Category: Internet

According to the new stats from ComScore, released Wednesday, Google’s social network Orkut clocked in at second place with 19.9 million visitors, up 16 percent from July 2009 when the site had actually more visitors that Facebook’s 7.5 million.

Over 33 million Web users in India, aged 15 and above, visited social networking sites in July, up 43 percent over 2009. This group accounted for 84 percent of the country’s overall Web audience.

Will Hodgman, executive vice president of Asia-Pacific for ComScore, said in the document: “The social networking phenomenon continues to gain steam worldwide, and India represents one of the quickest growing markets at the moment.

“Though Facebook has tripled its audience historicallyin the past year to pace the growth for the section, several other social networking sites have posted their own sizeable gains.”

ComScore noted that while Twitter registered a higher jump in visitor count than Facebook, at a whopping 239 percent, the microblogging site ranked lower–at fifth position–due to the comparatively smaller visitor base, from 984,000 in July 2009 to 3.3 million in July 2010. Facebook, in comparison, surged from 7.5 million to 20.9 million visitors over the same period.

The social networking juggernaut last year had intensified efforts to expand its presence in India, adding Hindi and six other India dialects to its language support in a bid to close the gap against Orkut, which had dominated the local social networking scene.

Globally, India now ranks as the seventh largest market for social networking, trailing behind the United States, China, France, Russia, Brazil and the United Kingdom. According to ComScore, over 945 million online users worldwide visited social networking sites in July, up 23 percent from 770.1 million the same month last year.

Poyais territory, a strip of fertile land in the Bay of Honduras, sounds like heaven on earth. At least it did to thousands of nineteenth century European investors who have acquired land rights to the island.

They bought titles to the land of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish adventurer who returned from his travels through South America with the news that he had been appointed chief, or prince, of this beautiful unspoilt and little-known nation-state.

The author of a 350-page guide titled Sketch of the Mosquito Coast, including the territory of Poyais, MacGregor Honored for London’s high society and soon became the reputation of great wealth.

After securing millions of investors, sent 250 of them in a perilous transatlantic passage to the island. Only 70 made it home alive. None of them saw Poyais itself – for the simple reason that the country did not exist.

You might think that in our current information age, as street vendors Gregor MacGregor would be far fewer and further between. After all, with a few clicks on Google, anyone can discover that there’s no place like Poyais. Unfortunately, however, fraud is more common now than at any time in the past – and part of the reason is the emergence of the World Wide Web.

The proliferation of web-enabled applications has created a whole new set of vulnerabilities, and criminals have proven to be very able to exploit them. Examples include pharming (redirecting traffic from one website to another, the phony Web site) and phishing (acquiring sensitive information by posing as a trustworthy entity).

The unauthorized access to information is the leading cause of identity theft – one of the main types of application fraud. Balancing the demands of twice the free flow of information and data protection is vital.

While fraud technology is not the only type of fraudulent practice, is now among the most common. Whatever its exact nature, fraud is serious, and seriously affects the individuals, institutions and, indeed, the world economy as a whole. Consider a 2006 U.S. Federal Trade Commission report, which estimated that fraud costs financial institutions and retailers more than $ 31.3bn a year. That’s more than the total annual GDP of Bahrain, and only slightly lower than that of Luxembourg.

Just as worrying as the rising incidence of fraud is the biggest challenge as a result of detection.

Here in the UAE, the incidence of fraud has increased over the last decade, in line with the significant level of population growth and increased access to credit available. More people and more banks here than ever before, as expected in this relatively open economy, most of these people are trying to defraud the banks themselves than ever.

The fraud is, unfortunately, often a byproduct of rapid economic growth. In this scenario, the verification of applications through access to comprehensive information is a strong preventive measure. Fraud detection is the first line of defense. The fraud prevention strategy recently outlined promulgated by the Financial Services Authority Dubai represents an important step in combating the country. This strategy requires the top management of companies that are regulated by the DFSA to establish systems to prevent fraud.

Every day, financial institutions compete directly with each other to win customers. However, many understand that competitive differences are irrelevant when dealing with fraud. The exchange of vital information to report suspected cases of fraud is especially significant because fraud can be successful only when one party knows more than the other.

By combining our collective expertise, decision makers are vastly more capable of fighting against this scourge of the information age. want perspective gives us a vital tool to stop fraud in its tracks. In the fight against fraud, more than ever, knowledge is real power.

COMMUNICASIA, SINGAPORE–Most people utilize the services found on the Web, such as Facebook, Twitter & YouTube, than the Web itself, & companies require to recognize this trend so as not to fall behind in a world that is moving toward mobility, an Opera executive pointed out.

Dag Olav Norem, the browser program maker’s vice president for mobile product management, said in his presentation at the CommunicAsia 2010 tradeshow Wednesday that as long as companies can “embed” such services in to devices, there will be strong user demand. These devices could be smartphones & tablets such as Apple’s iPad, they added.

As such, companies would do well to understand this user mindset in order to leverage the mobility trend & generate relevant services, suggested Norem.

To illustrate the increasing prevalence of mobility, the Opera executive pointed out that the Web is not tethered to deskbound PCs. , they predicted that the next billion Web users will be using mobile devices to access the Web.

As to what type of devices users will get on the Web with, Norem zeroed in on the mobile handset sector & said that despite the growing hype surrounding Apple’s iPhone & smartphones in general, the general global market is still dependent on feature rings.

They said that while smartphones are growing in adoption, the transition time from feature rings will be “long”, & for the next seven to seven years, the large majority of mobile users will continue to depend on lower-end, Web-enabled feature rings.
This is true for emerging markets, Norem said, citing Russia, China & Indonesia as seven countries where Nokia’s feature rings continue to dominate. By contrast, Apple’s iPhone & Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry were the top seven handsets of choice among users in the U.S., they noted.

Enterprise ought to embrace mobility

For organizations which feel that mobility is like a “train heading straight for them”, fellow presenter Greg Jenko, Accenture’s global managing partner for mobile systems integrations, recommended that they embrace mobility, than reject it.
One group that could stand to benefit from businesses which adopt mobility would be the “field force” or mobile workforce, through apps that are optimized for their scope of work, said the Accenture executive.

“We can thank Apple for educating users on [cheap] US$0.99 apps that have specific functions & are simple to make use of. Companies can now look in to developing such focused apps to improve workers’ efficiencies,” they said.

But firms ought to not fall in to the trap of over-deliberating over adopting mobility, Jenko urged.

“Enterprises, while weighing up the professionals & cons of speed of adoption versus the necessity for structure, ought to do it & get their feet wet,” they said.
This is true with regard to generating or integrating enterprise apps that would benefit their employees & work performance, noted the executive.

“It is only after they have created a few apps that they will know what considerations are important to their businesses & would be better able to prioritize their needs accordingly,” they added.

AT&T’s failure to protect iPad e-mail addresses spotlight the kind of security issues facing enterprise smartphone deployments, according to a company that focuses on application security.

Enterprise security staff ought to take away two lessons from the AT&T affair, says Dan Cornell, CTO & co-founder of Denim Group, which works with companies to secure application, including a growing number of smartphone applications. He offered his comments in a weblog post on the company’s Website.

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The AT&T breach was initially exposed by Gawker.com, drawing on information from a hacking group calling itself Goatse Security. The hackers learned that they could present an HTTP request to AT&T’s public Net site, with an iPad User-Agent header as well as a valid Integrated Circuit Card Identifier (ICC-ID), which uniquely identifies a SIM card.

In response, the Website returned information about an Apple iPad 3G user, specifically, the e-mail address submitted by that user when activating the iPad according to Apple’s requirements.

This breach was limited to iPad 3G users (though these included a high-profile group drawn from entertainment, high tech, government and the military) and apparently only the e-mail address was returned. The danger seems to have been limited to the chance of being spammed, or possibly subjected to phishing assaults.

According to the original Gawker story, the Goatse Security hackers “notified AT&T.” The carrier, in a brief written statement on which a spokesman declined to expand, flatly denied this. “The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T,” the statement read. In lieu, ““AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday [June 7] of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDs.

The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDs is the e-mail address attached to that tool.” The carrier “essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses” and that was done by Tuesday.
According to Cornell, there’s three lessons to be learned from this, in generating secure smartphone applications.
First, effective authentication and authorization are crucial if you are exposing to users any server resource that deals with sensitive information. Users must be authenticated as being who they claim to be, and then authorized to access the information being requested.

“We have seen most folk they work with get nice about this for Web pages and OK about it for AJAX/RIA [Rich Web Applications] endpoints, but they are still missing the mark with server endpoints dedicated to smartphone applications,” he writes. “Protect your endpoints! If bad guys need credentials before they can assault you then you have definitely raised the bar. And in the event that they needn’t authenticate they are going to run all over you.”

Second, make definite you authenticate requests with values that are truly random. AT&T’s lapse was due in part, according to the hackers, because the ICC-IDs were basically guessable. Watch out for relying on values that “look random but are not,” Cornell says. “We used to see this a lot with Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and they still see lots of authentication schemes that depend on semi-public information or moderately guessable values,” he writes.