| Syria Shuts Off Internet Today, Syria joined the lengthening list of countries who have cut themselves off from the world and their own people by turning off its Internet. In the words of Freedom House: "In a bid to limit Syrians' access to information and keep the outside world from learning the full truth about the government's campaign of violence, Syrian authorities shut down internet access and cell phone networks early this morning, with the exception of certain government services."
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Mobile Shopping Trends, Visualized (Infographic) Did you know that men aged 30 to 49 do more mobile shopping than their peers? Or that 50% of Groupon's business over the next two years will come from mobile devices? Or that Starbucks has seen over three million micro-payment transactions? These are the sorts of tidbits of information that a new infographic on mobile shopping and e-commerce trends helps to visualize.
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High-Profile Gmail Users Target of Chinese Phishing Scam Google's Gmail service was the target of a massive China-based phishing scam, according to the company's blog. The goal seemed to be the gathering not of money but information.
"This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists."
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U.K. to Recruit "Cyber-Soldiers" At the same time as the U.S. military is preparing to release a policy qualifying cyberattacks as acts of war, the military of the United Kingdom is engaging in a large-scale recruitment drive. Called "Operation Cupcake" Following from last year's "National Cyber Security Programme," this recruiting initiative will attempt to attract hundreds of computer experts to the British armed forces. Part of a £650,000 cyber-security budget will be devoted to the program.
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Google Acquires Postrank: A Fork in the Road for the Future of Social Media One of my favorite startups in the world, Postrank, has been acquired by Google. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use Postrank every day and if Google shuts it down I am going to be sick. New account creation has already been shut off and a shell of the technology is most likely to become a part of Google Analytics. Here's what Postrank does: you plug in any RSS feed to the system and it scores each post in that feed by the relative number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. Then you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most-discussed items in any feed. It's magic, it's gold and it's all too often unappreciated. Unfortunately, the company hardly focuses on that aspect of its business anymore. his deal could go one of two ways, very good or very bad, not just for Postrank but for its users and users of the entire social Web.
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Foursquare's Hacker Hire Points Toward Possibly Awesome New Features Location-based social network Foursquare has hired dashing French engineer Pierre Valade, creator of a very cool Foursquare/Twitter mashup called Agora, according to company statements on Twitter this morning. Agora sees who has checked in near you on Foursquare, then looks at everyone's linked-to Twitter activity and recommends that you meet anyone who appears to have interests similar to your own. That would be an awesome feature for Foursquare to add natively, though of course it can't be presumed that something like that will happen. If it did, it would mean two things: that Foursquare had a whole new layer of social interaction added to it (which it could use, as an opt-in feature at least) and that a leading social network is in fact interested in pulling in publicly-available data from outside its silo and doing something really compelling with it. Who else does that? Not Facebook, not Twitter. The whole structured, public web of data outside those silos represents a huge loss of opportunity to add value for users. It would be great to see Foursquare buck that trend.
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