've spent the last wee...
"OMG, somebody call the Waaaambulance!" went a comment on last week's column about South by Southwest. I had prepared myself for reader snark following my "it's all about me" piece regarding SXSW's denial of my complimentary press credential request. I was pleasantly surprised: only three comments -...
Gaming companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ask a lot of their customers. Every few years, they are encouraged by the companies to spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to a fancy new console. But as far as I can recall, only Sony has ever asked its fans to not play those consoles. It happened...
Facebook last week won the right to call the news feed its very own. Patent 7,699,123 was issued by the U.S. Patent Office last Tuesday to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and seven other Facebook executives. It's described as a method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment. The method includ...
Austin, Texas, is the home of the annual South by Southwest Festival, which in 23 years has grown from a music-only celebration featuring a few Sixth Street bars, a handful of bands and lots of Shiner Bock beer, into a two-week, multi-media extravaganza featuring hundreds of Next New Thing musicians...
Clearly, exponentially growing technologies are set to change social communications, bringing up a number of touchy privacy and control questions. This year's TED conference showcased a wide variety of gadgets and ideas, one of the most interesting being Microsoft's new "augmented reality" mapping t...