Researcher is building a prototype to protect users’ privacy from Facebook ‘widgets’

JANUARY 31, 2008 | University of Virginia researchers have discovered that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications have access to users’ private data, whether they need it or not — leaving users exposed to targeted phishing attacks and identity theft. So a UVA researcher is currently building a “privacy-by-proxy” prototype aimed at hiding a user’s private information on Facebook from these apps.

Today, a third-party Facebook “widget” or application requires full user privileges to a user’s account on the social networking site, including his or her name, address, friends’ profiles, and photos.

There’s no way to specify which apps can access which personal information. So Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major at UVA, is developing an application that lets Facebook users run these widgets while keeping their private data private. It basically works like this: The Facebook server gives the application a random sequence of letters in lieu of the user’s name and other private data.

Felt began developing the tool after studying the top 150 Facebook third-party platform applications last fall. It turns out 8.7 percent of these widgets didn’t need any personal information, she found, and only 9.3 percent required private data — the remaining 82 percent used “public” Facebook data, such as the user’s name, network, and list of friends. Felt and fellow researcher Andrew Spisak concluded that nearly 91 percent of these apps are getting access to more privileges than they actually need in order to run.

And when users install these widgets, their data gets stored on the widgets’ third-party servers. Although Facebook’s terms of service say developers can’t abuse the Facebook data they access, there’s no way for Facebook to enforce that, Felt says, because once that data leaves Facebook’s servers, it’s free game to the third-party application provider.

Privacy has always been a sticky issue for social networking sites. But Facebook’s third-party apps, which anyone with a Facebook account can develop, have been considered by some security experts as an open invitation for abuse. Earlier this month, Fortinet researchers found the first evidence of such abuse, reporting spyware disguised as a Facebook application spreading around the social networking site. (See ‘Secret Crush’ Spreads Spyware, Not Love.)

Kevin Haley, director, of product management for Symantec Security Response, says another risk with these apps is the distribution of malware. “Now that you have a platform to create programs for these sites… malware quickly follows,” he says.

Felt’s prototype is providing some hope for protecting and securing Facebook users’ privacy. “This is the first step,” says Felt, who has built several Facebook widgets herself. “Hopefully, the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

Fortinet Inc.

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Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday January 29 2008

Mobile network O2 has overhauled the cost of using Apple’s iPhone handset just two months after it went on sale in the UK.

The mobile network today announced that iPhone owners who are currently paying its lower-rate tariffs of £35 and £45 per month would get a substantially improved package, and simultaneously introduced an expensive “super-tier” contract costing £75 per month.

The new deal will give up to three times as many free calls and text messages for the same price, with £35 tariff customers – who form the bulk of the user base – receiving 600 free minutes per month instead of 200. The company also said it was phasing out its existing £55 per month deal, moving customers to the equivalent £45 per month contract instead.

The high-end tariff, costing £75, will give users 3,000 minutes and 500 texts. The £269 cost of the iPhone itself remains unchanged, and the length of all new contracts will remain at 18 months, said the company. It also confirmed that the iPhone’s free access to wireless internet provided by Cloud will stay in place.

Whiirl of publicity

O2 has exclusive British rights to carry the iPhone, which launched last year in a whirl of publicity. The new tariffs bring the costs of using Apple’s handset into line with many of O2’s other deals, but some critics will undoubtedly be concerned that the new offers are being launched as a remedy for poor sales - particularly in light of press reports that the handset has not met O2’s sales targets.

Apple has yet to release UK sales figures, although chief executive Steve Jobs said earlier this month that 4 million iPhones had been shipped worldwide since the gadget first went on sale in the US last summer.

In a statement, O2 said that it was happy with the performance of the iPhone and existing customers would be pleased with the changes.

“The iPhone is already our fastest-ever selling device and this added value will allow us to appeal to an even greater segment of the market - it is an unbeatable proposition,” said UK marketing director Sally Cowdry.

However, the Financial Times has quoted sources suggesting that the handset had sold 190,000 units in the run-up to Christmas, falling narrowly short of O2’s public expectations of 200,000 in the first eight weeks.

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Skyfire’s free mobile browser is meant to support everything a PC browser can, including Flash, QuickTime, JavaScript, and AJAX

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service January 28, 2008

A growing set of developers is setting to work making Web browsing on a phone match the experience on a PC.

Skyfire, a startup in Mountain View, Calif., joined the fray on Monday when it unveiled a free browser intended to support everything a PC browser can. That includes Flash video, QuickTime, JavaScript, AJAX, and more, though not everything may be there right now, according to Nitin Bhandari, Skyfire’s CEO. The browser is now in a private beta test for U.S. users only. The software was demonstrated at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

Apple’s iPhone changed the mobile browsing world last year when it drew a huge following with its Safari browser. Unlike most browsers for phones, it lets users view a full, standard Web page all at once and zoom in to make up for the small size of the screen, though it doesn’t support Flash video and some other standard Web features.

Meanwhile, more opportunities have opened up for third parties to get any sort of application onto a consumer’s mobile phone. Parts of Google’s Android development environment are already available to developers, and Apple is preparing a software development kit for the iPhone. Both Verizon and Sprint Nextel, two of the biggest U.S. operators, have outlined plans to allow any device and any application on mobile networks.

“The iPhone has pretty much settled the debate. People want a rich, full Web experience,” Skyfire’s Bhandari said. “There’s a lot of consciousness that that’s the bottom now, and everything now has to be there or above it.”

Since the phone’s June debut, Mozilla has started developing a mobile version of Firefox, which looks somewhat like mobile Safari in screenshots on Mozilla’s wiki. However, Mozilla has been vague about when that software will come out. Norwegian browser vendor Opera has its own mobile browser, Opera Mini.

Skyfire’s product will be set apart from Opera Mini and others by supporting the full browsing experience, Bhandari said. It does so by relieving the phone from some of the heavy lifting of presenting a Web page. In fact, a server transcodes every page into an efficient protocol that Skyfire has developed over the past 18 months, he said. The additional exchange of packets between phone and server to make that possible isn’t a problem, because the server can carry out tasks much faster than a phone, according to Bhandari.

“The delay added by the server is actually such a small percentage of the time we’re actually saving … that it’s actually a huge benefit in the end-user experience,” Bhandari said. Skyfire operates the servers in its own datacenter.

Skyfire can deliver full versions of popular Web sites, such as YouTube and ESPN, as demonstrated in a YouTube video. The zooming function, the critical tool for viewing full-size Web pages on a small screen, is different from the iPhone’s “pinch” and “unpinch” gestures. A gray box appears over part of the Web page, and users can size that box to cover the area of the page they want to see full-screen, then tap on it to zoom in, Bhandari said. The browser also features a search bar and a tab with featured links in categories including news, sports, and video.

The browser is available only for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 today, but a version for Symbian, as well as an international beta test, are coming later, Bhandari said. Skyfire might also develop versions for Android and for the iPhone once Apple’s SDK becomes available, he said. It is talking with handset makers and mobile operators about having the browser built into phones, but also sees search and advertising as possible revenue sources.

In addition to invited testers, a limited number of public users will be allowed to participate in the beta. They can sign up at Skyfire’s Web site.

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Analysts are alarmed at a perceived discrepancy in the figures in iPhone sales figures. Jonny Evans, Macworld

Analysts are mulling over Apple’s iPhone sales numbers and are alarmed at a perceived discrepancy in the figures.

Apple claims slightly over 3.7 million iPhones were sold in 2007 — yet AT&T this week revealed it ended the year with “just at or sightly under two million iPhone customers”.

That two million has been boosted somewhat by an estimated 300,000-400,000 sales in Europe, analysts believe.

The discrepancy is that the 3.7 million iPhones Apple says it has sold and the estimated 2.4 million sold by its network partners still leaves 1.3 million of the devices unaccounted for.

That implies that around one in three iPhones are being purchased in order to unlock the device for use on other networks and/or for use with unapproved third party applications.

While it’s possible some iPhones were sold over the Christmas period but not activated immediately as new users (perhaps) worked to cancel their existing mobile contracts, the discrepancy still implies an active market for unlocked iPhones.

Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook told analysts this week that the company believes the number of unlocked iPhones in the wild to be “significant,” but declined to furnish accurate figures.

Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research cites these figures in order to claim a substantial market in unlocked iPhones, and speculates this news may also mean a build-up in iPhone inventory.

“It indicates end-user demand for iPhone is lower than many investors may think based on Apple’s sales figure — and it points to slower iPhone sales in the current quarter, since much of this inventory is likely to be drawn down,” the analyst explains.

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Not too long after Microsoft had released a developer build of the Windows 7 Milestone 1 release to a select few, review and opinion pieces started to leak onto Windows enthusiast sites by OEM employees or their beneficiaries. So it’s hardly surprising that now -just a few days later, the full DVD image has started to show up on a few torrent sites.

Anonymous pirates vying to snatch credit for the first Windows 7 torrent have only served to frustrate, with many of the down loaders later verifying the various submissions as fake zero byte ISO images, and while we haven’t been able to verify for ourselves if indeed a valid Win7 image has been leaked to the pirating community, it sure is stirring up a lot of interest in the past 24 hours!

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Plenty of change lies ahead in the area of offshore outsourcing, which has evolved from a little-used practice to a mature industry in less than 10 years. Here are five predictions for offshore outsourcing in 2008:

1) Businesses that use offshore outsourcing will devote more time and effort to ensuring the success of such projects. Occasional problems with bad software code, miscommunications, and high staff turnover haven’t been enough to turn companies away en masse from offshore outsourcing — many are too hooked on the personnel cost savings — but they’ve been enough to demand greater oversight on offshore deals. This also will have some companies working in closer partnership with their offshore providers.

2) More offshore work will go to Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, and other low-cost locations as India struggles to deal with its tightening IT talent pool. Service providers in India say they’re working hard on the problem, going as far as to retrain science graduates to become technologists and scouring the rural regions of India for talent. But these measures smack of desperation, and India’s talent problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

3) India IT salaries will continue their annual double-digit increases, rising perhaps even higher than the 15% range suggested by Indian service providers, but not so much that U.S. companies won’t continue to be attracted by the cost savings/skill level combo offered by Indian technologists.

4) India will decline as a location for telephone call center jobs for U.S.-based companies. People are impatient by nature, and even more so when on the phone with a customer service rep talking about a bill they owe or a problematic product they’ve purchased. Add even a slight language barrier, and you’ve got customers demanding to speak to managers and e-mailing complaints. Meanwhile, turnover rates for call center reps serving customers during U.S. daylight hours are high in India, since they’re night-time jobs there. Even high-level execs at India offshore firms have admitted to me that call center work is an increasingly unattractive business. Look for U.S. companies to bulk up call center staffs in rural, low-cost areas of the U.S. where labor is cheap, and in Canada, for their English-speaking customers.

5) If the economy tanks in the next year, offshore outsourcing will suddenly become a much more interesting topic on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. The U.S. unemployment rate for IT is still very healthy right now, about 2%, and most Web-based development skills are in high demand. But if a recession hits, layoffs may follow, and presidential candidates will be forced to be more definitive on the topic than they’ve been to date.

Read full article Posted by Mary Hayes Weier, Jan 1, 2008 11:25 AM

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