Vk Tops List of Most Popular Websites in Russia
December 2, 2016
For anyone interested in Internet usage outside the U.S., VentureBeat supplies a run-down of the most-used websites in Russia in its piece, “Russia’s Top 10 Websites Include Facebook, Google, Instagram, and YouTube.” Reporter Adrien Henni writes:
Russia’s top 10 websites 2016 ranked by SimilarWeb tell us how Russians are spending their time online. Russia’s top 10 websites of 2016 consist of four social networking sites, three search engines, email, video entertainment, and classifieds. As opposed to some other markets, domestic sites dominate Russia but international websites still play a major role in the RuNet ecosystem. This blog walks through the top sites, defining the domestic sites and elaborating on some of the Russian uses of internationally well-known sites. … The ranking has not seen a large shift since last year.
Though the VentureBeat headline emphasizes U.S. sites, the top four entries are Russian. In fact, the most popular site is one we’ve been examining—the Russian answer to Facebook, Vkontakte, a.k.a. VK. The write-up describes the site:
Vkontakte (VK), Russia’s local social media site, is at the top of the list, making it the most popular website in Russia. This is no surprise with the increasing popularity of social media, not only in Russia but all over the world. Beyond staying connected with friends and family, VK offers entertainment services as well. Users are able to create playlists of videos and music.
Henni does not mention the looser restrictions on things like hate speech, which is apparently one of VK’s major draws (at least for now.) Unsurprisingly, innovative search engine Yandex is second on the list, followed by social-media site Odnoklassniki (OK), and Mail.ru. Facebook barely made the list, on the heels of Google and Instagram. See the write-up for details on each site, and how Russians utilize it.
Cynthia Murrell, December 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Tor Comes to the Rescue of Turkish Online Activists
November 29, 2016
Authorities in Turkey have effectively banned the use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Tor, however, has to come to the rescue of users, particularly online activists who want to get the word out about the social unrest in the country.
Motherboard in a report tiled Turks Are Flocking to Tor After Government Orders Block of Anti-Censorship Tools says:
Turkish Internet users are flocking to Tor, the anonymizing and censorship circumvention tool, after Turkey’s government blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Usage of Tor inside of Turkey went up from around 18,000 users to 25,000 users on Friday, when the government started blocking the popular social media networks, according to Tor’s official metrics.
Apart from direct connection to the Tor Network through TOR browser, the network also allows users to use bridge relays that circumvent any access restrictions by ISPs. Though it’s not yet clear if ISPs in Turkey have also banned Tor access; however, the bridge relay connections have seen a spike in number since the ban was implemented.
It is speculated that the Government may have notified ISPs to ban Tor access, but failed to tell them to do so effectively, which becomes apparent here (a Tweet by a user):
I believe the government just sent the order and didn’t give any guide about how to do it,” Sabanc? told Motherboard in an online chat via Twitter. “And now ISPs trying to figure it out.
This is not the first time Tor has come to the rescue of online activists. One thing though is sure, more and more people concerned about their privacy or do not want to be repressed turning towards anonymous networks like Tor.
Vishal Ingole, November 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Facebook AI pro Throws Shade at DeepMind Headquarters
November 29, 2016
An AI expert at Facebook criticizes Google’s handling of DeepMind, we learn in Business Insider’s article, “Facebook’s AI Guru Thinks DeepMind is Too Far Away from the ‘Mothership’.” Might Yann LeCun, said guru, be biased? Nah. He simply points out that DeepMind’s London offices are geographically far away from Google’s headquarters in California. Writer Sam Shead, on the other hand, observes that physical distance does not hamper collaboration the way it did before this little thing called the Internet came along.
The article reminds us of rumors that Facebook was eying DeepMind before Google snapped it up. When asked, LeCun declined to confirm or deny that rumor. Shead tells us:
LeCun said: ‘You know, things played out the way they played out. There’s a lot of very good people at DeepMind.’ He added: ‘I think the nature of DeepMind eventually would have been quite a bit different from what it is now if DeepMind had been acquired by a different company than Google.
Google and Facebook are competitors in some areas of their businesses but the companies are also working together to advance the field of AI. ‘It’s very nice to have several companies that work on this space in an open fashion because we build on each other’s ideas,’ said LeCun. ‘So whenever we come up with an idea, very often DeepMind will build on top of it and do something that’s better and vice versa. Sometimes within days or months of each other we work on the same team. They hire half of my students.
Hooray for cooperation. As it happens, London is not an arbitrary location for DeepMind. The enterprise was founded in 2010 by two Oxbridge grads, Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, along with UCL professor Shane Legg. Google bought the company in 2014, and has been making the most of their acquisition ever since. For example, Shead reminds us, Google has used the AI to help boost the efficiency of their data-center cooling units by some 40%. A worthy endeavor, indeed.
Cynthia Murrell, November 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Data: Stunners from Researchers
November 18, 2016
I read “Big Data Shows People’s Collective Behavior Follows Strong Periodic Patterns.” May I suggest you sit down, take a deep breath, and contemplate a field of spring flowers before you read these findings. I am not kidding. Hot stuff, gentle reader.
According to the write up,
New research has revealed that by using big data to analyze massive data sets of modern and historical news, social media and Wikipedia page views, periodic patterns in the collective behavior of the population can be observed that could otherwise go unnoticed.
Here are the findings. I take no responsibility for the impact of these Big Data verified outputs. You are on your own. You now have your trigger warning about the findings from online news, newspapers, tweets, and Wikipedia usage. The findings are:
- “People’s leisure and work were regulated by the weather with words like picnic or excursion consistently peaking every summer in the UK and the US.”
- Diet, fruits, foods, and flowers were influenced by the seasons.
- Measles surface in the spring
- Gooseberries appear in June. (Well, maybe not in Harrod’s Creek.)
- Football and Oktoberfest become popular in the fall. (Yep, October for Oktoberfest, right?)
- People get depressed in the winter.
Now you have it. Big Data delivers.
Stephen E Arnold, November 18, 2016
Neural-Net AI Service Echobox Manages Newspaper Presences on Social Media
November 18, 2016
An article at Bloomberg Technology, titled “It Took Robots for This French Newspaper to Conquer Twitter,” introduces Echobox, a startup that uses a neural-network approach to managing clients’ social media presences. The newspaper mentioned in the title is the esteemed Liberation, but Echobox also counts among its clients the French Le Monde, Argentinia’s La Nacion, and The Straits Times out of Singapore, among many others. Apparently, the site charges by the page view, though more pricing details are not provided. Writer Jeremy Kahn reports that Echobox:
… Determines the most opportune time to post a particular story to drive readership, can recommend what headline or tweet to send out, and can select the best photograph to illustrate the post. Using the software to post an average of 27 articles per day, Grainger [Liberation’s CTO] said that Liberation had seen a 37 percent increase in the number of people it reached on Facebook and a 42 percent boost in its reach on Twitter. ‘We have way more articles being seen by 100,000 people or more than before,’ Grangier said. He also said it made life easier for his digital editors, allowing them to spend more time curating the stories they wanted to publish to social media and less on the logistics of actually posting that content.
So, it seems like the service is working. Echobox’s CTO Marc Fletcher described his company’s goal—to create a system that could look at content from an editor’s point of view. The company tailors their approach to each customer, of course. There are competitors in the social-media-management space, like SocialFlow and Buffer, but Kahn says Echobox goes further. He writes:
Echobox professes to offer a fuller range of automation than those services, with its software able to alter a posting schedule to adjust to breaking news, posting content related to that event, and delaying publication of less relevant stories. Echobox uses a neural network, a type of machine learning that is designed to mimic the way parts of the human brain works. This system first learns the audience composition and reading habits for each publication and then makes predictions about the best way to optimize a particular story for social media. Over time, the predictions should get more accurate as it ‘learns’ the nuances of the brand’s audience.
This gives us one more example of how AI capabilities are being put to practical use. Founded in 2013, Echobox is based in London and maintains an office in New York City. The company also happens to be hiring as I write this.
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Job Hunting in Secret Is Not So Secret
November 3, 2016
While the American economy has recovered from the recession, finding a job is still difficult. Finding a new job can be even harder has you try to be discreet while handling emails, phone calls, and Web traffic under the radar. A bit of advice is to not search for jobs while at your current position, but that is easier said than done in many respects. Social media is a useful job seeking tool and LinkedIn now offers a job search incognito mode. SlashGear discusses the new mode in the article, “LinkedIn’s Open Candidates Feature Helps You Find A Job In Secret.”
The Open Candidates feature allows LinkedIn users to search for a new job while hiding their job search activity from their current employer. It will try to hide your job search activity, while at the same time it will add a new search feature for recruiters that displays profiles of people who have listed themselves under the Open Candidates feature. The hope is that it will bring more opportunity to these people.
However, nothing is ever secret on the Internet and LinkedIn can only do its best to help you:
While the new feature will probably be welcome by people who would prefer to carry out a job search while ruffling as few feathers as possible, LinkedIn does warn that even it will try to prevent your current employer from seeing that you’ve listed yourself as an Open Candidate, it can’t guarantee that it will be able to identify all of the recruiters associated with your company. In other words, use at your own risk.
If you work in a company that tracks your online social life or for a tech organization, you will have difficulty using this feature. LinkedIn and Microsoft employees will definitely need to use the first piece of advice, search for a new job on your personal computer/device using your own Internet.
Whitney Grace, November 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Americans Are Complacent About Online Data Breaches
November 1, 2016
Users of email, social networks, and other online services are aware of possible dangers that data breaches cause, but surprisingly are less concerned about it in 2016, a survey reveals.
Observer recently published a report titled Fears of the Web’s Dark Side—Strangely—Are Not Growing, which reveals:
People’s fears about their email being hacked have receded somewhat since 2014, bizarrely. Across the 1,071 Americans surveyed, that particular worry receded from 69 to 71 percent.
The survey commissioned by Craigconnects also reveals that online users are no longer very concerned about their data getting leaked online that may be used for identity theft; despite large scale breaches like Ashley Madison. Users, as the survey points out have accepted it as a trade-off for the convenience of Internet.
The reason for the complacency setting in probably lies in the fact that people have realized:
The business of social media company is built upon gathering as much information as possible about users and using that information to sell ads,” Michael W. Wellman, CEO of Virgil Security wrote the Observer in an email. “If the service is free, it’s the user that’s being sold.
Nearly 7 percent Americans are victims of identity theft. This, however, has not dissuaded them from taking precautionary measures to protect their identity online. Most users are aware that identity theft can be used for stealing money from bank accounts, but there are other dangers as well. For instance, prescription medication can be obtained legally using details of an identity theft victim. And then there are uses of the stolen data that only Dark Web actors know where such data of millions of victims is available for few hundred dollars.
Vishal Ingole November 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Brother Now in Corporate Avatar
October 31, 2016
Companies in the US are now tracking employee movements and interactions to determine how productive their assets are. Badges created by Humanyze; embedded in employee IDs track these key indicators and suggest appropriate measures to help improve employee productivity.
An article published on Business Insider titled Employees at a dozen Fortune 500 companies wear digital badges that watch and listen to their every move reveals:
Humanyze visualizes the data as webs of social interaction that reveal who’s talking to whom on a by-the-second basis. The goal: Revolutionize how companies think about how they organize themselves.
The badges though only track employees who have explicitly given permission to track their working hours, imagination is the only inhibiting factor that will determine how the meta-data can be used. For instance, as the badges are being embedded into employee IDs (that already have chips), it can also be used by someone with right tools to track the movement of an employee beyond working hours.
Social engineering in the past has been used in the past to breach IT security at large organizations. With Humanyze badges, hackers now will have one more weapon in their arsenal.
One worrisome aspect of these badges becomes apparent here:
But the badges are already around the necks of more than 10,000 employees in the US, Waber says. They’ve led to wild insights. One client moves the coffee machine around each night, so the next morning employees in nearby departments naturally talk more.
The ironic part is, companies are exposing themselves to this threat. Google, Facebook, Amazon are already tracking people online. With services like Humanyze, the Big Brother has also entered the corporate domain. The question is not how the data will be used by hacked; it’s just when?
Vishal Ingole October 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Posting to the Law Enforcement Database
October 28, 2016
The article titled Police Searches of Social Media Face Privacy Pushback on Underground Network discusses the revelations of an NPR article of the same name. While privacy laws are slow to catch up to the fast-paced changes in social media, law enforcement can use public data to track protesters (including retroactive tracking). The ACLU and social media networks are starting to push back against the notion that this is acceptable. The NPR article refers to the Twitter guidelines,
The guidelines bar search companies from allowing law enforcement agencies to use the data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users (…) in a manner that would require a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process or that would otherwise have the potential to be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.” But that policy is very much open to interpretation, because police don’t usually need legal orders to search public social media…
Some police departments have acknowledged that fuzziness around privacy laws puts the onus on them to police their own officers. The Dunwoody, Georgia police department requires supervisor approval for social media searches. They explain that this is to prevent targeting “particular groups” of people. According to the article, how this issue unfolds is largely up to police departments and social media giants like Twitter and Facebook to decide. But social media has been around for over a decade. Where are the laws defining and protecting our privacy?
Chelsea Kerwin, October 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Another US Outfit Learns about the Online Idiosyncrasies of Nation States
October 27, 2016
Google learned that China does not listen to suggestions from the ad giant about its online policies. Now LinkedIn has bumped into a similar ethnocentrism in Russia, altogether a really fun place in some folks’ eyes. I read “LinkedIn Runs Afoul of Russian Data Law — Is It on the Verge of Being Banned?” I highlighted this passage:
Russia could end up banning LinkedIn in a matter of weeks as the government reportedly seeks to make an example of the business-oriented social network. The company is being targeted following its failure to comply with a 2014 federal law that demands online firms that deal with the personal information of Russian citizens store their data within the country. Earlier this year, the Kremlin’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor attained an injunction against LinkedIn from a lower court. If a Moscow city court decides to reject an appeal, set for November 10, the platform will be blocked.
As the punk band learned in 2012, Russian authorities have some interesting approaches to resolving life’s little challenges. Not only did the band end up in jail, few knew in which jail the musicians resided. I was told at a conference in Prague that losing track of the female prisoners was an unfortunate administrative error.
LinkedIn may want to keep the fate of the punk rock band in mind if the Moscow authorities gear up and speed to locations where LinkedIn may have advisors, employees, fellow travelers, or folks who are championing the social media recruitment online service. Just an idle thought.,
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2016
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