Why did Lebron James create a Twitter account the same week he decided to crush his hometown’s collective heart? Maybe he was unaware that the micro-blogging service had been available to the public for the past 4 years. It could be a coincidence that he decided to utilize that forum during the biggest spectacle of self-love that I have ever personally witnessed. Truth is that Twitter provided an environment where he could display his glaring character flaws. Compassion, humbleness, loyalty and respect are not prerequisites to creating a Twitter account.
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It’s said and done now, but really, shame on Twitter. These are just some painfully obvious and blatant information assurance mistakes. And to consider these security errors occurred on a massive lifestreaming site such as Twitter. Unthinkable.
The FTC:
According to the FTC’s complaint, Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system, including:
requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks;
prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;
suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;
providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;
enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days;
restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and
imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.
It’s easy to overlook information security basics such as what the FTC found Twitter had done. But seriously, these steps listed above are not that painstaking to take care of. This should be a lesson-learned for all folks attached to the IT industry.
Pino is a sexy Twitter client for Linux.
Pino is Twitter and Identi.ca client for Linux desktop (actualy, for any OS, that has X11). It’s simple and fast. Pino is written in Vala language and compiled to the native binary code.
I am not entirely pleased with the existing Twitter client landscape, however Pino appears to be one of the best possibilities for Linux users. The application is available on just about every distribution possible and fulfills the standard Twitter client requirement – a tab for your stream, another for @replies and yet another for direct messages. Pino even supports multiple Twitter accounts as well as support for identi.ca accounts.
While Pino does not have built-in twitpic support, the capabilities offered by this lightweight client outweigh any potential drawbacks for those who truly need a dedicated Twitter client. I just played with Pino in an Ubuntu build I have running and was impressed with the simplicity. (via minimal linux)
Over the last 24-48 hours we are [again] seeing a DM phishing attack blowing through Twitter accounts. Are you spamming your Twitter followers with Direct Messages (DM) that contain links leading to phishing websites? Have you received a Twitter DM to a Twitter login page that isn’t the actual Twitter login page?
How would you know?
One quick way is to filter tweets on yourself by using the @’youaccountname’ link to the right on Twitter’s home page. Do you see tweets from you, but in fact not from you? If you answered yes, your Twitter account may likely be compromised.
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Being safe and smart when using the Internet is an issue that has been around since the rise of chatrooms and the exploitation of naive individuals by social predators. In other words, forever. The emphasis on being safe and not giving away details has always been young children or teenagers, since they’ve always been regarded as more trusting and the natural prey of social predators. It was assumed, of course, that adults would be more practical and less naive. As usual, we took for granted the processing power of the human brain.
While social networks like Facebook can give you access to invitations to parties and special online contests, it also opens you up to other things, such as:
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As of the past 96 hours (give or take a few hours), Twitter has been in full-blown #moonfruit mania, giving rise to a frequently asked question common to many Twitter trends: what the hell is #moonfruit?
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A few months back I wrote about how desktop Twitter clients are pointless, especially when they offer no benefit to the user. For the most part I still today hold the same contempt for desktop twitter clients I had back in early March 2009 with one exception: Tweetie for Mac by atebits. This is the one and only desktop Twitter client I have found worth using on a regular basis, and the one client offering many advantages unlike its competition. I continue to find the focused reliance on using a desktop client to access Twitter quite fascinating, but at the same time understandable, especially after having used Tweetie for Mac since its debut.
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Facebook and Twitter are two completely different types of web sites. Facebook is a full-featured web-based service, offering a wide ranging set of capabilities – it is the epitome of a social networking service. On the other hand, Twitter merely offers the ability to update your status and nothing else. It seems each site appeals to a specific subset of users and for particular reasons. What is it about each site that makes it appealing and what types of users engage each site?
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Over this weekend CNN was running one of their “Quick Vote” polls and the question was, “Do you use Twitter?” The overwhelming majority of respondents, approximately 94%, answered either “No” or “What’s Twitter?” compared to the meager 6% who stated they do use the micro-blogging service. The CNN audience reflects the average user, most of whom have no clue what the service is all about. So this begs the question, what benefits can the average user appreciate from using Twitter?
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