Social Round-up #32

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

This week: Revenge of the Zombie Slave Computers; human touchscreens; and robotic teachers.
 

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THE HEADLINES ...

In a considerable coup for cyber-law enforcement, Spanish investigators have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of a massive botnet which has, for at least a year, spread its monstrous tentacles across the net, allowing criminals and hackers to penetrate up to 12.7m computers. The botnet – known by the confusingly comely nickname ‘Mariposa’ - had successfully invaded the ‘secure’ systems of more than half of the US Fortune 100, and over 40 banks worldwide, harnessing them as slaves or ‘zombies' through which to access numberless individual PCs.  The gang – who appear to have relatively unsophisticated hacking skills - rented out parts of the botnet to other cyber-gangsters, as well as selling bank information harvested from infected computers. Following the arrests, investigators were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, in apparent retaliation for the destruction of the hideous monster: which final attack must henceforth be known as The Revenge of the Zombie Slave Computers.

Still no sign, seven long weeks after Google’s Chinese flounce, that it does actually plan on, like, leaving China. This Tuesday, the search giant told a Senate hearing that there is still no exit timetable, and indeed no official resolution on withdrawal – though it insisted that it was ‘firm in its decision’ no longer to allow censorship of its Chinese results.  Google claims still to be investigating the ‘massive’ cyber-attack that precipitated the breach – but intriguingly, Forbes reports a claim by cybersecurity firm Damballa that, contrary to the picture painted by Google, the attacks were unsophisticated assaults orchestrated by out-of-date, ‘old school’ botnets, using ‘amateur’ techniques.

This week the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords forced a last minute amendment to the Digital Economy Bill – defeating the government, but leaving critics anxious that they had done greater harm than good, according to the Guardian.  Clause 17 – the hotly-disputed section of the bill which threatened huge changes to British copyright law – now gives the High Court the power to slam a takedown notice on sites accused of hosting ‘substantial’ amounts of copyrighted material.  So … that’ll be YouTube, right?

Thus far, the Bill’s passage through the Lords is proving to be anything but stately: the government’s ‘three-strikes’ proposal, which could see Lord Mandelson making decisions about how long offenders are to be barred from broadband access – has come in for ferocious criticism in the second chamber, with opponents citing an “extraordinary degree of lobbying” from copyright-holding bodies.

Over in Europe, a German court has decreed that an existing law which requires that telephone and email traffic-data be stored for six months can’t stand. Lawmakers ruled that data-storage systems were insufficiently secure – and that it was still not yet clear what the law, which stems from a Europe-wide directive, hoped to achieve.

Elsewhere, experts are predicting that Western cyber-security policies are catastrophically underpowered, and might allow a future attack equivalent to "the next Pearl Harbour".  One former White House counter-terrorist warns in the Guardian that “terabytes, petabytes of data have been stolen - and our firewalls don't stop it.”

Much chatter this week about Apple’s patent case against HTC, the first manufacturer to use Google’s Android operating system in its phones – with some commentators suggesting that the case could eventually impact many others, and others questioning whether software patents are worth the paper they're written on. Apple appears to be dishing out mobile patent-infringement suits like sweeties presently – the one it launched against Nokia has just been put on hold, while the International Trade Commission decides what’s what.

Several unanswered questions surround the HTC suite, the most pertinent of which is “what do Apple want, precisely?” If you’ve missed the fun and games thus far, then PCWorld is a good place to start.

Earlier in the week, Apple’s Patented, Astounding and Fantastical Rumour-Generator had been cranked up once again, with many (Mashable amongst them) prophesying a March 26th release of the iPad, as well as ‘predicted delivery shortfalls’ and a possible ‘short supply’ – news which will doubtless have generated a wedge of panicked pre-sales calls.

Turns out the pundits were out by a week: Apple today announced a US date of April 3rd - with us poor Brits forced to exercise patience until the end of that month. If you’ve not yet succumbed to the iPad’s siren call, this demo at Tech Digest may well have you joining the throng in late April.

And look, here comes Condé Nast to boost Mac’s well-oiled PR-o-rama, with announcements that Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour magazines will all be available on the shiny new content-machine

Here's a man who, it’s safe to say, will have a considerable interest in how this iPad thing pans out: yes, it's the particularly paywall-positive Rupert Murdoch, who weighed in this week with the news that the Wall Street Journal, his most successfully ring-fenced property to date, is being tricked out as an iPad app for your delectation and delight, even as we speak. And speaking of News Corp, here comes the FT – another Murdoch jewel – to tempt us with the news that we no longer have to commit to a monthly subscription: henceforth a trifling micropayment of £2 will buy you a day’s worth of its charms.

Ah, content, content, content: it’s the issue that dominates the digisphere, and it ain’t going away any time soon. It emerged this week that Comedy Central was pulling both of its humungously popular Hulu offerings – "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"  - from the popular video website. A bit of a worry for the many other blogging sites which depended on Hulu’s embedded player to access Comedy Central’s tip-top content – owners Viacom announced that it would be suing infringers - and almost certainly a taste of things to come for other content-grabbers.

Yikes. Respected online Brazilian newspaper Folha has carried out an in-depth assessment of how well online-gaming companies organised their Haiti donations – and, as Social Media Today says -  it don’t look pretty. The report is particularly scathing about Zynga’s ethics – specifically its insistence that donations not made within a certain timeframe should revert to Zynga property Farmville.


THE LOWDOWN ...

Yes, it’s come to this. Mobile phones are now so intrinsic to the continuing success of humankind that researchers have decided to ditch the human/phone distinction – so C20! – and just turn us all into handsets. If you need to know how ‘skinput’ might transform my swarthy forearm into a giant touchscreen, this video (via Mashable) will enlighten you.

On which mildly dystopian theme, a $44m Japanese-Korean project is well on the way to removing humans from the education system, having successfully tested out its alluring range of robot teachers in schools. By 2013, robot educators are expected to be rolled out in 8,000 Korean kindergartens – but we predict that, without a serious Taser upgrade, the teach-bots will flounder in British schools.

Britons are particularly guilty in the matter of buying tech which they then fail to master, reports the Telegraph - and we waste a gargantuan £52 billion on gadgets which we don’t actually use. The figures come from a recent survey by Sky HD, which also reveals a tech-competency gender gap: only a quarter of men asking for help when stumped, compared with nearly half the women. Delightfully, the survey finds that ten per cent of IT experts have hit a gadget in the hope of making it work – and while the figures don’t reveal whether the hitters were male or female, I think we can hazard an educated guess, don’t you?

It cannot truthfully be said I am of a sentimental bent – neither kittens in cups, nor giggling YouTube babies have thus far succeeded in penetrating my steely emotional carapace. But even my bitter, unyielding heart momentarily softened at this viral video, which shows the moment that teen pop-sensation Justin Lieber made one small, sobbing girl’s dream come true.

And if this is a little saccharine for your taste, you might prefer the beefy goodness of OK Go’s astonishing new video. Shot in one geeky take, using plenty of repurposed junk, it contains all the ingredients you need for instant virality.


IN OTHER NEWS ...

Consumers are ‘grazing’ on online news, with few evincing loyalty to a specific news provider, finds a new report from the Pew Research Centre. Only 1 in 5 claims to stick to just one site – with the vast majority (a whopping 92%) snacking on multiple sources, and nearly half visiting 4 to 6 platforms a day.

A distinctly favourable reaction to the news that Twitter may well be offering ads this summer - Lloyds and Virgin Media have already put their hands up, and will take paid-for ads on the microblogging site if Twitter goes ahead with its sponsored-listings plan, says Brand Republic.

The NSPCC has weighed in on the growing controversy over the methods used to market products to children. The children’s charity says companies must “give more thought” to how they sell to kids, and contends that “the growing climate of sexualisation encourages a view of girls as sex objects”.

Wordpress has jumped into the real-time fray - posts from any of its 10.5 million Wordpress.com blogs will now have a real-time presence in services like Google Reader, Bloglines and Friendfeed.

Comscore reports a big old hike in the numbers of us who access Twitter and Facebook via our mobiles.  Facebook’s stats leapt a chunky 112% over the last year – while access to Twitter went ballistic: a 347% rise on 2009.

And a separate survey by Neilsen makes the surprise find that teens account for a diminutive 7% of mobile socnet use. Their parents are far more likely to be doing so, at 36% - and there’s a gender split too:  55% of women beat the 45% of men who use their phones to access social networks.

Microsoft appear to have struck oil on the farm: after they ran an ad inside Farmville which offered virtual currency in exchange for joining Bing’s Facebook Page, they gained an astonishing 400,000 new fans in the space of just one day.


That’s all folks!