| Spammers Now Using Facebook Events to Trick Users Spammers are now using Facebook Events to trick users into completing online surveys, taking part in online contests and perform other tasks that allow spammers to generate commissions. In some cases, users are also tricked into giving up their mobile phone number, which is then automatically signed up for expensive premium services. According to multiple security firms, spammers using Facebook Events to promote their links have been highly successful in their efforts to dupe unsuspecting users thus far. According to a report from TrendMicro,"tens of thousands" of users had mistakenly registered for one spammer's event. Meanwhile, Sophos found an example where over 10 million Facebook users had been targeted, and over 165,000 had accepted.
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Amazon Payments May Integrate NFC (Report) Amazon may integrate the emerging technology known as NFC (near field communication) into its mobile applications, allowing customers to pay for items at point-of-sale using only their mobile phone. The technology is currently being explored by the company's Amazon Payments unit, BusinessWeek recently reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the project.
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Toddler Tech: Building Vocabulary Skills with GoodieWords for iOS The iPad is often touted for its great potential as a learning device for toddlers - if you don't mind the smudgy fingerprints on the screen, of course. A newly updated app by GoodieWorld is aimed specifically at that sort of early education. The GoodieWords app is geared toward toddlers who are in their "What is it?" stage, but it explains words that parents might otherwise find difficult to define, like fingerprint, shadow, time, and dream.
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iPad or Smartphone: Which Has Impacted Your Life More? It's the one year anniversary of the launch of the iPad. But has the iPad had as much impact on the online world as smartphones like the iPhone and Android phones? In an internal discussion here at ReadWriteWeb, at least one of our number uses smartphones far more than the iPad. Personally, I use both the iPad and iPhone frequently - but I'd have to say that the iPad has had a bigger impact on my browsing and interaction habits over the past year. For my colleague, it's been the opposite. Below I'll explore some of the differences, but I'd love to hear your view in the comments. Which has had a bigger impact on your life over the past year: the iPad (or another tablet), or the smartphone?
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Thanks to Kinect, Google's Gmail Motion Joke Becomes Reality One of Google's April Fools jokes, Gmail Motion, looks a lot less like a joke and a lot more like reality today. Members of the ICT MxR Lab at the University of Southern California have made their own gesture-based system for handling email. The prototype utilizes Kinect's motion-sensing technology in order to send and receive email. This isn't the first Kinect hack from the ICT MxR Lab. The USC researchers built a prototype last year that allowed World of Warcraft to be played in full-body mode.
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E-Books: The New Frontier for Content Farms Recent changes to Google's search algorithm have sought to reduce the rankings of what Google has described as "low quality" and "low value add" sites. And while some of these websites have seen a significant drop in traffic, we may find that content farms aren't eradicated. Rather, they're relocating. Impact Media's Mike Essex suggests their new destination may be e-books. On the Internet, many content farms are full of unoriginal content, often scraped from other sites, and republished under different headlines. The advent of easy self-publishing makes it incredibly simple for this process to be replicated in e-books.
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What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School? iPads. Interactive Whiteboards. Netbooks. Video games. Although educational technologies are being implemented more and more in classrooms across the country, we don't often stop and ask students - or their parents - what they think their technology needs are. But the newly-released Speak Up 2010 survey has done just that. The project surveyed almost 300,000 students (along with 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, 2000 librarians and 3500 administrators) from over 6500 private and public schools last fall about how they're using - and how they want to be using - technology for learning. The results are pretty fascinating, as they show great adoption of technology among even very young students, but lingering resistance on the part of school administrators to sanction some of those tools into the classroom.
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U.S Developing Mobile Phone Panic Button for Democracy Activists The U.S. State Department is putting its money where its mouth is, according to the Daily Mail. It is funding the development of an application that will allow pro-democracy activists to delete all incriminating evidence on their cell phones with a single click while sending out an alert to their fellow activists. The "panic button" will send out a text message to everyone in the user's address book, then erase both that address book and the phone's call history. This will be an important tool, given how thoroughly governments comb through dissident's communications technology as a matter of course these days.
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China's Best Known Artist Arrested Ai Weiwei was arrested yesterday at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong, the New Yorker reported. Ai, China's best known artist, a global star and designer of the Beijing Olympics stadium, the Bird's Nest, had plans to possibly leave China to live in Germany, where he had set up a studio, according to Deutsche Welle. We cover threats to free speech here, especially when those threats intersects the Web. Sometimes we know the people involved, as is the case with Ai. Our founder, Richard MacManus, took part in an historic conversation a year ago in New York with Ai.
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Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that's ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO.
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