Linked List: May 13, 2013

Monday, 13 May 2013

Phishing With Forged Links 

Brad Choate is thinking the same thing I’m thinking:

Sophisticated phishing attacks can be hard to detect for most. As software developers, we need to build better detection, prevention, and countermeasures into apps and services that relay and present these messages so users will be less likely to fall victim to them.

How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion 

Phishing. (Wonder if it would have helped identify scammy URLs if the emails were in plain text, so that the phishers couldn’t put a URL in the message that was actually linked to an entirely different URL?)

‘We Already Have Money, It’s Called “Money”’ 

Garrett Murray on Amazon’s new “Amazon Coins” virtual currency thing. Sure hope Apple never goes this route; it’s slimy.

Lego Casino Royale 

“Yes. Considerably.”

Visualizing the Internet 

Adam Clark Estes, writing for Motherboard:

An anonymous researcher with a lot of time on his hands apparently shares the sentiment. In a newly published research paper, this unnamed data junkie explains how he used some stupid simple hacking techniques to build a 420,000-node botnet that helped him draw the most detailed map of the Internet known to man. Not only does it show where people are logging in, it also shows changes in traffic patterns over time with an impressive amount of precision. This is all possible, of course, because the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could ping each one, charting the resulting paths in order to make such a complex and detailed map. Along those lines, the project has as much to do with hacking as it does with mapping.

More on Facebook Home Looking Like a Flop 

Steve Kovach, reporting for Business Insider:

After we reported the news about the First’s price drop, one source familiar with Facebook employees’ thinking on Home said our headline, “HTC’s Facebook Phone Is Clearly a Flop,” was “sadly, very right.” Another source with knowledge of the HTC First sales wouldn’t provide numbers, but did hint they weren’t exactly flying off the shelves at AT&T stores.

Is this Facebook’s Rokr?

Update: Myriam Joire argues that Facebook already had its Rokr — the HTC Status back in 2011.