Our Friends Electric: Facebook Info Open to 'Socialbot' Snooping

Perhaps it's time to start paying more attention to whom you're friending on Facebook. A recent study designed to evaluate how safe social networks are from being invaded by programs pretending to be real people resulted in more than 250GB of personal information being collected from thousands of Facebook users by the researchers' "socialbots."

NORBERT VON DER GROEBEN / REUTERS

Researchers from the University of British Columbia's Vancouver campus released 102 socialbots onto Facebook as part of the eight week study, each one given a name and a profile picture so as to better convince real users that they were, in fact, entirely genuine. Each bot then proceeded to send 25 friend requests per day—limited to prevent setting off spam alerts—and within two weeks, 976 requests had been accepted.

For the next six weeks, the bots sent requests to the friends of their new friends, with 59% of that second wave accepting, leading to what the researchers call "a large-scale infiltration" of the site.

The researchers said that the exercise proved how ineffective existing safety measures are against this kind of attack, with only 20% of their socialbots being caught by Facebook's "Immune System," with even that low percentage only happening because users flagged the friend requests as spam.

A report on the experiment, "The Socialbot Network," explains the danger this presents:

"As socialbots infiltrate a targeted OSN, they can further harvest private users' data such as email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal data that have monetary value. To an adversary, such data are valuable and can be used for online profiling and large-scale email spam and phishing campaigns."

A Facebook spokesperson deflected criticism by attacking the report, saying that the company has "serious concerns about the methodology of the research by the University of British Columbia, and we will be putting these concerns to them."

Sources: Techland

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Samsung Bests Apple In Smartphone Sales

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co overtook Apple Inc as the world's top smartphone maker in the July-September period with a 44 percent jump in shipments, and forecast strong sales in the current quarter in a clear warning to its rivals.

Samsung only entered the smartphone market in earnest last year, but its sales have skyrocketed thanks to a sleek production system that rapidly brings new products to market. Apple introduced its first iPhone in 2007.

"In the handset division, Samsung has no real rival models to challenge its products except for the iPhone 4S. Apple and Samsung will continue to dominate the market in the fourth quarter," said Kim Hyun-joong, a fund manager at Midas Asset Management, which owns Samsung shares.

Profits from the South Korean firm's telecoms division, announced on Friday, more than doubled from a year ago to a record 2.5 trillion won ($2.2 billion) and accounted for 60 percent of Samsung's total profit, offsetting a plunge in earnings from its bread-and-butter memory chips.

Shipments of smartphones jumped 44 percent from the preceding quarter to 27.8 million units, up nearly four times from a year ago, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Apple's iPhone sales shrank by 16 percent to 17.1 million units in the third quarter. Samsung had 23.8 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, 9 points higher than Apple. Samsung's flagship Galaxy line of products is powered by Google's Android software.

Apple sold fewer phones in the third quarter, missing street expectations for the first time in year, as customers held off buying iPhones until the October launch of the latest version.

Samsung shares were up 1.6 percent by 0500 GMT (1 a.m. EDT), versus a 0.6 percent gain in the wider market.

The world's biggest technology firm by revenue reported a 4.25 trillion won operating profit for the July-September quarter, broadly in line with its earlier estimate of 4.2 trillion won.

That was down from 4.9 trillion won a year ago but up from 3.8 trillion won in the preceding quarter.

Samsung said its fourth-quarter earnings could be better than the third, boosted by one-off gains from its $1.4 billion sale of its hard disk drive business to Seagate Technology.

"I am cautiously optimistic on the fourth quarter outlook at this point," Robert Yi, head of Samsung's investor relations, told analysts.

"Looking ahead into the fourth quarter, when industry demand is traditionally at its peak, Samsung expects sales of mobile devices to remain strong and flat-panel TV shipments to increase," the company added in an earnings statement.

Apple, whose iPhone sales account for nearly half the firm's total sales, reported a 40 percent gross margin, or the percentage of sales left after subtracting the cost of goods sold. Samsung's phone division reported a 16.9 percent operating margin, which further takes account of marketing costs.

Nevertheless, Samsung faces challenges as the new iPhone introduced earlier this month is notching up strong sales.

Nokia is also fighting back with its first phones based on Microsoft's Windows software. And Sony Corp announced on Thursday it would take full ownership of its mobile venture, Sony Ericsson, in a bid to exploit its music and video library.

Samsung on Thursday announced the launch of its Galaxy Note mobile device, adding to the flagship Galaxy lineup of products. The device, powered by Android, will square off against a series of new models released by Apple, Nokia and HTC Corp.

The iPhone, introduced in 2007 with the touchscreen template now adopted by its rivals, is still the gold standard in the smartphone market.

Samsung may not have come up with the concept, but it has adopted Apple's breakthrough smartphone idea perhaps better than any other handset maker. It tries to offer the Apple experience at a better price with better functionality.

"Samsung's rise has been driven by a blend of elegant hardware designs, popular Android services, memorable sub-brands and extensive global distribution," said Alex Spektor at Strategy Analytics.

"Samsung has demonstrated that it is possible, at least in the short term, to differentiate and grow by using the Android ecosystem."

Q4 SEEN BETTER THAN Q3

Profits from Samsung's chip business more than halved to 1.59 trillion won, but the division held up well as its relatively high exposure to lucrative mobile chips helped the firm offset a sharp plunge in prices of commodity computer memory chips.

Samsung was the sole profitable firm among major global dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip makers in the third quarter.

Second-ranked computer memory chip maker Hynix Semiconductor and Japan's Elpida Memory swung to deep losses as prices of DRAM chips used in PCs tumbled about 50 percent in the third quarter.

Samsung's chip business is also benefiting from strong demand for mobile processor chips used in Apple's iPhone and iPad tablet as well as its own Galaxy smartphones.

Samsung expected demand for PCs to remain weak in the fourth quarter because of weak seasonality, while demand for mobile devices and servers will be relatively strong.

"I see some signs that chip prices have hit bottom as inventories are running out. However, we don't yet know when the industry is going to pick up since macroeconomic uncertainties overshadow the demand outlook," said Park Hyun, an analyst at Tong Yang Securities.

Samsung's display business posted losses for a third consecutive quarter on weak demand for TVs and PCs.

But losses narrowed from the previous quarter, helped by strong earnings from the OLED display, which is widely expected to replace LCD as the next-generation flat-screen in mobile devices and TVs.

($1 = 1,115.250 Korean won)

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park and Jungyoun Park; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner, Miyoung Kim and Dean Yates)

Lets see pictures of the state of the global smartphone market, according to Strategy Analytics.

1. Samsung

2. Apple

 3. Nokia

4. Other Vendors

Sources: Huf Post TECH

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Google Can Now Index Your Comments Made Through Facebook

I know that you, fair Techland readers, are always civil in the comments section. Those who aren't might want to think twice about saying something nasty, as Googlebots (a.k.a. Google's infamous web spiders) can now index website comments from engines like Facebook, Livefyre and Disqus.

Before, the fact that those commenting engines used JavaScript meant that Google couldn't read or index them. Now, however, Google SEO guru Matt Cutts confirms via Twitter that "Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments."

Digital Inspiration points out that you can now search for all the comments someone has made via Facebook's commenting system by searching for something like "commenter name * commenter title." So, internet trolls that for some reason sign in using your real name, your days are numbered!

This also has major implications for websites when it comes to SEO. As The Next Web points out, it's a good thing that all of a sudden a lot more content is going to be searchable, meaning that users could get to sites via things commenters have said. The negative? If a commenter—gasp!—says something inappropriate, that could show up in a site's search results. Also, if websites are lax in rooting out spam, that could negatively affect how Google's spiders view them.

Lesson to websites: Pay attention to what people are saying in your comments section. Lesson to commenters: Don't drink and post ill-conceived angry rants at 3:00 am! Or at least go incognito when you do.

Sources: TECHLAND

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Pluto — No Longer a Planet — Has a Twin Sister

If Pluto's looking for someone — or something — to blame for being drummed out of the planetary corps back in 2006, it need look no further than Eris. The solar system's ninth planet had long had its detractors — purists who sniffed at its tiny size and irregular orbit — but it was in 2005 things came to a head.

An artist's rendering of the dwarf planet Eris
NASA

That was when Caltech astronomer Mike Brown found a tiny, frigid world orbiting some three times further out than Pluto. Brown had been finding similar objects in the Kuiper Belt — the massive band of comet-like bodies that circles the solar system — for years. But all of them were smaller than 2,320 km (1,440 miles) across, the modest dimensions of Pluto. Eris (which Brown nicknamed Xena, before the International Astronomical Union settled on its official name), though, was evidently a little larger — and that discovery set off an international furor. If Pluto was a planet, Eris obviously was too. And if so, why not Quaoar and Sedna, and several other worlds, which were smaller than Pluto, but not by much?

In the end, the astronomical union avoided the whole mess by demoting Pluto and the rest to the status of "dwarf planet," infuriating Pluto partisans around the world (an odd category, when you think about it: there are no rabid fan clubs for Jupiter or Mercury or Mars). Brown ultimately poked Pluto lovers again when he wrote a book titled How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. The one hope Pluto fans had for revenge was that it was very tough to pin down Eris' size exactly. Maybe it would end up proving smaller than Pluto after all. That wouldn't restore Pluto to full planethood, but it would make them feel better, anyway.

Now a team of astronomers has finally nailed down Eris' size with high precision, and the answer is that it may be bigger than Pluto, or it may not — but the difference is probably pretty small either way. Much more significant, says Bruno Sicardy of the Paris Observatory, lead author of a paper on the discovery in the latest Nature, is that despite their comparable size, Eris is some 27% more massive than Pluto. What's more, it's prettier, with a surface Sicardy describes as "brighter than new fallen snow."

Measuring the size of something 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away is no mean feat. It is, says Sicardy, "like measuring a coin at a distance of 100 miles." Even with the Hubble telescope, Eris looks like a featureless pinpoint. The only way to gauge its size accurately was to wait for it to pass in front of a distant star, in what's known as an occultation. All you have to do then is time how long it takes the star to reappear on the other side and you can calculate the size of the obscuring object. Two years ago, Sicardy and his team found a good star in what seemed to be the right spot — but they couldn't be sure the two bodies would actually cross paths until it was about to happen. "You need to know the location of the star and the orbit of Eris very, very precisely."

Fortunately, they chose well. Last November, the occultation took place. "It's amazing it works!" says Sicardy, who knew better than anyone how hard it was to predict. "The star disappears and then reappears!"

If the occultation had been spotted from only one telescope, it wouldn't have been very useful, since the star might have barely skimmed Eris' edge rather than passed behind its fat middle. But two telescopes, both in Chile, managed to see the event take place. They were far enough apart and saw it from different enough angles that they captured different parts of Eris. Assuming the object is roughly spherical (not unreasonable), they could use those parts of the overall disc to trace out the rest and thus calculate its size. The answer they got: 2,326 km (1,445 miles), with an uncertainty of half a percent. That margin of error actually straddles Pluto's accepted dimensions. At its greatest possible size, Eris is bigger than Pluto; at its least, it's smaller.

Such exquisite mathematical ambiguity is made less certain still by the fact that unlike Eris, Pluto has a thin atmosphere, so when it goes in front of a star, the star doesn't wink out. It fades. Pluto may be a few tens of kilometers smaller than Eris, or a few tens of kilometers bigger.

Whatever Pluto's exact dimensions, the fact doesn't have much significance beyond cosmic bragging rights. What does matter a lot is Eris' surprisingly large mass, which means it has considerably more rock underneath its icy surface than Pluto. As Brown writes on his blog, "explaining why Pluto and Eris are so different is going to keep us busy for many years, I suspect."

Scientists also have to explain why Eris is so blindingly bright. Its surface should darken over the years as dust and cosmic rays mar its pristine whiteness, and yet it's kept its youthful sheen. The answer, the scientists suspect: when Eris comes closer to the sun in its highly elongated orbit, surface ice warms up to form a temporary atmosphere. When it recedes, the atmosphere condenses again to form a new coating of ice just a millimeter thick. "Unfortunately," says Sicardy, "we will have to wait 250 years to test this idea." But Pluto is currently moving further out, so the same thing might happen to it in reverse. "Within 20 years or so," he says "we could see Pluto begin to brighten" as its atmosphere starts to freeze out, confirming the hypothesis.

Astronomers won't have to wait that long to firm up their understanding of the outer solar system, though: Sicardy and his team already have occultations in hand from other Kuiper Belt objects. Measuring their size and density will help theorists figure out how these miniworlds came to be.

Brown, meanwhile, holds out an even more exciting prospect. "There are surely even larger dwarf planets out there," he writes. "It is only a matter of time before both Pluto and Eris are supplanted." Presumably, one hopes, before Eris develops a fan base of its own.

Sources: Science

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