The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘accounts’

This morning, Twitter started locking out a subset of users of their accounts, sending them e-mails asking them to change their passwords in order to regain access to the service. The e-mail said those measures were taken due to concerns that their accounts may have been compromised in a phishing attack, and hinted at a third-party service being at fault.

We asked Twitter for more information about the attack, and this is the response that they just gave us:

As part of Twitter’s ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite. In one case, a number of accounts posted updates indicative of given (sic) their username and password to untrusted third parties. While we’re still investigating and ensuring that the appropriate parties are notified, we do believe that the steps we’ve taken should ensure user safety.

Asked how many users were affected, Twitter declined to share details but said the number is ‘very small’. Twitter also said its response is for issues seen from last Wednesday on.

Twitter promises to continue to provide updates and encourages users to read the help pages on what to do if their account is compromised.

Note that Twitter has yet to communicate the whole ordeal on its company blog and/or status website, although the account @safety acknowledges the attack and refers to its security measures as a ‘precautionary step’.

We’ll keep you posted as we try and obtain more information about these attacks.

If you’ve been reading MobileCrunch lately (as you most certainly should be), you might have noticed a new name floating around the bylines. I thought we’d give him a day or two to get his feet wet before we made it official – but with that out of the way, we’re really proud to announce that Marc Flores has joined the TechCrunch family. I’ll let Marc take it from here, but be sure to drop a comment and bombard his inbox with warm welcomes. – Greg

I begged and pleaded with Greg, editor of MobileCrunch, not to make me write this, but it looks like I’m stuck introducing myself to you all. So in my best Troy McClure voice let me say: Hi, my name is Marc Flores. You might remember me from such popular sites as Boy Genius Report or True/Slant.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Twitter is locking many users out of the system this morning, and sending them notices that they need to change their passwords in order to regain access to the service, due to concerns over a possible phishing attack.

While some people are worried that the e-mails might have actually been a phishing attack, there’s a flood of tweets from users having received the same message after effectively getting denied access to their accounts, so this seems 100% legit.

The message, copied here by a blogger, reads:

Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser:
[PASSWORD RESET LINK].

The message adds:

As a reminder, you should be extraordinarily suspicious of any third party that offers to artificially inflate your follower count. We do not endorse any of these sites.

We’ve contacted Twitter for more information, but for now it may be wise to change your password regardless of whether you’ve received this e-mail or not.

Just yesterday, Sophos published a report that showed social networking services like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being targeted in cybercrime attacks.

(Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra)

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published a paper[PDF] titled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine, in which they outlined the core technology behind Google and the theory behind PageRank. Now, twelve years after that paper was published, the team behind social search engine Aardvark has drafted its own research paper that looks at the social side of search. Dubbed Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, the paper has just been accepted to WWW2010, the same conference where the classic Google paper was published.

Aardvark will be posting the paper in its entirety on its official blog at 9 AM PST, and they gave us the chance to take a sneak peek at it. It’s an interesting read to say the least, outlining some of the fundamental principles that could turn Aardvark and other social search engines into powerful complements to Google and its ilk. The paper likens Aardvark to a ‘Village’ search model, where answers come from the people in your social network; Google is part of ‘Library’ search, where the answers lie in already-written texts. The paper is well worth reading in its entirety (and most of it is pretty accessible), but here are some key points:

• On traditional search engines like Google, the ‘long-tail’ of information can be acquired with the use of very thorough crawlers. With Aardvark, a breadth of knowledge is totally reliant on how many knowledgeable users are on the service. This leads Aardvark to conclude that “the strategy for increasing the knowledge base of Aardvark crucially involves creating a good experience for users so that they remain active and are inclined to invite their friends”. This will likely be one of Aardvark’s greatest challenges.
• Beyond asking you about the topics you’re most familiar with, Aardvark will actually look at your past blog posts, existing online profiles, and tweets to identify what topics you know about.
• If you seem to know about a topic and your friends do too, the system assumes you’re more knowledgeable than if you were the only one in a group of friends to know about that topic.
• Aardvark concludes that while the amount of trust users place in information on engines like Google is related to a source website’s authority, the amount they trust a source on Aardvark is based on intimacy, and how they’re connected to the person giving them information
• Some parts of the search process are actually easier for Aardvark’s technology than they are for traditional search engines. On Google, when you type in a query, the engine has to pair you up with exact websites that hold the answer to your query. On Aardvark, it only has to pair you with a person who knows about the topic — it doesn’t have to worry about actually finding the answer, and can be more flexible with how the query is worded.



• As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones.
• The average query length was 18.6 words (median of 13) versus 2.2-2.9 words on a standard search engine.  Some of this difference comes from the more natural language people use (with words like “a”, “the”, and “if”).  It’s also because people tend to add more context to their queries, with the knowledge that it will be read by a human and will likely lead to a better answer.
• 98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.
• 87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.
• 86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer.  50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.

The Receivables Exchange, an online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, this morning announced that it has closed $17 million in Series C financing led by Boston, MA-based Bain Capital Ventures, with prior investors Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks participating.

This third round of financing brings the total invested into the company to just south of $30 million.

The Receivables Exchange started its online receivables financing marketplace in 2008 with the launch of its proprietary receivables trading platform.

The platform essentially enables businesses to sell their accounts receivable to a global network of accredited institutional investors that compete in real-time to purchase them. That way, companies are able to reduce their cash conversion cycles and gain access to capital that can be reinvested into growing their core business operations.

According to the company, the majority of companies have more than 60% of their working capital tied up in accounts receivable, limiting their ability to fund their own growth and contribute to that of the U.S. economy.

The Receivables Exchange says it will use the funding to scale its operations and sales activities and to expand its marketing, business development and corporate partnership efforts.

The Receivables Exchange, an online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, this morning announced that it has closed $17 million in Series C financing led by Boston, MA-based Bain Capital Ventures, with prior investors Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks participating.

This third round of financing brings the total invested into the company to just south of $30 million.

The Receivables Exchange started its online receivables financing marketplace in 2008 with the launch of its proprietary receivables trading platform.

The platform essentially enables businesses to sell their accounts receivable to a global network of accredited institutional investors that compete in real-time to purchase them. That way, companies are able to reduce their cash conversion cycles and gain access to capital that can be reinvested into growing their core business operations.

According to the company, the majority of companies have more than 60% of their working capital tied up in accounts receivable, limiting their ability to fund their own growth and contribute to that of the U.S. economy.

The Receivables Exchange says it will use the funding to scale its operations and sales activities and to expand its marketing, business development and corporate partnership efforts.

Realizing that it’s better to swim with the stream than against it, MySpace has just turned on two-way sync with Twitter. MySpace status updates can now be sent to Twitter and shared with all of your followers there, and Twitter updates can appear in your MySpace activity stream as well (blog post).

Members of both services can connect their accounts using OAuth. Status updates from MySpace are then identified as being “from MySpace” in your Twitter stream, as if though it were another Twitter client, with a link back to MySPace. Members can choose either one-way (read-only) or two-way syncing.

A couple weeks ago, AOL made its AIM lifestream go both ways with Twitter (and Facebook) as well. So we are definitley seeing a trend here.

Should MySpace start letting you post your status updates to Facebook as well?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It used to be that M.I.T was filled with code-breakers. Part of the movie A Beautiful Mind takes place there and in real life it’s always had close ties with the military and intelligence agencies. Tech companies also like to recruit there, and Google is no exception.

In search of some beautiful minds, Google has been putting up signs around the M.I.T campus with a code that say, “If you can figure this out, you may have a future with Google.” If they crack the code, which is a fairly simple substitution cipher (or not), it reveals a phone number where they can leave their contact information.

So far, no M.I.T. students have been able to crack the code, or at least they haven’t bothered to leave a voicemail. Maybe they need some help. The first person to crack the code gets a TechCrunch T-shirt, or maybe a job at Google if you call the number and leave your name.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In an ironic twist of fate, a number of people related to O’Reilly Media, as well as others guilty of using Twitter to express thoughts and commentary about and from the Gov 2.0 Summit, have found their accounts suspended this morning due to unspecified ’strange activity’.

That includes prolific (and real) Twitter users such as Tim O’Reilly himself, but also other accounts related to the publishing and event company, such as O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest (@brady), authors like Sean Power (@seanpower) and generic accounts including @w2e (for the Web 2.0 Expo) and @gov2events.

Mosey along now, nothing to see here

Published author and blogging expert Debbie Weil also got banned from Twitter for the time being, and assumes it has something to do with the fact that the hashtag #gov20e was a trending topic yesterday and may have caused Twitter to automatically suspend the accounts of several users who have been keeping busy tweeting about and from the event using the identifier. Well in that case at least the company’s trying to combat spam.

It’s most likely something like that, or it might be related to the downtime and other issues that has been plaguing the service for some time now.

Either way, Twitter has a number of support tickets coming their way today.

(Thanks to Sean for letting us know)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

Developers who want to add Flickr as a photo option to desktop and mobile clients can use Flickr’s existing APIs. (You can learn more here). Once that happens, Twitpic and yFrog will have some company on those clients as a pull-down option.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.