If you’re an avid Twitter user, you might from time to time find it difficult to keep track of who is following you. I personally only have a couple of hundred people following me and I don’t religiously follow everything that they all say (not that I’m rude, I just don’t have the time). But if you’re a really heavy user with a couple of thousand people following you, you might find it difficult sorting through everyone. You might also miss a good message or two. That’s where CrowdStatus comes in to mix things up and make things interesting.
Ever wondered about what’s really inside a U.S. blended cigarette? If you are a smoker and haven’t been given enough reasons to stop smoking yet, you’ll want to watch the following documentary. I know most smokers will dismiss everything said in the video as sensationalism, but as someone who lost 4 dear friends (who were heavy smokers) to lung cancer, and who died horribly by the way, I can assure you that the fact that they caught the disease was no coincidence.
Here’s a sneak preview of the upcoming Star Wars “Clone Wars” series that George Lucas is bringing out later this year. I am not a fan of animated programmes so I probably won’t watch it myself, but I’m sure there are a lot of die-hard Star Wars fans out there with their light-sabers and Jedi cloaks who will lap this up. Enjoy.
I am closely monitoring an online conversation today over a Twitter user’s decision to sell his account on eBay. This has raised the following questions – is a Twitter account worth anything financially? Is the guy betraying his “followers” by selling their loyalties and direct private messages to someone else? Thirdly, is he scamming the successful eBay buyer by selling them an account that may ultimately prove to be worthless?
More to the point, is there any value at all in a social networking account – period? What about a Facebook account? A Stumbleupon account? A Digg account? Is there such as a thing as “social network account squatting”? Set up an account, build up lots of nice contacts then sell it for a profit?
To be sure, this isn’t the first time someone has tried to sell online accounts for a profit. World of Warcraft accounts have been sold on eBay, and my girlfriend’s brother, who is highly active on Dark Age of Camelot, has seen high level accounts being sold for ridiculous prices on eBay. I have also seen people trying to hawk Stumbleupon and Digg accounts online for a few hundred dollars. I’ve even had direct sales pitches via instant messaging.
But I have never been able to get a satisfactory answer to my question – what REAL value is there to these accounts when the members or followers realize the account has been sold on? For example, If I bought Mr BabyMan’s Digg account tomorrow and everyone realized I wasn’t Mr BabyMan, what value would that account then have? Probably not very much.
As someone pointed out to me today, if it was a Facebook account with valuable contacts in it (phone numbers, email addresses, etc), that’s a whole different ballgame. But a Twitter account? Now that word is out that the Twitter account is being sold, that account will be toast and the followers will drop off like flies. If you were following that account, how would you feel being bartered and sold like a commodity?
I’d be extremely interested to hear your opinions on this one. Is there such a thing as “social network account squatting”? Is what Andrew Baron doing a bit on the low side or does he have the right to do what he wants? Readers, it’s over to you.
Johnny Lee, whose amazing Wii Remote hacks – which turn the $40 device into a digital whiteboard, multi-touch display, and 3-D viewer – have been a massive hit on YouTube, was invited to speak at the TED conference. Watch and be amazed by what a brilliant mind can do with a child’s toy.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Dell will soon launch a low-cost laptop with a base price of approximately $399. With all that’s been happening in the world of cheap mobile computing in the past year, it’s not really surprising that Dell wants to have its own share of the cake. Since Asus and HP have already released their own low-cost ultra-mobile solutions recently, Dell doesn’t really have much of a choice but to release a similar product if they want to remain in the game.
The only details we’ve been able to get so far are that this notebook will feature a 8.9-inch display and be manufactured by Dell’s Taiwanese sub-contractor, Compal.
Dell’s new mini-laptop could be available for purchase as soon as June 2008.
If you’re a heavy Internet surfer and are using Windows, you are probably vulnerable to a bunch of vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Flash Player without knowing it. A new version of the popular software has been just released, fixing seven flaws said to allow remote executable code to be run on a Windows system.
Adobe has upgraded its Flash Player to fix seven vulnerabilities in its software widely used for interactive Web pages and banner advertisements.
Adobe classifies the patches as “critical” and advises people upgrade to the latest version, 9.0.124.0. All of the vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to execute code on a machine.
One of the vulnerabilities allowed Shane Macaulay to win a laptop in the PWN 2 OWN hacking contest at last month’s CanSecWest conference in Vancouver.
Macaulay, a researcher with the Security Objectives consultancy, used the Flash flaw to break into a machine running Windows Vista. He later said 90 percent of computers worldwide were vulnerable.
Exploiting vulnerabilities in Flash software has become an increasingly popular vector for hackers to compromise machines for two reasons. Most Web browsers have the Flash Player installed, and malicious banner advertisements — which can achieve wide distribution on Web sites pulling ads from a network — can take advantage of those vulnerabilities.
As the article points out, the real danger of these flaws comes from malicious websites hosting banner ads that run when you open a web page. Such ads could auto-execute against the flaws and install malware on your system. Note that using an alternate web browser won’t protect you against this threat.
As a blogger, I see lots of the blog spam by these attackers. Sure, they are just text and links in blog comments, but the real intent of those comments is to drive up page ranking in Google. This way the attackers can poison Google search results to trick you into visiting a webpage that hosts their malicious flash crap. That is one of the reasons why YOU need McAfee SiteAdvisor on your box to validate that those search results are actually good.
Wow, you have to admit this thing is darn sexy… in kind of an evil way. In fact, I think it would fit Darth Vader’s outfit perfectly! The Van Der Led WM2 is a watch / cellphone hybrid that features a 1.3-inch, 260k color touchscreen, 1 GB of internal memory, and a 1.3 MP digital camera. The device supports Bluetooth connectivity, and apart from acting as a watch and a cellphone, it can be used as a media player as well. This little piece of mobile technology can be yours for only €300 (About $470). Hurry up and get yours now before the Galactic Empire decides to put their hands on the entire stock!
If you’re a heavy Internet surfer and are using Windows, you are probably vulnerable to a bunch of vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Flash Player without knowing it. A 