TechBlog

Metadata has long been part of Twitter applications. Viewing conversation threads or learning about a user’s location has changed how users interact with content and have provided third party app developers with great opportunities to innovate on Twitter’s platform. Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s director of platform, announced today at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference, that annotations can now be added to tweets. In other words, any kind of metadata can be added to any tweet; it’s up to developers to decide what kinds of apps they build to showcase what kinds of metadata. ...

Twitter has just announced a new feature and API for desktop applications: users streams. The revelation was made by Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver at the Chirp conference. The new API is focused around pushing out data to desktop applications in real time. There will no longer be rate-limits for data on desktops — tweets, retweets and all other updates will be streamed directly to the desktop. ...

Earlier this year we predicted that Twitter would use geotagging to identify physical places via Twitter, and today Evan Williams announced at the Chirp conference that the company is doing just that with its new Points of Interest feature. The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, but soon users will have the ability to click on a place name — included in geotagged tweets — to view the particular place on a map. Next to the map, Twitter users will see a stream of nearby tweets, giving them a real-time view of what’s happening in a particular place at a particular time. ...

“Faceparty is a UK based social networking site allowing users to create online profiles and interact with each other using forums and messaging facilities similar to email” – Wikipedia Faceparty does things a little differently to other social networking sites, however. Unlike most places where you register a username and password then start telling people how your farm is doing, to join Faceparty you need to send a text message to the tune of £25 / $38(!) and then enter your one time use password onto this page (warning: quite a few swearwords, because the site is indeed down with the kids). ...

In kicking off Twitter’s Chirp developer conference, the company finally revealed its long mysterious registered user number, and it’s surprisingly large (based on some prior outside estimates): 105 million, or to be exact, 105,779,710, according to a slide showing behind Co-founder Biz Stone during his opening remarks. The growth’s not over either — Twitter says its still adding 300,000 users per day. Moreover, as many have speculated, most of Twitter’s traffic — 75% of it in fact — comes from third-party clients and applications. ...

On April 9th, Tavis Ormandy published a proof of concept about how to use the latest version of Java to compromise a pc. You can read about it here. He notified Sun, but they weren’t concerned enough to break their patch cycle, so he published the code. The problem is that when Sun released Java 6, update 10 in April 2008, they introduced a new feature (it’s not a bug, it’s a feature folks) called Java Web Start. In order to make it easier for developers to install software, they created a method to execute a program from a website. ...

Last week we received a mass mailing that at first glance appeared no different from the usual mailbox clutter. The messages were in German and advertised an online casino. Nothing out of the ordinary there – after all, gambling-themed spam is one of the most popular in the German-speaking realms of cyberspace. But after a closer inspection, these messages turned out to be of much more interest – all the links in the messages led to pages created on legitimate sites that had been compromised. The links looked like this: **\*.com/news_.php or *****.com/1500.php. ...

A universe filled with kaleidoscopic colors blazes across your desktop in this theme for Windows 7, revealed by the infrared imaging of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Discover more about Spitzer’s unique view of stars, nebulae, and galaxies on the Spitzer Space Telescope website. Download: NASA Hidden Universe Theme Download ...

Yesterday evening our spamtraps started receiving the email below in a mass mailing action. The email was immediately flagged as spam even before reaching our spamtraps. No wonder since it has no To:-field, it has a different Reply-to:- than the From:-field and it comes from a DSL line IP address. If the user replies to the email, the return address is set to [email protected]. Nice try, but the email is just to generic to be actually taken seriously by anyone. I expect to see targeted emails in the next days (as we’ve already seen last year). ...

Does anyone really care about opening a zip file to examine an RTF or JPEG file? This task—combined with a dull, unexciting, unstimulating subject line—competes with the content of the email to win a race of worthlessness. Spammers have traditionally used zip files to carry executables, but in most cases the subject line or the content of the message made an effort to encourage users to open the attachment. There are cases of spamming attacks in which HTML attachments opened up a fully functional Web page, capable of carrying sensitive user information back to the fraudsters. However, with this latest spam attack using zipped files, not only have the spammers made an attempt to escape anti-spam filters, they’re missing out on reaching any users as well. The scope of returns for these messages looks to be much less rewarding than other comparable attacks. ...