Social Media and its influence

Twitter warnt Nutzer vor staatlichen Angriffen

Der Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter hat Nutzer informiert, dass sie möglicherweise Opfer von staatlichen Angriffen geworden sind. Die meisten befassen sich mit IT-Sicherheit oder Anonymisierung. Golem.de hat mit einem der wenigen deutschen Betroffenen gesprochen.

We don't lump Twitter in the same privacy bracket as, say, Facebook. But like any social network, Twitter is vulnerable to oversharing, data leakage and unintended consequences. We take a look at T...

Data uses include measuring happiness levels in cities based on Twitter images shared.

Twitter has a 200-million-strong and ever-growing user base that broadcasts 500 million updates daily. It has been lauded for its ability to unsettle repressive political regimes, bring much-neededaccountability to corporations that mistreat their customers, and combat other societal ills (whether such characterizations are, in fact, accurate).

Now, the company has taken aim at disrupting another important sphere of human society: the scientific research community.

In response, computational epidemiologists Caitlin Rivers and Bryan Lewis have proposed guidelines for ethical research practices when using social media data, such as avoiding personally identifiable information and making all the results publicly available.

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Whether or not Twitter and the scientists who have access to the company's data follow such guideposts, one thing is clear—the trend of mining social media data for various purposes won’t be tapering off anytime soon.

Twitter is shelving a project that would encrypt direct messages sent through its network, a report claims.

The social media giant is allegedly giving up encrypting private direct messages, which would make it more difficult for hackers and government officials to intercept Twitter messages without the rights to do so.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-direct-message-encryption-2014-3#ixzz2whO4GOHp

Twitter has warned a number of users that they may have been the target of a state-sponsored attack.

The company has apparently sent the warnings by email to more than twenty users, all of which contain the same details.

The warning begins: “As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors. We believe that these actors (possibly associated with a government) may have been trying to obtain information such as email addresses, IP addresses, and/or phone numbers.”

It continues: “At this time, we have no evidence they obtained you account information, but we’re actively investigating this matter. We wish we had more we could share, but we don’t have any additional information at this time.”

The US government loves Twitter. For NASA, it's a public relations goldmine. For the State Department, it's a bizarre weapon in the fight on terrorism. For the CIA, it's a chance to revel in...

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter today announced WebScaleSQL, a collaborative project bringing the engineers from these companies together to solve challenges working with massive databases. As its name suggests, WebScaleSQL is a custom version of MySQL designed for large scale Web companies.

Since November last year, 93,788 Twitter users - who thought their micro-blogging updates were private and protected - were being silently snooped upon.

Twitter has now fixed the embarrassing privacy flaw, and apologised to the victims.

The microblogging site adds a new security measure designed to make it harder for organizations like the National Security Agency to uncover its data. Read this article by Donna Tam on CNET News.