Security firm Trend Micro warned on Wednesday that a handful of rogue Facebook apps are stealing log-in credentials and spamming victims’ friends.

So far, six malicious applications have been identified: “Stream,” “Posts,” “Your Photos,” “Birthday Invitations,” “Inbox (1),” “Inbox (2)” according to a blog post by Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson.
As of Wednesday afternoon, all of the apps were live except for “Stream,” he said in an e-mail.

via cnet.com

In the past 25 years, I’ve asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint presentations they’ve seen that came across as really inspiring and enthusiastic.

Most struggle to come up with a single example, and the most optimistic answer I’ve heard was “two”.

So what are the main problems?

via bbc.co.uk

Just over a year ago, Twitter acquired a small startup, Summize, a search engine for tweets. Once the deal was done, Twitter launched Twitter Search, and the real-time search revolution began.

Because of that acquisition, real-time search has exploded. Twitter Search and trending topics have become a staple of the Twitterverse. It has also become one of the top tools for tracking major world events (i.e. the #IranElection crisis).

via mashable.com

It’s no coincidence that Facebook launched a new real-time search engine on the same day that it bought FriendFeed and Google announced a new infrastructure project aimed at speeding up its indexing time. Make no mistake about it: people that know search believe that there’s gold in real-time and social data, and Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed was a lob squarely across Google’s bow.

Facebook has always been in a position to take a lead in real-time and social search because of the sheer amount of data the site has collected about what people are doing, the things they’re interested in, and what their social graph looks like. About 15 months ago, Paul Buchheit, the founder of FriendFeed, actually wrote that the human link data at sites like Facebook “could ultimately be more valuable than the link data from the web” that Google’s search engine is based on – someone just needs to mine it. Now he may have his chance.

Read more here

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn’t tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results.

A few search engine experts we’ve spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they’re from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

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Almost four years since uTorrent had its debut, the development team has now released a version 2.0 Beta of their BitTorrent client with significant improvements and updates. BitTorrent tracker owners in particular have been looking forward to this release as it finally implements support for UDP trackers, turning it into a ‘good citizen’.

Read more here

Cellphones are poised to elbow personal computers out of their place at the centre of our digital universe, according to the results of a study.

In the first third-party measurement of its kind, Nielsen Online revealed this week that the number of Canadians accessing the Internet with their cellphones is reaching this “critical mass.”

Between the final quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, mobile Internet use shot to 21.3% from 16%, with 3.9 million Canadians using phones to dial up their online lives.
Read more here

According to a report released yesterday by McAfee, spam volumes have jumped over 140-percent since March of this year. This steady climb in spam only serves to further what is being called the longest streak of spam volume increases ever. In addition, botnet numbers are at an all-time high, McAfee says.
There are more than 14 million systems infected worldwide by Malware that adds the infected hosts to one of several botnets. This growth in botnet numbers is a 16-percent increase over what was reported by McAfee in the first quarter of 2009. This 16-precent jump means that more than 150,000 systems are infected and added to a botnet daily. According to Gartner, this number would account for 20-percent of all new computers bought daily.

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On May 28th, tech circles went wild when Google (Google) revealed Google Wave (Google Wave) at its Google I/O conference. The response to and the questions about the new communication platform were staggering. Is it something I should use? Is it a game-changer? Could it kill email itself?

This type of lofty rhetoric will always raise hopes and draw scrutiny. We want to believe that new and radical technologies like Wave will change the very way we live. And while our experiments with Wave have brought us to the conclusion that this platform may indeed be a game changer, it won’t happen if there isn’t widespread adoption. So instead of asking whether Wave will kill email, the better question to ask is this: Is the world ready for Wave-based communication?

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From what’s been reported so far, I don’t see much to like about Office 2010. The discussion thus far has lacked a single “killer feature” that makes me want to plunk down a few hundred dollars for an Office that seems only a teensy bit better than what I am already using.

In fact, the real “killer” aspect of the announcement may be what a free online version of Office does to the chance of consumers and very small businesses ever paying for Office again. Microsoft can blame that on the Googleopoly, right?

Read more here