Social Media Brings China New Challenges, Opportunities

Uploaded by VOAvideo on 30 Sep 2011 - China has more people online than any other country in the world despite strict government controls on the the web. As China marks National Day, October 1, VOA's William Ide examines the growing pressures facing China and its leaders in the modern information age.

US military creates fake online personas

The US military awarded a contract for software to create 500 fake personas on social networks in order to secretly influence online debate in its favour, it has been reported.

Facebook: The move has angered troops who regularly use networking sites to keep in touch with family and friends Photo: GETTY

By Christopher Williams, Technology Correspondent

4:54PM GMT 17 Mar 2011

The $2.76m contract was won by Ntrepid, a Californian firm, and called for an "online persona management service" that would enable 50 military spies to manage 10 fake identities each.

The personas should be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent", a US Central Command (Centcom) tender document said.

It added: "Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.

"Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms."

The project would be based at MacDill Air Force base in Florida, The Guardian reported. The contract was first revealed by The Raw Story, a US news website.

UK Telegraph | read full post 

Face Book Privacy issue crop up again:

CIA’s Facebook Knows Where You Go On the Web

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg said you need to get over the fact that there is no privacy on the internet? He meant it. Many of you have likely viewed the video below. It documents Facebook’s connection to the CIA. Many people, however, think the fun of posting on and the interaction of Facebook overshadows the downside, or they merely ignore the negative aspects. 

Well, it turns out it is worse than we previously thought. Hacker and writer Nik Cubrilovic has a post on his blog today revealing some really scary and downright police state Stasi-like aspects of the popular “service” that doubles as a data-mining operation for the CIA. Cubrilovic writes that Facebook keeps track of every website destination you visit, even if YOU ARE LOGGED OUT OF FACEBOOK. 

It does this through the cookies it routinely plants on your computer. This is somewhat of an overstatement. In fact, Facebook is only able to do this on pages that have its “Like” button on it, which is to say a lot of webpages, although hardly all.

Full report & video | Pakalert Press - 26 Sept 2011

Google launches latest tool in social networking

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Sep 22, 2011 - A war is brewing in the cyber world. Google has launched a social networking tool called Google Plus. It is aimed at dethroning the field's crowned king - Facebook.

Julpan Acquired by Twitter

I am very proud to announce that Julpan has been acquired by Twitter.

We founded Julpan more than a year ago. In that time we've created innovative, early-alpha-stage search technology that analyzes social activity across the Web to deliver fresh and relevant content to users.

Twitter houses an industry-leading engineering team that is tackling some of the Internet's most interesting opportunities. With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them. We look forward to joining forces with Twitter's engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan's innovations.

I'd like to personally thank the talented engineers, architects and designers of Julpan. I couldn't have asked for a better group of people with whom to invent some of the world's best social search technology.

Ori Allon, Director of Engineering, Twitter (former Founder & CEO of Julpan)

(Twitter Acquires Julpan, The Startup By The Guy Who Helped Perfect Google Search)

Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Update

You might have noticed that Facebook changed last night. Inline photos are a little bigger, the top bar a little blockier, and a news ticker now rests in the upper-righthand corner for real-time updates. Overwhelmed? We're here to help.

This latest flurry of updates caps off a steady flow of tweaks over the past few weeks. You now subscribe to your friends' updates as you would an RSS feeds. You can subscribe to people you're not even friends with. You can organize friend groups by type (in Google+ fashion), not just for chat purposes. And you also have more on-the-fly control over who does and doesn't see your wall posts. All of these features come together to make Facebook feel different, even if it's fundamentally unchanged at its core. Here's a look at the new Facebook.

Go to Original post : 

Brazilians leading social media boom.

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Sep 16, 2011 - Brazil is a country quickly becoming one of the most avid consumers of social media anywhere.

Blackberries - 4 new models.

Published on Sep 19, 2011 by france24english : TECH 24 - The new technologies and their impact on our society. Blackberries, androids, iphone, ipads, smartphones & mobiles.

This Is the Internet.

The Internet isn't only on your screen. Or behind your couch. Or in Google's data centers. It's also underwater, where fiber-optic cables stretch across oceans and loop around continents.

Satellites are like dial-up. Nobody uses them. Undersea cables make the Internet global, with the most sophisticated of them capable of transmitting nearly ten terabits of data per second, compressed through just a handful of fiber-optic strands. There are only hundreds of these cables in waters around the world. And they are all preposterously proportioned, as thin as a garden hose and as long as-actually, nothing. No human construction matches them. They are the longest tubes ever made, and, for the first time ever, there's a truly accurate interactive online map of them.

For a decade, Washington DC-based Telegeography has been publishing an undersea cable map. But it's always been on paper, delivered in a cardboard tube, and sold for $250. But starting today (right this second, actually) the company has put its map online, for free, and made it interactive. And rather than scraping data from Wikipedia, Telegeography's Internet cartographers get information the old fashioned way: They ask the cable owners, who happily share the location of their landing stations and the current bandwidth capacity of their systems.


Full report :

Window 8

Windows 8, which was fully unveiled at the Windows Build Conference in Anaheim, California, is here, and it looks much, much different from Windows 7. Sure, it has the start-bar-and-icon "Desktop" look that Windows users are familiar with, but it also has a new, touchscreen-optimized interface called 'Metro,' which looks more like the Windows Phone operating system and which looks like the future of Microsoft Windows from here on out. 

The touch-optimized interface was all Stephen Sinofsky, President of Windows, and Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President of Windows, were talking about when they showed off Windows 8 to developers at the conference. (They did not, however, mention when the new OS would be available to users.) Here are some screenshots of the new Windows 8 from Sinofsky and Larson-Green's presentation, along with explanations of the newest features and interfaces that users can expect on their new tablets and PCs. Which of these features are you most excited for? Share your thoughts about Windows 8 in the comments.

read full post.