At a UN-sponsored event today in Egypt, UN officials demanded the removal of a poster that alluded to the issue of Internet restrictions in China.

The poster was an advertisement for Access Controlled, an MIT publication about the so-called Great Firewall of China, one of the first national Internet filtering systems and a policy that has come under harsh international criticism. The poster was being displays at the fourth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The purpose of the forum is to support UN mandates regarding the sustainability, robustness, security, stability, and development of the Internet.

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Its mission makes the poster's removal all the more puzzling. The poster, displayed at an Open Net Initiative reception, was apparently removed because it contained a sentence that violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads as follows:

The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.

The goal of the Open Net Initiative is to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance. We remain unclear on the exact policies the poster violated; however, we must strongly question the act of its removal, which amounts to censorship of protest of censorship - a censorship sandwich, if you will, which few of us can find appetizing.

"It is ironic that while people are allowed to gather here to discuss freedom of expression online, censorship, and surveillanc/> [...]

Sun Nov 15, 2009 19:15 pm

A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good 'Influence Index' for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn't measure website traffic. It's similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs.

We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN's ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media - and in particular bloggers. That's a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it's still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

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://URLFAN is, as we write this, "currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds."

The list below is ://URLFAN's all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year's top 10 ranking (Nov '08).

#1. en.wikipedia.org (1)
#2. youtube.com (3)
#3. flickr.com (2)
#4. twitter.com (9)
#5. google.com (4)
#6. myspace.com (6)
#7. facebook.com (-)
#8. imdb.com (5)
#9. nytimes.com (7)
#10. apple.com (8)

There is one n/> [...]

Tue Nov 24, 2009 20:50 pm

Facebook is launching a new security measure that is clearly a response to the threats caused by the numerous rogue applications spreading virally across the social network in recent weeks. According to news from the Facebook Developers blog, all application developers must now verify their Facebook account by either confirming a mobile phone number or adding a credit card to their account.

The new procedure aims to cut down on the number of rogue applications created by hackers and spammers by forcing developers to share personally identifiable information with the social networking site. Unfortunately, say multiple security researchers, verification alone is not enough to stop these malicious apps.

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Rogue Apps on Facebook

Last week, we began to wonder if Facebook needed to implement its own anti-malware service after an especially busy weekend where thousands of user accounts were compromised by rogue applications promising tantalizing videos to anyone who was willing to "click here." Not surprisingly, many did just that, and ended up on an off-site webpage where malware was installed on their PCs.

Overnight on May 15th, security firm AVG reported its anti-malware service had blocked more than 30,000 rogue Facebook applications, a number so large, the company's chief researcher officer, Roger Thompson, called it "stunning."

But will the new verification measures actually make dangerous applicatio/> [...]

Thu Jun 03, 2010 07:45 am

For the last few years, Bing Cashback offered shoppers cashback rewards when they bought merchandise from some partners and advertisers on Microsoft's search engine. Most of the time, these cashback offers ranged between 2% and 10% of the price of the product. Now, however, Microsoft has decided to retire Bing's cashback feature. According to a post on the Bing blog, Microsoft "did not see the broad adoption that [it] had hoped for."

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The cashback feature will remain in place until the end of July. Users will be able to redeem their cashback earnings until July 2011.

Bing Shopping, the price comparison section of Bing that featured the cashback rewards, grew rapidly since its launch. With Bing Cashback, Microsoft was able to give users a reason to return to Bing regularly and give monetary rewards to its frequent users. Last year, when Microsoft ran a "Double Cashback" promotion, traffic to Bing Shopping [...]

Fri Jun 04, 2010 11:30 am