Facebook makes its desktop ads inescapable by blocking ad-blockers

Courtesy: Caitlin McGarry, Staff Writer, Macworld
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3105811/internet/facebook-makes-its-desktop-ads-inescapable-by-blocking-ad-blockers.html

How to manage your Facebook ad preferencesThe network is giving you more control over the ads you see, but now you can't avoid them.

Most website operators rail against about the widespread use of desktop ad-blocking software, but Facebook is actually doing something about it: blocking the blockers. The network said Tuesday that is deploying software on its desktop site that make those ad-blockers useless, so it can continue to serve you ads.

This move is guaranteed to enrage people who think companies have gone too far in their use of intrusive data-tracking methods like cookies, which follow you around the internet and use your activity to serve you targeted ads. But those companies, Facebook included, argue that their services and/or content are free, and so advertising is necessary to pay for all the labor that goes into providing that service/content.

Facebook’s ad-blocking blockers will make both ad content and non-ad content appear the same to ad-blocking software, according to the New York Times.

While many Facebook users will likely be unhappy about the change, the network is making its ad preferences easier to manage, Andrew Bosworth, the company’s vice president of ads, said in a Tuesday blog post:

“Some ad blocking companies accept money in exchange for showing ads that they previously blocked—a practice that is at best confusing to people and that reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web. Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected. Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show—as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past—we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls.”

How to manage your Facebook ad preferences
Facebook collects a ton of info about you, as you already know. It knows who your friends and family are, what you like, and where you go. All of that information is funneled into an advertising profile.

Yes, it’s kind of creepy. The good news is you have control over what that profile says. If you see an ad in your Facebook News Feed on your desktop or in the Facebook app, click or tap the drop-down arrow on the top left of the ad, and then choose “Manage your ad preferences.” There you’ll see a list of interests that Facebook has selected for you based on that info it has. If you remove all of those interests, you’ll no longer see such hyper-targeted ads, which is a good thing if you care about your privacy, or a negative if you want to see ads that are relevant to your interests.

Facebook will continue to add information to this profile as you tap on ads or like pages, but you can always edit it at any time.

Rent-a-botnet services making massive DDoS attacks more common than ever before

Nineteen attacks that exceeded 100Gbps were recorded during the first three months of 2016.

Courtesy : PCWorld.com
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3079990/security/massive-ddos-attacks-reach-record-levels-as-botnets-make-them-cheaper-to-launch.html

Nineteen attacks that exceeded 100Gbps were recorded during the first three months of 2016.

There were 19 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exceeded 100 Gbps during the first three months of the year, almost four times more than in the previous quarter.

Even more concerning is that these mega attacks, which few companies can withstand on their own, were launched using so-called booter or stresser botnets that are common and cheap to rent. This means that more criminals can now afford to launch such crippling attacks.

"In the past, very few attacks generated with booter/stresser tools exceeded the 100 Gbps mark," researchers from Akamai said in the company's State of the Internet security report for the first quarter of 2016 that was released Tuesday.

By comparison, only five DDoS attacks over 100 Gbps were recorded during the fourth quarter of 2015 and eight in the third quarter. Nineteen such attacks in a single quarter is a new high, with the previous record, 17, set in the third quarter of 2014.

But high bandwidth is not the only aspect of DDoS attacks that can cause problems for defenders. Even lower-bandwidth attacks can be dangerous if they have a high packet rate.

A large number of packets per second poses a threat to routers because they dedicate RAM to process every single packet, regardless of its size. If a router serves multiple clients in addition to the target and exhausts its resources, that can cause collateral damage.

According to Akamai, in the first quarter there were six DDoS attacks that exceeded 30 million packets per second (Mpps), and two attacks that peaked at over 50 Mpps. 

DDoS reflection and amplification techniques continue to be used extensively. These involve abusing misconfigured servers on the Internet that respond to spoofed requests over various UDP-based protocols.

Around one-in-four of all DDoS attacks seen during the first three months of 2016 contained UDP (User Datagram Protocol) fragments. This fragmentation can indicate the use of DDoS amplification techniques, which results in large payloads.

The four next most common DDoS attack vectors were all protocols that are abused for DDoS reflection: DNS (18 percent), NTP (12 percent), CHARGEN (11 percent) and SSDP (7 percent).

Another worrying trend is that an increasing number of attacks now use two or more vectors at the same time. Almost 60 percent of all DDoS attacks observed during the first quarter were multivector attacks: 42 percent used two vectors and 17 percent used three or more.

"The continued rise of multi-vector attacks suggests that attackers or their attack tools are growing more sophisticated," the Akamai researchers said in their report. "This causes problems for security practitioners, since each attack vector requires unique mitigation controls."

China, the U.S. and Turkey were the top three countries from where DDoS attack traffic originated, but this indicates where the largest number of compromised computers and misconfigured servers are located, not where the attackers are based.

The most-hit industry was gaming, accounting for 55 percent of all attacks. It was followed by software and technology (25 percent), media and entertainment (5 percent), financial services (4 percent) and Internet and telecommunications (4 percent).

Being hit by one isn't the only way DDoS attacks can affect businesses: They can also be blackmailed with the threat of one, an increasing trend over the past year.

In some cases attackers don't even have to deliver on their threats. Researchers from CloudFlare reported recently that an extortion group earned $100,000 without ever launching a single DDoS attack.

Google is going to start showing you more ads

Courtesy: CNN.com
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/25/technology/google-ads/

Google is growing its ads -- in size and in number.

Later this year, Google ising to start handing over more space to advertisers, and allow their ads to pop up in loads of new places: Google Maps ads could even start showing up while you're driving.

In an effort to boost its primary source of revenue (search) in the face of rapidly changing customer behavior (mobile), Google said it is making search ads bigger. Last year, Google (GOOGL, Tech30) added a third ad at the top of its mobile search results page. But Google's latest changes are far more substantial.

Google currently gives search advertisers 25 characters for a headline and 70 characters for a description. That's going up to 60 characters for a headline, split between two lines, and 80 description characters.

In a blog post, Sridhar Ramaswamy, head of Google's ads business, called the new strategy "the biggest changes to our text ads since AdWords launched fifteen years ago."

The results are promising -- for advertisers, anyway. The clickthrough rates on the new text-only ads are up 20% compared to the current ones, according to Google.

Search ads aren't the only advertisements getting a makeover.

Google will be simplifying the work flow for businesses to create display ads with images. The company says advertisers need to "simply provide headlines, a description, an image, and a URL," and Google will automatically design ads for the business.

Location-based ads will start showing up on Google too. If you search for "shoe store" or "car repair near me," ads for local businesses will populate the search results. Google is also redesigning local business pages, allowing customers to explore a store's inventor and get special offers.

And Google suggested that Maps customers may start seeing "promoted pins" for coffee shops, gas stations or restaurants that are along their driving route.

The new features, unveiled at Google's Performance Summit on Tuesday, will be rolling out later this year.

The changes come as Google is trying to stay ahead of customers' changing demands. Google isn't exactly struggling now In fact, mobile has been growing steadily.

But eMarketer expects that to change -- Google's ad revenue is forecast to grow 9% this year, less than the 15% growth from 2015. Mobile ads are growing fast, but advertisers still aren't willing to pay as much for mobile ads as desktop.

If Google can improve the effectiveness of its mobile ads, the company hopes it can force advertisers to pay more.

Online fraud is rising, thanks to those fancy chip cards

Courtesy: Quartz
Source: http://qz.com/680289/online-fraud-is-rising-thanks-to-those-fancy-chip-cards/

The shift to chip cards has been something of an ordeal for US consumers. They’re slower than magnetic stripe cards when checking out at the register, and generally cumbersome to use. And their greatest attribute—increased security for in-person transactions—is having an unwelcome knock-on effect: they’re spurring an increase in online fraud, which could accelerate in the coming years.

Juniper Research, a financial services research firm, said in a recent report that it expects global online fraud to skyrocket to $25 billion in 2020, thanks in part to the transition to chip cards. Online fraud only amounted to $2.9 billion in 2013, according to the Aite Group,

Some of this is simply a function of more money being spent online. Criminals will always follow the money, after all. But because chip cards are more secure than magnetic stripe cards, fraudsters and hackers focus more on online fraud after a country shifts to the standard. Other countries, including the Canada, and Australia, have experienced dramatic jumps in e-commerce fraud after moving to chip cards. So has the UK, which moved to chip cards in 2005.

ACI Worldwide, a payments firm, said in a January 2016 report that e-commerce fraud went up in 2015 versus the previous year. In 2015, one out of every 67 transactions was a fraud attempt, compared to one out of every 72 transactions in 2014, representing a 7.1% increase. The 2015 holiday season also saw an increase of 8% in online fraud attacks over the previous season, said ACI.

On the bright side, there are alternatives, like Apple Pay and Visa Checkout, that could solve the problem on desktops and mobile apps by turning your credit card number into a random code that’s harder to use if hacked. (Apple is also exploring adding Apple Pay to its Safari web browser.) But, in the meantime, online fraud may get a lot worse before it gets better.

Some of this is simply a function of more money being spent online. Criminals will always follow the money, after all. But because chip cards are more secure than magnetic stripe cards, fraudsters and hackers focus more on online fraud after a country shifts to the standard. Other countries, including the Canada, and Australia, have experienced dramatic jumps in e-commerce fraud after moving to chip cards. So has the UK, which moved to chip cards in 2005.

ACI Worldwide, a payments firm, said in a January 2016 report that e-commerce fraud went up in 2015 versus the previous year. In 2015, one out of every 67 transactions was a fraud attempt, compared to one out of every 72 transactions in 2014, representing a 7.1% increase. The 2015 holiday season also saw an increase of 8% in online fraud attacks over the previous season, said ACI.

On the bright side, there are alternatives, like Apple Pay and Visa Checkout, that could solve the problem on desktops and mobile apps by turning your credit card number into a random code that’s harder to use if hacked. (Apple is also exploring adding Apple Pay to its Safari web browser.) But, in the meantime, online fraud may get a lot worse before it gets better.

Cybercrime is booming and the Internet of Things will just make things worse

Courtes: QUARTZ
Source : http://qz.com/603996/cybercrime-is-booming-and-the-internet-of-things-will-just-make-things-worse/

Hackers are getting better and businesses are increasingly at risk, according to a new report from global security consultants PwC. Worryingly for corporate digital security chiefs, this problem is expected to get worse as the Internet of Things gains in popularity.

Here’s how bad corporate cybercrime is right now: The number of detected security incidents climbed 38% in 2015 compared to a year earlier, according to PwC, and has been growing at a steady double-digit clip over the last five years. The total number of incidents captured in the survey now stands at 59 million, although the true figure is likely to be much higher. “The numbers have become numbing … prevention and detection methods have proved largely ineffective,” says the PwC report.

These digital break-ins cost the global economy somewhere between $375 to $575 billion a year, according to a 2014 study (PDF) by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Breaches originating from cloud-connected devices devices jumped by 152% in 2015 compared to a year earlier, PwC says. That’s hacking of things like wearables, “smart” lighting systems and other embedded sensors in the corporate environment. And over the next five years, the world of such devices, or “Internet of Things” (IoT) is expected to grow from 13 billion devices to 30 billion, according to research firm IDC. That means there will be a lot more devices to hack.

The highly vulnerable nature of current IoT devices is the subject of a forthcoming report by Spanish carrier Telefónica. John Moor, an author of the report and director of the IoT Security Foundation, tells Quartz that insufficient regulatory oversight and safety standards from manufacturers are some of the reasons why IoT will be hacker-prone. Moor says websites like Shodan, a search engine for unsecured webcams connected to the internet, are just the start of IoT’s security problems. “Everybody’s falling prey to it. It’s not just kids in rooms. The scale is large, the scope is everywhere,” he says.

Companies are responding by throwing more money at the problem. Security budgets have risen gradually, averaging around 3.5% since 2010, according to PwC. But companies spent much more last year, with average budgets rising by 24%, perhaps in response to a spate of high-profile hacks that included Sony Pictures and British telco TalkTalk. In a sign that companies are taking security more seriously, about half of all companies surveyed by PwC now have board-level discussions about the safety of their digital systems.

For vendors selling alarms, locks and remedies to increasingly nervous enterprises, business couldn’t be better. That’s what Andrey Nikishin, special project director for future technologies at security firm Kaspersky Lab, believes. Nikishin is another author of the Telefónica report, and he keeps IoT devices out of his home. “Where others see opportunity, I see threat,” he says.
According to Nikishin, the security industry began to stagnate five years ago, as anti-virus software was commoditized. But business is booming now, and he expects security to be high on corporate agendas in the coming years. “In five years, security will be seen as an investment, not a cost. Chief technology officers are now important members of the board. In five years, chief security officers will be the same,” he says.

Amazon will open its first Canadian data centre in Montreal

Courtesy: CBC
Source : http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/amazon-aws-montral-data-center-1.3405616

More cloud computing companies setting up in Quebec for cheap electricity, cold climate

Web giant Amazon announced it will open a data centre for its AWS cloud services in Montreal – the first such data centre outside the U.S. in North America.

AWS, which stands for Amazon Web Services, offers a suite of computer services for businesses delivered over the Internet, like data storage and analytics.

In a corporate blog post, the company said the data centre will be carbon-neutral.

The Quebec government and local entrepreneurs have for years promoted the province as an attractive location for data centres. They cite cheap and plentiful hydroelectric power and the cold climate as ideal for cooling heat-generating server farms.

The Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal hailed the news as proof that Montreal's IT sector is recognized worldwide.

"The arrival of such a company in Montreal will have very positive impacts on innovation and generate creative projects," Michel Leblanc, the president of the Board, said in a statement

In June 2015, Microsoft announced it would open two data centres in Canada this year, in Toronto and Quebec City, to take advantage of the growing cloud computing market.

Tech consultancy IDC predicted Canadian firms would spend $2.5 billion more on cloud computing in 2015 and 2016.

The product that made Google has peaked for good

Courtesy : QUARTZ
Source: http://qz.com/573361/the-product-that-made-google-has-peaked-for-good/

Desktop web search, the product that made Google a household name and created one of the greatest advertising businesses of all time, is now likely in permanent decline.

Google doesn’t regularly disclose the number of search queries that its users conduct. (It has been “more than 100 billion” for a while.) But in the US, desktop web search has been in decline since peaking in 2013, according to comScore.

Desktop search queries in the US have declined on a year-over-year basis for 20 of the past 21 months, through October, according to comScore.

Overall, search—and Google—are still growing, now fueled by mobile search and video advertising. Google said in October that more than half of all worldwide search queries are conducted via mobile. (In May, it had disclosed that mobile searches outnumbered desktop queries in 10 countries, including the US.)

And while a nice chunk of Google’s revenue growth is coming from YouTube, its overall “Google Websites” business—mostly search ads, but also YouTube, Google Maps, etc.—grew sales 14%, 13%, and 16% year-over-year during the first three quarters of 2015. The mobile era hasn’t resulted in any sort of collapse of Google’s ad business.

Black Friday sales soared on portable (mobile) devices, but Black Friday also fading

Courtesy: CNN.com
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/28/pf/black-friday-early-sales-reports/index.html

Investing in better apps and mobile shopping sites paid off for retailers this year, IBM (IBM, Tech30) said Saturday, and digital sales were up 21.5% from last year.

Another report from Adobe (ADBE) said Americans spent more than $2.7 billion online Friday. That's a 14.3% increase from last year based on Adobe's tracking methods.

Both companies said shoppers filled their virtual shopping carts on their smartphones and tablets more than laptop and desktop computers.

"US consumers have turned into digital shopping ninjas," Adobe analyst Tamara Gaffney said.

Adobe (ADBE) also said that online spending on Thursday and Friday totaled a record $4.47 billion. IBM said smartphones were the device-of-choice for browsing deals and accounted for nearly 45% of total traffic. But on average, tablet shoppers spent more.

Tablet orders averaged $136, more than desktop, laptop or smartphone orders.

Black Friday is fading.

It's still a key sales day for retailers, but holiday shopping promotions began earlier than ever this year. And consumers responded by shopping earlier than ever.

The massive sales peaks that used to surround Black Friday have been replaced by calmer, sustained sales over the holiday shopping season.

"It's reflective of the economy. It's a steady pace, it's not as intense, but we're busy," said National Retail Federation chief economist Jack Kleinhenz.

He added that the industry is likely to reap the benefits of the wage and employment growth shown in the October jobs report in the coming weeks.

ShopperTrak said sales may have declined from 2014. It estimated in-store shoppers spent about $12.1 billion over the two-day period.

Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping.  Online browsing and orders had their strongest year yet, according to reports from IBM and Adobe that showed double-digit increases in online spending.

Adobe reported digital sales netted $8 billion over the four-day weekend, up 17% from last year.

A host of new apps and improved mobile sites from major retailers drove traffic to tablets and smartphones. IBM reported the majority of online traffic, 57%, came from mobile devices for the first time ever this year.

IBM and Adobe also reported the hottest holiday products, which included Samsung TVs, the Apple Watch, Beats by Dre headphones and iPads. The NRF's survey revealed shoppers spent $299.60 on average online or in stores. About a quarter of that amount was on self-gifting. The NRF changed its surveying methodology and said the report is not comparable to last year's numbers.