Update: Twitter has reacted to this raid by removing the term from its trending topics, but evidence can still be found on Twitter Search.
A set of instructions for the raid on Twitter.
(Credit: Insurgency Wiki)Twitter saw a huge influx of fake accounts on Sunday, pushing the NSFW trending topic, #gorillapenis, all the way to the top of the list. Popular image board 4chan /b/, along with other various sites, appears to be behind this latest raid on Twitter. 4chan, a hub of Internet culture and memes, has long been the spawning point of various raids on sites, most recently YouTube Porn Day. Before that, they were responsible for hacking Time Magazine's voting system for the World's Most Influential Person, making the site's creator, moot, the winner by a wide margin.
They are calling this latest effort "Operation Shitter." As you can see in the instruction set image, the blame is trying to be laid on Ebaum's World, which is, as far as we can tell, not involved in the raid. Blaming things on Ebaum's World is sort of a tradition on 4chan. A wiki (with information now pulled) was also formed to give instructions on how to systematically game Twitter's trending topics. The wiki suggests that raiders use a script, written by them, to spam the hashtag.
A similar NSFW trending topic on the subject of Mollie Sugden also sprung up recently after her death. While I'm not for censoring people by any means, when attacks like this pop up, Twitter has to have a better detection mechanism in place, ready to deal with it, especially as Twitter gets more and more mainstream attention.
Twitter is in the process of rolling out a new user interface update to its users.
This update focuses on Twitter's Following and Follower pages. In addition to a better looking list, Twitter has added more social actions to the page, including @replies, direct messages, and mobile update subscription. An extra collapsed "List View" has also been added to the traditional "Expanded View" and makes for a much more readable and quickly scannable page.
Twitter's new following list UI adds social actions like @replies, DM's, and Follow/Unfollow
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Due to the lack of a good way to browse, filter, and search through these lists, they are largely underused. This update is the first step in making Twitter's Following and Follower lists into much more usable and functional tools. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Twitter continued to build out these features more in the future, bringing in some of the functionality that third party applications have long included, such as TweetDeck's groups.
Click through to see what Twitter's new List View looks like.
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Real-time access to log data can help IT admins to quickly identify problems and solve them. The example that Paglo CTO Chris Waters showed me was detecting a user who is trying to brute force their way through a login, by using a dictionary attack on the password. Through Paglo's collection and presentation of log data, along with great searching capabilities, it was easy to find the culprit and block the appropriate IP address.
Paglo's new log management application is free if you are already using Paglo on your network. It is also appears to be very easy to implement and works in harmony with Paglo's search indexer.
PayPal just rolled out a fun little mini-site called Do Stuff for Money. The basic premise is that you can send one of your friends an offer, either through Facebook (using Facebook Connect) or e-mail, to do something of your choosing for some sum of money. For example, a recent offer reads, "Laura offered Adam $10.00 to 'Write all the thank-you cards from our wedding.'" If your friend accepts and does what you have asked, you can instantly pay them via PayPal, without having to mess with cash.
Somehow I don't think Steve Jobs is going to take me up on this offer.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Do Stuff for Money is more of a novelty promotion than anything else, but PayPal has really been trying to push these sorts of smaller transactions between friends. Since the service is mostly used for purchasing things online, PayPal would love for people to get used to pulling out their phones and sending a friend money when they say, "Hey, you owe me five bucks." PayPal needs to break into some of these other markets if they want to continue to expand. They are already a dominant player in e-commerce transactions, so expanding their presence in everyday life and the real world is a good route to explore.
Glue, the popular Firefox extension that lets users discuss content all over the web, is releasing a version of its add-on, built for Internet Explorer, today. This is a big step for Glue for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that being compatible with IE expands Glue's potential audience significantly. Net Applications reports that IE currently holds 65.5% of the browser market to Firefox's 22.51%. Being able to reach 88% of the internet browsing population should increase their registered user base of 130,000 significantly.
The other reason why this release is significant is the sheer accomplishment of developing a good, functional IE add-on like this. It took the people at AdaptiveBlue four months of work to bring Glue to Internet Explorer. Instead of taking the cheap way out, they reworked the code for Glue so that 90% of it is the common core that can work on any platform, with the additional 10% being platform specific code. This not only means that the add-on works consistently across both IE and Firefox, but that it will be much easier to develop for other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, in the future.
If you haven't tried Glue yet, give CNET's initial write-up a read and check it out if you're interested. I'm looking forward to some cool things from these guys in the future.
Paglo has been steadily building out its feature set as a Web 2.0-style solution to IT management. The latest improvements to hit the service include support for monitoring virtual machines, as well as patch management. Being able to monitor both physical and virtual machines from the same cohesive interface like this is really killer and the new patch management system is sure to ease some headaches during upgrades.
Paglo also seems firmly set on a price point of $1 per device monitored, per month. This seems like a good pricing strategy, but I would like to see Paglo adopt a similar strategy to Amazon Web Services in making the pricing more flexible based on exactly what clients need. Currently Paglo users have to pick from packages such as "Up to 300 devices," "Up to 400 devices," etc. Even though this is a pretty traditional model for pricing web services, I think that it seems a bit dated, especially with a $1 per device sort of model. Why not let Paglo analyze the network, add devices and bill for exactly how many devices a company is using, rather than sticking clients with paying for unused device slots? If a company only has 130 devices, it seems unnecessary to make them pay for 200, especially when the monitoring technology is in place to adjust for what you actually use on a per month basis like Amazon does. Paglo would obviously take a revenue hit on this, but it would save companies from flirting with the line between subscription plans, knowing that if they add their 101st device that it costs an extra $100 instead of an extra $1. Paglo's model is, of course, the way that most similar companies structure pricing plans, but maybe it is time for a market shift.
All minor gripes on pricing aside, these new features are welcome additions to an already robust toolkit for IT administrators. IT has a strong focus on rooting out problems with a network and with machines on that network. Traditionally, there tended to be a lot of guesswork associated with finding the source of a particular problem. With all of these new features that Paglo keeps on adding, they are making IT into a much more exact and manageable science.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Friend Lists has long been an underused feature in Facebook. The feature allows users to split their friends up into different groups, choosing different privacy settings for each one. It is clear now that Facebook has bigger plans for the feature and it's getting serious about trying to persuade people to use it. Recently, Facebook automatically created Friend Lists for its users in an effort to help them filter and better consume their Live Stream. Now, Facebook has redesigned their Chat feature in order to take advantage of Friend Lists. Users can now organize their previously unwieldy Chat lists into groups, defined by their Friend Lists.
Upon loading up Chat for the first time since this change, Facebook users are prompted to say which Friend Lists they want to add to Chat. Users can segment these friends into sublists for Chat, and everyone else gets dumped into a generic "Other Friends" list. This alone is going to be enough for a lot of users to put these previously uncategorized friends into a List. While there apparently wasn't enough motivation for users to group their friends before, now that they are grouping them for the purposes of a clean Chat list, the rest of the functionality of Friend Lists throughout the site is unlocked. Suddenly users can now filter by these Lists that they have taken the time to create, send Inbox messages to whole lists, and create customized privacy settings. I have no doubt that Facebook has more plans for Friend Lists as well.
Not only does this new grouping by Friend Lists give users a cleaner view of their online friends, but users can also toggle whether they appear offline or online for a certain group. This is yet another feature that is going to provoke people to start organizing their friends.
Facebook has been doing a lot of work lately, building new functionality into the site. On Friday, the site brought "refresh alerts" to its home page and now it just rolled out this newly enhanced Chat. It looks like the Facebookers are working overtime to try to win back the hearts of some of the users that they angered in their last major redesign.
For the uninitiated or nongamers out there, the Konami Code (UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A) is arguably the most famous cheat code in video games.
It has been used in countless games and has references in multiple forms of pop culture. Lately, some sites have taken to using the code to trigger amusing events on the page. Recently, ESPN used the code to spawn unicorns and rainbows all over its pages.
Now, Facebook has dropped the code into its site. When entering the Konami code, followed by Enter, a lens flare is generated every time the user scrolls or clicks something on the page.
UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A ENTER: The Facebook lens flare in action.
(Credit: Facebook)This Easter egg is becoming more and more common, and a site has even popped up to track the sites using it. (You will have to enter the Konami Code to see it, of course.) ESPN has since taken its Easter egg down, but those that remain include Facebook, Digg, Google Reader, and our very own GameSpot.
It's nice to see Easter eggs making a resurgence since they have been largely frowned upon by the tech industry in recent years, with Microsoft formally banning them from its software in 2002.
To try out the code for yourself on Facebook, load up a page on the site, hit UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A ENTER on the keyboard, scroll around and enjoy. Instructions on how to activate other Konami Code Easter eggs around the Web can be found at Konami Code Sites.
Twitter's notification emails when you get a new follower have been in plain text since the site started. Today, Twitter finally rolled out a richer, HTML version of their follower notification emails. These emails include the number of people that this user is following and how many are following them back, along with their total number of updates tweeted.
This is a big step up from Twitter's old follower notification system. With the old system, you were just blindly clicking into their account with no knowledge of the user. While it's still not perfect, at least getting a look at the follower/following numbers can help to weed out the spammers. Ideally, Twitter should include the user's bio, along with their last few tweets so that users can really make an educated decision as to whether or not it's worth checking out the profile.
At this time, it doesn't appear that users can choose between plain text and HTML emails. Twitter seems to moved completely to HTML-based emails. While this may have been a concern in the past, realistically any modern email client or service can handle emails in HTML.
If you are interested, you can follow me on Twitter or check out more CNET Twitterers.
Updated at 11:30 p.m. PDT: This blog misreported the percentage of swine flu interest on Facebook member pages in the states of Texas and Mississippi. The correct percentages are 0.82 percent and 0.29 percent, respectively.
There have been a lot of resources that have surfaced to help track the newly spreading swine flu. On Monday, we covered some of these online resources to help you stay on top of it. Tuesday night, Facebook released some interesting data on the conversations taking place around the swine flu outbreak. The company has posted a photo album on Facebook's official fan page, containing images that detail the growth of the discussion as well as the geographical distribution of people talking about swine flu.
As this image shows us, there is a wide range in the percentage of people talking about swine flu in wall posts from state to state. Texas has 0.82 percent of its Facebook users mentioning swine flu, while Mississippi only has 0.29 percent. Hotbeds for the outbreak, such as California, Texas, and New York obviously show the greatest concentration of users discussing swine flu. The numbers in Canada are significantly lower than those in the U.S., obviously showing that the Canucks aren't getting as concerned yet.
All of this data was generated using Facebook's Lexicon service, which tracks how frequently certain terms are mentioned in wall posts. The Facebook data definitely gives us a better understanding of who is talking about the outbreak and can help us to visualize the spread of information on the subject.
The role that social media has played in the spread of information throughout the swine flu outbreak has been significant. Some would argue that social media has helped to fuel the fire, along with the constant coverage on the news. For better or for worse, social media is likely to be one of the primary mediums through which information spreads in a crisis moving forward.
