Jun 022014
 
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youtube_logo

Starting today, internet providers in the United States will finally be held to account for lackluster YouTube streaming speeds. Google has brought its Video Quality Report — first launched in Canada at the start of this year — to the US, and is now ranking ISPs like Cablevision and Verizon FiOS based on the fidelity of their YouTube streams. If you’ve been experiencing buffering issues or playback interruptions despite paying for a speedy internet connection, this monthly report could help answer the lingering question of why.

via YouTube reveals which US internet providers are best and worst at streaming | The Verge.

 


 

May 282014
 
facebook

facebook

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is tweaked constantly to ensure a better experience for users and a more profitable experience for advertisers. The company announced the latest major change today, as stories shared automatically from third parties will receive a lower ranking in News Feed.

Facebook found that when a user posts content to News Feed through a third party or an app, that generally gets more activity than a post automatically generated via a third party. For instance, the News Feed post generated by automatically listening to a Spotify playlist or artist will move down in the algorithm, while an album or song manually shared via Spotify to Facebook will receive a better ranking.

According to Facebook’s Peter Yang, many times, automatically generated posts from a third party were marked as spam. Additionally, the users didn’t like how stories were being shared implicitly.

via Latest News Feed algorithm change: third party implicit posts punished – Inside Facebook.

 


 

Jan 222014
 

 facebook

Facebook announced the change to its algorithm on Tuesday in a post aimed mainly at owners of “Pages,” which are generally created for companies and public figures rather than individuals.

The company explained that it had previously begun showing more text-only posts in users’ newsfeeds, because internal tests showed that it caused people to write more status updates themselves. In fact, when Facebook began showing more text posts at that time, users posted an average of nine million more status updates each day.

But over time, Facebook realized that text updates from Pages didn’t have the same effect. So, Tuesday’s newsfeed change treats text posts from Pages “as a different category from those of friends.”

MORE: Facebook’s latest tweak means less text-only Page posts for you – NBCNews.com.

 

 

 

Oct 072013
 

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Television networks have been tapping Twitter hashtags for a couple of years to drum up more buzz for their programs. However, new Nielsen data shows that programs with the greatest Twitter activity does not always correlate to programs with the highest ratings, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is one of the takeaways from data Nielsen will begin publishing on Monday, ranking shows with the greatest traction on the microblogging social network. The goal of the “Nielsen Twitter TV Ranking,” which the companies announced last December, will be to measure the unique audience tweeting about individual programs.

MORE: Nielsen to roll out Twitter ratings for TV shows on Monday | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 

 


 

Sep 162013
 

netflix

Netflix is following the pirates as it chooses content to add to its streaming-video service.

When rolling out its service in the Netherlands, the company looked at what content to offer based in part on what shows were popular on piracy websites. “Prison Break is exceptionally popular on piracy sites,” Kelly Merryman, Netflix’s vice president of content acquisition, told Torrent Freak, a website that tracks news about the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.

Netflix takes the view that it can draw people away from a life of video piracy by offering the same content, only with a better user experience and less risk of legal fallout. Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive, has said that whenever Netflix is launched in a market, the level of activity on piracy sites drops.

MORE:  Netflix Uses Content Pirates to Help With Programming.

 

 


 

May 292013
 

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Attackers are exploiting an extremely critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails framework to commandeer servers and make them part of a malicious network of hacked machines, a security researcher said.

Ars first warned of the threat in early January, shortly after Rails maintainers issued a patch for the vulnerability. Ars warned at the time that the vulnerability gave attackers the ability to remotely execute malicious code on underlying servers. Criminals’ success in exploiting the bug to make vulnerable machines join a botnet suggests that many server administrators still haven’t installed the critical update more than four months after it was issued.

Servers that have been exploited are infected with software that caused them to join an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel on one of at least two servers, security researcher Jeff Jarmoc said in a post published Tuesday to his personal website. Attackers can force servers to download and execute malicious code and join new IRC channels from there.

MORE:   Critical Ruby on Rails bug exploited in wild, hacked servers join botnet | Ars Technica.

 

 

 

May 292013
 

 facebook

A new scam going around Facebook recently begins with a message to page owners about a new “Fan Page Verification Program.” From there, users are prompted to share their Facebook email and password, which is part of a phishing scam.

Similar to another scam that targeted page admins in the past, the message purports to be from Facebook Security and is designed to trick users into sharing their Facebook login information. This latest scam, detailed by Hoax-Slayer, tells page owners that they qualify for a new security feature and must choose a 10-digit security code by May 30, otherwise their page could be suspended. The message includes a link to a site with form fields for their page URL, email address, password and a “transferring code” of their choice.

MORE:   ‘Fan Page Verification’ scam goes after Facebook page admins.

 

 


 

 

May 282013
 

 facebook

Marketers at Vistaprint, Dove and Nissan will have been very busy recently. All three have fallen victim to advertising appearing next to compromising content on Facebook. The companies found their collateral next to materials supporting and making light of domestic abuse which has led to a customer backlash and severe criticism in the media.

Both companies were quick to respond to the issue, with Vistaprint posting an explanation on their Facebook page, and Nissan on their Twitter feed. While Dove hasn’t replied on either platform, it’s written to campaigners to apologise. However, the fundamental problem with the Facebook platform is that it targets individuals and not the content of each of the pages where the adverts land. Because of what might be totally innocent searches of Facebook or page ‘Likes’, adverts can then appear on pages which have the worst kind of content on them. And according to Facebook’s own rules, it’s up to users to self-regulate the site. There are no protective measures in place for brands.

All of this comes at a time when the pressure group the Everyday Sexism Project has been challenging brands to better manage where their advertising appears. The group wants companies to introduce stricter practices to help prevent against them appearing to support such material.

MORE:   Vistaprint’s Facebook fail just the tip of the iceberg « iMediaConnection Blog.

 

 


 

May 282013
 

 

Opera has built a new Web browser from the ground up, and it’s available now on Windows and Mac.

The new Opera, which the organization is calling Next, its channel for what used to be known as “beta,” was built from scratch, it claims. What has resulted is a much cleaner interface and a host of features that Opera says, will make it easier for users to find contents.

The big change is that Opera has replaced its proprietary engine Presto with the Chromium engine. That will allow the company’s browser to load more quickly and handle slow network connections more effectively.

MORE:   Opera Next makes its debut on Windows, Mac | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 

 


 

May 282013
 

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In March, readers followed along as Nate Anderson, Ars deputy editor and a self-admitted newbie to password cracking, downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes. Within a few hours, he deciphered almost half of them. The moral of the story: if a reporter with zero training in the ancient art of password cracking can achieve such results, imagine what more seasoned attackers can do.

Imagine no more. We asked three cracking experts to attack the same list Anderson targeted and recount the results in all their color and technical detail Iron Chef style. The results, to say the least, were eye opening because they show how quickly even long passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols can be discovered.

The list contained 16,449 passwords converted into hashes using the MD5 cryptographic hash function. Security-conscious websites never store passwords in plaintext. Instead, they work only with these so-called one-way hashes, which are incapable of being mathematically converted back into the letters, numbers, and symbols originally chosen by the user. In the event of a security breach that exposes the password data, an attacker still must painstakingly guess the plaintext for each hash—for instance, they must guess that “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99″ and “7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c” are the MD5 hashes for “password” and “password1″ respectively. (For more details on password hashing, see the earlier Ars feature “Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger.”)

While Andersons 47-percent success rate is impressive, its miniscule when compared to what real crackers can do, as Anderson himself made clear. To prove the point, we gave them the same list and watched over their shoulders as they tore it to shreds.

MORE:  Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” | Ars Technica.