Want to remove embarrassing photos from FB? Try Facewash app

The "Facewash" app developed by researchers from Kent State University will search through a user's Facebook activity and content for items that the user may want to hide or delete.

Researchers have developed a new app that can help Facebook users clean up vulgar or embarrassing pages from their profile. The "Facewash" app developed by researchers from Kent State University will search through a user's Facebook activity and content for items that the user may want to hide or delete. That could include status updates, photo captions, and comments users left or received as well as pages and links that were liked, Los Angeles Timesreported. "We realised that there's a lot of content that perhaps someone might not want a future employer to see," researcher Daniel Gur. Gur created the Facewash over the weekend along his two friends and fellow computer science majors Camden Fullmer, and David Steinberg. The trio built the app in less than two days while at a hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania. To use Facewash, users first need to go to its website, Facewa.sh, click on get started and then log into their Facebook account.They will be prompted to click "Go to App" and then give they have to give the app permission to access their content. caption id="attachment_602316" align="alignleft" width="380"] A screengrab of the Facewash App.

Infidelity in the age of tech: Beware Mobile phones, Facebook!

In the age of modern technology, snooping on a partner's mobile phone is the most common way to catch if they are cheating, followed by going through their Facebook activities, according to a new UK poll.'Going through mobile phone' has been cited as the top reason why illicit affairs have been exposed, the poll found.Nearly 2,400 UK adults, all of whom had either been caught cheating while in a relationship or who had found a partner was being unfaithfulto them in the past, were quizzed bya mobile phone insurance website on the circumstances in which the infidelity was discovered.Almost half of those questioned - 41per cent - said checking for evidenceon their partner's mobile phone wasthe reason why an affair came to light, the 'Daily Mail' reported.The second most common way to catch a cheater was via social network websites like Facebook (23 per cent) and by going through their files on their personal computer or tablet (13 per cent).A minority of 11 per cent were unable to cover their tracks so they were caught face-to-face while 5 percent had to be told their partner wasup to no good by a friend or family member.Just two per cent admitted having a guilty conscience led them to making a full confession.Mobile phone insurance website www.mobileinsurance.co.ukconducted the research after noting a rise in the number of claims for breakages that occurred to handsets during relationship splits or arguments.Almost a tenth of the respondents taking part said that a mobile phone had become broken as a direct result of an argument within a relationship, such as by being thrown or dropped."You'd be surprised how often relationship arguments and cheatinggets cited in mobile phone insuranceclaims, even though we often dont ask for that depth of detail," John Lamerton, managing director of MobileInsurance.co.uk, said."Evidently, those being unfaithful in relationships need to keep better tabs on who is looking at their mobile....

Award Winning Interactive Agency Database Launched by Web Marketing Association

Finding an "award winning" interactive agency has justgotten easier. The Web Marketing Association has just launched a new website that brings together advertising agencies and interactiveagencies who have won recognition in major award programs. 燭his new searchable database of award winning interactive agencies is found atwww.AwardWinningInteractiveAgencies.com.(Logo:http://photos.prnewswire.com
"Each year, we are contacted by individuals looking for a reputable interactive agency to help with website development, online advertising or other forms of internet marketing.  Now they havea single source to find the right interactive agency for them," saidWilliam Rice, President of the Web Marketing Association. "One of the major reasons advertising agencies enter award programs is to standout from the rest of the field and receive third party endorsement for their work. Entering takes time and money, butthe rewards when they win are worth the effort. The Web Marketing Association has created the AWAdb as a service to the online marketing community and tohelp bring together brand marketers and qualified interactive agencies."The Award Winning Agency Database, or AWAdb, allows users to search thousands of full service advertising agencies and interactiveagencies that been recognized by major award programs for their outstanding interactive work. The AWAdb can be searched by several fields that are cumulative in helping to narrow your search quickly. Visitors can search by:牋牋燗gency Name– Enter the agency name to find that agency牋牋燣ocation– Search by country and/or state to find agencies close to you.牋牋燣anguages– Need a specific language skills? Narrow your searchto 10 different牋牋爈anguages including English, Spanish, Turkish, German and Chinese.牋牋燬pecialty– Finding the right agency also means finding someonewho is an expert牋牋爄n your specific need. 53 specialties can be selected in areas include web development,牋牋爋nline marketing, mobile, social media and public relations.The site also offers anInteractive Agency Mapthat allows the user to click on the geographic area they are interested in and drill down to see the exact locations of various award winning agencies.To have great award winning interactive agencies, you need to have great interactive award programs for them to enter and win. AWAdb draws upon some of the major award programs that the online marketing community recognizes as significant awards for interactive marketers.  They include: Web Marketing Association WebAwards, Internet Advertising Competition and MobileWebAwards, Clio Awards, Cannes Cyber Lions, Ad Club of NewYork Andy Awards, Effie Awards, American Advertising Federation Addy Awards, The One Show Interactive, D&AD Pencil Awards, DMA Echo Awards, SXSW InteractiveAwards IAB Mixx Awards, PRSA Silver Anvils, BIMA Awards, Webby Awards, and the Stevie Awards to name a few.Rice added, "These are not all of the award programs out there, onlysome of the best. Many of these are awards are categories of long-standing advertising award programs. Others have been started specifically to recognize outstanding interactive advertising and great websites."Participation in the Award Winning Agency Database is free to all agencies who have won recognition in a recognized interactive award program. If your agency is not already listed and you've won awards, pleaseadd your agency to the AWAdb.About the Web Marketing AssociationTheWeb Marketing Associationis working to create a high standard ofexcellence for Web site development and marketing on theInternet. Staffed by volunteers, it ismade up of Internet marketing, advertising, PR and design professionals who share an interestin improving the quality of Website development and marketing on theInternet. Since 1997, the Web Marketing Association's annualWebAward,Internet Advertising CompetitionandMobileWebAwardaward programs have been helpinginteractive professionals promote themselves, their companies, and their best work to the outside world. Now in its 17th year, the WebAward Competition has become the premier award event for Web developers and marketers worldwide.

7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013

3 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013(click image for larger view and for slideshow)Many people seem to want to stick a sexier name on business intelligence, whether that's "business analytics" or "big data." To me, it's still business intelligence, a top-priority technology that can help companiesboost revenues, improve customer service or control costs by making better, faster decisions.Whatever you want to call this still-vital category, here are my predictions for the top BI trends of 2013, along with a few looks back athighlights of 2012.
1. Dashboards Evolve, ExpandYou would think that there's not much room for dashboard innovation now that they're the bread-and-butter BI interface, already in use among most large and midsized companies. And yet dashboards were ratedthetop priority for expansion and innovation in the BI Scorecard2012Successful BI Survey. The dashboard's rise to prominence is aconfluence of next-generation technology along with a recognition that BI must be aligned to business goals to be successful.[ Want more on trends in the year ahead? Read5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013. ]Access to data alone doesn't help a company improve. Next-generationdashboards keep workers focused on the right metrics and inform in away that lets employees take preemptive action. Key features enabling such dashboards include in-memory processing, the ability for users to mash data together andto assemble their own dashboards, KPIs, faceted (filter-by-category) search, mobile, and the ability to link insight to action.With big BI platform vendors IBM, Microsoft, and SAP generally lagging the dashboard capabilities provided by specialty vendors, customers will continue to mix and match systems from different providers in 2013. Differentiated leaders include QlikTech, which supports rapid deployment and intuitive "associative" analysis, JackBe, which has strong operational dashboards, and Metric Insight, which offers top-notch KPIs.Look for all vendors in this space tocontinue to improve their capabilities in 2013. SAP, for example, recently released its next-generation dashboard tool, Design Studio, though data-source support is initially limited to SAP BW and the Hana in-memory database. Look for SAP to improve related mobile and data-visualization capabilities. SAP will also eventually integrate and merge its once-leading Xcelsius dashboarding product, now rebranded "Dashboards," into Design Studio. QlikTech also is expected to release a next-generation dashboarding product this year.Looking back, one important dashboard release in 2012 was Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, acquired by Oracle at the end of 2011 and adapted to runon its Exalytics appliance. Oracle classifies this product as a discoverytool, but in my view it's best positioned as a dashboard application uniquely positioned to explore unstructured data using faceted search.2. Self-Service BI Gets RealSelf-service BI continues to be a vision for many companies in whichusers are empowered to explore new data sets without much IT support. Visual-data-discovery toolshave become synonymous with self-service BI and are growing at three times the pace of the overall BI market. Unfortunately, some vendors are too quick to attach the visual discovery moniker to their products. As I wrote in the latestBI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report, there's a continuum of self-service BI capabilities that ranges from interactive reporting to business query to visual data discovery, and yes, even to tools such as spreadsheets.My hope in 2013 is that practitioners recognize this range of self-service, and that vendors help educate rather than just jumping on whatever bandwagon has the most hype. Leading companies will make the shift to self-service BI, both to empower workers and to ensure the smartestallocation of constrained IT resources. In our Successful BI Survey, 44% of respondents say BI teams do not have adequate time, funding or resources to keep up with BI demand. With the fight for BI talent, simply hiring more people is not the solution. Instead, business users have to embrace responsibility for routine BI tasks. At the same time, IT has to let go of some of the mundane enhancement requests and focus on complex data challenges and leveraging innovations.In 2013 Tableau will release version 8 of its software, which will include browser and iPad-based authoring, a relative rarity in the visual data discovery category. Also look for improvements in other first-generation visual discovery products:-- SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, first released in February 2012, is due out with a new version that willsupport calculated columns, forecasting, decision trees, and maps.-- Microsoft's Power View via SharePoint (released in Q1 2012) will reemerge as an Excel add-in.-- AP Visual Intelligence, first released for Hana in March 2012, isnow on a six-week release cycle, gaining support for more data sources and capabilities.3. Mobile BI Boosts BI AdoptionJust when you thought the dust had settled on the question of tablet leadership (the iPad), Microsoft released the Windows Surface and Apple missed Wall Street earnings estimates. Prime-time ads for the Surface abound! And oh, how I would love to more easily synch myOutlook calendar!Gone are the days when corporate IT can set mobile device standards. Instead, users are increasingly bringing their own devices, forcing IT (and BI vendors) to support a broad swath of smartphones and tablets. The most promising way to support diversity is to support HTML5, but the best user experience continues to be throughdevice-native apps. Just what those apps need to support is a moving target, as user requirements evolve. For example, availability of offline data-interaction capabilities -- rare in 2011, but supported by specialty vendor RoamBI -- increased in 2012 with MicroStrategy, SAP Mobile and Oracle Mobile HD adding such capabilities.Will we see native support for Microsoft Surface in 2013, or will vendors use the HTML5 approach for this device? It's too early to tell,but I don't anticipate any broad shift. The debate about which capabilities to provide on smartphones versus tablets will continue. Mobile Device Management will remain a separatemarket segment, but savvy mobile BI providers and customers will integrate with these solutions so that when a device is lost or stolen, there is additional security beyond just a user name and password so that offline data can be wiped.Mobile will also continue to drive BI adoption in 2013, re-igniting executive interest and making BI more relevant to field and front-line workers. In last year's Successful BI Survey, only 11% of respondents said their firms had successfully deployed mobile BI. BIadoption at those firms stood at 39% of employees, far ahead of theindustry average of 24% of employees.

Java security news is not getting any better.

The Data Protection Act offerseightcentral principlesthat any organization working in the U.K. and holding personal data must comply with. These require that such personal information must be:fairly and lawfully processed; obtained for limited purposes; adequate, relevant and not excessive; accurate and kept up to date; never kept for longer than necessary; processed in line with personal legal rights; not transferred to other countries without adequate protection; and, most relevant to this case, always kept securely.The organization's deputy commissioner and director of data protection, David Smith, said in theInformation Commissioner's findingthat, "If you are responsiblefor so many payment card details and log-in details then keeping that personal data secure has to be yourpriority. In this case that just didn't happen, and when the database wastargeted -- albeit in a determined criminal attack -- the security measures in place were simply not good enough ... There's no disguising that this is a business that should have known better. It isa company that trades on its technical expertise, and there's no doubt in my mind that they had access to both the technical knowledge and the resources to keep this information safe."The body also points to the impact the scandal has had on U.K. consumers' willingness to share their personal information online, which could of course impactU.K. e-commercemore widely. It quotesdata based on market research conducted shortly after the incidentthat said 77% of consumers had been left "more cautious" about giving their personal details to websites.The Information Commissioner's action is part of a stream of high-profile actions on organizations it deems have been too lax in protecting customer information.What's unusual here is both the sizeof the financial swipe it's made on the global brand of Sony -- more commonly, it fines public-sector bodies in the U.K., with a particular focus on cases where hospital workers lose USBs with sensitive patient data -- and also how clearly it says the company's bad security practices are to blame."The penalty we've issued today is clearly substantial, but we make no apologies for that," says Smith."The case is one of the most serious ever reported to us. It directly affected a huge number of consumers, and at the very least put them at risk of identity theft."Sony has yet to publicly react to thenews.Recent breaches have tarnished digital certificates, the Web securitytechnology.

Sony Slapped With $390,000 U.K. Data Breach Fine

Sony's European arm has been dealt a harsh punishment by the U.K.'s data privacy czar for poor protection of its customer's privacy:a punishing $390,000 (£250,000) fine.In 2011, due to ahack of its PlayStation Networkonline gaming community's database, 77 million customers' personal details were exposed. The cyber housebreakers were able to get away with customers' payment card details, names, postal and email addresses,dates of birth, and account passwords. In the U.K., about three million bank customers had to change their account details and obtain new credit cards, it has beenreported.
Two years later, the U.K. Information Commissioner -- the official watchdog for privacy and data security -- has decided the breach was due to poor IT security by Sony and has decided to teach it a lesson.It busted the company under the U.K.'s 1998 Data Protection Act, after its investigators decided the attack could have been prevented ifnetwork software had been up to date. It also believes the way Sony Entertainment Europe had set up user passwords was not sufficiently secure.

4 Steps For Proactive Cybersecurity

If not all, nongovernmental entities it's too soon to go down thepath of all-out, offensive security counterattacks. Many other securityprofessionals agree, and you can get a good summary of the academic and government researchon cyber espionage, cyber deterrence and cyber offense by reading a recent post by Dave Dittrich, a member of the HoneyNet Project:"No, Executing Offensive Actions Against Our Adversaries Really Does Have High Risk (Deal With It)."But you can do a lot more than read and hope. Here are some ways to take action now that will at least let your team start taking a more offensive security mindset.
Step 1: Do active risk analysis to know what attackers may strike at, and how.Intelligence gathering is an arduoustask for even well-funded government agencies, so it is highlyunlikely that your company can achieve the level of detail required for true cyber intelligence about attackers. Further complicating intelligence gathering is that private-sector chief information security officers don't share details of successful breaches, even thoughsuch collaboration would be critical to understanding and linking methods and attackers. But that's another article.For now, focus your effort on the intelligence gathering you do control: knowledge of your own systems, networks and business.