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  • Facebook, Twitter use raise security issues

    Corporate executives are concerned the use of Facebook and Twitter by employees could lead to the exposure of critical corporate data, according to a recent study.
    According to the study, carried out by email security vendor Proofpoint, 34 percent of US companies surveyed have been affected by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information during the past year.
    The June survey of 220 email decision-makers at companies with more than 1000 employees also found that 17 percent of companies have investigated the possible exposure of information on popular social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn. And 10 percent reported they have disciplined employees for violating social networking policies in the past year, while 8 percent have fired a worker for such offences.
    Recently, the US Marine Corps officially banned the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter on military networks. One reason cited in the administrative directive: Social networks provide an easy conduit for information leakage to adversaries.
    "Businesses are still evaluating both the threat and opportunities presented by social networking," says Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "It is a way to get their message out to real people, but it can also be an avenue where confidential or embarrassing information can leak out as well. And this can be as innocent as an employee posting on Facebook that he is worried about layoffs, or they are extra busy because of customer complaints about their product. If these things get disseminated enough, it can cause real problems."
    Olds also points out that companies have to walk a fine line between advising employees to be cautious of what they post online and overstepping their bounds.
    "Businesses can't be seen as encroaching on their employees' free speech rights," he adds. "They need to put out reasonable guidelines and point out how innocent postings can be misconstrued," he says.

  • App developers stung by Twitter's DOS woes

    Developers who built applications for Twitter and generate money from them have been hard-hit by the micro-blogging service's many hours of downtime in the past day, as hackers pummel Twitter with an ongoing denial-of-service attack.

  • Emergency alert provider sues Twitter over patents

    TechRadium, a provider of mass notification and emergency alert systems to school districts, municipal governments, the U.S. military and other organizations, has filed a lawsuit charging Twitter with patent infringement.

  • Victoria Police use Twitter to report on road blitz

    Last night, the Victoria Police force began a three-day blitz on dangerous driving, Operation Ardent, and for the first time used microblogging site Twitter to enforce the safe driving message among young drivers.

  • Twitter documents stolen from Google Apps

    A hacker has reportedly obtained and distributed more than 300 confidential documents pertaining to Twitter's business affairs. The documents were reportedly stored on Google Apps. 

  • 'Twitpocalypse' slays iPhone apps

    The surging popularity of the Twitter messaging service has broken some or all of several Twitter client applications as a part of what is being called “the Twitpocalypse".
    Each message on Twitter is assigned a unique identification number. On Friday evening, the number of tweets exceeded 2,147,483,647. While that doesn’t seem like a round number, it’s the largest number that can be stored as the data type known as a “signed integer”.
    Once that number was exceeded, some versions of some Twitter client apps could break in a fashion similar to what was expected during the Y2K “millennium bug” era.
    The first apparent victim of the Twitpocalypse was The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific for iPhone, which stopped working immediately following the event. Though The Iconfactory released a version of the app that the company felt addressed the Twitpocalypse, apparently that assumption was incorrect.
    Twitterrific for iPhone users attempting to contact the service will receive a “YAJL error 3” indication.
    A tweet from Twitterrific developer Craig Hockenberry seems to indicate that he’s fixed the bug, but now must wait for Apple to approve the bug-fix release. The Iconfactory has suggested that Twitterrific users follow @twitterrific on Twitter for status updates.
    Twitterrific users might want to use a free Twitter app such as Twitterfon or Twittelator in the meantime.
    Atebits Software’s Tweetie for iPhone has also been affected by the Twitpocalypse. The program continues to function for browsing and posting tweets, but searches no longer work. Tweetie developer Loren Brichter said on Twitter that he is working on an update to address the problem as well, but like all iPhone developers he is at the mercy of Apple's approval process once he’s submitted his fix.
    If you’re experiencing problems with the Twitter client you use, check to see if you’re using the latest version. Most Twitter clients have already been updated to deal with this issue.

  • Facebook use grows by 700%, maintains top spot

    In April, Facebook users spent 13.9 billion minutes on the site, a dramatic hike from the year-earlier total of 1.7 billion minutes, according to a report from The Nielsen Co. The 700% increase let Facebook easily maintain its place atop the social networking business.

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