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.”

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Lindsay Lohan is returning to familiar territory — a criminal court to face a judge who could send her back to jail or rehab for a failed drug test.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elden S. Fox will formally determine whether the "Mean Girls" star violated her probation with the drug test in September. If the actress admits the results are accurate — as she has already done publicly — then Fox could return her to jail or order her to remain in an inpatient rehab program.

Fox had been expecting Lohan to arrive at court directly from jail, where he ordered her to be held on Sept. 24 after a brief hearing. Within hours another judge had overturned his ruling and the starlet was released on bail.

The following week, a person close to the actress told The Associated Press, Lohan entered rehab for the fifth time. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Her recent court troubles have put Lohan's career on hold. She missed opportunities to promote her role in the summer film "Machete" because she was in jail and rehab. Her next starring role is supposed to be in a biopic on porn actress Linda Lovelace.

Friday's hearing will be Lohan's fifth court appearance since May, when she ran into trouble with her probation on a three-year-old drug and drunken driving case.

In July and August, she spent 14 days in jail and 23 days in rehab as punishment for missing several court-ordered weekly counseling sessions.

Fox allowed her to be released from rehab early based on the recommendations of her doctors and laid out a path for her to be taken off probation by the end of the year. His regimen included frequent counseling sessions, meetings with probation officials and random drug screenings. It also included several incentives, including an assurance that if the actress complied with the terms for 67 days, her probation oversight would end and she would be free to move from Los Angeles. He also dismissed two drug charges that were filed after a pair of arrests in 2007.

Within weeks of her release from rehab, Lohan, 24, failed a drug test. She acknowledged the result in postings on Twitter and said she was struggling with addiction.

Fox had threatened to send her to 30 days in jail for each failed or missed test. He did not indicate at last month's hearing whether he was mulling other sentences.

Lohan's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, did not return e-mail and phone messages seeking comment.
If Lohan is sentenced to jail, she will be subject to early release due to jail overcrowding. When a judge sentenced her to three months in jail in July, she served 14 days. She spent 84 minutes at the jail in 2007 before being released due to overcrowding.

Lohan pleaded no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08 percent and one count of reckless driving. She was sentenced to three years of probation, but that was later extended after the actress didn't complete the terms of her sentence in time.

A potentially serious security breach affecting tens of millions of Facebook users is the latest privacy snafu dogging the world's largest online social network.

Apple has shipped 7.5 million iPads since it launched in April, turning it into the largest player in the tablet computer market. The company grabbed that position in just six months thanks to its focus on a single device and surprising contributions from enterprise sales, Apple executives said on its quarterly conference call to discuss earnings.


Apple sold 4.19 million iPads  in its most recent quarter, and 3.27 million iPads in the quarter before that. About two-thirds of the 100 largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have begun deploying iPads for enterprise use, leading to a lot of growth in the corporate sector that has helped drive iPad sales, said Tim Cook, chief operating officer of Apple. Nearly 85 percent of those companies have also deployed the iPhone for enterprise use, he said.
“I’ve never seen an adoption rate on the enterprise side like this in my life. Enterprise is historically much slower moving on adoption,” he said. “We have built and are building additional capacity to call on businesses, and we’re putting a lot of energy into that — we aren’t treating this lightly or as a hobby.”

It's been widely remarked that The Social Network  isn't about social networking: it's about the genesis of any kind of empire. Maybe so, but whatever his creators' intentions, the Mark Zuckerberg confected by Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg can't help taking on an emblematic quality. He seems to manifest in extreme form a reshaping of the human personality that his own invention is helping to bring about.

The question that Facebook chooses to put to us is "What's on your mind?" In the film's first scene, Eisenberg's version of Zuckerberg pours out the contents of his own mind to his girlfriend Erica with zero interest in either her preconceptions or response. She tells him he speaks as if "every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared". As it happens, Zuckerberg's thoughts are indeed clever. In the world of digital discourse, however, stupid and nasty thoughts are tumbling out of the rest of us with the same lack of concern for those expected to share them.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, headlined the Wednesday press conference at which Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook to integrate Microsoft's Bing search engine into the world's most popular social network.

Lu's presentation might lead you to believe this was mostly about Bing continuing to nibble away at Google's seemingly unshakeable 60%-plus share of the U.S. search market.

Lu, whom Microsoft lured from a senior post at Yahoo, vowed that Bing integrated into Facebook would " harness and unlock the tremendous potentials of social."

However, this partnership isn't really about Bing vs. Google. It's much more about Facebook hunkering down to repel the ambitious search giant.

Gartner tech industry analyst Ray Valdes points out that Facebook's engineering team was in lockdown mode from mid-August until last week, when the team emerged to unveil an updated Facebook Groups and several other improvements.

This skunkworks output and the Bing partnership stem directly from Facebook CEO's Mark Zuckerberg's concern about Google's relentless and continuing attempts to muscle its way into the social Web, says Valdes, who has recently spoken with Zuckerberg about this.

Lucky for Zuck, Google thus far has stumbled. It's acquisitions of microblogging site Jaiku and mobile social network Dodgeball have gone nowhere. Its ambitious, would-be Facebook-killer initiatives Google Wave and Google Buzz both fizzled -- Buzz spectacularly so. Last month, Google quietly agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit stemming from the February launch of Buzz, the massive social network Google created overnight by automatically including Gmail users' private contacts on public Buzz profiles.

But Google is nothing if not relentless. Its resolve to get a toe hold on Facebook's turf became evident three months ago when Paul Adams, a senior user-experience designer, posted this extensive presentation, which got 300,000 page views on slideshare.net. Adams outlined what he characterized as a glaring weakness in Facebook's architecture: the inability for members to easily create multiple independent groups of friends. The implication: Google is developing a secret project that will exploit this weakness, says Valdes.

Shortly after Adams posted his slides, Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to work seven days a week in the skunkworks, says Valdes. The improvements Facebook announced last week -- and the new Bing partnership -- directly result from the gauntlet thrown down by Adams. Facebook's recent moves should be viewed as pre-emptive strikes to impede the Google juggernaut, he says.

"Facebook's no. 1 threat right now is Google," says Valdes. "So Facebook is trying to align its forces with others, in this case Microsoft, who are also trying to compete against Google."

Google has not been deterred. The search giant has recently "hired a bunch of people, repositioned management and continues to view the social Web as strategically important," says Valdes. "Rumor has it Google will roll out a major new social Web initiative over the next few weeks or months."

Apple tablet which is known to refer to the 16 GB Apple iPad is a feature packed, powerful and performance-oriented equipment. This is a Tablet PC, but many of the functions of the onboard network. The iPad is a kind of revolutionary design, user interface, applications and connectivity.

IPad can be very useful for both professional and personal. It is best suited for those who travel a lot and needs a portable computer, such as the ability of a smaller framework. ....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Warner Bros on Friday said it abandoned plans to convert the next Harry Potter movie to 3-D, bringing mixed reactions from box office watchers and fans of the multibillion-dollar blockbuster franchise.

The Hollywood studio said it was unable to produce a 3-D version of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" in time for its release on November 19.

The movie will be presented only in conventional 2-D and in Imax theaters, but the second installment, due to be released in July 2011, is still set to be released in 2-D and 3-D.

Mozilla on Thursday released a Firefox 4 beta for Android and Maemo devices, a release that includes features like pinch-to-zoom, the Awesome Screen, and synching.
Pinch-to-zoom is now supported on multi-touch devices, Mozilla said. The beta also add access to Firefox Sync and the Awesome Screen.
Sync provides seamless activity between the Web browsing and mobile experiences; make a change on the mobile Firefox and it will automatically appear on the desktop version as well. That applies to browsing history, bookmarks,

When rumors swirled this weekend that Emma Stone was about to be cast in the upcoming "Spider-Man" reboot, initial speculation was that she'd play the high school version of Mary Jane Watson. Well, Sony announced last night that Emma had been cast, but not as Mary Jane—as Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's first love interest.


Since Gwen is a blond, we wonder if Emma will dye her hair back to her natural color, or if she’ll go the wig route. Either way, she's got the right balance of smarts and beauty to play the part. Plus, we're very interested to see her chemistry with our beloved future hubby Andrew Garfield (if we say it enough, maybe it will eventually be true). Emma seems like she'd be able to intimidate Andrew with her very skilled levels of sass, which is probably a good thing if Peter is supposed to have a nervous crush on her.

"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.

Yahoo Oct. 5 agreed to buy contextual display ad provider Dapper for an undisclosed sum. The assets should help Yahoo advertisers build more personal, relevant ads.

Yahoo Oct. 5 moved to build on its market lead in display advertising assets by agreeing to buy partner Dapper for an undisclosed sum.

Dapper provides "dynamic display ad creation and optimization," a fancy way of saying it makes tools that help advertisers build and make money from contextual ads placed on Websites.

Dapper's "smart ads" take the lead of the content people are consuming on a publisher's Website to "automatically show the right product, offer, or message."

Ashton Kutcher is planning to revive the hidden-camera reality show “Punk’d” for MTV, potentially with the singer Justin Bieber as the host behind the pranks, New York magazine and Deadline.com reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous sources. The premiere date is unknown.

MTV and Mr. Kutcher’s production company, Katalyst, declined to comment on the reports, so is the press being “Punk’d”? Well, probably not. “Punk’d” is the type of show that is best produced in secret — if it’s too well known, the celebrities who are the target of the tricks might be in on the jokes.

“If we confirm too much detail on this, it’s going to make it harder to punk people,” said an executive familiar with the production, who insisted on anonymity for that very reason.


The original “Punk’d” was a staple of MTV from 2003 to 2007.

It's about to be put up or shut up time for Microsoft in mobile. On October 11, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega will be conducting a New York City press conference to spill the beans on the widely anticipated Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

Microsoft has been rather immobile in the smartphone biz these past few years. The company's handsets have been overshadowed by Apple's iPhone, Google's Android devices, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry. Recent efforts by the company to turn things around in mobile have proved disastrous--witness the summer demise, after less than two months in the market, of the company's youth-oriented Kin handsets.

The iPad sold 3 million units in the first 80 days after its release in April, and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter, says Bernstein Research, a rate far surpassing that of the first iPhone.

The detail comes in a fawning article about the open-source OS from Newsweek, covering how Android was developed by one man with a vision (Andy Rubin) who now has "virtually unlimited resources" to make it great. But the interesting part of the piece is Eric Schmidt's assertion that despite giving the OS away, Google still turns a profit on it.

he premise is that Android makes it easier for mobile users to get onto the internet, and that every internet user generates advertising revenue for Google. The corporation reasons, therefore, that if there were no Androids, there would be fewer people online and thus less revenue for Google...

David Fincher's The Social Network can easily be labeled the movie of the year, because it shows how the 21-year-old evil genius Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, used his advanced abilities as a hacker to manipulate those around him in order to create the largest social networking site used by over 500 million users. Zuckerberg always seems to have an arrogant comeback for every remark thrown his way.
Eisenberg plays the role of Zuckerberg brilliantly - the way he portrays the young Mark Zuckerberg is believable and matches up with the personality that Zuckerberg presently exhibits.
A huge part of why this is the movie of the year is, because it's more than just a movie. If this was a work of fiction then it may not have as big an impact - but this movie is based on the real story of how Zuckerberg did whatever he had to do, even if it meant betraying his closest friend, in order to make it to the top. The selfish Harvard student can easily be labeled as an arrogant jerk, but he is in fact the arrogant jerk who has created a site that millions of users spend hours of their day on.

Apple could surpass energy giant Exxon as the most valuable company in terms of market capitalisation.

According to The Associated Press, as soon as the total value of the iPhone maker's shares edges above those of Exxon's, Apple will take over the top spot in the Standard and Poor's 500

The S&P 500 has been widely regarded as the best single gauge of the large cap US equities market since the index was first published in 1957, and is used by most professional money managers. ..

Apple appears to have approved an iPhone application capable of managing BitTorrent downloads.


BitTorrent, a free, open source file-sharing application for distributing large software and media files, while has wholly legitimate uses for businesses, organisations and individuals, can be used for sharing illegal files and infringing copyrights.

The iPhone application, IS Drive allows users to check and manage downloads from ImageShack.us, which offers image hosting, free photo sharing and video sharing, along with the company's paid download BitTorrent service.

TorrentFreak, a weblog dedicated to bringing the latest news about BitTorrent, claims IS Drive may have slipped through Apple's approval process simply by avoiding using the term BitTorrent.