Surprise! Young Users Protect Their Privacy Online.

When adults talk about personal privacy on sites like Facebook, someone is bound to contend that that young people are too self-absorbed, or too naive to care about securing personal information that’s stored in various places stored online.

Well, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, that person is likely wrong.

The Pew survey of 2,253 Americans found that people aged 18 to 29 are more likely than older adults to take steps to limit others from accessing their personal informationonline. The study results, released Wednesday, noted that 44% of younger adults try to protect their information, compared to 33% of users between 30 and 49, and 25% of those between 50 and 64.

“Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at Pew, in a statement. “Many users are learning and refining their approach as they go, changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online.”

And she added that people have a misperception about how vigilant younger users are.

“Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Madden.

The survey found that 71% of younger users of social networks have changed the privacy settings on their profiles to limit what is shared with others, while only 55% of social networkers between the ages of 50 and 64 have changed their default settings.

Younger users also are more likely to delete unwanted comments from their social networking pages, and to remove their names from photos that their friends have posted, the survey found.

The Pew report is based on telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International.

Online privacy has increasingly become a hot button issue , especially in social networking circles.

Last week, Facebook rolled out new, simpler privacy controls in an attempt to appease users of the social network who had grown angry and frustrated over their inability to limit who has access to personal information posted on the site.

The unrest among users had escalated in recent months apparently prompted many to at leastconsider quitting Facebook .

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Surprise! Young Users Protect Their Privacy Online.

Surprise! Young Users Protect Their Privacy Online.

Surprise! Young Users Protect Their Privacy Online.

Surprise! Young Users Protect Their Privacy Online.

HTML5 Highlights

In many ways, HTML5 is an attempt to bring order to many of the features and behaviors that have become the norm in recent years. This section highlights some of the more compelling additions.

Audio and Video Support

With plugins such as Flash, Silverlight, and various codecs causing considerable grief over the years, HTML5 seeks to standardize the audio and video access process by including new <audio> and <video> tags, respectively. Of course, the mere addition of such tags won’t remove the need for the client to somehow load the media resource. So, vendors are still working out exactly which formats will be supported, although currently MP3, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis are leading the pack. Further, you can determine whether a particular MIME type is supported on the client with HTML5, and offer alternative formats to those browsers that necessarily support the default choice.

Semantic Improvements

With CSS and DIV/SPAN so commonly used to define page elements such as a header and footer, it’s almost as if tags such as <div id="header"></div> have become part of the HTML lexicon. The W3C seems to agree, having added <header></header> and <footer></footer> tags to the specification.

Several other new tags have been incorporated into HTML5, including meter (representing scalar measurements), time (dates and times), address (e-mail addresses, postal addresses, etc.), and more.

Local Storage

Web-based solutions such as Google Apps have done a great job in terms of bringing client-side applications to the browser. However, these sorts of applications logically must be constantly connected to the Internet, as all of the information is stored in the cloud. HTML5 will allow disconnected clients to continue using these applications by introducing a new feature known as Local Storage, which will store data offline until a connection is resumed. Although the browser vendors still have to decide exactly how much information a web site will be able to store on the client, the specification draft currently recommends a 5MB limit.

SQL Integration

Why should the server side have all the fun? HTML5 will also support a new feature known as Web SQL, which will allow for SQL queries to be embedded directly alongside HTML. The matter of specifically which databases will be supported — not to mention the proposed solution in its entirety — has been a subject of much contention. Firefox currently supports a SQLite-driven solution, but as of late it seems that Mozilla, Microsoft, and other vendors are putting their weight behind an alternative solution known as WebSimpleDB.

HTML5 Sounds Cool, But What About Browser Support?

If I were to one day stumble upon the proverbial genie in a bottle, my three wishes couldn’t be more obvious:

1. World peace
2. A long, happy life
3. Recuperation of the thousands of hours I’ve lost over the last 10 years dealing with poorly implemented standards

The so-called Browser Wars have indeed been bloody, with the primary victims being the developers who create web sites and the users who’ve chosen to use Internet Explorer to navigate them. Yet with Microsoft’s flagship browser still managing to dominate the market, it’s clear that HTML5′s success will hinge in large part on how committed the software giant is to supporting the new standard in future browser releases.

In a move sure to send developers around the globe into the streets in a geeky reenactment of VE Day, Microsoft is emerging as an enthusiastic HTML5 adopter, announcing Internet Explorer 9′s considerable HTML5 capabilities during the March MIX conference. If you’re running Windows Vista or 7, a preview version of IE9 is available for download at the IE Test Center. You can also check out a few impressive HTML5-specific demos on the IE site, several of which work quite well on my Ubuntu 9.10 laptop running Firefox 3.5.

Joining Microsoft as active participants within the HTML Working Group and earnest supporters of HTML5 in their respective browsers are Apple, Google and Opera. Online destinations such as YouTube are also planning for the future, currently offering experimental support for an HTML5-based video player. Joining the beta program will result in the new player being used for any videos you watch via the site instead of the standard Flash player, allowing you to test the feature and offer the YouTube team valuable feedback. Learn more about this experimental program here.

Great Learning Resources

Developers around the Web are already hard at work putting together pretty impressive learning resources that cover various facets of the forthcoming standard. In this section I highlighted a few of my favorites.

• Dive Into HTML5: Mark Pilgrim has published a draft of his pretty amazing forthcoming book titled “Dive Into HTML”, which discusses many new HTML5 features alongside working implementations.
• HTML5 Demos: This site contains approximately 20 demonstrations highlighting many of the key HTML5 features discussed in this article.
• The SublimeVideo Player: Although not a learning resource per se, this can’t-miss demonstration of HTML5′s video capabilities is undoubtedly enough to have you searching the Web for more HTML5 inspiration.

Conclusion

HTML5′s impact on how we develop web sites will no doubt be significant, particularly given the most cohesive vendor support for an HTML standard that we’ve seen in the past 15 years. Although the standard isn’t yet official, there’s no time like the present to begin exploring its many features and at least thinking about how you can use it to wow your audience!

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday condemned cyber attacks and called for an Internet where all have equal access to knowledge and ideas. “Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century,” she said.

After years of censoring Internet searches for the Chinese government, Google’s patience with Beijing abruptly came to an end last week. The trigger for Google’s announcement that it will stop most censorship of searches from China and may halt its business there was a sophisticated series of E-mail hacks based in China and targeting companies and human-rights activists. Some search results such as politically sensitive topics and pornography will continue to be censored as negotiations proceed with officials from the Chinese government, according to a Google official.

The decision has prompted serious examination in Washington, where for years lawmakers and civil liberties groups have decried both Chinese hackers and Google’s policy of abetting communist censors in Beijing. The incident touches on several resonant issues for lawmakers, including censorship, electronic espionage, intellectual property, and human rights. The White House, which was briefed about the cyberattack before the public announcement, said that it backs the “right to a free Internet.   Full Story

Comcast

Comcast is in discussions with partners to offer a music streaming service to its customers as an à la carte offering, we’ve heard from multiple sources. For an additional monthly charge of $5 or more, users will be able to stream on demand music online via a website and on their TV via their cable box.

For the last 18 months a Danish ISP called TDC has been offering customers in that country the ability to stream music online as part of their basic ISP packages ranging from $47 to $65 per month. From what we’ve heard from our friends in Denmark, the service is very popular.

The Comcast service would offer users the ability to stream music without any additional charges. Services like MySpace Music, Spotify and MOG (and the late iMeem) offer similar services today, but not through the cable box.

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Bill Gates

Last summer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates made the somewhat surprising announcement that he was quitting Facebook after being inundated with friend requests, explaining “It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up”. Today, it looks like he’s decided to give it another go. A few hours ago, Gates launched both a new Facebook Page and a Twitter account (@BillGates).

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If their as good as Jackie Chan then it has to be good. This Kaspersky Lab video was the best ad I have seen in a long time. Once you watch it, you will want to watch it over and over again.  Maybe he should think about doing a movie about cyberspace. It would be totally different.

Social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can expect more attention from cybercriminals in 2010, according to a new report (PDF) released Tuesday by McAfee Labs. Also at risk are users of Adobe Systems products including Acrobat Reader and Flash. And move over Microsoft; the security firm predicts that Google’s Chrome OS will “create another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users.”

The company also anticipates smarter and more dangerous Trojans that “follow the money,” as well as a “significant trend toward a more distributed and resilient botnet infrastructure that relies much more on peer-to-peer technologies.”

In a recorded interview (scroll down for audio) David Marcus, McAfee Labs’ director of security research and communications, said that he expects “an explosion of Facebook and other services targeted by cyber criminals.” In addition to malware like Koobface that spreads among Facebook users’ friends list, Marcus expects an increase in rogue Facebook applications.

“When you click yes to ‘do you want to allow this application to access your Facebook account,’ you’re giving that application access to all the data in your Facebook account,” he said. Facebook vets the third-party applications that it distributes, but rouge developers are finding other ways to get people to install unauthorized apps.

“A lot of the spammers and scammers will send fake Facebook application requests to users’ inboxes,” he said. Marcus recommends that you only install apps from within Facebook by clicking “browse more applications” in the Facebook application installer.”

Twitter vulnerabilities
According to McAfee, Twitter is vulnerable mostly because of URL-shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com. There’s nothing wrong with Twitter or these services, but when you click on a shortened URL you have no idea where you’re going until after you get there. I would like to see a URL-shortening service that vets each URL for security and rejects those that are potentially dangerous. Twitter, according to the McAfee report is “also serving as a control vehicle for botnets.”

Criminals are now being more surgical in their attacks, singling out individuals and corporations as targets. The report points to the 10-month investigation of “GhostNet,” which McAfee Labs describes as a “network of at least 1,295 compromised computers in 103 countries” that “primarily belonged to government, aid groups, and activists.” The malicious code was delivered by e-mail with subject headings related to the Dali Lama and Tibet, according to the report.

The report also sites “a very targeted wave of attacks against the management of major companies,” as well as attacks carried out against “journalists from various media organizations, including Agence France Press, Dow Jose and Reuters based in China.”

Adobe products and Google Chrome vulnerable
Adobe products, especially its Acrobat Reader and Flash, are likely to replace Microsoft Office as the No. 1 software target, according to McAfee. It’s nothing they’ve (Adobe) done wrong,” Marcus said. “The bad guys go where the masses go” and because of the increasingly widespread use of Adobe products, “that tends to be what the bad buys will start looking to exploit. It really is nothing more sophisticated than that.”

Criminals are infecting PDF files and leveraging exploits in the opening of PDF documents, according to Marcus.

“Instead of viewing a PDF you’re actually taken to a website that downloads some type of malware to your machine.” Adobe plans to patch a critical hole in Reader and Acrobat on January 12.

There is also concern about Google’s Chrome operating system, which is expected to be officially released in 2010. Chrome, which will run Web-based applications, is likely to be vulnerable to attacks in HTML 5–the newest version of the hyper-text markup language that, says the report, “holds all the promises that today’s Web community seeks–primarily blurring and removing the lines between a Web application and a desktop application.”

McAfee also warned of banking Trojans with “new tactics that went well beyond the rather simple keylogging-with-screenshots” that were used earlier. Trojans now use rootkit techniques to hide on a victim’s system to disable antivirus software.

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