Facebook vs Porn

Facebook wins.

From Reuters:

Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek," has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.
...

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters," said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior.

"There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays," Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

I propose a different theory: They decided to stop watching sex and actually have it. Succesful social networking does increase one's odds after all.

H/T The Daily Dish

The New Flu

Is an interesting experiment. Essentially its trying to see how information is spread on the web. Just click the spread it button and post it on your site. The widget then ads a link to your blog on the map which is posted on hundreds of blogs already. More details here

H/T to OTB

US Government to Monitor All of Cyberspace?

For our security of course.

From the Wall Street Journal

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Ok, blatantly obvious privacy concerns aside I see this creating a slippery slope. By that I mean how long until this technology goes from being used to protect us from being used to protect us from ourselves? Eventually someone is going to wonder if its possible to use this to protect children by tracking or blocking visitors to kiddie porn sites. Then some administration down the road decides to do the same with sites that depict the denigration of women. Then another decides to do the same with hate speech and another cruelty to animals and so on and so on until eventually we're behind the equivalent of a moral Great Firewall of China.

To me that is the problem with such broad ranging surveillance initiatives. It's not always the government of today one needs to fear, it's the unforeseen administrations of tomorrow.

Plus there is always the chance that any such security initiative will be rendered obsolete by a sixteen year old kid in Micronesia a week after it's rolled out.

h/t to Donklephant

Chinese military hacked into Pentagon

From the Financial Times:

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials.

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

additionally

Sami Saydjari, chief executive of Cyber Defense Agency and a former Pentagon cyber expert, warns of the potential for terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, to attack the financial, telecoms, and power sectors.

To underscore the threat, he notes that no cyber red team – hackers enlisted to attack systems to help identify weaknesses – has ever failed to meet its objective.

Gregory Garcia, the assistant secretary for cyber security at the department of Homeland Security, says the number of cyber incidents reported to the department’s computer readiness team so far this year is 35,000. That compares to 4,100 for the whole of 2005.

I've spoken on this before but we really need to get our ducks in a row when it comes to national network security. I know why the problem hasn't been fixed and thats cost and lack of political will. Nothing will be done until after something major happens. Unless the govt currently has some sort of network security Manhattan Project going on odds its up to the private sector to provide a solution. Needless to say a company that can provide a significantly more secure OS or an adaptive and/or reactive firewall stands to make billions. Ultimately its just a matter of time before one or the other happens.

Additionally its too easy to paint China as the villain here. Anyone capable of cracking our network could have just as easily cracked theirs and launched their attack from a compromised Chinese govt computer. Without inside confirmation that the hacking was by the PLA we'll never be one hundred percent certain. (However we have to treat the attack as though the information downloaded is in the hands of China.) We have in essence moved into an IT cold war in which an individual or group can be as much of a threat to our networks, financial sector, or infrastructure as any state. Now isn't that a comforting thought?

Ron Paul's Website #1 of All Candidates

in a custom report created for ClickZ News, Hitwise measured traffic market share of the candidate sites. The measurement firm found traffic to Democratic candidate sites was top heavy, favoring Clinton's, Obama's and Edwards's sites. HillaryClinton.com garnered nearly a third of visits among Democratic candidate sites in May. BarackObama.com attracted almost 28 percent, and JohnEdwards.com drew 23 percent of visitors to Dem campaign sites last month.

Visits to Republican candidate sites were spread a bit more evenly among the sites tracked. RonPaul2008.com drew a 27 percent share of visitors to Republican candidate sites in May. MittRomney.com attracted almost 21 percent of visits last month, while JohnMccain.com brought in almost 13 percent.

Hitwise defines market share of visits within a site category as the percentage of traffic to a particular site based on its sample of 10 million U.S. Web users. full article

Now should Mr. Paul's finances show the same gain his site has we'll be seeing candidate's scrambling to imitate his web strategy.

h/t to Donklephant

Digital Reputation

Thomas Friedman did an interesting piece (Behind the pay firewall)about one of the pluses and minuses of the information age.

When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer — and each of us so much more transparent.


The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called “How.” Because Seidman’s simple thesis is that in this transparent world “how” you live your life and “how” you conduct your business matters more than ever, because so many people can now see into what you do and tell so many other people about it on their own without any editor. To win now, he argues, you have to turn these new conditions to your advantage.

For young people, writes Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them. more

I'm sort of fortunate in that I chose the handle (as it used to be called) Dyre42 sixteen years ago and then transferred it over to the internet once it became more widely available (and affordable) in that there really isn't much linked to my real name.

But my children will grow up with much of their lives being documented on the interwebs. In order to maintain some type of firewall between the real and virtual worlds they'll have to actually think ahead about what they want people to be able to find out about them online. And frankly that wasn't in the parenting manual that comes attached to the baby when its born.

King of Spam Canned

Finally a great victory in the war everyone supports.

Longtime 'Spam King' Charged With Fraud

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007; A01

From his 17th-floor Seattle apartment overlooking Puget Sound, Robert A. Soloway allegedly ran an illicit network of computers around the world, secretly commandeering the machines of thousands of unsuspecting bystanders. Prosecutors say Internet users who clicked on infected e-mails and Web sites inadvertently took part in his criminal endeavor: spam.

Soloway, 27, used his empire of hijacked "zombie" computers to send tens of millions of unsolicited e-mail messages over the past four years, prosecutors allege. Described as a spammer since he was a teenager, he allegedly covered his digital tracks using Chinese servers, fabricated Web sites and the purloined identities of hundreds of Internet users whose names and e-mail addresses were slapped on the bulk mailings. He opened and closed bank accounts faster than creditors could track them, prosecutors said.

But federal authorities caught up this week with the man prosecutors call the "spam king" and arrested him on 35 charges of fraud, identity theft and money laundering, casting a light on the byzantine, highly lucrative underworld of mass e-mail marketing. Soloway pleaded not guilty.

"He is one of the bad ones. He's one of the longest-running and uses criminal methods all the time," said John Reid, an investigator with Spamhaus, a European organization that fights spam. "Anyone on the Web for a while would have received one of Soloway's spams."

Spamhaus had included him on its list of the 10 worst spammers until last year, when he was overtaken by more-sophisticated operators, primarily in Russia and Ukraine, Reid said.

A lawyer for Soloway could not be reached for comment. more

New Strategy in The War Against Spam

Hey, at least its a war that everyone can support.

From the BBC:
Backing for tool to battle spam

The DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) system is a method of validating the identity of the sender of an e-mail.

Spammers hide their identity by using a false, or spoofed, address in the millions of messages they send out.

DKIM uses encrypted digital signatures to prove a message's origin and a draft standard has been accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The IETF is the umbrella group representing firms such as Yahoo, Cisco, Sendmail and PGP Corporation.

The firms have pledged to work with ISPs, businesses and financial institutions to roll out the technology as soon as possible.

Protecting e-mail users from scams was a top priority, said Mark Delany, lead architect for Yahoo Mail and author of DomainKeys.

"DomainKeys Identified Mail is positioned to become the pre-eminent standard for e-mail authentication," he said.

Key consideration

Although 90 to 99% of e-mail comes from senders known to the recipient, establishing the identity of a sender remains a key consideration in the protection against spam.

Spammers get away with sending spoofed e-mails because mail servers only check if a domain mentioned in these spoofed addresses - such as @madeupmailname.com - is known to be used by spammers.

DKIM lets honest e-mail senders prove they sent a message by encrypting a two-part signature, or key, in a selected part of the mail.

The e-mail provider, such as Yahoo, puts an encrypted private key into the e-mail when it is sent.

It is linked to a public key held by the internet's domain name system - the phonebook of the internet.

The mail server which receives the e-mail checks to ensure that the private and public keys match, proving that the message has come from a genuine sender.

But in order for the technology to work, both the sender and recipient need their mail services to be signed up to DKIM.

"DKIM is an example of major players coming together to do the right thing, sacrificing short term competitive edge to ensure safety, security and trust on the internet," said Eric Allman, co-founder of messaging service Sendmail.

Since a huge amount of the resources of the net are used to transport spam this could potentially save the web from death by spam traffic, save ISPs tons of money in bandwidth costs, and prevent financial loss from phishing emails. Its a win win situation for everyone.

Fame, Fortune, and Maybe Even Power 2.0

Bear with me here, I'll get to the political crap eventually....

I was visting Jonathan Coulton's blog earlier and he scored a write up in the NY Times. If you're not familiar with Mr. Coulton hang with me while I bring you up to speed. Mr. Coulton left his programming job to pursue music which he then made available on the internet via podcast for free. He turned out 1 song a week for a year (that's five albums) most of which were originals and allowed his fans to muck around them however they saw fit (according to CC licensing) resulting in multiple videos for certain songs which were distributed via YouTube. Fans opted to buy songs, listen to songs and then donate to Mr. Coulton, and many listeners paid him jack. However he managed to make a living off of voluntary purchases/donations to an average of 4 grand a month.

How did he manage it? By interacting over the web with his fan base over the web via his blog, forums, MySpace, and email. Now I like some of his songs but he's no Mozart. His strength lies in catchy rhythms and melodies, good although often odd subject matter (monkeys, mad scientists, robots, and the difficulties of becoming a parent), and an honest sounding voice.

If you'll check out the Times article you'll find out that he just one of several artists that have manged this. (He's just the only one that quit his job before the model was tested.)

Now given those results I'm left wondering how long it will be before a mayor, state congressman or federal congressman manages to pull out a victory using a similar model ie spending six hours a day answering emails and blog/MySpace comments. Admittedly the demographics of the area would have to be right but if one had that they could theoretically fund raise and interact daily with their future constituents thereby bridging the gap between elected official and voter. After all the Netroots have already proven what a fund raising machine the interwebnetthingy can be.

With online services that allow for blog posts, text messages, and emails to be sent to cell phones one could theoretically be plugged into ones city or district 24/7. And as the old beltway guard gives way to a new generation of political newcomers the possibilities on a local or district level become endless like oh say fund raising without donations from special interests or corporate sponsors. The question is who is going to be the first to explore the possibilities of digital democracy to it fullest extent?

Now back to Mr. Coulton. I hereby award him the Crapomatic Institute's coveted Golden Cajones Award for taking an incalcuable risk and succeeding. And if you happen to run for office using a similiar model drop me a line. I'll cover the race and you'll be the prime nominee for the same award.

You can listen to all of Mr. Coulton's Songs here

I advise listening to "You Ruined Everything" first, "Code Monkey" second, and if you appreciate dark comedy "Skullcrusher Mountain" third.

Terrorists Improving Internet Operations

I had previously covered this topic last year when the FBI's computers were hacked:




And according to this interview Al Quaeda has been the pushing the boundaries of what can be done over the internet for 20 years




"I've been tracking Al Qaeda and actually bin Laden and his group forward since the late 1980s. And it's simply because as a group that is operating in what can be referred to as best practice, they really are very good at what they do. I'm always willing to learn from somebody who may learn something that I should know. So I've been watching them for quite a while. And they are very, very good at everything from money laundering, to secure communications. And to underestimate them at any point in time is suicidal."