Internet

Hey there newspaper reporter—has your broadband-powered job got you filing not only conventional stories, but blogging, video blogging, Facebooking, podcasting, picture posting, and Tweeting? If so, you'll be happy to know that the Federal Communications Commission earned its keep this week by coming up with a term for this ever growing set of digital duties: the "hamsterization" of American journalism.

"As newsrooms have shrunk, the job of the remaining reporters has changed. They typically face rolling deadlines as they post to their newspaper's website before, and after, writing print stories," the FCC notes in its just released report on The Information Needs of Communities.

Tuesday evening, hundreds of Web destinations, including the four most popular ones worldwide, showed up on the IPv6 Internet. IPv6 traffic went up a lot in relative terms, but still barely registered as a blip on the radar. The 0.05 percent of users who were expected to encounter delays or errors didn't—or decided to call their Moms, watch TV, or otherwise refrain from complaining. Twenty-four hours later things went back to the way they were before—for the most part. But not everything went according to plan: a small but significant number of websites did participate, but experienced some IPv6-related problems.

Facebook's integration of face recognition technology into its photo tagging feature has EU regulators concerned over possible privacy violations. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which advises national data protection agencies, suggests the feature "can bear a lot of risks for users."

"Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default," Article 29 member Gerald Lommel told Bloomberg Businessweek. Article 29, along with Ireland's national data protection agency, will examine the new feature to see if it violates any EU regulations.

The new feature, called "Tagging Suggestions," has been in testing for the last several months, but was recently rolled out "in most countries," according to Facebook. When photos are uploaded to Facebook, its servers use face recognition technology to automatically identify faces and suggest possible matches among your friends. The same basic technology is widely used in photo editing software from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others.

The feature is active by default, though users can turn it off if they wish. It does not automatically tag anyone as Lommel suggests, however. Instead, it merely presents a suggested tag based on matches from previously uploaded and tagged photos; users can click an "x" to ignore any tagging suggestions. The feature also won't suggest tags for people you aren't friends with, and it won't suggest your name if someone you're not friends with uploads a picture of you.

Like Facebook's regular tagging feature, though, users can tag images with their friends' names without prior consent. Your friends can remove the tag however, and you can also limit who can see photos you are tagged in via Facebook's privacy settings. Tagging friends in photos has worked this way ever since it was first added to Facebook several years ago, so it seems odd that this new feature should raise any new privacy concerns now.

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Bitcoin—a pseudonymous cryptographic currency designed by an enigmatic, freedom-loving hacker, and currently used by the geek underground to buy and sell everything from servers to cellphone jammers. No, this isn't a cyberpunk artifact from Snow Crash or Neuromancer; it's a real currency currently valued several times higher than the US dollar, the British pound, and the Euro.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency, designed to allow people to buy and sell without centralized control by banks or governments, and it allows for pseudonymous transactions which aren't tied to a real identity. In keeping with the hacker ethos, Bitcoin has no need to trust any central authority; every aspect of the currency is confirmed and secured through the use of strong cryptography.

Did Congressman Anthony Weiner really tweet a photo of his, well, wiener? It's possible, but he also might have been "hacked" via an image service vulnerability that makes it easy for anybody to send a photo to a user's account.

The incident happened over Memorial Day weekend: Weiner's official Twitter account sent a link to a photo on ImageShack's yFrog service of a man's bulging underpants. Weiner immediately denied sending the photo, claiming that his account was hacked. As this is a common defense used by politicians and celebrities against Twitter and Facebook boo-boos, many Weiner-watchers took the hacking claim with a grain of salt.

Scammers based out of China have been hijacking the personal Gmail accounts of "hundreds of users," Google revealed on Wednesday. The company wrote in a blog post that the attacks appear to be originating out of Jinan, China and that the main goal appears to be to covertly monitor the contents of users' e-mail accounts. Some of the targeted users include Chinese activists, military personnel, journalists, senior US government officials, and officials in other Asian countries.

"It’s important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself," wrote Google Security Team's Eric Grosse, who noted that the scammers are likely obtaining people's passwords through phishing. "But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online."

Grosse said that Google "detected and has disrupted" the campaign through its own abuse detection systems combined with user reports and a report by contagio about targeted attacks against military and government employees.

The revelation comes a year and a half after Google revealed that attacks originating out of China were targeting Google's own corporate infrastructure, and that the attackers were "accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists." Google eventually pulled most of its operations out of China and began redirecting its Chinese search engine towards Hong Kong, but that apparently hasn't stopped those interested in monitoring the communications of interesting parties. Google advises that users turn on two-step verification, use strong passwords, and check their forwarding addresses in case someone's getting a copy of all your e-mail—good advice for anyone, not just Chinese rights activists.

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Hulu fans will soon be able to watch a plethora of films from Miramax, but most will only be accessible to Hulu Plus subscribers. Hulu announced Wednesday that it had signed a multiyear deal with the movie studio to bring 27 movie titles to subscribers, with "hundreds" more coming over the next few weeks.

According to Hulu's senior VP of content and distribution Andy Forssell, only Hulu Plus subscribers will get access to films like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Trainspotting, and more. Free Hulu users who want to check out the Miramax offerings will be able to watch a "selection" of ad-supported Miramax films starting in mid-June. "This is the first time Miramax has made films available to movie fans on an ad-supported, on-demand streaming basis," Forssell wrote on the company blog.

The deal isn't an exclusive one—as noted by Reuters, Miramax also signed a deal with Netflix last month. Still, although Hulu has always offered some streaming films, it's largely known as a TV site. A deal with Miramax would help draw attention to Hulu's movie offerings, but the company will need to sign agreements with a few more studios before it starts attracting more users looking for films.

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