Mediaboss Marketing

The social networking website Orkut shuts down forever on Tuesday, September 30.

I was 18 years old when I first came to know about Orkut.

I am not sure how I came across social networking. Those were still the days of Yahoo Messenger chats, Yahoo Groups and scary chat rooms infested with fake profiles. I dont recall if Gtalk was being used as frequently.

But the first ever social network I used was hi5. Hi5 was very flashy in its design and had few privacy controls. It resembled a more colourful version of MySpace. After scourging for friends and adding some newbies there, I began to tire of the addiction. It was more glamour and less substance.

Then one fine day I had to bear a friends ridicule for using hi5. He said, Get on to Orkut, you idiot, and there I was, the next day. He gave me my first scrapbook entry and my first testimonial - a bad one.

The problem started with pronouncing the social networks name - Or-kat or Or-koot? Nobody seemed to be obsessed with this as much as I was, so I just went along.

A rush to get onboard

Within the next six months or so, it seemed that my whole school was on Or-kat, as so was my college. After feverishly adding people as friends, I would post in their scrapbook for fun. The chats were public and non-moderated. But the social media space back then was benign, the right wing saw it as a threat to Indian culture and parents were exasperated with their kids newest addiction. In other words, all was normal in the Orkut world.

Soon it devolved into the now-familiar world of an unhealthy new age addiction, becoming an avenue to express your support for a particular cause (though you might never step out of your house to do something real about it). I founded a group called I Hate Moral Policing after Mumbais cops decided they would shoo away/ harass/ attack couples on the citys streets. The group (or community, as Orkut called it) became a hub for feminists, pseudo-feminists, liberals, right-wingers, leftists, confused Indians, kids, hypocrites, and some others. For some crazy reason I refused to upload a lead picture or hand over the moderator duties to anyone else.

Simple interface in nascent era of social media

See the article here:
Ode to Orkut, the innocent pioneer of a social media revolution

Ex-NSA Chief: Global instability worse than Americans know
General Michael Hayden lays out how to handle current conflicts overseas.

By: Fox News

Originally posted here:

Ex-NSA Chief: Global instability worse than Americans know - Video

Episode 58 CO Tax Hike; NSA Code in Android clip4

By: HUONG 01

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Episode 58 CO Tax Hike; NSA Code in Android clip4 - Video

By John Johnson

Newser

A customer holds his new iPhone 6 at an Apple Store in Augusta, Ga.(AP Photo/The Augusta Chronicle, Michael Holahan)

Apple says its latest iPhone has an encryption system that will keep users' emails and photos safe from the prying eyes of the NSA or any law-enforcement agency, reports the New York Times.

The company says its algorithm is so complex that if it ever had to turn over data from an iPhone 6, it would take the NSA about five years to decode it.

Even if Apple is underestimating the NSA's abilities, the principle isn't sitting well with FBI chief James Comey. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law, he says.

Comey cited the example of a kidnapping in which parents come to him "with tears in their eyes" and say, "'What do you mean you can't?'" The Times report also quotes security officials who predict terrorists will quickly embrace such technology, along with a tech expert who says law-enforcement concerns are being exaggerated.

In an earlier piece on the encryption by Matthew Green at Slate, Green says Apple isn't picking a fight with the government. "Apple is not designing systems to prevent law enforcement from executing legitimate warrants," he writes.

"Its building systems that prevent everyone who might want your dataincluding hackers, malicious insiders, and even hostile foreign governmentsfrom accessing your phone." What's more, "Apple is setting a precedent that users, and not companies, should hold the keys to their own devices." Google has similar protection available for Android phones, though the encryption is not currently a default option.

That will change with new Androids out in October. (In other iPhone 6 news, Apple said last week it's received only nine complaints about phones bending.)

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NSA-proof iPhone 6?

WASHINGTON Documents released by the government show it views an executive order issued in 1981 as the basis of most of the National Security Agency's surveillance activities, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.

The NSA relied on Executive Order 12333 more than it did on two other laws that have been the focus of public debate since former agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked files exposing surveillance programs, according to the papers released by the ACLU.

The ACLU obtained the documents only after filing a lawsuit last year seeking information in connection with the order, which it said the NSA was using to collect vast amounts of data worldwide, inevitably including communications of U.S. citizens.

The order, signed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, was intended to give the government broad authority over surveillance of international targets.

One of the documents obtained was a 2007 NSA manual citing the executive order as the primary source of NSA's foreign intelligence-gathering authority.

A legal fact sheet on the memo produced in June 2013, two weeks after Snowden's disclosures, said the NSA relied on the executive order for the majority of its activities involving intelligence gathered through signals interception.

Alex Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a blog post published on Monday that the documents confirm that the order, although not the focus of the public debate, actually governs most of the NSA's spying.

Congress's reform efforts have not addressed the executive order, and the bulk of the government's disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA's extensive mandate under EO 12333, Abdo wrote.

Neither the NSA nor Justice Department, which is defending the lawsuit, responded to requests for comment Monday.

The ACLU's lawsuit, filed in December 2013 in New York, cited news reports indicating that, under the order, the NSA is collecting data on cell phone locations and email contact lists, as well as information from Google and Yahoo user accounts.

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NSA relies on 1981 executive order signed by Reagan