Facebook, Washington Accuse Marketing Firm of Clickjacking

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29 January 2012
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Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics.

The company at the centre of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person’s Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view “provocative” content in exchange for clicking the ‘like’ button on the Facebook page.

By clicking like, the user alerts their Facebook friends to the page. From there, the user was directed to complete one of several online surveys and provide information such as their age. Oftentimes, the promised content did not exist, and the duped user was directed off Facebook through a series of prompts that took them to unrelated Websites. In some cases, clickjacking was used to activate the like function and spread spam, according to the state’s suit — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Man Steals Stuffed Leopard, Dingo From Buena Vista Museum

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29 January 2012
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Two stuffed animals were stolen from the glass display in front of the Buena Vista Museum Wednesday morning.

Officers said 55-year-old Henry Slivers was found two blocks away at the Jack In The Box with a stuffed dingo.

That’s where he was arrested in connection with the break-in.

I was just bored and decided I wanted to be a cat burglar, Slivers told 23ABC in a jailhouse interview. So I kicked in the window and tried to steal the lion but it was too heavy, so I stole the cat.

I took the leopard to my hotel. I then decided I wanted the dingo so I went back and took it. I took it to Jack In The Box because I wanted to have breakfast with it.

23ABC asked Slivers what he was planning on doing with the dingo and he replied, I was going to take it around town with me — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Why Twitter’s new policy is helpful for free-speech advocates

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28 January 2012
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My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.

I often criticise companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognise Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.

In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can. (It also fits with its business model so I am not going to argue they are uniquely angelic, but Twitter does have a good track record. Twitter was the only company which first fought the US government to protect user information in the Wikileaks case, and then informed the users when it lost the fight. In fact, Twitter’s transparency is the only reason we even know of this; other companies, it appears, silently caved and complied.)

Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Visodate / Tissot

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28 January 2012
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In Design
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The Visodate is based on the model of the same name that Tissot had in the ’50s, but it has been updated. Most obvious is the sizing, which, at 40mm, is completely up to modern tastes (though, about the upper end of what I’d consider for a dress piece). At 11.6mm, it’s not the slimmest watch in the stable, but it’ll still do just fine — via Wrist Watch Review

Belen Police Station / EDU

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27 January 2012
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This police station [EDU] is a new effort by the city of Medellin and the National Police organisation to initiate a change in the image that these buildings have on the community, making it a role model where the institution is closer to the people — via ArchDaily

Mikrogirder 2000 / TAG Heuer

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27 January 2012
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Simpler, faster and more efficient than science dreamed possible, impervious to gravity and dramatically reducing isochronous error, potentially easier to manufacture and able to precisely measure time to a phenomenal 5/10,000th of a second today, and probably even more precisely tomorrow…

TAG Heuer challenges three centuries of hairspring/balance wheel mechanical regulation conventions to create a totally new mechanical regulator. The legendary Swiss brand is now unveiling a first Concept version, a 5/10,000th of a second chronograph beating at 1,000 Hz or 7,200,000 beats per hour — via TAGHeuerOnline

Twitter to censor content in some countries

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27 January 2012
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Twitter has announced it will begin restricting tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression, Twitter wrote in a blog post.

It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries.

Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there, it said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

MegaUpload Users Plan to Sue the FBI over Lost Files

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27 January 2012
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In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.

However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.

As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.

In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Burgled in Philly

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27 January 2012
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Hanging the machine guns on the wall was a bad idea, but the burglary wouldn’t have happened if we’d just covered up the little decorative window over the front door. If you stood on your toes in the hallway and looked in through the little window, the guns were in plain sight. Almost everything was in plain sight because most of our third-story apartment was a single large room — a shoddy retrofit of a massive early twentieth-century industrial building on Philadelphia’s north side, in Fishtown, where those kind of buildings are common.

The building owner, a tattoo artist we’ll call Daryl, also lived somewhere on the third floor and ran a printing business on the first floor that employed a half-dozen people, most of whom were heavily tattooed tenants. There was plenty of activity around the building during the day and everyone made sure the main doors were always locked, so we had good reason to believe a burglar wouldn’t be able to break into the building in broad daylight, climb the stairs to the third floor, peek into our apartment, force his way in and carry off our machine guns without being caught. That was naïve. We should have covered up the little window — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Dimora Trial: Puppet’s Court Day

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27 January 2012
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Channel 19 in Akron, Ohio was disappointed that it wouldn’t be allowed to take cameras into the corruption trial of Jimmy Dimora, a former county commissioner. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla: they bring the courtroom proceeding to their viewers’ TV sets by re-enacting them with puppets — via Boing Boing

Swiss thieves take 100kg safe on snowboard

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26 January 2012
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Swiss police say thieves took a 100kg safe from a youth hostel in a ski resort and apparently used a stolen snowboard to make off with it.

Police in the Swiss canton of Graubünden said someone broke into the building in Valbella, in the south-east of the country, on Monday night or in the early hours of Tuesday — via redwolf.newsvine.com

ISP data retention still an issue, Ludlam warns

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26 January 2012
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Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s War on the Internet event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around the data retention proposal had been integrated into new cybercrime legislation introduced in mid-2011.

Ludlam said the proposal had been narrowed down to a degree to which most people would find reasonable, in that law enforcement agencies could, for example, request ISPs to keep all available data on people suspected of committing major crimes such as terrorism — a technique he described as hold that person’s everything, until we tell you not to any more.

However, the Greens Senator warned, that cybercrime legislation could mutate into something completely different. Maybe let’s trap all the data of these categories of people, he said, appearing to refer to the political activist community, many members of whom had gathered at the Melbourne event. Or these postcodes of people — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Stop ACTA: secretive treaty will bring in the worst of SOPA through trade obligations

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26 January 2012
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ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world’s richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.

Stop ACTA! — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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