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"Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing have been reporting exponential growth rates. These sites have millions of registered users, and they are interesting from a security and privacy point of view because they store large amounts of sensitive personal user data. In this paper, we introduce a novel de-anonymization attack that exploits group membership information that is available on social networking sites. More precisely, we show that information about the group memberships of a user (i.e., the groups of a social network to which a user belongs) is often sufficient to uniquely identify this user, or, at least, to significantly reduce the set of possible candidates. To determine the group membership of a user, we leverage well-known web browser history stealing attacks. Thus, whenever a social network user visits a malicious website, this website can launch our de-anonymization attack and learn the identity of its visitors.
The implications of our attack are manifold, since it requires a low effort and has the potential to affect millions of social networking users. We perform both a theoretical analysis and empirical measurements to demonstrate the feasibility of our attack against Xing, a medium-sized social network with more than eight million members that is mainly used for business relationships. Our analysis suggests that about 42% of the users that use groups can be uniquely identified, while for 90%, we can reduce the candidate set to less than 2,912 persons. Furthermore, we explored other, larger social networks and performed experiments that suggest that users of Facebook and LinkedIn are equally vulnerable (although attacks would require more resources on the side of the attacker). An analysis of an additional five social networks indicates that they are also prone to our attack."
"Predictions about the appeal of cloud computing were on the money. We increasingly share, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves with software and media on remote servers rather than on our own computers. But a big catch prevents more of us from investing much time or money in ephemeral digital media or constantly-changing online services: It can be difficult, if not impossible, to grab your stuff and split.
Say you don’t like the latest redesign of Kodak Gallery, formerly Ofoto. Some complain that the site now uploads photos in the wrong order — by size instead of date, as customer service confirmed — while others don’t like the “buy one thing per year or lose your photos” feature the site unveiled last year.
There’s no easy way for disgruntled customers to migrate their photos back to their own computers or to another service, although clever hacks exist. If you want your photos back, Kodak Gallery advises you to mouse over each photo and click to download them one-by-one.
Who has 60 or 70 hours to spare for downloading their own photos? Nobody we know.
Those who have been burnt by this sort of thing are less likely to trust another online service with memories, music, documents, books or anything else of import. Keeping media and other data locked up not only riles consumers, but could slow the growth of all sorts of online services.
Data portability is a rapidly growing movement among cloud-computing supporters. The idea that the online services we’ve herded ourselves into should let us at least pass from one pen to the next is key, although the nuts and bolts of how open standards will work are still being hammered out.
Here’s how a few of the major ones currently stack up in terms of data portability..."
Haiti on Our Minds"Haiti, once the colonial-era 'Pearl of the Antilles' (Caribbean), then the 'Mother of Revolutions', has suffered for nearly two centuries for daring to fight for, and win, its freedom from European colonialism, slavery and plunder.
Haiti, we are informed by the corporate media, is the poorest nation in the West. We are never told however, how it got that way. How many of us know that the U.S. brutally occupied Haiti, and stayed there for over 20 years? Or that Haiti, which had the temerity to defeat not one, not two, but three colonial armies (the French, the British, and the Spanish), was forced to pay France billions of dollars in reparations for 200 years -- the first and only time in history that a victor in war had to pay back the nation it defeated!?
Haiti isn't just poor; it's been impoverished by a global system of exploitation and a plantation capitalist economy that was designed as a sanction for Black Liberation."
1) 3:17 Haiti on Our Minds MP3
2) 3:56 Haiti on Our Minds MP3
Haiti's Suffering"As we near two weeks after the devastating earthquake and terrifying aftershocks in Port-au-Prince and Zacmel, Haiti, we face the inevitable media wall, that closes up, unless a story emerges of such surprise and delight that it's able to shine through.
For the media light, by it's very nature, must move on -- to the new, to the odd, to the freaky.
A new al[Qaeda tape, a new sex scandal, a new bimbo eruption for a prominent politician, and away we go. And away we go.
But long before the earthquake of Jan. 12th, Haiti has been exposed to unique and vicious attacks for centuries, for daring to fight for, and win, Black freedom."
1) 2:10 Haiti's Suffering MP3
2) 3:15 Haiti's Suffering MP3
"A report this week laying out a strategy for social search has been getting a good deal of attention in tech circles. The paper, “Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine,” was written by Damon Horowitz and Sepandar Kamvar of Aardvark, one of several companies working on creating social search engines. As of October 2009, Aardvark had about 90,000 users.
Social search aims to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast, regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most relevance to these keywords. The idea has been floating around tech circles for years. Yahoo, among others, has tried to develop social search as a way to challenge Google."
