i3m Blog

Facebook updates messages layout to look and function more like email

interface, Internet News 288 Responses »

Aug 232012

Facebook today announced a new design and features for its messages product on the web. The two-paned layout and addition of keyboard commands makes the update similar to some email clients.

When users access messages from Facebook.com, they will see one column with recent messages and another column with an individual conversation. This should allow for faster browsing, similar to how users navigate messages in the Facebook for iPad app. Users can also search by a sender’s name or keyword at any point. In the previous layout, users could only search for names and keywords from the main inbox. When they opened a message, they could then search within that conversation.

MORE: Facebook updates messages layout to look and function more like email.

Password hints easily extracted from Windows 7, 8

Tech News 53 Responses »

Aug 232012

Our recent feature on the growing vulnerability of passwords chronicled the myriad ways crackers extract clues used to guess other people’s login credentials. Add to that list a password reminder feature built in to recent versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

It turns out the password clues for Windows 7 and 8 are stored in the OS registry in a scrambled format that can be easily converted into human-readable form. That information would undoubtedly be useful to hackers who intercept a cryptographic hash of a targeted computer, but are unable to crack it. Jonathan Claudius, the SpiderLabs vulnerability researcher who documented the new Windows behavior, has written a script that automates the attack and added it to Metasploit, an open-source toolkit popular among whitehat and blackhat hackers alike.

The clue is added to the OS registry when users configure a Windows account to provide a hint about the password needed to access it. When he first saw the long string of letters and numbers that stored the hint, he thought it had been encrypted. Upon further examination, he learned that an eight-line Ruby script quickly decoded the text chunks.

MORE: Password hints easily extracted from Windows 7, 8 | Ars Technica.

Logitech comes clean with $40 washable keyboard

Tech News 272 Responses »

Aug 222012

We all know food, drink and technology don’t mix, yet dusty and crumb-filled keyboards are rampant in households and offices across the world. To help out on the housekeeping front, Logitech today unveiled a new PC keyboard — the Logitech Washable Keyboard K310 — that could spell the end of the dirty QWERTY.

The K310, which Logitech says can tolerate anything from “a light dusting to a rinse in the kitchen sink,” can be washed multiple times and can be submerged in up to 11 inches of water, and then left out to dry.

MORE: Logitech comes clean with $40 washable keyboard | Tech Culture – CNET News.

Hot Chicks in Ads Arent Always What They Seem

Marketing 243 Responses »

Aug 222012

You know what they say about making assumptions, right? Well be sure you take that to heart when you view this Japanese Toyota Auris ad which features 19-year-old transgender model Stav Strashko.

via Hot Chicks in Ads Arent Always What They Seem – Adrants.

The Most Popular Freelancer Apps for Work-Life Balance [INFOGRAPHIC]

Internet News 285 Responses »

Aug 212012

It’s no surprise that freelancers tend to rely on cloud-based apps, which allow flexibility in storing and grabbing files on the go. Among the top 25 apps on the list include Dropbox, Google Analytics, Gmail, Evernote and Hootsuite.

Meanwhile, some emerging favorites include expense report app Expensify, to-do list app Remember the Milk and Jing, which captures and shares anything you see on a computer screen as an image or short video.

For a full look at which tools are top of mind among freelancers, check out the list below.

MORE: The Most Popular Freelancer Apps for Work-Life Balance [INFOGRAPHIC].

2 ways companies are losing fans on Facebook [video]

Internet News, Marketing 254 Responses »

Aug 212012

Facebook’s Open Graph is a powerful tool — when used correctly. Here are the most common mistakes companies are making.

Despite recent struggles, Facebook continues to dominate the social environment. And the platform’s Open Graph environment is a powerful tool that allows companies to “frictionlessly” and continuously share users’ actions, after the users have given permission.

But many companies are misusing the tool, alienating users, and losing fans instead of locking in important interactive relationships. We spoke with Roland Smart, VP of marketing at Involver, about critical do’s and don’ts.

MORE: 2 ways companies are losing fans on Facebook – iMediaConnection.com.

Scientists figure how to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA

Tech News 439 Responses »

Aug 212012

Traditional platter-based hard drives and solid state flash drives might dominate the storage landscape today, but in the future, you’ll be storing more data than you could possibly sift through within your very own DNA.

George Church and Sri Kosuri, two Harvard Wyss Institute scientists, have successfully demonstrated a process by which it’s possible to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA.

At the moment, the stashing and unstashing process for DNA data isn’t exactly simple. Once you’ve translated your binary data into the right sequence of DNA base pairs (A and C for zeros, T and G for ones), you have to turn all of those sequences into DNA itself. Doing so involves standard laboratory techniques, but it takes a while: several days to convert 675 KB of text, pictures, and Javascript into 55,000 DNA strands. Reading it out again with a gene sequencer (another now-standard laboratory technique) takes even longer, and neither the read process nor the write process are particularly cheap, which is why you’d only really want to use DNA storage for archival purposes.

MORE: Scientists figure how to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA | DVICE.

Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger

Internet News, Tech News 281 Responses »

Aug 212012

In late 2010, Sean Brooks received three e-mails over a span of 30 hours warning that his accounts on LinkedIn, Battle.net, and other popular websites were at risk. He was tempted to dismiss them as hoaxes—until he noticed they included specifics that weren’t typical of mass-produced phishing scams. The e-mails said that his login credentials for various Gawker websites had been exposed by hackers who rooted the sites’ servers, then bragged about it online; if Brooks used the same e-mail and password for other accounts, they would be compromised too.

The warnings Brooks and millions of other people received that December weren’t fabrications. Within hours of anonymous hackers penetrating Gawker servers and exposing cryptographically protected passwords for 1.3 million of its users, botnets were cracking the passwords and using them to commandeer Twitter accounts and send spam. Over the next few days, the sites advising or requiring their users to change passwords expanded to include Twitter, Amazon, and Yahoo.

“The danger of weak password habits is becoming increasingly well-recognized,” said Brooks, who at the time blogged about the warnings as the Program Associate for the Center for Democracy and Technology. The warnings, he told me, “show [that] these companies understand how a security breach outside their systems can create a vulnerability within their networks.”

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

A new world

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study (PDF) from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too.

Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking. Now used increasingly for computing, graphics processors allow password-cracking programs to work thousands of times faster than they did just a decade ago on similarly priced PCs that used traditional CPUs alone. A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

MORE: Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.

YouTube video basics from its brightest stars

Marketing, Meme 422 Responses »

Aug 202012

You don’t need a spending forecast to tell you that online video is gobbling up an increasingly larger share of today’s advertising dollars. More advertisers are spending more money on video — whether we’re talking about pre-roll, branded YouTube channels, or integrations with existing content producers. But more money doesn’t necessarily mean smart spending.

Right now, YouTube has two strong opportunities for brand advertisers. They can either partner with established YouTube stars, or they can go their own way and launch a brand channel. (Obviously, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.)

But while most of us are familiar with the opportunities and challenges of those two options, we’re less conversant with the nuances of YouTube’s culture. In the face of that knowledge gap, only a handful of brands have truly prospered with video. Many brands, perhaps even the majority of brands, haven’t had much success with video, and frankly, a lot of brands simply misunderstand platforms like YouTube, their audience, and the acts that have used YouTube to launch their careers.

Connect with the industry. Want to meet the brands that are driving the future of digital marketing? Attend the iMedia Brand Summit, Sept. 9-12. Request your invitation today.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend VidCon in Anaheim, California. While there were some good breakout sessions that were clearly aimed at marketing types, the real action was down on the floor, where fans lined up seeking autographs from their favorite YouTube stars.

Of course, “star” is a funny word in this context. Being big on YouTube doesn’t make you a household name. For every pack of teenagers I saw gushing over their favorite YouTube star, there was a somewhat bewildered adult chaperon who would say things like, “Whose autograph do you want, and why are they famous?”

As a category, it’s easy to dismiss YouTube stars as flukes — amateurs who got lucky early with a weird gimmick or a cheap stunt. But YouTube stars have something all brands crave — an audience. And they also have something else — a solid understanding of what will and won’t work on YouTube.

Watching the frenzy on the VidCon floor, as diehard fans rushed from one booth to the next, I couldn’t help but think that the marketers in their breakout sessions upstairs were missing the real lesson. Yes, in some cases, these YouTube stars present a huge — and relatively untapped — opportunity for branded integrations. That’s important for some advertisers. But let’s put sponsorship opportunities aside for the moment, because there’s something more fundamental that all marketers can learn from these YouTube stars. Each of them, in their own way, has broken some important ground in the Wild West that is YouTube. And if you’re looking to take your brand’s YouTube channel to the next level, it’s worth studying the people who’ve already blazed that trail.

MORE: YouTube video basics from its brightest stars (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

Why social media agencies are a farce

Marketing, Your Brand 73 Responses »

Aug 202012

Social media, although still quite a hot topic, is only one piece of the brand building and customer acquisition puzzle. An effective marketing strategy is inclusive of various mediums; each communicating the same message in their own unique way. Social media definitely has its place within a marketing strategy, but just like faxing, rarely is it the sole medium.

The reality is this isn’t a warning just for social media agencies; it’s a warning for any agency that tries to encapsulate their diverse marketing services within a single industry buzzword.

In a recent Adweek article about social media agencies becoming less social, Jim Tobin, president of Ignite Social Media, stated the following: “Social is a totally different discipline, it’s part SEO, it’s part [audience] development, it’s part advertising, and it is part PR. There’s a lot of interest in specialists out there.”

His view of social media is quite holistic, almost to the point where you could call these specialists “online marketing specialists.”

MORE: Why social media agencies are a farce – iMediaConnection.com.

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