Future Technologies

Facebook Inc, the world's No. 1 social network, is adopting the "hashtag," one of the most recognizable features of its younger rival Twitter, in a move to position its Web service as an important complement to television, sporting events and breaking news. Facebook said on Wednesday that it will begin to roll out the feature on its social network, making it easier for users and advertisers to find hot spots of user activity around specific events or topics. And Support for the all-but-ubiquitous topic organization system was rumored in March and will roll out to a small percentage of users Wednesday. Facebook will roll out hashtags to more users in the coming weeks. The social network wants to make it easier for users to find content already on Facebook, and functional hashtags are the first step. According to Facebook, many users already post hashtags anyway, so why not make them work. Hashtags will be both clickable and searchable, so, for example, topics l...

It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging. Last week, McAfee  released a threat report  showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal. In a  cryptically-worded blog post  , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms." Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin." Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results. Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendor...

 UPDATE: McAfee on Friday, June 6, said it  made a mistake . Koobface has actually been quiet of the past three months. Koobface, the fast-spreading Internet worm cybergangs use to hijack Facebook accounts on a massive scale, is on the move once again. McAfee this morning released a  threat report showing samples of Koobface spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. "The resurrection of Koobface reminds us that social networks continue to present a substantial opportunity for intercepting personal information," says Vincent Weafer, senior vice president, McAfee Labs. Meanwhile, the bad guys also are turning up the spam spigot, as activity of the equally infamous spam-spreading botnet Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, also surged in the first quarter. After remaining more or less stable in 2012, spam levels reached the highest volume McAfee has seen in the past two years. The rising trends are very probably related. The logon...

President Obama's  defense of the government's collection  of phone records and Internet traffic may not appease staunch privacy advocates. Jody R. Westby, adjunct computer science professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, would prefer that Obama call for "a full investigation to ensure that no laws have been stretched or broken." Should the wide exposure of the government's Internet and telephone records data mining projects prompt a similar reaction among the general public, the tech giants that generate and store this data very well might be compelled to adjust their business models, going forward. Americans have always been willing to know that some crimes will take place simply because people are acting undetected, but the rule of law, based on police, courts, and prosecutors to keep the public safe works well, says Westby, who is also CEO at consultancy Global Cyber Risk LLC. "Whatever happened to that line of thinking? It is an odd tw...