We did so for a lot of reasons, including being able to offer a social layer to our comments that has been dormant until now.

Through this new commenting system, readers can:

• more readily share comments to Facebook and Twitter (or choose not to)
• follow conversations across multiple platforms
• tag friends and draw them into the stream
• accurately flag other comments as spam or offensive

As part of the change, users will have the option to sign in to comment using their Twitter, Facebook, Google or LinkedIn credentials, or you can create a user ID specific to AllThingsD.

And don’t worry, the comments left on the site since it launched are being imported into this new system and should still be entirely accessible. If you don’t see posts you’ve made or comments in a thread you’ve been following, give it a little time and they will appear. In other words, no pixels were harmed in the making of this move — except the troll ones.

On the back end, Livefyre will be working to reduce spam before you have to see it, as well as making it easier and faster for us to moderate the comments that you want to see (and excise the ones all of us don’t).

Although we have done everything in our power to minimize any hiccups in the process of installing Livefyre, all changes come with bumps in the road. Ideally, you will not really notice the new interface and only see a new ease in commenting.

Still, we fully expect you to have an opinion about the switch, so, as always, feel free to comment. Just keep in mind that, new commenting software or not, we still actively monitor our comment threads.

In short:

• Play nice. Rude, derogatory, defamatory stuff? Not here.
• While we welcome criticism as well as praise, we don’t tolerate baseless attacks.
• If your comments create a hostile environment, they’re outta there.

We have a delete button and we’re not afraid to use it.

The attack against the Spamhaus Project Ltd., a nonprofit group that tracks spammers, was massive enough to slow some of the traffic on the Web to a crawl.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It was awful. With it came incredibly spammy apps like SocialCam, the flawed, oversharing Washington Post Social Reader and The Guardian, and others that unexpectedly pushed out your app activity.

No more. In a move that speaks directly to a better user experience, Facebook announced on Monday that it will no longer let developers auto-publish certain actions — that is, most of the ones that occur “simply by a user consuming content.” You won’t see ’em in your ticker in the right-hand corner, nor in your Timeline or News Feed.

“When apps automatically publish stories on a person’s behalf in a way that is unexpected, such as when they browse an online store, it can surprise and confuse people,” Facebook employee Henry Zhang wrote in a blog post when Facebook first began making changes.

There are notable exceptions to this rule. Activities using what Facebook calls “built-in actions” — “like, follow, listen, read and watch” — will still auto-publish to your Timeline, News Feed and ticker unless you specify otherwise. These are the bread-and-butter actions of Facebook’s Open Graph, so don’t expect their auto-publishing capability to go away.

The point here, however, is that Facebook is actually paying attention to how fed up people get on both sides of a spammy action. It’s jarring when I realize that I’ve performed some action in an app and it’s broadcast to all of my friends without my even realizing it. And at the same time, I really have no desire to see every little thing you’re doing. So it’s a win for the consumer experience, for sure.

Developers and publishers may not be so thrilled with the decision. Part of a company investing time and resources into a Facebook app depends on the promise of distribution found on Facebook. After all, an app only spreads as fast as other people can see it. And if you’re forced to cut back on the amount of sharing your app can do, that can severely curtail your growth.

Still, Facebook’s answer to this remains the same: If you want your app to spread, make it look good within Facebook. Higher quality stuff means fewer clicks on the “report as spam” button, and more “Like” clicks (in theory, at least). And it’s not like the app is cut off at the legs: Non-auto-sharing custom actions will still show up in users’ feeds.

To hear more on all of this, by the by, I’ll be chatting with Facebook VP of Partnerships Dan Rose at our Dive Into Media conference coming up next week.

Developers aside, I welcome the change. I’m less apt to get annoyed at a new app that pushes something out without my permission. Now if only those pesky, auto-tweeting apps would follow suit.

Update: Date math wrong! The actions will begin on Wednesday, not Tuesday as I wrote previously.

Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer Justin Somaini (pictured here) has left the company, according to sources.

It’s not clear why the top security risk exec has departed the Silicon Valley Internet giant. But, said sources, it could be partially related to the recent hacking issues around the newly refreshed Yahoo Mail, including its vulnerabilities to cross-site scripting, or XSS, attacks. This has been blamed for a surge in spam emanating from compromised email accounts, a problem that some security experts outside the company said Yahoo has been slow to fix.

Along with a number of execs, including Connections SVP Shashi Seth, addressing such issues were within Somaini’s purview. It’s not clear if Seth — who has also been the subject of persistent departures rumors internally over the last few months — will also be getting some of the blame for the embarrassing security problem in a key Yahoo product.

But sources noted that Somaini’s leaving is also part of a wider look at a range of higher-level execs at Yahoo — top staff status is based on Levels, such as L3, L4, L5 — that is now taking place across the company by CEO Marissa Mayer.

Sources noted that Mayer is moving to replace a number of them as she seeks to remake the top ranks of the company, even as some are contemplating departure in the March time frame when their various and sundry stock options and other payouts are realized.

That said, sources said Somaini has been looking to leave too, unhappy with the new regime, as are some others at his level.

His quest for a new job should not be too hard, since Somaini has a strong resume, coming to Yahoo in April of 2011 from Symantec, where he was also CISO. Before that, he worked as a director of information security at VeriSign. He has a very lively cybersecurity blog, too, which you can look at here.

I reached out to Yahoo for comment, but have not heard back as yet.

The American delegation tasked with defending the Internet’s flat, decentralized and globally unregulated structure was composed of a vast swath of government agencies ranging from the State and Defense departments to the FCC and White House National Economic Council. The delegation also encompassed a powerful tier of commercial representatives from preponderant technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Cisco. In the months before the conference, the U.S. team was assiduously briefed on an array of hugely controversial proposals to regulate Internet content, impose tariffs on Internet traffic, and usurp management of the Internet’s technical protocols and address system. But no member of the delegation, not even the most seasoned veterans of such global negotiations, could confidently predict how the acutely contentious conference agenda would ultimately generate an acceptable international agreement.

“Consensus! Consensus! Consensus!” This was how an emphatic Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), promised to navigate world governments through the two weeks of talks, the first in history to debate the prospect of international Internet regulation. Delivering his opening remarks to more than 150 national delegations, Toure, an electrical engineer from Mali educated at the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics in Russia, sought to assuage the palpable anxiety among many countries that the future control and governance of the Internet were at risk.

In the weeks before the conference, Toure had provided repeated assurances to the U.S. and other governments that the treaty under discussion in Dubai would hew carefully to established principles for the management of international telecommunications that have been in force for decades. The last time member states had debated the scope of the ITU charter was in the decidedly pre-Internet era of 1988. As the body convened 24 years later to modernize its rules and mission, the ITU’s culture of consensus, Toure seemed to be arguing, was the ultimate safeguard that a United Nations agency primarily dedicated to managing a largely anachronistic international telephony regime and radio spectrum would not aspire to exercise regulatory oversight of the Internet.

Toure’s promise of consensus came on the first day of the conference, during a plenary meeting held on Dec. 3, when all of the ITU member states patiently listened to a series of opening statements delivered to an attentive assembly convened in Dubai’s mammoth international trade center. It was a hopeful moment with thousands in attendance, many wearing the traditional national dress of the Arab world, Africa and South Asia. Within 10 days, however, the conference was on the brink of collapse.

The tipping point came after iterated sessions of grinding, tedious parliamentary skirmishing and maneuvering. With two days before a treaty was to be signed, and scant progress on the most consequential issues, the conference delegations were called into late-night negotiations. It was then, at about 1:10 am on Dec. 13, when Toure jolted a sleepy proceeding awake with a surprise intervention.

The hushed quiet of the plenary meeting that evening was the same it had been each day before. Hundreds of delegates sat at long rows of tables in a massive space the size of an airplane hangar. Strapped into headsets that transmitted the now deeply familiar voices of the U.N. translators interpreting Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and English, the delegates listened in respectful silence, with the only noise emanating from the floor being the tap-tap-tap of countless laptop computers transmitting live color commentary and email exchanges about the historic debate. Walking through the cavernous meeting room for the plenary sessions, studiously quiet except for an occasional muffled cough, one would have assumed that a gigantic standardized test was being administered, a global LSAT or GRE exam.

Into this environment of perfunctory calm swooped Toure, prompting conference delegates to consider a resolution calling on the ITU and its member states to play an enlarged role in “international Internet governance and for ensuring the stability, security and continuity of the existing Internet and its future development and of the future Internet.” It was precisely the sort of provision, recycled from a prior U.N. conference, that Toure had promised would not divide his gathering, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).

One of the senior American negotiators, Dick Baird, a career State Department official with an elegant mastery of the ITU’s arcane procedural and political machinations, jumped in swiftly. Always the diplomat, Baird cloaked his skepticism with courtesy. “We are concerned about this resolution because it begins to be — it is a resolution about the Internet.”

The conference chairman, Mohamed Nasser Al-Ghanim of the host United Arab Emirates, responded incredulously. “I’m so surprised to hear this, while yesterday I thought we have reached a consensus,” he said. This premise — that a secret deal had been brokered to expand the U.N.’s authority over the Internet — would engender continued bitterness and confusion long after the conference. The notion that the U.S. and its allies in the Americas, Europe and Asia had agreed to empower the ITU to have even a whisper of authority over Internet governance was baffling. Rejecting that effort was the most consistently articulated priority of the U.S. team and its top allies. Chairman Ghanim nonetheless sought to force the issue by preempting debate. “I think I’m going to stop this discussion at this point,” he casually pronounced, “because we are not moving forward.”

Yet the discussion continued. Toure took the microphone. “It’s not a crime to talk about the Internet inside the ITU,” he insisted. Toure launched a rambling defense of his resolution, his emotion rising and his argument splintering into incoherent fragments. “There is nothing wrong with this. Please, we are trying to build bridges so we work together so the consumers benefit better. Please, everybody, help us to continue to build that bridge.” Toure added: “The future is broadband, and the future is Internet, and the future is Internet, and the future is broadband Internet.” He was now pleading with the delegates for their support. “Trust me,” he implored.

In the next few minutes, the conference imploded. A series of countries endorsed Toure’s resolution, with South Africa, Cuba, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia taking the floor. The chairman called for a show of hands to measure support for the resolution. “I want the feel of the room,” he offered innocuously. According to the ITU’s procedures, the chairman had the prerogative to seek a simple show of hands — little placards, really — to assess the weight of opinion on a given issue or provision. And he also could interpret that expression opinion, known as the “temperature of the room,” according to his own discretion, which is precisely what Chairman Al-Ghanim did. “You can lower your plate now,” he stated coolly from the dais. “The majority is with having the resolution in.”

Mass confusion erupted from the plenary floor. The delegate from Spain spoke on behalf of the dozens of member states deeply confounded by the procedural sleight of hand that apparently had just legitimized a role for the U.N. in the governance of the Internet. “I would like you to clarify whether the temperature you were taking was simply a taking of the temperature,” he asked, borrowing from the arcane conference nomenclature.

“No it was not a vote, and I was clear about it,” Al-Ghanim replied. Although it was not voted on, the resolution was nonetheless adopted at the discretion of the chairman, its language to be incorporated into the final treaty text. “We have reached the end of the time,” said the chairman. “Thank you, and have a good night.” According to the official transcript of the proceeding the plenary session then concluded, at precisely 1:31 a.m.

The conference’s fate was now sealed. It would likely end in angry discord because the red line of Internet governance had been crossed. Before the formal debate was concluded other Internet provisions were crammed into the treaty, dangerous precedents recently enumerated in a news analysis for the Financial Times. At the insistence of Russia, China and several Arab states, the new treaty includes a provision mandating coordination on cybersecurity, defined euphemistically in the treaty as “network” security. The treaty calls on the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and its member states to accede to vague commitments that experts fear may evolve into an effort by state governments to engage in the global surveillance of Internet traffic.

Encouraged by African states and supported by countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the treaty creates a requirement that member states seek to defend against Internet spam, which is imprecisely defined as “unsolicited bulk electronic communications.” Critics of the provision noted that spam is easily managed by commercially prevalent software programs, and warned that the expansive definition it applied could be appropriated as a tool to censor content on the Internet ranging from political speech to Web advertising. Yet that vague definition was more than satisfactory for some of the member states. “Spam is spam!” the delegate from Iran complained. “I don’t need a definition!”

Finally, the scope of the treaty and the entities to which it could be applied was never clarified. Under the treaty’s fuzzy language, its jurisdiction could potentially be applied to Internet service providers, private networks, and even government networks.

When the full panoply of provisions relating to Internet governance was clearly defined, the U.S. signaled its refusal to sign the treaty. The U.K. and Canada quickly followed. Eventually, all of Europe refused to sign the treaty, along with Japan, Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand, and Latvia. In total, 55 countries rejected the agreement.

Silicon Valley should take note of the international debate in Dubai. The collapse of the global dialogue about the future of the Internet foreshadows a conflict that will almost certainly accelerate in coming years. The Internet’s prevailing governance paradigm revolving around the private sector, technical cooperation, innovation and multi-stakeholder management will be increasingly challenged by world governments. Why? The Internet is simply too consequential a strategic and geopolitical resource for many global powers to not seek to control it. In that sense, Dubai was only the first battle in an emerging global contest to shape the future of the Internet.

The author is a managing director at Silver Lake, and served as a member of the American delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. He writes in his individual capacity, and the views expressed here are his own.

Pay up.

The social network is overhauling its in-house messaging system with a new set of filters that it says will help users reach out and “Poke” each other more effectively; you can see details here. Part of the overhaul: A test that will allow some users to ping people they’re not friends with, if they’re willing to spend a dollar.

Facebook says the changes are primarily designed to let Facebook users who already know each other make sure their missives connect. But the most interesting part of the move is what the social network is calling a “a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals.”

Here’s how it will work: A limited number of U.S. Facebook users will now have the ability to pay Facebook a fee to send a message to other U.S. Facebook users who they don’t know. Facebook isn’t spelling out the cost publicly, but people familiar with the company’s plans say it will start at a dollar a message, and Facebook will tinker with the fee over time. The option will only be available to individual users — not marketers and brands — and Facebook will only allow users to receive a single paid message per week. But users can’t opt not to receive paid messages.

Here’s Facebook’s rationale for the move:

This test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient. For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox. For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.

Glass-half-empty translation: Facebook is selling access to your inbox — which you previously could have kept closed to anyone you don’t know — to the outside world.

Glass-half-full version: Maybe you do want to hear from those people! And the one-message-a-week cap, combined with the $1 fee, will prevent your inbox from filling up with spam.

In the wake of Facebook’s botched IPO, the company has been working very hard to show Wall Street that it has the ability to generate revenue from all sorts of streams it hadn’t previously tapped — mobile ads, for instance, as well as gifts, and maybe-but-not-quite-yet, an ad network.

But at first blush this doesn’t seem like it belongs in that category. At least not with the restrictions the company is placing on this initial test: If Coke wants to get my attention on the social network, Facebook has an ever-expanding series of ad options it wants to sell them.

Meanwhile, if anyone can figure out how to make pay-to-play work for my real-world inbox — which spam has rendered just about useless — I’m all ears.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Fussypony)

Hopefully, not for much longer. Instagram announced late on Friday it planned to tackle its massive spam problem head on, devoting a number of engineers to fixing the issue inside the service.

“There’s no quick fix, but we have a team of engineers working every day to tackle the issue and we hope you’ll notice their improvements,” Instagram said, appropriately enough, in the comments section of a recent photo taken from the official Instagram account.

Take a look at the “Explore” tab inside the Instagram app, and click on any one of the pictures. They’re flooded with spammy comments, ads for promotional accounts and Web sites. Same thing with the account of any major celebrity who uses the service and has a large following.

It’s a mess, and Instagram knows it.

But now that the small start-up has been acquired and folded into Facebook, CEO Kevin Systrom has the resources and experience of the world’s largest social network to help Instagram in the fight. Facebook has lots of background in this area, having fought against spammers intensely over its eight-year existence with tools like the artificially intelligent Facebook Immune System, and having even gone after some well-established spammers in court.

No word on how Instagram is going to crack down internally, but externally, Instagram wants users to help in a sort of community watch program, flagging spam by clicking through to spammers’ accounts and reporting them.

With any luck, the service will see a noticeable decrease in spam over the coming weeks.

The site already has a spam reporting system for pins and comments. It tries to take care of bad behavior — like posting a picture of some cool product that redirects to a weight-loss site instead — on a rolling basis.

But it saved up a big batch of infringing accounts to wipe out in one fell swoop, in part because some users’ follower counts may drop significantly.

Pinterest engineering lead Jon Jenkins noted that larger follower drops will likely only happen to a small minority of accounts that are on popular user lists or have bought fake followers.

All Pinterest users “will have just as many valid followers as today, but they will just lose a bunch of cruft,” Jenkins said. More than 99 percent of accounts will lose fewer than 10 followers in the cleanse.

Jenkins said he didn’t think there was anything special about Pinterest spam, just that it was the nature of running a social service, and especially one “that hits the scale we’ve hit.” He said his team is now using machine learning to track spammer habits and wipe them out on an ongoing basis.

And it’s true; Pinterest is hardly the only service with a spam problem. Instagram spam comments have been particularly bad of late, especially for celebrity user accounts and hashtags. Let’s hope they can put a lid on that ASAP.

According to sources close to the company, Yahoo is prepping to launch a major overhaul of Yahoo Mail — which sources said has a cleaner, “more Gmail-like” look.

I am not clear exactly what that means in terms of features and design. But sources said the goal of the redo — which has been initiated by new CEO Marissa Mayer, who is also pushing ahead with a new homepage design — is to better compete with the fast-growing mail offering from Google.

“Marissa thinks Yahoo Mail has been a big missed opportunity for the company and she wants to fix that,” said one person with knowledge of the effort, which had also been mulled by previous CEO Scott Thompson.

Sources said the latest iteration of Yahoo Mail will be released in early December, just after the new homepage is rolled out widely.

That’s a lot of change at a critical money-making time for Yahoo, but Mayer — a former top Google product exec — has publicly committed the company to releasing innovative and mobile-focused products as a key differentiator.

It’s a good idea when it comes to Yahoo Mail, even though it got a major refresh just about a year ago. At the time, the first change in five years got good reviews, with a cleaner design, Twitter and Facebook integration, improved spam filters and speedier delivery.

Unfortunately, since then, Google’s Gmail has become the most popular email service in the world, passing Microsoft’s Hotmail (which is now called Outlook.com after a recent rejiggering), according to recent stats from comScore. That has added up to Gmail’s 287.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, 286.2 million for Microsoft’s email product and 281.7 million for Yahoo Mail.

Still, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo is holding onto its longtime — though dwindling — lead, with 76.7 million using Google’s email product and 35.5 million using Microsoft’s.

It’s an important spot to maintain for Yahoo, since many of the users of its products now come to the site to access email and it has been a key driver to its content properties.

But to keep mindshare, Yahoo faces increasingly strong competition. Google’s Gmail released a series of solid improvements last fall. In addition, along with the positively reviewed Microsoft Outlook.com redo, AOL has just announced a new email product called Alto. While it is in beta to a small audience, it is aiming to help users with multiple email accounts organize them better.

In others words, the mail business — especially using it via smartphones and tablets — is another place Yahoo has to make sure it remains innovative.

Using a stolen password, a hacker accessed a Dropbox employee account and stole a company document which contained a list of user emails.

In the weeks that followed the theft, users began seeing a serious uptick in the number of spam emails they received. Many noticed that the only email addresses getting hit by the spam were those associated with their Dropbox accounts, which led to complaints in Dropbox’s user forums.

Tuesday was the first time that Dropbox admitted to the security breach.

“Keeping Dropbox secure is at the heart of what we do, and we’re taking steps to improve the safety of your Dropbox even if your password is stolen,” Dropbox employee Aditya Agarwal wrote in a company blog post. “We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Those controls include an optional two-factor authentication for sign-in — which basically means giving Dropbox two forms of proof that you are who you say you are — a page that lets users monitor active account logins, and “new automated mechanisms to help identify suspicious activity” (though Dropbox doesn’t detail what those are).

This isn’t the first time Dropbox has had security issues with its online storage service. About a year ago, an error made by a programmer left all users’ accounts able to be accessed with any random password, leaving millions of users’ data at risk for a period of about four hours.

Dropbox stated its new security measures would be deployed to the service in the coming weeks.

The amount of spam sent by text messages has more than tripled from last year’s level to 45 million messages sent each day. About 92 percent of those are messages are trying to trick people into giving up money.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The microblogging service said today that it has filed lawsuits in San Francisco Federal Court against several people it said are posting spam or providing tools to create unwanted messages in violation of its rules.

The spam issue has continued to grow along with Twitter, which now has 140 million active users posting some 340 million tweets per day.

“As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers,” Twitter said in a blog post. “While spam is a small fraction of the incredible content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be.”

The company continues to try engineering tactics to thwart spammers, but anyone who has tweeted about an iPad or iPhone can tell those efforts alone are not stopping the problem.

“With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” Twitter said. “By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

Last year, the nation’s top 100 retailers by e-commerce revenue sent recipients an average of 177 emails apiece, up 87% from 2007, according to research by marketing-technology company Responsys Inc. Some of the most aggressive emailers — including Neiman Marcus Group Inc. — sent each recipient more than 500 emails apiece in 2011, Responsys said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s a year-end recap app that could actually be useful: ToutApp analyzes your email throughout the course of the year and provides data on your busiest month, day of the week and time of day for email exchanges. It also tells you who you email the most, who you receive the most emails from, and which marketers send the most emails.

An application that analyzes your email accounts may seem like a huge waste of time, but the purpose of ToutApp is to make users more aware of what their email patterns are so they could, theoretically, be more efficient with their time. According to Pingdom, 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide last year, up from 90 trillion in 2009; an average of 294 billion emails are sent per day.

ToutApp can take some time to work, depending on the size of your inbox. It took a couple hours for the ToutApp to scan my entire Gmail inbox — around 15,000 emails — and it eventually revealed that I receive more emails than I send. I also learned that January of this year was my busiest month in terms of email traffic (I’m going to unscientifically pin that one on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which probably upset the average), and that I send the most emails between 8 pm and 9 pm — which makes me a fantastic dinner date. ToutApp also listed individuals as well as circles of people I email with the most, and highlighted key words that often appear in my email.

Some of the data, such as the list of emails from marketers, could be channeled into usefulness. And ToutApp’s analysis says I received hundreds of Facebook notification emails this year, which reminded me that I should probably disable “Notifications,” as that would help declutter my inbox.

But other info — such as the fact that “FW” is a key word that often appears in my emails — didn’t tell me much, except that I get a lot of forwarded mail.

ToutApp only works on Gmail accounts, and in order for it to work, you have to allow it access to your Gmail account. The company is not affiliated with Google, and it says says that during the analysis process it will not have access to your password or any other personal info through your Google account.

Google’s information section on third-party access says the data and activities available to third-party sites, like the ToutApp, depend on the Google product;, some apps may not be able to add or modify data or may be able to see a small portion of data. (To unsubscribe after your ToutApp report is generated, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

ToutApp comes from a San Francisco-based start-up that offers email management services for business owners. According to its Web site, Tout is backed by venture capitalists Esther Dyson, Dave McClure and Eric Ries, along with other angel investors and seed-stage firms.

If you’re looking for apps that dissect non-Gmail accounts, a research group from the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford University has created something called MUSE, or Memories Using Email, that works to analyze and chart your exchanges across different email accounts. There’s also something called Topalt Reports for analyzing email through Microsoft Outlook.

The order, which was handed down by a federal district court judge in New York on Monday, resolves a lawsuit filed in 2008. The judge found the defendants liable as participants in a conspiracy under New York common law.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

I don’t know how to say this any other way, so I’ll be direct: Please stop with the spam.

I’m talking about crud like this, which you left in the comments of one of my stories:

Personally I’m done with Netflix. They became too much of a hassle, too confusing, and with the price hike, kind of expensive for what I was getting out of it. I have the Blockbuster Movie Pass now, and I like it a lot more. Now I realize I could be called biased since I’m a long time subscriber — and more recently an employee — of DISH Network, but Blockbuster costs less, at $10 a month, and includes streaming to my receiver and computer, DVD’s, Blu-rays and video games (which lets me cancel my Gamefly account too, saving me more money), plus 20 movie channels. And it’s all on the same bill so it’s easier too. So for me it’s a no-brainer.

Now, this pitch, written by “Andrew_K_Anderson,” does disclose that “Andrew” works for you guys. And it’s on a post about Netflix and Dish and Blockbuster and that new rental service you’re launching. So it wouldn’t seem like a completely obvious piece of spam, except that “Andrew” left the comment yesterday. And I wrote this post back on Sept. 23.

Who leaves comments on two-month-old posts? Sometimes it’s a bona fide reader who just happened across something they’ve never seen before. More often it’s a spammer.

In this case, Disqus, the commenting system we use at AllThingsD, makes it quite easy to figure out that “Andrew” is the latter. Because it tells me that “Andrew” leaves the same kind of comment on sites all over the Web.

Here’s another one he left yesterday, on SlashGear:

Now that I’ve had some time with both services, I have to say that I like the Blockbuster Movie Pass a great deal more. It simply provides more options. There’s no additional charges for Blu-rays, you can rent games (a huge bonus in my book) …

Etc.

I don’t know what else “Andrew” does for you, but he was sort of busy yesterday. He left the same comment, taking time to tweak each one by just a few words — I gather this was to defeat the Disqus spam filter — on six other sites, too: The Atlantic; VentureBeat; CNNMoney; the Washington Examiner; and two Time.com sites.

This wasn’t a one-day binge for “Andrew.” Disqus tells me he’s left 188 comments using the same account and, as far as I can tell, they’re all promotional pitches for Dish, Blockbuster, etc. Last month, for instance, he found a four-year-old blog post complaining about Dish competitor DirecTV, and chimed in on that one.

So who is “Andrew”? Disqus tells me he signed in to their system using the name “Ender Chadwick” and a Dish Network email address. Somebody on Facebook named “Ender Chadwick” says he works at Dish, so maybe it’s that guy.

But who knows. Andrew/Ender signed on using an IP address owned by Dish. It’s the same one used by people named “Rose” and “Monica” to write Dish love letters, too, as Gizmo Lovers pointed out last month.

And this gets to one of the reasons this stuff is such a downer: Look at all the calories burned on this petty little exercise, on both sides of the equation. What a waste.

I asked Dish about this yesterday, expecting them to explain that whoever was leaving this stuff probably wasn’t a Dish/Blockbuster employee. Maybe an over-zealous contractor, and that “the wires had gotten a little crossed.”

That’s what Blockbuster marketing head Kevin Lewis told me back in September, when I asked him about a story that seemed to involve the Blockbuster Twitter account offering a free year’s subscription to people who would tweet about dumping Netflix. (I wasted a bunch of time and energy on that one, too. Never bothered to post it. Glad I kept my notes!)

But Dish PR head Marc Lumpkin didn’t try to apologize for Andrew/Ender/whomever, at all.

“We require our employees who post about DISH products to identify themselves as a DISH Network employee,” Lumpkin told me via email. “This appears to be an informative posting describing the options consumers have for getting entertainment and is posted in a discussion of a similar topic.”

Really? I asked. You sure you want me to print that?

“It looks informative to me and appropriate for those Web site discussions. I’m fine with the response.”

Okay. So, Marc, Kevin, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton, et al. — we don’t really need to spell out why this isn’t “informative” or “appropriate,” right? Because we don’t need to explain why you shouldn’t show up at funerals for people you don’t know and hand out flyers for term life insurance, either. Right?

But think about it this way: Stuffing BS comments onto Web sites is the kind of thing that low-rent scammers do. You? You’re a big, publicly traded company. You have 14 million satellite TV subscribers, a left-for-dead video-rental brand you want to revive, and big plans to launch a new Web TV service.

That’s a whole lot to take care of. And spending time and money on tacky, clumsy astroturf seems like it won’t help, and could probably hurt. This article, for instance, doesn’t go in the “win” column, right?

Meanwhile! Here’s “Explosion,” by Eli “Paperboy” Reed, which I learned about from your newest ad campaign. It’s great. More of this, please.

[Image credit: Christina Richards/Shutterstock (litter crew);
Wikimedia (Sisyphus)]

The issue, which first started appearing on Facebook pages a couple days ago according to ZDNet, has generated a growing wave of revulsion online as some users took to Twitter to complain of graphic and lurid imagery that goes far beyond ordinary porn.

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Facebook has launched a major redesign for games, bringing back some viral components that were turned off after users complained about random alerts cluttering their news feeds.

The updates were announced Thursday evening, just hours after Google unveiled its games network that offers game makers a larger cut of the revenues than Facebook does.

Facebook’s new features will likely be favorable to developers, who are constantly looking for new ways to get players to discover their games, but it’s questionable how the social network’s audience will react.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook shut off developers’ ability to post messages to people’s walls — messages that asked friends to help look for their lost cow or plow their crops. When users complained, Facebook cracked down significantly, which made it much more difficult for developers to find new players for their games.

Meanwhile, Google announced today that it is trying hard to contain all game activities to a particular tab under a user’s profile to steer clear of ever being accused of spamming a person’s communication flow.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, told me that there’s a name for unwanted solicitations: Spam.

“We do not want to inundate you with things that are not relevant,” he added.

It seems that Facebook is now looking for some middle ground to give developers another way to find new consumers.

In a blog post, Facebook said its began rolling out a new ranking system with the goal of only surfacing relevant items to friends, including “high quality content from apps.”

Messages will even appear in the feed of a person who doesn’t already use the app.

Apparently some of the responsibility will fall on the users to determine what they end up seeing. For instance, apps that post content which results in high usage will be posted more often; conversely, apps that have content “that is frequently hidden or marked as spam” will be posted less often.

Given that users will have to manually participate in marking alerts, it’s hard to understand how this does not represent a reinstatement of the social network’s old viral channels that people loved to loathe.

Beyond reinstating some viral components, Facebook users will also notice other obvious changes, like a live ticker of real-time game-related updates; bookmarks, where users can select their favorite apps; and leaderboard-type features, where users can post achievements and scores to make game play more competitive.

Another major update will give developers the ability to expand the size of their games so people can expand the game to the full screen of their browser.

Today, Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in its second-quarter earning, growing revenue and lessening losses.

The Santa Monica, Calif., online content maker also announced that it had re-upped and expanded its advertising partnership with Google and also bought two start-ups in social media and advertising.

Now, it’s time for the inevitable conference call to explain it all to Wall Street analysts and the media.

2:02 pm PT: The call starts off with an unusually jaunty CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who quickly got to the real deal: Exactly how badly did Google’s changes to its search algorithm, under a program code-named Panda, hurt Demand’s content business?

Not much, says Rosenblatt, who reels off a list of things the company has done to improve its offerings, which have been dinged by many as, well, spam.

Rosenblatt was not having any of that, talking about removing 300,000 pieces of crappy content and also “quality improvements” with partners such as cheerily demented cooking goddess Rachael Ray. She might cook with spam — here is a delightful Spam Hawaiian recipe — but she ain’t spam!

2:13 pm: Now it is on to the acquisition of IndieClick. Essentially: It’s for the young people.

Then, international. Latin America Demand editorial via eHow en español! (Actually, the acquisition of Emergincast.com, an Argentine start-up. Coming soon to a blog site near you: ¿Cómo se hierve el agua?

Last, social media. Demand will be doing a lot more of it, like everyone else in the world, including more recommendations. I would really like it if some Internet company said it was going anti-social.

2:18 pm: The finance guy comes on, covering everything already in the press releases. Which is why I am cutting out here and getting a gluten-free doughnut at the Whole Foods store where I am writing this post.

It is as delicious as you might imagine a gluten-free doughnut can be. Which is to say: Not very!

2:32 pm: Q&A time from the Wall Street dudes — and, let it be said, they are all dudes.

The first question is about the “cleansing” of its cruddy content and if it is all flushed out.

It might be baked-on sludge, but Rosenblatt assures that Demand has it all figured out.

Then, a query about international and how the company decides what to pick. Algo, of course! And local content writers.

Back to the spam content: Does the need to have better content mean less of it? Kind of, since there is a lot more video. But still a lot of content churning out of Demand!

A question about Facebook and how to program Demand content into it. Good lord, it’s hyper-poking!

“It’s not clear the best way of how you expand into all these properties,” said Rosenblatt, specifically referring to its acquisition today of both IndieClick and RSS Graffiti.

The next question is how successful Demand is in the display and brand business, and how IndieClick, a premium ad company aimed at niche blogs, will be integrated in.

More on social media advertising’s future. Aaaghh, this is as obvious as a store-bought-crust apple pie baked by Rachael Ray.

Rosenblatt notes that its flagship site, eHow, is but one means of distribution, but Demand content is going all over the place and winging by people when they least expect it.

“Social is more effective … to try to find stuff you didn’t know that you needed,” says Rosenblatt, who also would not dis search as a means of discovery.

That’s important, since Google is a major traffic driver and advertising partner, when it is not terrorizing Demand and others with its search algo version of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor Snape.

And presto, here comes a question about Demand’s Google ad relationship, which Rosenblatt touts nicely.

Of course he does. It’s tastier than spam, after all.

Vitrue has a somewhat expansive definition of spam, including swearing, derogatory comments and inappropriate promotional material.

The Atlanta-based company says it measured average monthly growth of 8.6 percent in spam on Facebook as a percentage of all fan posts and 0.4 percent growth in spam as a percentage of fan comments between Dec. 2009 and Oct. 2010.

Facebook itself has improved spam tools for page administrators in recent months, helping them more easily ban users, report spam and build blocked word lists.

Facebook spokesperson Fred Wolens strongly disputed the Vitrue claims, saying that Facebook’s requirement for real names makes it far less spammy than email or traditional comment systems. “A fraction of a fraction of a percent of users are affected on any given day by spam,” Wolens said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Jim Bankoff, the fomer AOL exec responsible for buying Engadget for the Internet portal, has grabbed eight staffers who had recently left the huge tech site amid tensions, in order to start a new gadget property.

The site–which is still unnamed and will be run by outgoing Engadget Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky–will debut sometime in the fall. It is the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C. sports news site SB Nation, which is helmed by Bankoff.

“The technology we built is applicable beyond sports,” said Bankoff, in an interview with BoomTown tonight. “It was an opportunity to apply our model…into another content category where there was an overlap in demographics.”

That would be fanboys and, well, boys-who-will-be-boys.

UPDATE: In related news, sources said that AOL has zeroed in on Tim Stevens, Engadget’s automotive editor to replace the outgoing Topolsky. The New York-based company had already named Darren Murph as its new managing editor.

Now Stevens will be competing with Topolsky, as well as managing editor Nilay Patel, who will also lead the Engadget tech-exodus (techxodus?). The others include former Engadget staffers Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Ross Miller, Chris Ziegler, Justin Glow and Dan Chilton.

Stern and Ziegler are still on Engadget’s editors site as current employees.

All of the above had left Engadget in a series of departures of late, all due to increasing unhappiness with AOL’s management and content strategy.

Paul Miller and Ross Miller, who are not related, both stated publicly that they did not like the editorial direction AOL was going in, especially a controversial content strategy document titled “The AOL Way.”

In his blog post, Topolsky threw another smackadoo at AOL, noting “SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”

New AOL content head Arianna Huffington has shifted toward a more journalistic path, but the talent bleed began before AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

In a blog post, which is embedded below, Topolsky said the new SB Nation gadget site will be similar in pace and topic, but it will be broader than Engadget.

The move is an interesting one for SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

It had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

In related news, also restarting tomorrow will be a popular gadget podcast that Topolsky, Patel and Paul Miller had done for Engadget.

The New York Times’ David Carr mentioned the new site in the middle of a column earlier tonight.

Here is Topolsky’s blog post on the move, titled “This Is My Next Project”:

As you may have already heard (or read), there’s some activity going on in the world of Joshua Topolsky. Earlier this evening, David Carr published a piece in the New York Times about a new project that I’m embarking on…and I want to just say a few things about it.

Firstly: yes, this is happening. I’ve decided to join the team at SB Nation to build something brand new in the tech space. Now I know it might seem odd to some that I would be partnering with a sports publisher to build a technology news site, but that’s only half the story. This isn’t just about sports, or tech, or lone silos. What we will build together at SB Nation is a new media company–buoyed by the absolutely incredible work SB Nation has already done in publishing–and part of that new media company will be the as-yet-unnamed gadget and technology site that I’ll be working over the next few months to create. When we launch (hopefully in the fall), I will be editor-in-chief of a property that I hope will inform, entertain, and engage fans of technology in whole new ways.

I should say that I wouldn’t want to build something like this alone, and thankfully, I won’t have to. I’ll be joined by some very good friends at this new venture–people like Nilay Patel, for instance.

Of course, the natural question I’m sure a lot of people have is: why SB Nation? The easy answer is that the people at SB Nation share my vision of what publishing looks like in the year 2011. They think that the technology used to create and distribute news on the web (and mobile) is as important as the people who are responsible for the content itself. And that’s not just pillow talk–SB Nation is actively evolving its tools and processes to meet the growing and changing needs of its vast editorial teams and their audience communities. They’re building for the web as it is now. From the perspective of a journalist who also happens to be a huge nerd, that’s a match made in heaven. SBN isn’t just another media company pushing news out–it’s a testbed and lab for some of the newest and most interesting publishing tools I’ve ever seen. In short, I was blown away when I saw what kind of technology they’re using to get news on their front page and engage audiences, and even more blown away when I started talking to them about what could come next.

But beyond the technology (and possibly more important than the technology), there’s another factor here that’s driving my decision. It’s that SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on. This is a group of people that not only think independent media works, but are reaping the rewards of new publishing done right. As the fastest growing online sports publisher, they’re seen as a source for credible and honest journalism, which is why industry stalwarts like Rob Neyer have recently joined their ranks (ranks which include hundreds of talented sports experts). This isn’t tabloid page grabbing or content farming–it’s news and insight by and for a passionate and informed group of people. And that’s exactly where I want to be.

So, what happens next? We get to work.

In the coming months I’m going to be laser focused on one thing: building the best tech site in the world–and I would love to hear what you guys think the next phase in technology and gadget news should look like. Ping me with ideas, gripes, or even better–come and work here! SB Nation is looking for new developers as we speak, and as we ramp up to launch, we’ll be bringing on lots of talent to work both on the front page and behind the scenes.

I couldn’t be more excited and enthusiastic about what we can build right now, and I can’t wait to share what we’re going to make with the rest of the world. The months ahead are going to be filled with lots of early mornings and sleepless nights, intense debates, triumphs, and trials–and I can’t wait.

But people who click on those links activate malicious code that is embedded in their personal computers. According to Satnam Narang, a threat analyst with Internet security firm M86, the code not only turns the infected computer into a drone that can be used by hackers to send more spam in the future, but also tricks people into paying $49 for fake anti-virus software.

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Botnets like Rustock use malicious code to string together hundreds of thousands of personal computers that are then used to send spam email without knowledge of their owners. In the case of Rustock, infected computers were managed by a fleet of 26 separate “command and control” servers that sent them instructions.

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I’ve never logged onto Facebook before but I hear it’s nice. In terms of e-mail, Facebook has it built in.

Former “spam king” Robert Soloway, who has spent the last three years and eight months away from his computer while serving a federal prison sentence. Soloway, who was released last week, sent out 10 trillion emails during a 10-year spam career. Probation officers will monitor his computer use for the next three years.