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LinkedIn users have filed a lawsuit for 'hacking' users' email accounts

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Four LinkedIn users have filed a lawsuit accusing the business-oriented social network of accessing their email accounts without permission, harvesting the addresses of their contacts and spamming those people with repeated invitations to join the service. 
 
In their most explosive claim, the plaintiffs say that LinkedIn is "breaking into" external email accounts, like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, by pretending to be the account owner, although the legal complaint offers no details about that assertion. Larry Russ, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, declined to comment beyond the suit. 
 
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The lawsuit, which is seeking damages on behalf of all LinkedIn users, revives a long-standing issue about the service: Does LinkedIn adequately inform its users about how it uses sensitive information, including email addresses of everyone they know, and get their consent to do so? 
 
As the lawsuit puts it: "As a part of its effort to acquire new users, Linkedln sends multiple e-mails endorsing its products, services and brand to potential new users. In an effort to optimize the efficiency of this marketing strategy, Linkedln sends these 'endorsement e-mails' to the list of e-mail addresses obtained without its existing users' express consent and, to further enhance the effectiveness of this particular marketing campaign, these endorsement e-mails contain the name and likeness of those existing users from whom Linkedln surreptitiously obtained the list of email addresses." 
 
LinkedIn has always maintained that it gets full consent of its users before reaching out to any of their contacts. And the company reiterated that position in a statement in response to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday by the Los Angeles law firm Russ August & Kabat. 
 
"LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members' data," the company said. "We believe that the legal claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we intend to fight it vigorously." 
 
Regardless of the claims in the lawsuit, there is no doubt that LinkedIn makes it awfully easy for you to send an invitation to connect to everyone you have ever emailed and much harder to revoke that permission. 
 
When you sign up for the service, or want to add contacts, LinkedIn prompts you to import the email addresses of potential contacts from your email accounts, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Microsoft Outlook. The lawsuit says LinkedIn does this without seeking the email passwords, suggesting that LinkedIn is hacking into accounts. Under LinkedIn's normal procedures, it asks users for permission to access each account, though email passwords may not be required if a user is logged into the email account. 
 
Once those addresses are imported, LinkedIn asks you for permission to contact them on your behalf. 
 
And here we get to the crux of why LinkedIn might be viewed as spamming: By default, LinkedIn wants to invite every one of those people to connect with you on the service. 
 
Instead of asking you to opt in by checking off which specific contacts you want to invite, LinkedIn requires you to opt out by unchecking the "select all" button. If you are not careful, hundreds of invitations can go out - no second thoughts or cooling-off period provided. 
 
In fact, once the authorization is given, LinkedIn will email your contacts several times asking them to join the service or connect to you. (You can withdraw an unaccepted invitation once it is sent, but it is a tedious process.) 
 
Moreover, even if you don't invite some or all of those imported names to connect with you, LinkedIn saves the information for various purposes, including prompting you later to add the people as connections. 
 
LinkedIn had 238 million users worldwide at the end of June, up 37 per cent from the second quarter of 2012. It relies heavily on user referrals for that sizzling growth, which has also sent its stock price into the stratosphere. 
 
Such growth by referral is common to social networks, games and mobile applications, though sometimes they cross the line into what many of their users would consider spamming. For example, the Path social network got into trouble for such mass mailing this year, prompting Facebook to restrict it from accessing its users' accounts. 
 
The lawsuit, and numerous complaints on LinkedIn's own message boards, suggest that the company is treading dangerously. As one user quoted in the lawsuit put it in a post on LinkedIn: 
 
"Accessing my contacts so that I can see who I'd like to connect with is one thing. Spamming my entire contact database of everyone I've ever emailed is definitely black hat tactics at growing users. This included people I know, don't know, email addresses from people off Craigslist, even mailing lists received an 'invite to connect' from me today. I did not click on 'invite all.' In fact, I clicked on 'skip this step.' Very disappointing." </div>

LinkedIn users have filed a lawsuit for 'hacking' users' email accounts

Four LinkedIn users have filed a lawsuit accusing the business-oriented social network of accessing their email accounts without permission...

Apple iPhone 5S fingerprint sensor hacked by Germany's Chaos Computer Club

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An Apple employee instructs the use of the fingerprint scanner technology built into the company's iPhone 5S. German hackers say they can beat it. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP 
Germany's Chaos Computer Club says it has cracked the protection around Apple's fingerprint sensor on its new iPhone 5S, just two days after the device went on sale worldwide. 
 
In a post on their site, the group says that their biometric hacking team took a fingerprint of the user, photographed from a glass surface, and then created a "fake fingerprint" which could be put onto a thin film and used with a real finger to unlock the phone. 
 
The claim, which is backed up with a video, will create concerns for businesses which see users intending to use the phone to access corporate accounts. While it requires physical access to the phone, and a clean print of one finger which is one of those used to unlock the phone, it raises the risk of a security breach. 
 
 
Chaos Computer Club shows how it has hacked fingerprint sensor on iPhone 5S 
 
"This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided," said the Chaos Club's blogpost author, "Starbug". "In reality, Apple's sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake. As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints." 
 
The group does not claim to have extracted the fingerprint representation from the phone itself, where Apple says it is held on a secure chip. Instead it relies on capturing a high-quality fingerprint elsewhere, and having access to the phone. 
 
"Relying on your fingerprints to secure a device may be okay for casual security – but you shouldn't depend upon it if you have sensitive data you wish to protect," commented security specialist Graham Cluley. 
 
Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the hack. 
 
The revelation is the third security failing discovered since the phone and its iOS 7 software were released last week. First, a hacker found that they could use a flaw in iOS 7's Control Centre feature on the iPhone 4S and 5 to access photos and send emails. Another found that the Emergency Call screen can be used to place a call to any number. 
 
The Chaos Club details its methods for the fingerprint hack, which begins with a high-quality fingerprint lifted from a glass, doorknob or glossy surface. The print, which essentially consists of fat and sweat, is made visible using graphite powder or a component of superglue, and then photographed at high resolution to create a 2400 pixel-per-inch scan. That is then printed onto an overhead projector plastic slide using a laser print, forming a relief. That is then covered with wood glue, cut and attached to a real finger. 
 
Apple introduced Touch ID, as it calls the fingerprint system, on its top-end iPhone 5S, unveiled earlier in the month. The technology uses a scanner built into the home button of the phone to take a high-resolution image from small sections of the fingerprint from the sub-epidermal layers of the skin. Apple says "Touch ID then intelligently analyses this information with a remarkable degree of detail and precision." 
 
Users can choose to use up to five fingerprints - which can be changed - to unlock the phone and optionally pay for iTunes Store purchases. They have first to create a passcode of at least four digits, and then "enrol" fingerprints separately. Apple says that the process creates a mathematical representation of the fingerprint representation, and that it is only stored on the phone. 
 
Apple's own notes about its Touch ID system on its site say that Touch ID will incrementally add new sections of your fingerprint to your enrolled fingerprint data to improve matching accuracy over time. Touch ID uses all of this to provide an accurate match and a very high level of security." 
 
The company says that "Every fingerprint is unique, so it is rare that even a small section of two separate fingerprints are alike enough to register as a match for Touch ID. The probability of this happening is 1 in 50,000 for one enrolled finger. This is much better than the 1 in 10,000 odds of guessing a typical 4-digit passcode. Although some passcodes, like "1234", may be more easily guessed, there is no such thing as an easily guessable fingerprint pattern." 
 
It notes that after five unsuccessful attempts to match the fingerprint, the user has to enter their passcode, and the fingerprint unlock will not work. 
 
Speaking to BusinessWeek just after the iPhone 5S was unveiled, Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, emphasised that the fingerprints would not leave the phone. He said that making a finger unlocking and purchasing system "sounds like a simple idea, but how many places could that become a bad idea because you failed to execute on it? We thought, 'Well, one place where that could be a bad idea is somebody who writes a malicious app, somebody who breaks into your phone, starts capturing your fingerprint. What are they doing with that? Can they reuse that in some other location? Can they use it to spoof their way into other people's phones?'" 
 
He said that Apple's focus had been to make sure that "no matter if you took ownership of the whole device and ran whatever code you wanted on the main processor [you]could not get that fingerprint out of there. Literally, the physical lines of communication in and out of the chip would not permit that ever to escape."</div>

Apple iPhone 5S fingerprint sensor hacked by Germany's Chaos Computer Club

An Apple employee instructs the use of the fingerprint scanner technology built into the company's iPhone 5S. German hackers say they c...

Choosing A Good Domain Name

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Choosing a domain name for your site is one of the most important steps towards creating the perfect internet presence. If you run an on-line business, picking a name that will be marketable and achieve success in search engine placement is paramount. Many factors must be considered when choosing a good domain name. This article summarizes all the different things to consider before making that final registration step! 
 
 
Short and Sweet 
 
Domain names can be really long or really short (1 - 67 characters). In general, it is far better to choose a domain name that is short in length. The shorter your domain name, the easier it will be for people remember. Remembering a domain name is very important from a marketability perspective. As visitors reach your site and enjoy using it, they will likely tell people about it. And those people may tell others, etc. As with any business, word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool to drive traffic to your site (and it's free too!). If your site is long and difficult to pronounce, people will not remember the name of the site and unless they bookmark the link, they may never return. 
 
 
Consider Alternatives 
 
Unless a visitor reaches your site through a bookmark or a link from another site, they have typed in your domain name. Most people on the internet are terrible typists and misspell words constantly. If your domain name is easy to misspell, you should think about alternate domain names to purchase. For example, if your site will be called "MikesTools.com", you should also consider buying "MikeTools.com" and "MikeTool.com". You should also secure the different top level domain names besides the one you will use for marketing purposes ("MikesTools.net", "MikesTools.org", etc.) You should also check to see if there are existing sites based on the misspelled version of the domain name you are considering. "MikesTools.com" may be available, but "MikesTool.com" may be home to a graphic pornography site. You would hate for a visitor to walk away thinking you were hosting something they did not expect. 
 
Also consider domain names that may not include the name of your company, but rather what your company provides. For example, if the name of your company is Mike's Tools, you may want to consider domain names that target what you sell. For example: "buyhammers.com" or "hammer-and-nail.com". Even though these example alternative domain names do not include the name of your company, it provides an avenue for visitors from your target markets. Remember that you can own multiple domain names, all of which can point to a single domain. For example, you could register "buyhammers.com", "hammer-and-nail.com", and "mikestools.com" and have "buyhammers.com" and "hammer-and-nail.com" point to "mikestools.com". 
 
 
Hyphens: Your Friend and Enemy 
 
Domain name availability has become more and more scant over the years. Many single word domain names have been scooped up which it makes it more and more difficult to find a domain name that you like and is available. When selecting a domain name, you have the option of including hyphens as part of the name. Hyphens help because it allows you to clearly separate multiple words in a domain name, making it less likely that a person will accidentally misspell the name. For example, people are more likely to misspell "domainnamecenter.com" than they are "domain-name-center.com". Having words crunched together makes it hard on the eyes, increasing the likelihood of a misspelling. On the other hand, hyphens make your domain name longer. The longer the domain name, the easier it is for people to forget it altogether. Also, if someone recommends a site to someone else, they may forget to mention that each word in the domain name is separated by a hyphen. If do you choose to leverage hyphens, limit the number of words between the hyphens to three. Another advantage to using hyphens is that search engines are able to pick up each unique word in the domain name as key words, thus helping to make your site more visible in search engine results. 
 
 
Dot What? 
 
There are many top level domain names available today including .com, .net, .org, and .biz. In most cases, the more unusual the top level domain, the more available domain names are available. However, the .com top level domain is far and away the most commonly used domain on the internet, driven by the fact that it was the first domain extension put to use commercially and has received incredible media attention. If you cannot lay your hands on a .com domain name, look for a .net domain name, which is the second most commercially popular domain name extension. 
 
 
Long Arm of the Law 
 
Be very careful not to register domain names that include trademarked names. Although internet domain name law disputes are tricky and have few cases in existence, the risk of a legal battle is not a risk worth taking. Even if you believe your domain name is untouchable by a business that has trademarked a name, do not take the chance: the cost of litigation is extremely high and unless you have deep pockets you will not likely have the resources to defend yourself in a court of law. Even stay away from domain names in which part of the name is trademarked: the risks are the same. 
 
 
Search Engines and Directories 
 
All search engines and directories are different. Each has a unique process for being part of the results or directory listing and each has a different way of sorting and listing domain names. Search engines and directories are the most important on-line marketing channel, so consider how your domain name choice affects site placement before you register the domain. Most directories simply list links to home pages in alphabetical order. If possible, choose a domain name with a letter of the alphabet near the beginning ("a" or "b"). For example, "aardvark-pest-control.com" will come way above "joes-pest-control.com". However, check the directories before you choose a domain name. You may find that the directories you would like be in are already cluttered with domain names beginning with the letter "a". Search engines scan websites and sort results based on key words. Key words are words that a person visiting a search engine actually search on. Having key words as part of your domain name can help you get better results. 
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Choosing A Good Domain Name

Choosing a domain name for your site is one of the most important steps towards creating the perfect internet presence. If you run an on-...