WIRED – Aug 24 – For companies like Ashley Madison or health insurer Anthem, financial loss, customer anger and professional embarrassment aren't the only consequences of getting massively gutted by hackers. A U.S. appellate court ruled that the FTC has the authority to sue Wyndham Hotels for allowing hackers to steal more than 600K customers' data from its computer systems in 2008 and 2009, leading to more than $10 million in fraudulent charges. The ruling more widely cements the agency's power to regulate and fine firms that lose consumer data to hackers, if the companies engaged in what the FTC deems "unfair" or "deceptive" business practices.
Category: Outlets – Wired
Ashley Madison Ex-CTO Hacked Competing Site
WIRED – Aug 24 – According to an email exchange in November 2012, Ashley Madison's one-time CTO told colleagues, including the CEO of parent company Avid Life Media, that he had found a security hole in the web site of Nerve.com and used it to exfiltrate the competitor's entire database. He also indicated that he had the ability to alter records in the database. If Bhatia did in fact hack Nerve.com, he could be criminally charged with unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
by Kim Zetter
See full article at Wired
The Psychology Of Online Dating
WIRED – July 18 – According to stats, 20% of heterosexual couples and ~70% of same-sex couples met online. The usual criticism of online dating is that it's a hive of airbrushed photos and downright lies. A couple of scientific studies come to conclusions that small lies were not merely self-deceptions, but deliberate. On paid sites people tend to be looking for something more serious, they're more keen to progress offline to actual dates and abusive messages are at a minimum. Psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd believes that much of the directness in online dating occurs because all interactions are in a "social vacuum". With no mutual friends to avoid alienating, there's less social pressures to keep behaviour in check. There could also be "grass is greener" attitude inherent in online dating. "We see that people are more willing to leave unsatisfying relationships because there's less friction to finding a new person to date. So, average relationship length comes down, but not because people seek that," says OKCupid co-founder and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan.
by Alan Martin
See full article at Wired.co.uk
Dating Service Connects People Over Their Leftovers
WIRED.CO.UK – Dec 2 - Farmers cooperative Lantmännen has developed a dating tool that connects singles based on what food they have leftover in their fridges. It might not sound like the level of psychometric filtering touted by other dating sites, but Lantmännen aims to pair up fellow environmentally-conscious single people to share leftover dishes or ingredients. According to Lantmännen, a fifth of all food in Sweden is thrown away. It was this figure that led to the creation of the dating service, called Restdejting. Lantmännen is a major player within food, energy and agriculture in Sweden. It is owned by 36K Swedish farmers and has over 10K employees.
by Olivia Solon
The full article was originally published at Wired.co.uk, but is no longer available.
Badoo Built A Billion-pound Social Network… On Sex
WIRED.CO.UK – Apr 25 – – Apr 25 – Badoo is a 120M-member social network that's adding ~300K users a day. Its Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570K new daily users, making it the 3rd biggest app, after FarmVille and CityVille. Still barely registering in Britain or the US, the free network is a mass phenomenon in Brazil (14.1M members), Mexico (9M), France (8.2M), Spain (6.5M) and Italy (6M). Andrey Andreev founded Badoo and highly profitable Russian internet businesses: Mamba, SpyLog, Begun. Badoo launched in 2006 in Spain, where Andreev was living, as a photo-sharing site. The site wasn't generating revenue, but was growing sharply. In 2008, Andreev refocused the site on meeting new people. He introduced premium services. You could pay a dollar or euro to "rise up" the search results. In 2009, the site had 48M users and 20% were paying to boost their profile. Badoo Mobile launched on the iPhone and Android and was downloaded 1.5M times in 8 months. Forbes Russia put Andreev in the top 30 successful businessmen in Russia.
by David Rowan
See full article at Wired
Mark Brooks: $2 billion! Kthud! (fell off chair). There's hope and money and prospects left in the idating industry yet. 😉
‘Dating’ Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission
WIRED – Feb 3 – Two provocateurs Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic launched Lovely-Faces.com with profiles, names, locations and photos — scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages. The site categorizes these unwitting volunteers into personality types, using a facial recognition algorithm, so you can search for someone in your general area who is “easy going,” “smug” or “sly.” Facebook is not amused. “Scraping people’s information violates our terms,” said Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s director of policy communications. “We have taken, and will continue to take, aggressive legal action against organizations that violate these terms. It’s a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about scraping of personal data that is quasi-public. FULL ARTICLE @ WIRED Dan Ariely: Why Online Daters Talk About Shared Interests
WIRED.CO.UK – Nov 29 - When on a first date, we try to express ourselves and learn about the other person, but we're also being careful not to offend them either. This is called a bad equilibrium, a strategy that all the players can easily adopt and converge on, but it does not produce a desirable outcome for anyone. Dan Ariely and Jeana Frost decided to look at this problem in the context of online dating. They limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by giving them a preset list of questions. For example: "How many romantic partners have you had?"; "Do you have any STDs?"; "What is your sexual fantasy?" This forced them to risk rejection by posing questions that are outside of generally accepted bounds. What they learned is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain, but that no one really enjoys or benefits from. If we restrict the equilibria, we can get people to gravitate toward behaviours that are beneficial for everyone. FULL ARTICLE @ WIRED.CO.UK
eHarmony Opens Relationship With AOL
WIRED — Sep 17 — eHarmony partners with AOL to share its online dating advice to readers of AOL Personals. AOL users will be able to register for eHarmony's singles matching service directly from AOL Personals, but in keeping with AOL's new aggregation format, eHarmony will share the screen with competing services like Match.com. FULL ARTICLE @ WIRED
Committing MySpacecide
The full article was originally published at Wired News, but is no longer available.
Antisocial Networking Gets Hip
WIRED NEWS — Apr 5 — The founder of a new anti-social networking site is finding that shared hates can be an equally effective bonding tool. Bryant Choung satirized social discovery services when he launched Snubster last month. Members create public lists of people and things that rankle them.
The full article was originally published at Wired, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Other Friendster satire includes Fiendster (now defunct) and Dogster (which is actually taking off!?)