Twitter & Yahoo Tightening Their Security to Prevent Eavesdropping of NSA

Twitter & Yahoo Tightening Their Security to Prevent Eavesdropping of NSA & Other Govt Agencies 

Last month a untold and sensational story came to light, when the whistle blowers Edward Snowden unveiled one of the top secret program of NSA called called “Muscular” Former NSA contractor Snowden himself disclosed that the National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world in order to collect and snoop the private data of millions of internet users. NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video. Both Yahoo & Google said that they had never gave access to nay Govt agency to their data centers. Yahoo spokeswoman said, “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond said “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” 

But the matter of fact is that NSA has indeed sniffed the personal & private communication of million internet users of tech giants like Yahoo and Google. To get rid of this kind of privacy breach, now the tech giants who hold the personal record and credential of mass, are tightening and enhancing their existing security system. According to Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo "We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it." Yahoo also says it will encrypt all information moving between its data centers by the end of the first quarter, and it will work on getting international partners to enable HTTPS encryption in Yahoo-branded Mail services.Yahoo says it will give users an option to encrypt all data flow to and from Yahoo. "Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL - Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014." added Marissa Mayer.

Not only Yahoo, but the social networking giant Twitter, who have registered users of almost 550 million with an active user of 250 million across the globe has also taken immediate steps after this breathtaking story of spying by NSA get the spot light. Twitter is implementing new security measures that should make it much more difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on communications between its servers and users. The entire security mechanism has been taken to tighten the data privacy of its users. According to a blog post of twitter the company has implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its Web and mobile platforms, which made eavesdropping almost impossible. "As part of our continuing effort to keep our users’ information as secure as possible, we’re happy to announce that we recently enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com, api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com. On top of the usual confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic." -said the blog post.

While talking about Muscular program of NSA, we would also like to remind you that couple weeks ago we came to know about 'Royal Concierge' another secret program of GCHQ & NSA to spy foreign diplomats through hotel bookings uncovered by Edward Snowden.

-Source (CIO & PC World) 

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Several Twitter Accounts of CBS News (60Minutes, 48Hours & CBSDenver) Hacked

Several Twitter Accounts of CBS News (60Minutes, 48Hours & CBSDenver) Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army [#twithackery]

Yet again CBS one of the major commercial broadcasting television network of United States faced cyber attack. First it was hacker collective Anonymous who targeted CBS and managed to hack the TV network of CBS in January last year. The attack was done under the banner of Operation Megaupload. And now CBS have fallen victim of what it called twithackery, where hacker managed to gain temporary access of popular twitter accounts and broadcast fake tweets. This Sunday such twithackery targeted and compromised several twitter account of CBS. Infamous hacker community going by the name of Syrian Electronic Army claimed to have hijacked the twitter accounts of CBS, the list of the hijacked accounts include "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" which is maintained by CBS news program. Later it has been reported that another twitter account @CBSDenver has also been hacked, during this ongoing cyber attack. CBS acknowledged the whole phenomena and later a CBS spokeswoman confirmed that the accounts had been compromised. "PLEASE NOTE: Our Twitter account was compromised earlier today. We are working with Twitter to resolve." - said the CBS spokesman. Another message from CBS said, "A message that was posted earlier to this account was not written or sent by @60Minutes or its staff."

Here is the list of those fake tweets came from the hijacked accounts of CBS:- 

From @60Minutes account we got the following message -

• "The US government is hiding the real culprit of the Boston bombing"
• "The US government is sponsoring a coup in Venezuela and a terrorist war in Syria"
• "Your duty is to protect your nation from the parasites that have taken your government"
• "Obama wants to destroy the Syrian and American people. We must stop this beast" 

Other messages claimed: "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here via @SyrianCyberArmy" and suggested the action was in response to the suspension of the @Official_SEA account. Tweets sent out on the @48Hours account reportedly included: "General Dempsey calls for #Obama's arrest under new anti-terror laws #48hours" As soon as the issue get spotted, CBS regain those hijacked accounts and immediately deleted those rouge messages. Later the two accounts @60Minutes and @48Hours has been suspended. 

While talking about twitter hacking, widely known as #twithackery; we would like to remind you the following names, WWE champion John Cena, Star Rita Ora, Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor,American pop singer Kesha, NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post; these are the famous names who have fallen victim to twithackery before CBS. 

-Source (BBC & Reuters)

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Twitter Account of Hacktivist Group Anonymous Hacked By 'Rustle League'

Twitter Account of Hacktivist Group Anonymous Hacked By 'Rustle League'

The scenario of hackers targeting another hacker has became a very common matter, in last two years we have seen many instances of the above matter where a hacker hit another hacker's site, community, blog, forums and so on. Today the story which I will about to discuss is the same matter where infamous hacker community named 'Anonymous' fallen victim. A newly formed hacker group calling them selves "Rustle League" targeted one of the officially recognized twitter account (@Anon_Central) belongs to hacktivist group which have more than 160,000 followers. According to security experts  "the reason Anonymous fell victim is probably human weakness." Or in other word many of twitter accounts get hacked due to choosing week passwords. "Chances are that they followed poor password practices, like using the same password in multiple places or choosing a password that was easy to crack. Everyone should learn better password security from incidents like this - if it can happen to an account run by Anonymous supporters, it could happen to you" said another expert of security firm Sophos. The hack on Anonymous twitter account placed Thursday morning and three hours later, those running the feed tweeted that they had gained back control of their account. 

While talking about attack on Twitter, we would like to remind you that, in this month a sophisticated cyber attack compromised the security system of the social networking giant twitter, where more than 250,000 twitter users have fallen victim. Though the hack of Anonymous twitter account does not resembles to the said matter, but the hack can be considered in the list of twitter hacking, widely known as #twithackery; where hackers gain temporary access of celebrity and famous twitter accounts. If you did the history we will find the following names, WWE champion John Cena, Star Rita Ora, Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor,American pop singer Kesha, NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post; these are the famous names who have fallen victim to twithackery. 

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Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

The social networking giant and the world famous micro blogging site Twitter again fallen victim of cyber attack. Last year we have seen that the tight security system if twitter have been compromised many times. Yet again in this year the San Francisco based social media giant who have more than 500 million registered users failed to protect them selves from hackers. On last Friday Twitter acknowledged that it had become the latest victim in a number of cyber-attacks against media companies, saying hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. The micro blogging giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected. According to reports usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords for 250,000 users might have been accessed in what it described as a “sophisticated attack” 

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” said Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked” Bob added. 

Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, would not say how hackers infiltrated Twitter’s systems, but Twitter’s blog post said hackers had broken in through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software. Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, though Oracle patched the security hole, but Homeland Security said the fix was not sufficient. The DHS issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. Prosser said Twitter was working with government and federal law enforcement to track down the source of the attacks. For now, he said the company had reset passwords for, and notified, every compromised user. The company encouraged users to practice good password hygiene, which typically means coming up with different passwords for different sites, and using long passwords that cannot be found in the dictionary.

Twitter said it “hashed” passwords — which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and “salted” those, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auction-like black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.

While talking about Twitter and cyber issues, I would like to remind you that in last year twitter faced several cyber attacks where more than 55,000 twitter account details was leaked, after this issue in the middle of last year the social networking giant faced massive denial of service which interrupted its services. Later a huge number of Twitter users across the globe received  emails warning that their account have been compromised and their passwords had been reset, and it was another security breach which affected twitter. Such big organization are not at all careless about security, so as twitter and it has been proved when they hired renowned white hat hacker Charlie Miller to boost up their security, but after this current massacre, it seems that twitter need to think more and emphasize a lot to make sure that their system is good enough to prevent cyber attacks. For all the hot cyber updates and reviews stay tuned with VOGH.

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Security Breach: Twitter Unintentionally Resets More Passwords Than Accounts Hacked

Security Breach: Twitter Unintentionally Resets More Passwords Than Accounts Hacked

Yet again the famous micro blogging site Twitter faced security challenge. Tuesday a huge number of Twitter users across the globe received  emails warning that their account may have been compromised and their passwords had been reset as a precautionary measure to prevent unauthorized access. In the e-mail, the microblogging company noted: "Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a Web site or service not associated with Twitter. We've reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account."

It remains unclear how many have been affected by the password reset e-mail or what's caused the mass e-mailing of its users. A post by TweetSmarter on Wednesday noted that in some cases when "large numbers of Twitter accounts have been hijacked," the company sends out these e-mails en masse, even sending messages to accounts that may not have been affected by any hack or hijack to err on the side of caution. The emails are apparently legitimate, though they were sent to more than victims of compromised accounts. The mass email coincided with incidents involving several high-profile accounts, including at least one account belonging to the BBC. Other media organisations, such as the TechCrunch blog, reported being warned. 

"We’re committed to keeping Twitter a safe and open community," reads a notice the company issued earlier Thursday. "As part of that commitment, in instances when we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users. "In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused."

Twitter officials have not disclosed how many uncompromised accounts had passwords reset, nor any more on the attack that led to those actions. The social media site currently has 140 million active users. Some victims reported having select tweets deleted, while others started sending out spam.

-Source (CNET)

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American Actress & Model Lindsay Lohan's Twitter Account Hacked

American Actress & Model Lindsay Lohan's Twitter Account Hacked

Now a days hacking of celebrities, singer, Media, high profile personalities' twitter has became a natural phenomena. Here again another twitter hacking, also known as #twithackery occurs. After John Cena, Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor,American pop singer Kesha; now it was time for popular  American actress, fashion designer, model and recording artist Lindsay Morgan Lohan. A fake tweet was posted to the 26-year-old star's feed on the social-media site, leaving all of Lohan's 4.5 million followers a bit confused. According to sources Lindsay Lohan’s Twitter account was hacked on Tuesday with the tweet, 

“How does Hitler tie his shoes?” including a link to the answer on @oatmeal's blog. 

As soon as this tweet was spotted on the wild, immediate step has been taken from the side of Lindsay Lohan, and as expected that fake tweet has been deleted. So far the actress hasn’t expressed much concern for this slight security breach. 

But after regaining access on the twitter page Lindsay Lohan confirmed that her page indeed hacked while tweeting "my twitter was hacked, please ignore the last tweet."  as shown on the above picture. While talking  Lindsay Lohan twitter hacking, we also want to include the name of those celebrities  who have fallen victim to these nonstop #twithackery : NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik’s twitter, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post & many more. 

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Security Flaws Allowing Hackers to Brute Force Twitter Passwords

Security Flaws Allowing Hackers to Brute Force Twitter Passwords 

A security flaw has been discovered in popular micro blogging site 'Twitter' which is allowing an malicious attack to brute force user's passwords.  On Saturday, multimedia producer and Twitter user Daniel Dennis Jones (@blanket) received a notification that his Twitter password had been reset. This alone would have been cause for concern; at the very least, it would mean that someone had tried and failed to access his account. He quickly found out that the problem was much worse than he expected. He was eventually able to log back into the account, but found that his username had been changed to @FuckMyAssHoleLO , and that @blanket was now operated by someone else. His account, in other words, had clearly been hacked. After seeing the above scenario it is very clear that - Twitter's password reset process allows hackers to attempt a more wide-ranging brute force approach to breaking into accounts than other services with more restrictive systems. Both Apple and Amazon quickly closed the loopholes that led to Honan's hack, but Twitter accounts (the ultimate prize Honan's hackers were after) remain surprisingly vulnerable to unsophisticated hacking efforts. That vulnerability was on display this past weekend as a desirable group of "OG" Twitter handles the short, memorable, one-word names that got snapped up when the service launched were brute-force hacked by a group of kids looking to make a little cash and impress their friends.

Daniel Jones is not the only victim of this recently discovered vulnerability, many other people around the globe also fallen victim of this security hole. After a day of research, Jones "got to the bottom of a little ring of kids who crack passwords to gain access to handles" - he found a number of other short, memorable handles like @hah, @captain, and @craves had also been hacked. Judging from the conversations he saw over Twitter, these hackers were not sophisticated social engineers, but just a group of teenagers trying to sell the names they had collected. Eventually, Jones had a long Skype conversation with a 14-year-old hacker who goes by Mason he wasn't the one who stole @blanket from Jones, but he was part of the young crew grabbing and selling these desirable names.

Of course, Twitter's security regimen is probably not all that different from that of many other sites. According to Jeremiah Grossman, CTO and co-founder of Whitehat Security, the attack that victimized Jones was "very, very common....Perhaps Twitter could have a bit stronger and more comprehensive approach to dealing with brute force attacks, but they can really only take it so far before annoying their users." 

We personally think that, after this case twitter should implement two step authentication, like Google to prevent its user getting compromised. 

-Source (Buzz Feed & CNET)

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WWE Champion & Actor John Cena's Twitter Account Hacked

WWE Champion & Actor John Cena's Twitter Account Hacked

Now a days hacking of celebrities, singer, Media, high profile personalities' twitter has became a very natural phenomena. Here again another twitter hacking, also known as #twithackery occurs. This time the victim is World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) champion and renowned actor John Cena. This week more than 2.8 million fans of American professional wrestler John Cena was shocked after seeing irrelevant tweets coming from John Cena's official twitter account. Immediately after it get noticed, the twitter page was restored and those false tweets was deleted. Later a tweet came from John Cena's official twitter page while saying "Sorry guys, guess some attachments got sent out thru my account. Im been a victim of #twithackery" 

Similar things happened earlier when British pop Star Rita Ora, Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor,American pop singer Kesha, NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post Twitter Account became the victim of such twitter hacking. 

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Twitter Hires Renowned Apple Hacker Charlie Miller For Twitter Security Team

Twitter Hires Renowned Apple Hacker Charlie Miller For Twitter Security Team

It is almost impossible task for social networks to keep everything safe against hacks and other vulnerabilities. Hackers will constantly find their way around anything that you put in place. So they often deals with hackers & turn themselves to beef up the security level. Social networking giant Twitter exactly did the same thing. The micro-blogging network has hired the famous/infamous Apple hacker, Charlie Miller, to be a part of its security team. Charlie Miller, a popular figure among hackers, broke the news via his Twitter account, saying, “Monday I start on the security team at Twitter. Looking forward to working with a great team there!” Twitter issued a short statement noting that Miller’s title will be that of Software Engineer, but declined to discuss any further details.

Charlie Miller has a background as a Global Exploitation Analyst in the National Security Agency, and has hacked devices running on iOS, OSX, and Android. He is considered to be a white-hat hacker, which means that he hacks to expose vulnerabilities in a system in order to have those weaknesses fixed. Five year ago, Miller was said to be the first to hack the iPhone using the device’s browser, exposing the handset’s vulnerability to security attacks. Several months after this, he was likewise able to hack a MacBook Air in just two minutes. This feat allowed Miller to win the Pwn2Own hacking competition. Miller also showed a way to hijack iPhones through SMS in 2009. In 2011, he used the MacBook power adapter to implant malware on the laptop. In the same year, his license as an Apple developer got revoked because Apple found that he breached the development agreement. 

In more recent times, Miller had been working on Android devices. In June, he was able to overcome Bouncer, Google’s security program. He has furthermore experience in using Near Field Communications to control Samsung and Nokia handsets with a simple wave of another phone that is within the vicinity. 

While talking about Charlie Miller, we must have to take another name and that is Nicholas Allegra, the world-famous hacker known as "Comex", creater of JailbreakMe.com; who later has been hired by Apple itself . In case of Twitter we must have to say, apart from Miller, Twitter also hired Moxie Marlinspike, a hacker who specializes in SSL and VPN encryption.

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Fbpwn Version 2.0 Released (Java Based Facebook Social Engineering Framework) Twitter pwn added

Fbpwn Version 2.0 Released (A cross-platform Java based Facebook social engineering framework) Twitter pwn added

Earlier we have discussed about Fbpwn. Now the time has come to update the version as the author - Hussein El Motayam has going to release version 2.0 of Fbpwn -A cross-platform Java based Facebook social engineering framework developed by Team Motayam. The most notable thing of this version is that the author has added 'Twitter pwn' that means you can now also extract Twitter information using Fbpwn Version 2.0. 

Bug Fix in Beta - 2.0

• Fixed all Login issues
• Added a new module: Dictionary builder
• Added a new module: Close friends finder
• Added an option to group dumped information by victim's ID
• Use FBPwn through proxy

Fbpwn 2.0 is Capable of:

• Dump friend list
• Add all victim friends
• Dump all users album pictures
• Dump profile information
• Dump photos
• Check friends request
• Dump victim wall
• Clone the profiles

FBPwn modules are:

AddVictimFriends: Request to add some or all friends of bob to increase the chance of bob accepting any future requests, after he finds that you have common friends.

ProfileCloner: A list of all bob's friends is displayed, you choose one of them (we'll call him andy). FBPwn will change mallory's display picture, and basic info to match andy's. This will generate more chance that bob accepts requests from mallory as he thinks he is accepting from andy. Eventually bob will realize this is not andy's account, but probably it would be too late as all his info are already saved for offline checking by mallory.

CheckFriendRequest: Check if mallory is already friend of bob, then just end execution. If not, the module tries to add bob as as a friend and poll waiting for him to accept. The module will not stop executing until the friend request is accepted.

DumpFriends: Accessable friends of bob is saved for offline viewing. The output of the module depends on other modues, if mallory is not a friend of bob yet, the data might not be accessable and nothing will be dumped.

DumpImages: Accessable images (tagged and albums) are saved for offline viewing including comments under each image and album names. Same limitations of dump friends applies.

DumpInfo: Accessable basic info are saved for offline viewing. Same limitations of dump friends applies.

DumpWall: Dumps wall posts for offline viewing. Same limitations of dump friends applies.

DictionaryBuilder: Builds a dictionary using words from comments under photos and wall posts.

CloseFriendsFinder: Finds the victim's close circle of friends by counting number of comments,likes and tags under photos and wall posts with the ability to change the weights of the ranking criteria.

To Download Fbpwn Version 2.0 Click Here (Disclaimer- Use this tool at your own risk)

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British pop Star Rita Ora's Twitter Account Hacked

British pop Star Rita Ora's Twitter Account Hacked

Yet again another celebrity have fallen victim of twitter hacking. After Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor, American pop singer Kesha; now it was time for British pop star Rita Ora. The hacker have broken into the pop star's account and posted a fake tweet saying "I wanna be with Harry Styles". 

Rita Ora has immediatley apologized to fans after a prankster hacked her Twitter account and posted that she has a crush on One Direction singer Harry Styles. The 21-year-old pop singer got to know about the news Saturday when she discovered a tweet on her page. She quickly deleted the message and told her 1.1 million followers she had contacted bosses at the social networking site about temporarily closing her account while resolving the problem. She writes, "My Twitter has been hacked! Trying to get it frozen for a bit!! Sorry guys!!"

Similar things happened earlier when NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post Twitter Account became the victim of such twitter hacking. 

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Twitter Joins The Linux Foundation as A Silver Member

Twitter Joins The Linux Foundation as A Silver Member

Social networking giant Twitter joined The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization while dedicated to accelerate the growth of Linux & open-source. In addition to Twitter, the Linux Foundation also announced that Inktank and Servergy have also become members. Twitter joined as a silver member, paying $15,000 for the privilege. The Linux Foundation announced Twitter’s membership today as it gears up for next week’s annual LinuxCon conference in San Diego. “Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, manager of open source at Twitter, in a statement. “By joining The Linux Foundation, we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

Twitter is a real-time information service on which people post ideas, comments and news in 140 characters or less. Twitter brings users closer to the topics, events and people they care most about around the world. Based in San Francisco, Twitter is available worldwide in 30 languages, with 140 million active users and 400 million Tweets per day. This volume of data puts high demands on real-time data processing and the pace of innovation at the company. Twitter is supported by tens of thousands of Linux machines, which allow the company to customize for its unique needs. Twitter is joining The Linux Foundation to support the mission of promoting, protecting and advancing Linux, the company said. Twitter’s Chris Aniszczyk will deliver a keynote at LinuxCon on Aug. 30 entitled “The OSS Behind a Tweet.” 

Google, Yahoo is another big Web company that is part of the foundation. One missing name is Facebook, but Zemlin hopes to get Mark Zuckerberg and team on board as well. "We would love to have them as a member," Zemlin said. "They do participate in our events around the Open Compute Project so that’s a good thing. Their business runs on Linux as well."

-Source (eWeek & ars technica)

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Twitter May Face Nationwide Block in India, If They Doesn't Remove 28 Harmful Pages

Twitter May Face Nationwide Block in India If They Doesn't Remove 28  Harmful Pages

The Government of India has threatened to block Twitter across the whole country, if the social networking giant doesn't block and remove 28 accounts containing objectionable content within 12 hours. The department of telecommunications (DoT) ordered blocking of the accounts on August 20. The blocked accounts include those maintained by a columnist and a journalist working for a TV channel. Those Twitter accounts are part of a list containing over 300 specific URLs that internet service providers (ISPs) in India have been told to block. The list is dominated by URLs belonging to Facebook and Youtube. Indian government allegedly found 102 URLs on Facebook and 85 URLs on YouTube where communally sensitive content was posted. According to a blogpost at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) told almost "all of the blocked items have content that are related to communal issues and rioting". The information ministry has issued Twitter with a deadline notice to remove "inflammatory and harmful" material that has allegedly triggered ethnic tensions against northeastern migrants living in southern cities. Thousands of migrant students and workers have fled cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore in fear of retaliation for violence against Muslims in the northeastern state of Assam. Internet posts, phone text messages and fake video clips allegedly spread rumours that Muslims were poised to attack them. "If Twitter fails to respond to our request, we will take appropriate action," senior home ministry official R K Singh was quoted as saying in the press. 

"We have asked the information technology ministry to serve them a notice." Information technology minister Kapil Sibal said he was frustrated at the lack of response from US social networking sites.

Twitter has conveyed that it was facing technical difficulties in blocking certain webpages where morphed and inflammatory images were uploaded but the government made it clear that the social networking site has to withdraw them or face punitive action. "We are not ruling out," an official said when asked whether Twitter was buying time. The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

The blocking of Twitter accounts was partial due to technical challenges. The accounts have already been blocked with the help of ISPs and not Twitter. Accessing them from India shows web users a message, saying "This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications". Also, the block works only if the accounts are accessed using HTTP and not HTTPS protocol.

-Source (TOI, PTI& IBT)

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Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours

Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours 

Yet again social networking giant Twitter faced massive cyber attacks which interrupts its normal service. Millions of people across the planet were having problems while accessing Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site. The San Francisco-based company acknowledged the problem, saying "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue". Visitors to the site were greeted with a half-formed message partially in code saying that "Twitter is currently down."

At the time of outage, VOGH team took the above screen shot which clearly indicating that twitter was indeed down. Sluggishness or outages were reported from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Some users were apparently able to post updates known as 'tweets' through their phones or third-party  applications. About an hour after issues were first spotted, service appeared to be restored in parts of the U.S. and Asia, but users elsewhere continued to report problems. So far Twitter did not confirmed the reason of this disturbance. But its predictable that the cause of this outage was either cyber attack or some kind of technical issues. We also like to remind you that, this is not the first time; last month a hacker collective group named UG Nazi performed massive denial of service attack which send Twitter offline for a certain peroid. 

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Not only Twitter, Google Talk the popular instant messaging service used by millions across the world, suffered a massive outage lasting over four hours. The outage, which started around 4PM India time, affected users across the world. Millions of Google Talk users around the globe reported that they could log into the service, saw their contacts with the respective status but failed to send messages to them. Some other users could not log in. Google immediately acknowledged that Google Talk service was having some issues at 4.10pm, saying, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk."

The service is not only used by people to keep in touch with friends but has also become a popular way to interact with co-workers in offices.

According to Google, the service was restored around 8.25pm. "Google Talk service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change," said the company. Nearly 40 minutes after this message, the company declared that Google Talk service was fully restored. "The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," it said. Earlier, Google responded fast to the problem. 

"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 5.20pm detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change," the company said on the status page of Google Talk app. After that the company provided hourly report on the outage.

However, like Twitter Google also did not explain what caused the outage and how many users were affected by it.

-Source (TOI)

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