Diary of a Disordered Mind

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August 7, 2009

Cyber Warfare: Russia v The Internet

Yesterdays denial of service attack which took down twitter and effected facebook, google and, it has emerged, the blogging site LiveJournal, appears to have been a large scale attack by Russian hackers to silence one man: a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu.

 The attack, it is alleged, was co-ordinated by Russian hackers who sent out spam messages containing links to Cyxymu's twitter, facebook, LiveJournal and youtube pages. Cyxymu's pages at these sites are still down, though this may not necessarily be due to an ongoing attack rather than people curious to see who Cyxymu is. The question now is, how are these sites going to defend themselves from similar attacks?

 And does this mean I might have to do some work instead of reading twitter?

Filed under  //   DoS   social network   twitter  
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August 6, 2009

ITV Sells Poor-Man's Facebook, for £100m Loss, to the Beano

guardian.co.uk

is today reporting that ITV has managed to offload friends reunited, a once popular social network site, for £25 million, 4 years after buying the site for £120 million plus performance-related bonuses (worth up to £55 million). The question is, why would DC Thomson Publishing, home of such iconic magazines such as the Beano and Dandy comics, and Classic Stitches Magazine, want the company which has lost a majority of it's users to the likes of facebook?

When friends reunited started in 2000, there wasn't a UK alternative to the popular US website Classmates.com. Us Brits had no-way of finding out which of the pretty girls from school had gotten fat, or how many of the school bullies had ended up in prison. I signed up for an account pretty early on, but was astounded to find that it was a paid service, or rather, if you actually wanted to connect with a friend, you had to pay a yearly subscription. It was a pretty modest £7.50 or so but, as a student, there was far more important things to spend my money on. Like alcohol for example. It got old pretty quickly because, essentially all you could find out about the people you went to school with was if they were married, where they lived and what job they had. My account became neglected and eventually, when facebook was opened to people outside of universities, abandoned.

When I visited friendsreunited.co.uk recently, I didn't recognise it. Or rather I did, but only because it had become another facebook/myspace/twitter clone that had fewer members than the alternatives. And of those members, many had neglected their profiles.

So why buy the company? Well, prior to the original sale to ITV, friends reunited had branched out into genealogy and dating. These are far for lucrative businesses to DC Thompson, who's subsidiary Brightsolid runs a genealogy website. Also, friends reunited dating provides online dating for daily local and national newspapers in the UK.

The timing couldn't be better for ITV, who lost £1.6 billion last year and £105 million this year to June. Hopefully, the money saved/made from the sale will be ploughed into ITV.com where the number of views shot up almost 4-fold to 116 million and made £18 million.

Filed under  //   internet   social network  
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August 3, 2009

Archbishop Nichols Comments on Social Networks in the Telegraph

I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community.
via telegraph.co.uk

I think I must be getting old; when I read Archbishop Nichols' comments on the use of social networks by young people, I didn't recognise any of the practices he describes. In the article he claims:


We're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.

His description suggests that the young are living in an almost distopic world where they cannot communicate without the aid of the internet. Don't kids go to school any more? Do they only communicate via text when in each others company rather than the mumbled grunts we got by with?!

Personally, I don't believe this for a second. Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, e-mail, SMS, MSN etc are, in my experiences, a way of extending our reach of communication. When we're not in physical proximity with friends and family then why not use social networking sites as a way of staying in touch? It was exactly the same when I was younger, only the telephone (and later SMS) was a great way of keeping in touch with friends who didn't live in the same village as me. I can't see what's changed apart from the medium in which we engage with each other.

I do, however, agree that it's very easy to collect "friends" on these sites, but these are never real friendships and I don't see how this reflects on how we make real friendships. Take my facebook and twitter accounts for example. On the whole I try to keep the two very separate: twitter is for people I will never know where facebook is for those I know or have known. But, even then my facebook "friends" list is populated with people I vaguely remember from school and those I've met only a handful of times. None of those I consider friends in the traditional sense and many I'll never speak to again.

The issue of bullying on social networks should be a serious concern. Any medium where people can inflict emotional abuse without having to physically be in that persons presence makes it far too easy. People quite often say things on the internet they wouldn't necessarily have the courage to say in real life. I think it's an issue that needs to be addressed but we shouldn't discount the value of social networks simply on this basis.

I would ask Archbishop Nicols to spend some time using the communication tools he's dismissing and maybe talking to some young people about how they use them before dismissing them.

Filed under  //   facebook   internet   social network  
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