Trends Hut

With many adults in the UK using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, a large number are updating on their actions and whereabouts without considering the associated risks.

According to research by The Co-operative Insurance, 70% of adults in the UK using social networking websites.


Over a third of these though use such as Facebook and Twitter to make people aware of a whole range of personal information – such as where they are, what they are doing, when they are off on holiday etc.
They also divulge information about their date of birth, marital status and family details. In isolation this may seem harmless but collectively in the wrong hands may result in a number of problems.

Divulging personal information puts people at risk of identity theft but detailing when you are away from your home puts you at greater risk from burglary of your home and theft of your personal possessions, such as your car.

Giving this level information is done even though almost two thirds of UK adults believe that they would not be able to make a claim on their home insurance, due to a burglary, if they had clearly documented their movements on social networking websites.

David Neave, Director of General Insurance at The Co-operative Insurance, said: “A common sense approach when using social networking websites is key.

You have to ask yourself ‘would I be happy to divulge this information normally?’ If not, you shouldn’t make people aware of it online.”

He added “Unfortunately, whilst the majority of people use these websites as they are intended, there is a minority group which will be using them for their own illegal gains and therefore it is very important to be vigilant and err on the side of caution when updating statuses.”

"Crime expands to fill the space available" should be a well-known epithet: Evidence it's true is revealed in news that social networking phenomena Facebook and Twitter were used in a classic stock fraud trick.

The two-year investigation of a cocaine-trafficking crime involving $34 million worth of the drug being smuggled through the Port of New York also uncovered something unexpected--a $7 million pump-and-dump stock fraud.

The trick this time, according to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, is that instead of word-of-mouth "pumping" statements, cold calls or subtle manipulation of traditional media, the Web--and social media sites in particular--were used to spread misleading statements and "defraud the investing public." The 11 fraudsters used more than 15 different websites and managed to accrue over $3 million in profit while fleecing the public for $7 million. Facebook pages and misleading Twitter statuses played a key role.

This new type of "wire fraud" is inevitable, and Facebook and Twitter (along with blogs and other social media services) are absolutely perfect vehicles for criminals to use to disseminate misleading stock information. This is because they're communications systems that rapidly spread messages from one to many (Twitter almost exclusively so, and Facebook increasingly so as it pushes toward public-accessible statuses), and their design means they don't necessarily have to give away personal information about the sources of stock rumors. Expect cybercrimes like this one to only get more common.

And Facebook's also in the news at the moment because notorious spammer Adam Guerbuez is refusing to pay the $873 million fine that a Canadian court levied against him for sending over 4 million spam messages over Facebook (the classic type, offering penis enlargements and drugs). Guerbuez used various tricks to pull the scam off, including phishing for user's passwords, and an appeals court recently upheld the charges against him for the crime. Guerbuez doesn't see himself as a criminal though, and as well as declaring his business bankrupt so he won't have to pay the fines, he's noted he's hoping to profit on his notoriety with a book or movie deal.

Pew Internet has just completed a survey of nearly 2000 mobile users in the US and has come up with some not particularly startling statistics about phone and app usage. Still, it’s good to have some cold hard numbers to look at, even if the sample size seems a bit small. Here are a few highlights from the survey and writeup:

• 23% of Americans are now landline-free
  Higher than I expected. I suspect a fair amount of people with land lines these days are more or less required to have them as part of a internet or cable deal.
• 24% of mobile users are active app users
  That is, 24% use their apps regularly, as opposed to simply having apps sitting there on their phone.
• Apps rank low on non-voice activities
  Pew mentions that many apps are used for such things as text messages, picture taking, and so on, but the structure of the survey didn’t allow for this kind of flexibility.
• 13% of users have paid for an app
  Whether this is high or low is kind of a matter of perspective. Two years ago this number was probably more like 2%.
• Median number of installed apps is 10, average is 18
  You seem to be either a light or a heavy app user, not too many people in between. This stat likely owes a lot to the age gap as well. The young people have way more apps than the geezers....
  

People said it would happen with Foursquare, it may have already happened with Twitter, and now the trend has continued on Facebook: Burglars in Nashua, New Hampshire looked at updates from Facebook to figure out when one target wasn’t at home.
Police caught three young men who had used “social networking sites like Facebook to identify victims who posted online that they would not be home at a certain time,” according to local news station WMUR 9.
That said, don’t jump to conclusions. The burglars weren’t using the new Facebook Places location system, despite implications by The Huffington Post and other web publications. Facebook released the following statement published by NECN:

We’ve been in contact with the Nashua police, and they confirmed that they while they have an ongoing investigation and have already made a number of arrests, the only Facebook link was that one of those arrested had a Facebook friend who posted about leaving town in the near future (which is why they believe that home was targeted) and it had nothing to do with Facebook Places. The police confirmed that the other burglaries had nothing to do with Facebook altogether.

These particular burglars performed more than 50 burglaries but they didn’t use Facebook Places, and they may have only targeted one person by looking at his Facebook page. But it goes to show that you should be careful even if you’re using Facebook’s privacy settings to make your updates viewable only to friends.
We’ve heard speculation that burglars would use Facebook status updates to target people in the past, but this time it looks like it’s not just talk. So let this be a warning: Be careful what you include in your social media updates.
 Trends Hut
This Article is written by Samuel Axon

 Trends Hut


Would you believe that Justin Bieber  and his legion of fans use up 3% of Twitter’s server infrastructure at any given time — such a large amount of activity that “racks of servers” are dedicated to Bieber mania?
So said a Twitter employee, according to web designer and blogger Dustin Curtis. Yesterday he sent out the following tweet:

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter”

When we asked Curtis who the Twitter employee is, he said his source is someone “who would know such things. I obviously can’t give you his name. But I trust that the information is absolutely correct.” So maybe you’d better believe it. Bieber consistently appears on the top Twitter trends chart we publish each weekend, and he topped a “Twitter’s most listed” chart too.
We shot an e-mail Twitter’s way to confirm, and while the Twitter rep we contacted didn’t confirm the figure, she didn’t discourage us from believing it, either. “While we don’t break out metrics like this, everything around and about Justin Bieber is consistently popular on Twitter,” she said.
Curtis also tweeted that “most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts.” He believed the Twitter employee and tweeted what he said in part because he thinks the numbers make perfect sense:

“Every time Bieber tweets, his messages have to be delivered to more than five million people who then endlessly retweet it. Apparently, his account receives more than 60 @-replies per second for a while after he tweets, which is something Twitter wasn’t originally designed to handle.”

He’s certainly no Justin Bieber, but Curtis isn’t totally unknown on Twitter himself. He appeared in our “10 Web Design Bloggers You Should Follow” list a couple of months ago.

 Trends Hut
This Article is written by Pete Cashmore

Trends Hut
This article is written by Chris Cameron
 
Social check-in app GetGlue has been making significant strides in the mobile space lately with the release of an Android app following success on the iPhone earlier this summer. Today, the popular app which allows users to check-in, rate and like things like movies, TV shows and music, has come to everyone's favorite "lean back" entertainment device, the iPad. With some added functionality (and more sticker deals to boot), GetGlue hopes its iPad app will become your couch surfing app of choice for "second screen" media interaction.....