Around The Blogosphere 06 August 07

Blog of the week: Web Wahala (by Tinu), which features a timely post entitled And Now, Back to “Spammers. Are. Stupid!”

Tags: Caroline Giuliani, Facebook, bloggers union, XiaXue, politics

In respectful memory of the events of August 6th 1945, Thebookman shares a fascinating post about an artbook called Hiroshima.

In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards. Organizers hope a bloggers' labor group will not only showcase the growing professionalism of the Web-based writers, but also the importance of their roles in candidates' campaigns.

About 11 percent of American Internet users have created Web pages or blogs for others while eight percent have created their own online journals or Weblogs, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

With pages focused on everything from bird watching to celebrity footwear, more than 120,000 blogs are created every day and more than 58,000 new posts are made each hour, according to data from Technorati, which tracks more than 94 million blogs worldwide.

Few bloggers are paid for their posts, and even fewer are able to make a living doing the work. But many say they often devote as much energy and time to their online musings as they do to their salaried careers.

While bloggers work to organize their own labor movement, their growing numbers are already being courted by some unions.

"Bloggers are on our radar screen right now for approaching and recruiting into the union," said Gerry Colby, president of the National Writers Union, a local of the United Auto Workers. "We're trying to develop strategies to reach bloggers and encourage them to join."

New MySpace Warning:

Infiltrating password-protected social networking sites has been an increasingly fruitful area of study for hobbyists and professional computer security researchers.

One hacker, Rick Deacon, a 21-year-old network administrator from Beachwood, Ohio, says he's discovered a so-called "zero-day" flaw -- or a problem that hasn't been patched yet -- in MySpace that allows intruders to commandeer personal Web pages and possibly inject malicious code.

Deacon is scheduled to present his findings Sunday. So far, it only affects older versions of the Firefox Web browser and does not affect Internet Explorer, he said.

The attack uses a so-called "cross-site scripting" vulnerability, a common type of flaw found in Web applications that involves injecting code onto someone else's Web page.

The vulnerability could not be independently verified, but experts said these types of attacks are a particular problem for social networking sites, where it's difficult to police the content of the millions of posts each day.

Deacon said the flaw he discovered requires that a user click on a link that leads to a Web page where the computer's "cookie" information is stolen. Deacon said he discovered the problem several months ago along with several other researchers and alerted MySpace, but the company didn't fix the problem. [more]

“Whatever you place on the web will be found”: Karel Mc Intosh says that there’s an online connection between your personal and professional identities.

New GMail WARNING:

At a Defcon keynote Robert Graham showed by sniffing traffic and stealing cookies you can easily hack sombodies GMail account.

The demonstration highlights how easy unsecure network traffic can make for some very simple session hijacking. One way you can avoid having your Gmail account taken over by people on your network is to use the SSL version — be warned though, any website that relies heavily on cookies for authentication remains vulnerable.

To at least eliminate the packet sniffing angle I highly recommend people use some sort of VPN when connecting to an untrusted network. Also, utilize any websites secure server (https) to encrypt all your web traffic.

[Read More]

from the blog, Uneasy Silence, which offers the opportunity to listen to the post as well. I tried that service out for awhile, but it got busted after I posted an article that had Chinese words and characters. If I ever do get back into webaudio, I will have "supplemental" sound recordings to go along with the articles I upload.

Ah-hah... The daughter of Republican hopeful Rudy Giuliani has signaled she's backing Democrat Barack Obama for president.

According to her Facebook profile (click on the picture to see a larger version, courtesy of Slate), Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, belonged to Democrat Barack Obama's Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)." She left the group Monday morning after the online magazine Slate sent an inquiry.

Her profile can be viewed by Facebook users who have access to New York City's Trinity School or Harvard University networks. Caroline, who is Giuliani's daughter with his second wife, Donna Hanover, recently graduated from Trinity and will attend Harvard in the fall.

Slate posted a screen shot of her profile, which uses a slightly different last name. She lists herself as having liberal political views.

Giuliani, a leading Republican candidate, has asked for privacy to deal with strained relationships in his family. Son Andrew, 21, has said their relationship became distant after Giuliani's messy divorce from the children's mother and his marriage to third wife Judith Nathan.

Researching the Remix Culture (the Center for Social Media at American University launches a big project to research and document "Copyright and Fair Use in Participatory Media.")

Feedbuddy is a social network that was bound to happen: one built around RSS feeds.

XiaXue has posted Road Trip: Episode 8 - The Ride Home!