The last week of tech headlines reads like some sort of cybersecurity end-of-days scenario. The New York Times hacked. The Wall Street Journal hacked. The Washington Post hacked.

And finally on Friday, Twitter — one of the world’s largest Internet communication services — also hacked.

“Who’s next?” you may be thinking. But the question to ask isn’t “Who’s next?” The question is, “Who will admit it next?”

You only need to look back on Twitter’s blog post from Friday afternoon, which stops just short of directly naming other companies, although it all but confirms this problem isn’t just affecting Twitter alone.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” Director of Information Security Bob Lord wrote in the company blog post. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.

Of the many members of the security community I’ve spoken to over the last 24 hours, all have said the same thing: Companies large and small all over the world face cyberattacks all the time. Sometimes these attacks are potentially connected — as in the case of the Times, Journal (which, full disclosure, is owned by News Corp., which also owns All Things Digital) and Post. But many attacks occur in isolation or at random, from groups or collectives, different nations (especially from Iran, Syria or Russia) and even solo hackers.

The point is that “high value targets,” such as prominent Web companies, hold massive troves of interesting data, making them obvious and constant targets for outsider attack. It’s simply that we, the public, rarely hear about it.

But right now, during a week-long spree of hacking disclosures kicked off by the Times, we’re more apt to hear about other companies getting hacked than ever before.

“There’s a herd mentality when it comes to disclosure,” independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani told AllThingsD. “Having other companies disclose their breaches makes it easier for your company to as you’re less likely to get singled out in the press and public eye.”

In that vein, notice the timing of the hacking announcements last week. The Times kicked off the week of announcements on Tuesday evening. The Journal followed shortly thereafter. Then the Post. And finally Twitter.

So who will fess up next? Experts said now is the best time to come out with it, whether it’s connected to other hacks or entirely separate.

To be fair, there are often reasons that may keep hacked companies from coming out with a disclosure of their own. For one, the company may be working on an ongoing investigation with law enforcement to monitor hackers who may have infiltrated their systems in the past. Tipping the hackers off by “coming out” may jeopardize existing surveillance.

Or even scarier: Perhaps these companies aren’t aware they’ve been hacked in the first place.

“I truly believe we’re going to see quite a bit more of these annoucements as companies start to get smarter and look more closely at their systems,” Soltani said. “It’s not a matter of whether or not you’ve been compromised. It’s whether you have the expertise to tell.”

Even the New York Times wasn’t aware of hacks that had occurred on its network for months on end; the company’s security software, provided by Symantec, failed to identify all but one of 45 separate pieces of custom malicious software over a period of three months.

“Perhaps the press coverage might push them to take a deeper look inside their network,” said Soltani. Indeed, all three of the major papers that were hacked went to outside security firms for aid, and Twitter is currently working with the federal government to track down the hackers responsible for its own network breach (my guess is that Twitter is paired up with the Department of Homeland Security).

But here’s the truth: No system is 100 percent safe. No matter how secure a company tries to make its network, there’s still one giant, glaring point of access that hackers will always go after — you, the user.

All it takes is an errant clicked link to exploit massive vulnerabilities in Java, a phishing attempt in a lookalike email.

“Humans are the weakest link in any security strategy,” said Soltani.

Two quick snapshots, via Cristina Cordova, using stats from AppData. Here’s the usage data for the Washington Post’s Social Reader. Note the second steep drop, in the middle of this month:

And the Guardian’s, which has the same pattern and the same mid-May drop:

Note that Cordova runs biz dev for Pulse, the iOS/Android news reader app, so she’s presumably not unhappy about this trend.

But I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I’m delighted with it myself. I’ve always thought the “social reader” apps were bad ideas, executed poorly: I don’t need to automatically know what my friends are reading — I only want to know about the articles they want me to read, and they’re pretty good about telling me that. And I don’t want to have to use an app to read them — the Web works just fine.

The new digerati consensus is that the drops don’t indicate a sudden revulsion by Facebook users, but that they’re the result of Facebook engineers twisting the dials, and ensuring that Facebook users don’t see the apps in their feeds anymore.

There’s an important lesson there for any Facebook partner or would-be partner (hello, Socialcam!). But as a Facebook user, I don’t really care — I’m just glad I don’t have to see these things anymore.

The new apps behave similarly to the “read,” “listen” and “watch” Open Graph applications that have already rolled out in the past few months, which include the Washington Post, Spotify and Hulu. So every time your friends read an article or listen to a song, you might now learn about it on Facebook, and possibly even join them in reading or listening at the same time.

Outside developers have been furiously coding other custom actions since September; and recently, many have been waiting on Facebook, so they can make them available to users.

Facebook has invited press to an unveiling event on Wednesday evening in San Francisco — where it will launch the first batch of these apps, sources confirmed.

Facebook did not reply to requests for comment, though it did send us invitations to the event.

This may well be one of Facebook’s last big press conferences before it files to go public and enters a quiet period, during which financial regulations keep it from commenting on its products, business or criticism from competitors and analysts.

The timing of the Wednesday press event aligns with Facebook’s last public guidance on the subject. The company told developers in late December that since its Timeline profile design was being rolled out worldwide, Open Graph Actions would start being approved in January.

Currently, Facebook Timeline is available to users on an opt-in basis. At some point soon — perhaps as early as this week — Facebook will start requiring users to migrate to the new design.

That’s because Open Graph and Timeline go hand in hand; the idea is for each user’s activity across various Web sites and apps, both on and off of Facebook, to be aggregated as a visual living record of his or her life.

What kind of Actions will developers build on the Open Graph? Some examples include tracking a workout with a GPS device, completing a recipe from a cooking site, or buying an item on an e-commerce site. Those Actions could be expressed on Facebook with verbs like “run,” “cook” or “purchase.”

Along with the new verbs will surely come Facebook’s usual problems: Unanticipated incursions into user privacy, people who hate change, and profligate oversharing.

Sources said that in the lead-up to the launch, Facebook has been busy working on things like how to conjugate the verbs for the Open Graph Actions.

Facebook told developers their Actions must be “simple, genuine and non-abusive.”

To Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is known to have studied Latin, I say: Just remember, “Veni, vidi, vici!”

Perhaps I should have saved that joke for our live coverage, which you’ll be able to find here Wednesday at about 5 p.m. PT.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

However, it didn’t coordinate the Timeline release with the unleashing of the many “Open Graph” applications that developers have been busy building to fill in the story of users’ lives going forward.

Asked when all the Open Graph apps would go live, a Facebook spokesperson said “in the coming weeks.”

Developers reached by AllThingsD seemed to have heard different things from Facebook. Some seemed confident they’d get the nod next week, as soon as Monday. Others said they doubted their apps would be out before January, even though they’re fully ready to go.

Many companies have been working for months on Open Graph apps that have yet to see the light of day. Tens of partners were named in September, but only a handful were allowed to launch, like Spotify and the Washington Post. Many more companies have been working on their own apps in the past three months.

Here’s today’s full Facebook statement on Open Graph timing:

“As we’re rolling out Timeline to everyone on Facebook, developers can build with the Open Graph in beta now. Open Graph apps announced in September at f8 focused on news, music and video have already launched. In the coming weeks, we’ll launch the Open Graph so developers can build a greater variety of apps on Facebook, such as fitness, sports, food, and travel apps.”

And here’s a refresher on the context for how Timeline and Open Graph are tied together:

Users are encouraged to fill in the gaps in their new Timelines, for instance by scanning their baby pictures and other child pics. (By the way, there’s an outside app called ShoeBox from 1000memories to help scan pictures from an iPhone.)

A sampling of content from users’ lives already exists on Facebook — anything they and their friends have posted and tagged on the site. With Timeline, Facebook will display in chronological order every photo, friending and status message each user has posted since joining. The privacy settings will be kept intact, but all this content will be far easier to see than before.

But what about the future of users’ lives? Facebook wants to make Timeline much more full and interesting by including live records of virtually everything its users consume online or track offline. Through its new Open Graph features, outside developers can send automatic activity updates to Facebook.

This could be when a user reads, watches, listens or does anything else for which a developer builds an app.

So a fitness app could send a “run” update of the GPS route each time one of its users goes for a jog, or a kitchen app could send a “cook” update every time a recipe is noted as complete.

That stuff still comes from users approving the app and allowing Facebook to access the information. But once users approve the sharing the first time, it happens “frictionlessly” in the future until they turn it off.

Expect to see a lot more of those options coming soon.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Way back in September, Facebook told the world it was launching two major changes to its service: A revision of user profiles, called Timeline, that would make them more substantive and beautiful records of people’s lives; and “Open Graph” tools for developers to automatically share activity by logged-in Facebook users to their Timelines and friends.

Facebook didn’t give a firm date for the new launches, though it indicated they would be ready soon. “We’re going to roll [Timeline] out widely over the next few weeks as we polish all the edges,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers and press attendees in his keynote at f8 on Sept. 22.

But we’re already in December, and those tools have yet to arrive. Why the delay?

“We wanted to let developers build on the platform and to give users more time to get used to the idea of change coming,” a Facebook spokeswoman told AllThingsD, noting that Facebook has been criticized in the past for rolling out products in a hurry. Would she offer a launch date, or even an estimate? Nope.

Developers told AllThingsD that they are eager and ready to launch their Open Graph tools, but that Facebook keeps pushing its dates back. In recent developer communications, Facebook’s promises to launch “before the end of the year” have segued to January, the developers said.

Developers also said they’re worried that Facebook has told them it will likely run a staged rollout, where all users might not receive access at the same time, and where users would have seven days to review their Timeline before publishing it.

Those various states of deployment could be a chafe for app makers to support simultaneously, and could potentially confuse users.

At f8 in September, Zuckerberg had promised that Facebook would soon be filled with a cornucopia of verbs — like “watch,” “listen,” “read,” “cook,” “run,” “throw sheep,” etc. — building on the more static “people,” “places,” “things” and other nouns the site had supported in the past.

He said users could look forward to automatically sharing and collecting records of their culinary and athletic adventures through social cooking and social running apps, for example. Facebook also named a list of developers who had already agreed to create Open Graph applications, including Blockbuster, Flipboard and Mashable.

But only a chosen few — including Spotify, Rdio, the Guardian, the Washington Post and Netflix (though the social version of Netflix is not available in the U.S. yet) — got to launch in September; to my knowledge, no other partners or any other developers have since been allowed to release their “frictionless sharing” apps to the masses.

Meanwhile, more than a million Facebook users are already trying Timeline through a preview version for developers.

Months later, it seems rather odd that some users have an entirely different Facebook aesthetic. Personally, as a user with many connections in the tech industry who have activated their Timelines, when I happen on an older-style profile, with no glossy cover photo, the layout feels dated.

Here are some of the reasons Facebook, developers and conspiracy theorists gave for the delays:

• From the Facebook camp, we hear of efforts to rewrite Timeline to make it faster, to sync up mobile versions, and to fully ensure the product is ready. There’s also some chatter of internal conflict over the Timeline concept.
• Based on my own observations, early response to beta versions of the new features has been mixed. The new real-time Ticker, built to show Open Graph activity and every other action taken on Facebook as a sidebar on the site’s main page, was initially unpopular with many users. Anecdotally, I’ve seen very few Timeline beta users scan in their baby photos to tell the backstory of their lives. And new automated sharing features — like Spotify and especially the social news reader apps — can be annoying.
• There are also some external factors. A small company called Timelines, with trademarks on its brand, sued Facebook right after f8. A judge denied Timelines a temporary restraining order against Facebook, but said he would reconsider if Facebook opens Timeline to a larger audience. As of Oct. 8, 1.3 million people were using the Timeline beta, and tens of thousands were signing up per day, according to court documents. Also, Facebook recently agreed to settle with the FTC over privacy complaints. While the settlement specifically prohibits Facebook from retroactively changing any user privacy settings, it’s not as explicit about how Facebook must introduce privacy features for new products. Given that Facebook is likely to go public soon, people at the company are probably especially interested in surviving a major launch with as little privacy backlash as possible.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

I know my friends are sharing more interesting things about their own lives on Facebook, but these dang stories are almost always at the very top.

After uninstalling and hiding the app failed to stop this from happening, I asked Facebook and the Washington Post what was going on, and how I could make it stop.

Washington Post remains glued to the top of my news feed. Marking it as spam doesn’t seem help; no app settings. This is crazy.

November 11, 2011 8:58 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@bpm140

Eric Marcoullier

They said the box I’m seeing is an aggregated list of activity from news apps, with the new “frictionless” Open Graph that shows every single story my participating friends read.

Because Facebook has rolled out to only a few news apps, and the Washington Post Social Reader seems to be by far the most popular with my friends, Facebook’s algorithm keeps determining that it’s very relevant to me.

The Facebook newsfeed allows users to hide all updates from a single app, but at least for now there’s no way to hide all updates from the aggregated news list.

You can see this in the screenshots a Facebook spokeswoman sent me, embedded here. The news box above is missing the “hide all” option offered for Spotify, below. (Her news box happened to include the reading activity of Washington Post CEO Don Graham, who is on the Facebook board of directors.)

The Washington Post automatically shares every story read on its site by anyone who has installed its Social Reader App. (And that’s a lot of people — the app has 1.9 million monthly active users, according to Facebook, including about a quarter of my Facebook friends.) The publication aggressively promotes its app to those users’ friends, by asking them to install it when they click from Facebook on a link to a Washington Post story.

For his part, Washington Post Chief Digital Officer Vijay Ravindran said the integration with Facebook is a work in progress.

“We’re excited to be part of a small set of apps that are learning as Facebook is learning about the power of the Open Graph,” Ravindran said. “We’re encouraged by how things are going to date but we also know that we could do a better job having a more engaging app and there’s a lot of evolution to build upon what they’ve done.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the best way for a user to downvote the aggregated news story box is to right-click and select the “unmark as top news” option.

“This is something we’re testing, and we’re continuing to gather feedback based on people’s actions with these stories and others related to the Open Graph,” she said.

My experience is, of course, biased by my news-junkie habits and the preferences of my particular set of friends. According to AppData, the Washington Post Social reader has 210,000 daily users, while the Guardian’s Facebook app has 420,000. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said 400,000 people are opting in per day to share their news-reading activity on Facebook.

Anyway, there are lots of things to complain about in the world and on Facebook, but I thought I’d let you know that I tried to get to the bottom of this one.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

In a statement, the bank said it “sincerely apologizes to [Jason] Goldberg for this misunderstanding. This situation had nothing to do with the content of his web site and any comments by our staff to the contrary were incorrect; we are reviewing what happened.” But questions remain about the bank’s policies; Deal Journal reported last week that a business selling underwear online was denied a Citi account because of the bank’s concerns about content.

Mr. Goldberg, whose site fabulis recently received $625,000 in funding from investors led by The Washington Post Co. (WPO), said in an interview that he opened a business account with Citi and deposited that seed money into the account last month. Earlier this week, he said, he found himself unable to access the funds. He blogged about his experience, describing repeated conversations with Citibank staff in which he says they told him about a review process that found the content of his site was not in compliance with the bank’s policies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site