Social networking

Bin Laden raid live-blogged (week in review)

Twitter was where many people got news of the death of Osama bin Laden, but it was also unwittingly an excellent venue to follow the raid as it happened.

Speculation that American special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, perhaps the most wanted man in the world, first began to trickle out when the White House communications director posted on Twitter that President Obama planned to address the nation Sunday evening. A onetime chief of staff for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was credited for the Twitter scoop when he posted this note: "So I'm told by a … Read more

Did Sony know its security was outdated?

When things go wrong in large institutions, one question that is often asked is: "What did they know and when did they know it?"

In the case of Sony--now confronted not only with two data breaches, but with the threat of a third, more destructive attack--that very question was posed this week in a House of Representatives subcommittee.

The answer given by Gene Spafford, a security expert and professor of computer science at Purdue University, raises troubling thoughts.

In written testimony to the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, Spafford highlighted recent data breaches at Sony … Read more

Chat up a live parrot on Facebook

Few things warm the heart quite like a goofy publicity stunt. P.T. Barnum once had an elephant plow a field. German phone manufacturer Gigaset is right on Barnum's wavelength. Animals get attention. In this particular case, the animal is a chatty British Gold Macaw on Facebook.

OK, let's review. We have a parrot. We have Facebook. Put the two together in a live-chat format and you get people from around the world jawing with a bird over the Internet's most popular social-networking site.

I had the opportunity to briefly interview the bird (actually, it's a team of three birds taking different shifts). Certain keywords are likely to set him off. I was instructed that he likes peanuts, but that he was much more interested in the topics of chocolate and dogs.

In all this excitement, it might be easy to forget exactly why we're talking to a bird on Facebook in the first place. The parrot is supposed to pitch Gigaset's new L410 hands-free clip for cordless phones. He's a lousy pitchman. His obsession with chocolate completely overrides his ability to speak eloquently about the clip's tech specs.… Read more

Sohaib Athar on Twitter fame after bin Laden raid (Q&A)

As U.S. special forces assaulted Osama bin Laden's walled compound in Pakistan, a Twitter user was already recording a rough outline of the events to come.

Sohaib Athar, who describes himself as a 33-year-old programmer and consultant "taking a break from the rat race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops," happened to be staying up late at the time. And, from an account called Really Virtual, he live-blogged what he heard.

Athar's real-time dispatches and self-effacing follow-ups have transformed him into an instant online celebrity. He's received at least one marriage proposal--through … Read more

Report: Woz tells Paul Allen to stop trolling

It's like Batman's Robin getting upset with Holmes' Dr. Watson.

For it seems that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn't entirely happy with the behavior of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and decided to tell him so. Not to his face, it seems. But almost.

The Register reports that Wozniak dedicated some pointed, if not poignant, remarks toward Allen at the Embedded System Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, Calif., last week.

He reportedly declared: "That patent-troll thing...the other night Paul Allen was speaking at the Computer History Museum and I had four tickets. And I decided … Read more

Assange: Facebook is an 'appalling spy machine'

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are actually tools for the U.S. intelligence community.

Speaking to Russian news site RT in an interview published yesterday, Assange was especially critical of the world's top social network. He reportedly said that the information Facebook houses is a potential boon for the U.S. government if it tries to build up a dossier on users.

"Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented," Assange said in the interview, which was videotaped and published on the site. "Here we have … Read more

Twitter's Osama correspondent spreads his wit

It's not easy to be famous--even if you're merely Twitter-famous.

Sohaib Athar, the 33-year-old software consultant who happened to have escaped to Abbottabad in order to get some peace and quiet, became an Internet legend overnight.

He had, unwittingly, begun to tweet strange happenings in his tranquil neighborhood. The strange happenings turned out to be the raid on and elimination of Osama bin Laden.

Once his tweets had taken on their worldwide significance, you might have imagined that Athar would have hunkered down (perhaps in a cave) and returned to his solitude--especially after he was reportedly hacked by … Read more

Marketers rethinking social media

Marketers have become more realistic about how to best engage their audiences, according to the results of a new IBM survey.

The State of Marketing 2011 report presented today at a marketing event in Boston covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes. Results reveal that marketers have become more practical about their expectations for both mobile and social marketing, as well as the realization that their efforts are strongly tied to IT, especially when it comes to making marketing campaigns actionable for the end-user.

From the survey results:

More than … Read more

Republican tweet govt.'s first word of bin Laden

The first U.S. government report that Osama bin Laden was dead didn't come from the White House. Nor was it the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the State Department.

Instead, it appears to have originated with a freshman Tea Party congressman from Florida, Dennis Ross, who posted a note to Twitter at 10:41 p.m. ET yesterday saying: "Bin Laden is dead. GOD BLESS AMERICA!" (See list of related CNET stories.)

That public announcement came nearly an hour before President Obama's White House appearance. It came three minutes before The New York … Read more

How to kiss your Facebook friend online for real

While the rest of the world is rapt by news of international terrorists and stealth special ops missions, perhaps we should offer a little thought to kissing.

Our new Web-oriented world has brought people together in ways never before possible, but we're still missing some elements of human connection. You know, like the physical kind.

The Kajimoto Research Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications, however, believes it can bring us that nirvana.

It has create a device that looks like a straw, which doesn't seem entirely sensual. Still, you mimic your kissing motion (everyone's is different, naturally). … Read more