Google to block data from Facebook

Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users' information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.

Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.

Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google's Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.

In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook "leave users in a data dead end." Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.

While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users' ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world's largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.

"The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that."

"If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google's properties."

Reciprocity 
Google said that while it makes it easy for other Web services to automatically import a user's contact data, Facebook was not reciprocating.

"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," Google said in an emailed statement.

"We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites," Google said.

Some technology blogs were reporting that Facebook still appeared to be allowing users to import their Google Gmail contacts into Facebook as of mid-day Friday.

A Google spokesman told Reuters that the company had begun enforcing the new rules "gradually."

Google also stressed that users will still be able to manually download their contacts to their computers in "an open, machine-readable format" which can then be imported into any Web service.

Google has coveted the wealth of information that Facebook's half-billion users generate and amass. Having access to that data could be especially valuable to Google, whose business model is based on allowing its users to find any information anywhere on the Web.

"Google is trying to use the leverage that it has to get as much access to the Facebook social graph (network of friends and interests) that it can, so it can provide the best search function that it can," said Wedbush Securities analyst Lou Kerner. "The more data Google has access to the better its search results are going to be."

Last month, Facebook announced a deal with Microsoft Corp allowing Facebook information -- such as Web pages that Facebook users have endorsed by clicking on "like" buttons -- to appear within Microsoft search results.

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in September the company would add social "layers" to many of its existing Web products in the coming months, following its less-than-stellar track record of developing stand-alone social networking products like Orkut and the recently shuttered Wave service.

Google also has acquired a slew of small social networking companies in recent months, including Slide and social payment company Jambool.

Gartner's Valdes said access to the explosion of new types of data generated by Web services, such as location-based services, would provide further flashpoints between Google and Facebook.

"It's one skirmish among many to come," said Valdes.

Google's shares closed Friday's regular session down 81 cents at $625.08.

Yahoo to sell HotJobs to Monster

Yahoo! Inc plans to sell its HotJobs employment Web site to Monster Worldwide Inc. for $225 million in cash as the company focuses on its traditional properties, including the home page.

As part of the sale, Monster will become the provider of career and job content on Yahoo’s home page in the US and Canada for three years, Monster said today in a statement. The company expects the transaction to close in the third quarter.

Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz has reduced expenses and shuttered underperforming businesses, such as the GeoCities Web-hosting site. In July, she struck a deal with Microsoft Corp. to collaborate in Web search and advertising, cutting engineering and capital costs.

“It’s housekeeping step one,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial LP in New York, who recommends buying Yahoo shares and doesn’t own them. “It’s the first part of the non-core divestitures that the company and management has to go through. The real notable part is it took a year to get this done.”

Yahoo paid about $436 million for HotJobs in 2002. The business, the No. 3 U.S. career and development site, had 11.1 million users in December, down 22 percent from a year earlier, according to ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia. Monster, ranked No. 2, had 16.5 million users in December, down 10 percent from a year ago. CareerBuilder ranked first.

Last month, Yahoo agreed to sell Zimbra, an e-mail and online collaboration unit, to VMware Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, paid $350 million for Zimbra in 2007.

‘Refocusing Yahoo’
“Carol has definitely done a good job in terms of refocusing Yahoo,” said Aaron Kessler, an analyst with Kaufman Brothers LP, who recommends buying the stock and doesn’t own it. “Whether longer-term they can really turn around the core growth is another issue.”

With the three-year agreement, Monster will make annual payments to Yahoo, based partly on traffic from users, Monster said.

In addition, the company will be able to pursue similar agreements in areas outside of Canada and the U.S., including Europe and Asia. New York-based Monster also will expand its network of newspapers with the addition of HotJobs, which has more than 600 newspaper partners.

“Essentially, the transaction positions Monster to add high-quality, relevant job seekers efficiently, while at the same time significantly expanding our customer base,” Sal Iannuzzi, CEO of Monster, said in a conference call.

Yahoo rose 29 cents to $15.46 today on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have fallen 7.9 percent in 2010. Monster, down 5.6 percent this year, climbed 38 cents to $16.42 on the New York Stock Exchange.

“HotJobs and Monster believe the transaction will benefit job seekers and recruiters alike by allowing them to have access to a larger and more diverse pool of job seekers and recruiters,” Yahoo said in an e-mailed statement.

How to beat a spammer

Spam messages are an incredible nuisance for most web users. But, now scientists claim to have developed an effectively "perfect" method for blocking the most common kind of spam, using spammers’ own trickery.

An international team, led by International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and California University, has come up with a system that deciphers the templates a “botnet” is using to create spam. These templates are then used to teach filters what to look for, the ‘New Scientist’ reported. According to the scientists, the system works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters.

As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies message content and how it should be varied.

The team reasoned that analysing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And, since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot.

To test their idea, the team installed a previously captured software bot onto a machine. After analysing 1,000 emails generated by this compromised machine, less than 10 minutes’ work for most bots, the scientists were able to reverse-engineer the template.

Knowledge of that template then enabled filters to block further spam from that bot with 100% accuracy. The new system did not produce a single false positive when tested against more than a million genuine messages and the biggest advantage is this false positive rate, team member Andreas Pitsillidis said.

“This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters,” added Michael O’Reirdan , chairman of the messaging anti-abuse working group, a coalition of technology companies.

'China tried to hack India's computers'

Chinese hackers have tried to penetrate computers in the offices of National Security Adviser MK Narayanan, a British paper quoted him as saying.

Narayanan said his office and other government departments were targeted on December 15, the same date that US defence, finance and technology companies, including Google, reported cyber attacks from China.

"This was not the first instance of an attempt to hack into our computers," Narayanan told The Times in an interview, adding the would-be hackers sent an e-mail with a PDF attachment containing a Trojan virus.

The virus, which allows hackers to download or delete files, was detected and officials were told not to log on until it was eliminated, Narayanan said.

"People seem to be fairly sure it was the Chinese. It is difficult to find the exact source but this is the main suspicion. It seems well founded," he told The Times, adding that India was cooperating with the US and Britain to bolster its cyber defences.

The Chinese government has denied any role in the attacks, with a foreign ministry spokeswoman saying: "Hacking in whatever form is prohibited by law in China."

Narayanan said that while he expected China to be an increasingly high security priority for India, the main threat still came from militants based in Pakistan.

He said Islamabad had done nothing to dismantle militant groups since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and criticised Britain for accepting its excuse that such groups were beyond its control.

"The British are still blinkered on this. We believe Pakistan's policy of using terror as a policy weapon remains," Narayanan said, adding India is anxious to prevent an attack from Pakistan during the Commonwealth Games in October.

"From Pakistan's point of view, it's important to disrupt the Games so you can claim that India is not a safe place," Narayanan said.

What makes your email hackable

What's the name of the school you attended? What is the first name of your favourite cousin? Well, email services often protect accounts with these kind of security questions in case holders forget their password. Now, a new study in the US has revealed just how easy the answers of such security questions are for other people to guess - in fact these facts make life simple for hackers, the 'New Scientist' reported.

Researchers at Microsoft have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment, involving 32 email users. Acquaintances of the email users - people with whom they wouldn't normally share their login details - were asked to try and guess the answers users assigned to protect their accounts. The volunteers managed to guess correctly a fifth of the time, raising questions over how secure the commonly used system is, the study found. However, a second study by software giant Microsoft has suggested a more secure alternative -- relying on trusted friends to vouch for you if an account becomes locked.

"Securing webmail is important because email accounts typically allow an attacker access to other accounts, for example, eBay and Amazon. If I can recover these passwords via your email account then I can spend the balance of your credit card on flat-screen TVs," Ross Anderson of Cambridge University was quoted as saying. Under the new system proposed by Stuart Schechter and Rob Reeder at Microsoft, users select several "trustees". If a user becomes locked out of their account their trustees receive a message asking them to download a "recovery code". The user must collect codes from multiple trustees to unlock their account.

A group of 19 Hotmail users trialed the system and 17 successfully regained access to their Hotmail account. That 90-per-cent success rate compares favourably to 80-per-cent success rate of the secret question system, say Reeder. In the trial, most users recovered their accounts within two days. However, when the researchers got users' acquaintances to ask the trustees to give up the codes, many of them did so. Reeder said this attack could be avoided by getting account holders to advise trustees of their role in advance. In the trial, trustees simply received an email containing the code out of the blue.

Rather than replacing the standard secret questions approach, the new method should be an optional choice for users, according to Anderson, who agrees that it is important to train trustees to be appropriately security conscious. But the idea has promise, said Reeder, pointing out that it is not a new idea to have people use third parties to back up their identity.