I'm 24, so I'm obviously getting old. How do I know this? Well, because social networks and Web services that I've used for years seem to get more convoluted every day, and I simply have trouble keeping up. I guess I'm just old-fashioned.
Most complicated with social networks are all the scams to avoid: For example, on Youtube, some advertiser that wants my information keeps trying to "link" my account with Google+. Now, obviously this is a scam, because a) "Google+" is an awful name that no reputable company would roll out, and b) it's already taken all my personal information from my Google account. It keeps trying to get me to "switch" to a linked account, and I'm pretty sure it's also trying to get my credit card info. I am also reasonably sure friends have been scammed into this Google+ malware scheme by promises of content management, only lately rescinded.
"Facebook Social" is another one of these scammers' names. When I'm reading a site, I'm frequently asked to link up my Facebook account with the commenting system of the site (and hence share my personal information). I don't know how they got my Facebook information on a completely unrelated site, but, again, at 24, I'm behind the times, being an old codger. I just assume that they've used my webcam to find out the social passwords I have written down on little yellow Post-Its on my monitor. Whatever the case, the goal is to link every site with every other and to spam my and my friends' newsfeeds with ads for that site. Given how frequently the privacy settings on these sites' accounts change, it's no wonder such scams like Google+ and Facebook Social can emerge so readily. I find myself opting out of something and, next week, having to opt out of still more. And after awhile, there is no opt-out except to delete my account, and, even then, it's unlikely the data won't be preserved on a hacker's computer. I'm certain if I comment with "Facebook Social" on another site that my friends from high school will know, and judge me, and so I'm shamed into silence by the scam.
However, these pale in comparison to Twitter. The recent attack on Twitter is easily the most egregious malware I've seen in social networking. Apparently some hackers made it so that images display automatically on your timeline, and fixed the site so that you couldn't disable the images except on mobile devices. So by default (and on desktops in aeternem), Twitter will show whatever images someone uploads - except cropped of the top and bottom thirds. I don't know why a hacker did this, but I know that the net effect is to make it easier for one of these scammers to place malware banner ads in between Tweets. Poor Twitter, and right before their IPO. But I suppose if you can't stop hackers from altering your site, your stock price deserves to take a hit for that.
Given the recent news about the NSA, it's not hard to imagine how these sites are so easily hacked and manipulated - if every Tom, Dick, and Harry from the government can crack into a Skype call, it's not surprising that a cottage industry of spammers and crackers like Google+ and Facebook Social have invaded legitimate enterprises like Google, Youtube, and Facebook.
The Internet - for its great informational promise - is an incredibly distracting and complicated place, but distractions and complications are not the culminations of life, and, arguably, their introduction - without corresponding benefit to the end-user - is uniformly evil and malevolent.
But a few malware coders outside the companies are just that and it's comforting to know that the problem is simply one of enforcement. The companies themselves remain pristine.
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