Facebook has come under fire from those who say the network is turning down the volume on their posts, but the bottom line is that the network can — and will — do whatever it wants with the algorithms controlling its news feed. Read more »
Just when you thought spam was under control, a new breed of spammers is taking up new methods to infiltrate our inboxes, search results and social media feeds. Data science could make them very effective. Read more »
The mystery of the spam afflicting Dropbox users remains unsolved as of late Wednesday. Starting Monday, users of the popular file-sync-and-store service started complaining about spam sent to email addresses associated only with their Dropbox accounts. Read more »
Amazon is finally banning some of the junkier content in the Kindle Store, including “content that is freely available on the web, unless you are the copyright owner of that content.” Read more at paidContent »
A new study has shown that highly popular Twitter accounts such as Barack Obama and Britney Spears may be inadvertently contributing to the swell of tweet spam — and that millions of users trying to increase their online influence may also play a major role. Read more »
Twitter hopes to make it safe to tweet about the iPad again. The company has filed a lawsuit against five companies that build tools for helping really annoying people spam Twitter users with shady offers and dangerous links. Read more »
Growth phases at Web startups are invariably accompanied by attacks, as we’ve seen with sites like Facebook, Twitter and many other web-based companies. Here we look at which are the most brutal attacks and how companies and developers can guard against them in the future. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A California court ruled yesterday that social media site Power.com breached the Can-Spam Act and state criminal law when it induced Faceboo… Read more at paidContent »
Companies such as Google, PayPal, Facebook and Microsoft have teamed up to create a standard to help boost email security. They are part of a working group to create the DMARC standard, which will help cut down on the number of phishing attacks. Read more »
UPDATED. Posterous encountered “server connectivity issues” that made the blogging site inaccessible to a number of users Wednesday. The apparent outage occurred after at least one Posterous user received a series of email posts from random Posterous groups, some of which were meant to be private. Read more »
A common New Year’s resolution is getting more organized, and email is often very much in need of organization. I’ve long been a fan of the “Inbox Zero” philosophy. It’s easier than you think to accomplish, and these simple tips will help you get there. Read more »
Updated. On Wednesday morning, the New York Times sent a number of emails urging customers to call a toll-free number to renew their subscriptions. They seem to have been sent by Epsilon Data Management, an email marketing firm which had a major data breach in March. Read more »
Social startup Allthis found itself under fire this week for a viral marketing approach many people found spammy and invasive. But heinous though it is, its behavior is just part of a trend among new services to appropriate our online identities to power themselves. Read more »
Last month, Facebook came under fire for enacting new spam controls that disabled developer apps without prior notification. Facebook has softened its spam control policy and is now giving developers tools with more insight into when their apps are setting off spam alarms. Read more »
Google announced this week plans to shut down its Translate API “due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse.” The news raises a question: When dealing with the costly threats of hackers and spam abuse, when should a web company cut its losses? Read more »
A chorus of complaints about spammy results in Google searches highlights a growing problem the search company is going to have to solve — and doing so will inevitably bring it into conflict with Demand Media, currently planning a high-profile IPO for later this year. Read more »
Email spam is, of course, a continuing problem, even if the total amount has fallen recently. So Google has responded by adding some new spam-fighting tools to Google Apps. Administrators can now enable DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This technology is intended to prevent “spoofing” of messages. Read more »
Most email providers have filtering systems that do a pretty good job of catching spam messages. But every so often, there will be a surge of spam messages that get past the filters to pollute our inboxes. Here’s a tip that may help reduce future messages. Read more »
If you need a throwaway email address — perhaps you’d like to sign up for an online service without providing your real email address because you’re concerned about spam — look no further than tempalias. It’s a simple service that generates a temporary email address. Read more »
No matter what you do, social media is probably impacting your industry — especially if you do most of your work online. Even though we can all agree on the importance of social media, figuring out how to use it is not so obvious. Read more »
