Hackers use Twitter to control botnets
Twitter, which recently became the latest big-name victim of a denial-of-service attack launched from a botnet of thousands of compromised personal computers, has also been pressed into service by the masters of another botnet.
Security researcher Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks said Thursday he had found a handful of streams on the micro-blogging service that were used to tell drone computers where to go to download new instructions. Read more
Chalk up two for the good guys
Internet filters have become more powerful and continue to be used more widely for government censorship – as shown most recently in this week’s report from the OpenNet Initiative on the state of the art in the Middle East and Africa.
So it’s worth celebrating when the rising tide of official censorship is kept at bay, even if such victories are hedged with qualifications, and are by no means certain to last. Read more
Lex: Smartphones
Yesterday Microsoft and Nokia announced an alliance meant to challenge Research in Motion’s lead in the corporate mobile phone market. The FT’s Lex column writes that “the battle is hotting up because this year the smartphone market is the only game in town.”
Shipments of phones that allow web surfing, e-mail and run other popular software applications rose 27 per cent in the second quarter – while overall handset sales remain on track for their first full-year decline. Even during the recession, consumers are abandoning dumb phones when, for just a little more money, they can get a pocket-sized computer instead. Read more
The Google social network proceeds apace
A mechanism to connect with your friends as you travel around the Web, a place to store and manage your network of relationships, and now… a platform for social apps.
Piece by piece, Google is building many of the core functions that define social networking. They do not all reside in one place, but as it finds more ways to link these things, the utility should increase exponentially. Read more
Holding Microsoft’s feet to the fire on IE8
A deliberate attempt to use its desktop dominance to protect its browser market share, or an inadvertent glitch that might have had the unintended side-effect of hurting rivals?
Whichever way you look at it, the anti-trust regulators aren’t giving Microsoft an inch in the browser wars that are now raging.
From Tuesday, anyone who uses a non-Microsoft browser on their PC, and who installs IE8, will be presented with a very clear prompt asking them if they want to make this their default browser (see image after the break). The same will happen for people in future who upgrade to Windows 7. Read more
Apple could sell 2m tablets @600 per, analyst says
While most tablet-style personal computers have failed, Apple should be able to sell 2m of them next year, analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said Friday.
Mr Munster estimated that Apple will pack enough quality media software and other gee-whiz quality into the machines to justify a $600 price, which should boost company revenue by about 3 per cent. Read more
Target and Amazon part ways
A lucrative if relatively unknown side business for Amazon.com is powering the online websites of other major retailers.
The partnerships began at the height of the dot-com boom ten years ago, when Amazon had established an early lead in e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar companies were looking for ways to sell their goods online.
Initially, some retailers opted to maintain “store fronts” on Amazon’s own site. Later, Amazon also provided fulfillment and website management services for some retailers’ new separate sites, including Target.com and the UK’s Marks & Spencer, through its enterprise services business.
Now Target has decided to end its relationship with Amazon. Read more
Twitter down from attack
Twitter was down around the globe for at least two hours today after being hit by a denial-of-service attack. By 8:16am in California, the site was back up for most US users. Less than an hour later, Twitter was again working in the UK.
Denial-of-service attacks overload websites with meaningless requests for data in order to slow them down, or take them offline altogether. Read more
Facebook’s adolescence
If Silicon Valley technology companies go through something like the stages of life, then Facebook is in its adolescence — growing quickly, and struggling to find its identity.
That it is rapidly bulking up is no longer in question. The latest figures from comScore show Facebook to be the fourth-largest site in the world, with a 340m unique visitors, trailing only the sites of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Facebook has added 208m visitors in the past year, a 157 per cent growth rate that has allowed it to surpass MySpace, Amazon and Wikipedia. Read more
Online ad spending falls again, will keep at it
Online advertising spending fell 5 per cent in the second quarter to $13.9bn from the same period a year earlier, research firm IDC said Wednesday, with the more developed US market declining even more, by 7 per cent.
It marked a second consecutive period of declines, and IDC said that there will likely be between two and four more quarters of the same. In the US, classified advertising dropped 17 per cent in the latest quarter, display ads fell 12 per cent, and search ads held up relatively well, allowing Google to post slight growth. Asia bucked the trend and showed an overall increase in online ad spending. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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