Will Facebook Enter The Healthcare Arena?

Facebook Inc already can tell who your friends are and the what types of things grabs your attention. Soon, it could also know the state of your health.

On the heels of fellow Silicon Valley technology companies Apple Inc and Google Inc, Facebook is plotting its first steps into the fertile field of healthcare, said three people familiar with the matter. The people requested anonymity as the plans are still in development.

The company is exploring creating online “support communities” that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. A small team is also considering new “preventative care” applications that would help people improve their lifestyles.

In recent months, the sources said, the social networking giant has been holding meetings with medical industry experts and entrepreneurs, and is setting up a research and development unit to test new health apps. Facebook is still in the idea-gathering stage, the people said.

Healthcare has historically been an area of interest for Facebook, but it has taken a backseat to more pressing products.

Recently, Facebook executives have come to realize that healthcare might work as a tool to increase engagement with the site.

One catalyst: the unexpected success of Facebook’s “organ-donor status initiative,” introduced in 2012. The day that Facebook altered profile pages to allow members to specify their organ donor-status, 13,054 people registered to be organ donors online in the United States, a 21 fold increase over the daily average of 616 registrations, according to a June 2013 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

Separately, Facebook product teams noticed that people with chronic ailments such as diabetes would search the social networking site for advice, said one former Facebook insider. In addition, the proliferation of patient networks such as PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that people are increasingly comfortable sharing symptoms and treatment experiences online.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg may step up his personal involvement in health. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatric resident at University of California San Francisco, recently donated $5 million to the Ravenswood Health Center in East Palo Alto.

Any advertising built around the health initiatives would not be as targeted as it could be on television or other media. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are prohibited from using Facebook to promote the sale of prescription drugs, in part because of concerns surrounding disclosures.

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HTTP2 Procotol Nears Completion

When it comes to amping up traffic over the Internet, sometimes too much of a good thing may not be such a good thing at all.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is putting the final touches on HTTP/2, the second version of the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). The working group has issued a last call draft, urging interested parties to voice concerns before it becomes a full Internet specification.

Not everyone is completely satisfied with the protocol however.

“There is a lot of good in this proposed standard, but I have some deep reservations about some bad and ugly aspects of the protocol,” wrote Greg Wilkins, lead developer of the open source Jetty server software, noting his concerns in a blog item posted Monday.

Others, however, praise HTTP/2 and say it is long overdue.

“A lot of our users are experimenting with the protocol,” said Owen Garrett, head of products for server software provider NGINX. “The feedback is that generally, they have seen big performance benefits.”

First created by Web originator Tim Berners-Lee and associates, HTTP quite literally powers today’s Web, providing the language for a browser to request a Web page from a server.

Version 2.0 of HTTP, based largely on the SPDY protocol developed by Google, promises to be a better fit for how people use the Web.

“The challenge with HTTP is that it is a fairly simple protocol, and it can be quite laborious to download all the resources required to render a Web page. SPDY addresses this issue,” Garrett said.

While the first generation of Web sites were largely simple and relatively small, static documents, the Web today is used as a platform for delivering applications and bandwidth intensive real-time multimedia content.

HTTP/2 speeds basic HTTP in a number of ways. HTTP/2 allows servers to send all the different elements of a requested Web page at once, eliminating the serial sets of messages that have to be sent back and forth under plain HTTP.

HTTP/2 also allows the server and the browser to compress HTTP, which cuts the amount of data that needs to be communicated between the two.

As a result, HTTP/2 “is really useful for organization with sophisticated Web sites, particularly when its users are distributed globally or using slower networks — mobile users for instance,” Garrett said.

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Malware Targets Job-seekers

A new version of the Gameover computer Trojan is targeting job hunters and recruiters by attempting to steal log-in credentials for Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com accounts.

Gameover is one of several Trojan programs that are based on the infamous Zeus banking malware, whose source code was leaked on the Internet in 2011. Like Zeus, Gameover can steal log-in credentials and other sensitive information by injecting rogue Web forms into legitimate websites when accessed from infected computers.

The ability to inject content into browsing sessions in real time has traditionally been used by computer Trojans to steal online banking credentials and financial information. However, cybercriminals are increasingly using this technique to compromise other types of accounts as well.

For example, in February, researchers from security firm Adallom found a Zeus variant that stole Salesforce.com log-in credentials and scraped business data from the compromised accounts.

The latest development involves a new Gameover variant that contains a configuration file to target Monster.com accounts, one of the largest employment websites in the world, security researchers from antivirus firm F-Secure said.

“A computer infected with Gameover ZeuS will inject a new ‘Sign In’ button [into the Monster.com sign-in page], but the page looks otherwise identical,” they said.

After the victims authenticate through the rogue Web form the malware injects a second page that asks them to select and answer three security questions out of 18. The answers to these questions expose additional personal information and potentially enable attackers to bypass the identity verification process.

Targeting Monster.com is a new development, but the Gameover malware had already been targeting CareerBuilder.com, another large employment website, for some time.

Recruiters with accounts on employment websites should be wary of irregularities on log-in pages, especially if those accounts are tied to bank accounts and spending budgets, the F-Secure researchers said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for sites such as Monster to introduce two factor authentication beyond mere security questions.”

The authors of the Gameover Trojan program have been particularly active recently. In early February researchers from security firm Malcovery Security reported that a new variant of Gameover was being distributed as an encrypted .enc file in order to bypass network-level defenses. Later that month researchers from Sophos detected a Gameover variant with a kernel-level rootkit component that protected its files and processes, making it harder to remove.

Unlike most other Zeus spinoffs, Gameover is also using peer-to-peer technology for command-and-control instead of traditional hosted servers, which improves its resilience to takedown efforts by security researchers.

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Amazon, Microsoft Cut Cloud Storage Prices

Last April, Microsoft agreed that it would match Amazon’s Web Services’ (AWS’) prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.

So when Amazon announced last Thursday  that it would cut its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) prices by up to 22%, Microsoft followed suit the very next day.

“We are matching AWS’ lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide,” Microsoft posted in its official blog.

For Microsoft’s “Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage,” the company is reducing prices by up to 28%. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by 50%.

Amazon’s new prices take effect Feb. 1. Microsoft’s price cuts begin March 13.

“We’re also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions,” Microsoft said.

Amazon said it dropped its prices for its S3 storage by 22% and its EBS standard volume storage and I/O operations by up to 50%.

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LinkedIn Beefs Up

LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.

For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.

So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.

LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.

“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.

The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.

It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.

However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.

Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.

LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.

As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.

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Is Apple Spying?

Apple, which was in all sorts of hot water when it was caught tracking its users, is up to its old tricks again.

Apple was slammed by privacy experts protested the use of a universal device identifier, or UDID, to track the online preferences of iPhone and iPad users. This made it a perfect target for hackers who broke into digital media firm Bluetoad and made off with close to a million device IDs.

It looks like Apple remains addicted to tracking its users. According to Naked Security iOS 6 has a new tracking system called IDFA, or identifier for advertisers. Like the UDID, the IDFA uniquely identifies your Apple device and any websites that you browse with your iPhone or iPad device can request the IDFA.

While UDID could be tracked to users the IDFA can’t be traced back to individuals, it merely links a pattern of online behaviour with a specific device. In other words, it knows all about you, just not your name.

Fortunately it can be disabled from within iOS, though Apple leaves it enabled, by default and hopes no one will notice. The IDFA acts like a persistent cookie on the phone: allowing advertisers to track user surfing behaviour on their phone and record interactions up to and including purchases or downloads.

Michael Oiknine, the CEO of mobile application analytics firm Apsalar said that IDFA offered many advantages over the discredited UDID. For a start the IDFA is reset when the device, itself, is reset. That will prevent user data from being corrupted when they sell or transfer their phone to a new owner, Oiknine said.

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Is Internet Explorer Making A Comeback?

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) in April again managed to grab more user share, the third time in the year’s first four months, to stay well above the 50% mark and remain the world’s top browser, a Web analytics company said on Tuesday.

Google’s Chrome’s share also climbed in April, said Net Applications, ending that browser’s three-month decline.

IE boosted its share by about three-tenths of a percentage point last month to average 54.1% in April. That returns IE to a mark comparable to its September 2011 share.

Since Jan.1, IE has increased its usage share by 2.2 percentage points for a 4% gain since the end of 2011. The turnaround has been IE’s largest and longest since the browser began shedding share years ago to Firefox, then later, Chrome.

Microsoft has pinned its hopes almost entirely on IE9, the 2011 edition that runs only on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Tuesday, Microsoft again stayed on message, highlighting the gains made by IE9 on Windows 7 — the pairing the firm has said is the only metric it cares about — but ignoring the overall IE increases this year.

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Google SEARCH Goes SSL

Google is finally taking privacy seriously to a degree by offering its users a secure form of searching while using Google Search. Moving forward users will have the opportunity to enable SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for added security.  Be advised, the service will only cover the Google search and clicks made through Google to other non-secured sites will be visible.

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