SocialSafe Blog

Continuing yesterday’s theme of social media helping with weddings, I thought this story was also worth sharing. On a standard lunchtime scan of my Facebook news feed, I saw that a couple of friends had written on the wall of someone called ‘Romeo Juliet’.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I went onto this person’s profile, to discover that it was a profile created by a man wanting to organise a flash mob proposal to his girlfriend. His profile information looks like this:

If you go to the actual Romeo Juliet Facebook profile you’ll see that the proposal happened yesterday, and that there are many messages of congratulations on the wall. You’ll also find a link to a series of professional photographs taken by one person who befriended the mystery romantic, and a video of the actual proposal.

That’s all there really is to say, other than good luck to the happy couple!

Google are following the growing trend of rewarding hackers for finding bugs in their code by holding the Pwnium security challenge at next week’s CanSecWest conference in Vancouver.

On Monday Google announced that it would pay cash awards from a fund of $1 million to anyone who can hack the Chrome browser. Google has pledged to pay multiple awards in the value of $60,000, $40,000 and $20,000, depending on the severity of the exploits, up to $1 million. Successful hackers will also win a Chromebook.

Writing on its blog, Google said: “We require each set of exploit bugs to be reliable, fully functional end to end, disjoint, of critical impact, present in the latest versions and genuinely ’0-day,’ i.e. not known to us or previously shared with third parties.”

The rewards criteria are detailed as follows on the Chromium Blog:

$60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

$40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

$20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

This is not the first time a company has rewarded hackers for finding faults with their products – in the Summer of 2011 Facebook ran a similar programme, and even admitted that it acts as a recruitment process in some cases.

Twitter has teamed up with  UK-based company Datasift to offer businesses the ability to search through and analyse up to two years worth of Twitter updates for market research purposes.

Up until now, the search capabilities of Twitter only allowed companies to go back as far as the last 30 days of tweets, while regular users were restricted to the past seven days. Speaking to the BBC, Tim Barker - Datasift’s marketing manager - said “It’s a brand new service that we’re bringing online – it’s a massive technology challenge because of the amount of data that is pumped out every single day.”

On an average day the company compiles around 250 million tweets which are then analysed for content such as positive or negative sentiment. In addition to this, location data will be logged where available, and Datasift are also keen to stress that private accounts and deleted tweets will NOT be indexed by the site.

This looks set to be a very useful tool for companies wanting to gauge the public opinion on a number of matters. However, there are concerns from privacy campaigners, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation describing the service as “creepy”. Having said that, unless your tweets are protected, every update you make on Twitter is completely public, so people should be aware that any tweets they make are fair game for the whole world, should it reach that far.

So companies can mine the data, but what about individuals? If you are a prolific Twitter user it can be a very laborious process trying to find one of your own tweets or mentions from even a few weeks ago. Thankfully SocialSafe allows you to backup and search your Twitter timeline, mentions, messages and people who you follow/follow you, so you can really take a detailed look at your online social life!

I think it’s fair to say that all of us – well, all of us that use Facebook that is – have been on either side of this little situation: the annoying status update. Andy McDonald at the Huffington Post has compiled a list of what he thinks are “The 10 Most Annoying Facebook Status Updates“.

To save reproducing them all here and committing the cardinal internet sin of ‘duplicate content’, you can find the list in the link above. So let’s have a bit of an honesty session here – how many of these are you guilty of posting?

By my reckoning, I tick three of the ten boxes. They are as follows:

No. 1 – The “Food I Just Made/Ate Photo” Update: I like to cook, and I like to eat, so often I’ll post a picture of a meal I’m proud to have put together, or occasionally I’ll upload a photo of the Dominos that just arrived, knowing full well that somewhere there will be a friend of mine who sees it who will be massively envious.

No. 3 – The “Gym” Update: Unfortunately these a never as regular as the ‘food’ updates, thus why I don’t look like a cast member from 300.

No.6 – The “Vegas” Update: Not technically true for me, as I’ve never been to Vegas, therefore I’ve never had cause to post updates to that effect. However, I do tend to get very excitable from the moment I book tickets to see certain bands (Pearl Jam being the one where I turn into the grunge equivalent of the Justin Bieber fans that plague Twitter), right up to the day after the show, so I think it’s fair to plead guilty on this count.

So then… which of the 10 types of update on Andy McDonald’s hit list will you admit to posting? Or which annoy you the most? If your pet peeve isn’t on there, what is it? Feel free to have a rant in the comments section beneath.

Part of the problem with Facebook is that once you’re friends with someone, it can become very awkward to swing the axe and ‘de-friend’ them if their updates drive you up the wall. However, at least with Facebook’s Subscribe feature you do have a semblance of control over what sort of updates appear in your news feed, and from whom.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor who rose to fame portraying characters such as Ali G, Borat, and more recently the gay German fashion reporter Bruno, caused a stir last night at the Oscars by pranking interviewer Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet.

Arriving in the full military dress of his latest character, General Aladeen – from the film ‘The Dictator’ – Baron Cohen spoke with E!’s Ryan Seacrest while carrying an urn containing the ‘ashes of Kim Jong Il’, explaining that it was the ‘dream’ of the now deceased Supreme Leader of North Korea to attend the Oscars.

During the interview, General Aladeen ‘accidentally’ spilled the ashes all over Ryan Seacrest, who quite frankly didn’t seem too happy about it. However, his studio colleagues then told him how lucky he was to have been picked as the victim of the prank, and that he would be “trending worldwide in about one second.”

They weren’t wrong. About 10 hours after the event, and Ryan Seacrest and Sacha Baron Cohen are still trending on Twitter. You can view the video of Sacha Baron Cohen Ryan Seacrest prank here:

As if the digital television changeover isn’t confusing enough for some people, there is further news this week that almost a million homes in the UK will need to have filters installed to prevent TV interference from 4G mobile signals.

The estimated cost of this is £108m, and a smaller number of homes (around 10,000) will need to switch to cable or satellite services to avoid degradation in picture quality. The costs for that will be met by the winner of a spectrum auction to be held later this year.

Homes within a certain radius of 4G transmitter towers will automatically be issued with a filter that fits to a digital TV box and blocks out unwanted noise from the 4G signal.

There is more on this story of 4G TV interference on the BBC.