Googirl Marissa Mayer: What is a Googirl?

Googirl Marissa Mayer

Googirl Marissa Mayer: What is a Googirl?

Marissa Mayer, often called googirl because she is Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. Google, a search engine company is one of the leading used search engines in the web wherein Mayer determines what products are to be released for users.

Googirl Marissa Mayer

Googirl Marissa Mayer

She has been frequently interviewed in press releases and events on behalf of her company. She is the first female engineer that Google hired and belongs to the first 20 employee batch that was hired by Google in 1999. And if these facts were not enough for you, then here is a case of googirl fever.

This purple-loving googirl, once spent $60,000 on a lunch with her favorite fashion designer Oscar dela Renta. Having an Aibo robot named Rover as pet dog and loves baking cupcakes. As a testament to that, she bought various cookbooks to study cupcake recipe, created a spreadsheet for her ingredients and tested the recipes before finally making her own. She also did the same thing for her frosting recipes.

She was also quipped saying she enjoys eating vanilla fudge which gives her extreme happiness. A food lover who enjoys foods like duck confit Sloppy Joes, sliders of Angus beef with brie, and macaroni and cheese with lobster. On a trip from Zurich, she also came home with bite-size macaroons and shared her love for the product by sending invitees which is a Wikipedia link to give information about her newly found favorite food.

Fetish to make her ceiling installation really beautiful, she asked famous glass artist Dale Chihuly to make 400 pieces of blown glass in the shapes of sea flora and fauna. A stocker for contemporary art, she has a craftsman in Palo Alto. Moreover, she has a light panel containing 576 individually placed Ping-Pong balls which she herself made as inspired by the U2 2005 concert light display.

This “gorgeously geeky Googler” once dated Google cofounder Larry Page. Among her achievements were belonging to a winning debate team when she was in senior year, owning a $5 million pent-house at the famous Four Seasons hotel and having assets assessed to be over a hundred million dollars.

Googirl Marissa Mayer

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'Dating' site imports 250,000 Facebook profiles without permission

How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day?

Simple.

You scrape data from Facebook.

At least, that's the approach taken by two provocateurs who launched Lovely-Faces.com this week, 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."

Or you can just search on people's real names.

The duo behind the site say it's art, not commerce.

In what seems to be liberal-arts-grad-schoolese, Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovic, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine, explain why they made the site.

"Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating -- unfortunately, without the user's control. But that's the very nature of Facebook and social media in general. If we start to play with the concepts of identity theft and dating, we should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be."

And, the duo speculate, if people pull hard enough on that bothersome thread, Facebook's $50 billion valuation will unravel.

Facebook, as you might expect, 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. We're investigating this site and will take appropriate action."

Facebook's terms of service require those who want to collect data from its pages to apply for permission, which Cirio and Ludovic did not do when they pulled down publicly available profile information on a million Facebook users. (They aren't the first to scrape a million Facebook profiles.)

Cirio and Ludovic say they will take down a user's profile, if a person asks and the site doesn't have any indication they are actually trying to make any money. Instead, it's part of a series of prank sites, the first two of which aimed at Google and Amazon, intended to make people think more about data in the age of internet behemoths.

Moreover, it's a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about scraping of personal data that is quasi-public.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder, made his name at Harvard in 2003 by scraping the names and photos of fellow classmates off school servers to feed a system called FaceMash. With the photos, Zuckerberg created a controversial system that pitted one co-ed against another, by allowing others to vote on which one was better looking.

So even if Facebook's anticipated legal nasty gram makes its way to the duo, who seem to be based somewhere in Europe, they'll have an excellent defense.

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Wow, Twitter must be beta testing a spine

The title of this posts was inspired by an excellent post over at Threat Level by Ryan Singel but is says exactly what my thoughts were when I first read a few days ago that Twitter went public about receiving subpoenas from the US Department of Justice demanding that Twitter turn over user information from a select number of people connected to WikiLeaks.

Not only did they go public but they also reached out to all the people whose information the DoJ had subpoenaed and let them know what was happening and that they had ten days to file arguments against the information being released. If they did nothing then after the ten days Twitter would hand over the information.

Now this may not seem like much but remember these subpoenas were sealed and came with a gag order which means Twitter had to go to court in order to get the gag order lifted, which they did, and won.

This is the email that was sent out by Twitter to those the DoJ was subpoenaing (via Geekosystem):

Kessel, Jan-07 11:20 am (PST):

Dear Twitter User:

We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @rop_g. A copy of the legal process is attached. The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account.

Please be advised that Twitter will respond to this request in 10 days from the date of this notice unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the legal process has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.

To respond to this notice, please e-mail us at .

This notice is not legal advice. You may wish to consult legal counsel about this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the ACLU .

Sincerely,

Twitter Legal

I particularly like the last part of the email:

This notice is not legal advice. You may wish to consult legal counsel about this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the ACLU .

Nice touch Twitter and for once it is nice to send kudos your way.

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Facebook's ‘Hacker’ stealing users’ personal info

A new tool called Facebook Hacker is doing the rounds on the social networking website. The tool tricks users into sending their personal information to the sender.

According to News.com.au, Facebook Hacker sends other people an executable file (.exe) that, if clicked on, will steal their login details and secretly email it back to the sender.

And unlike programs that secretly monitor keystrokes to steal passwords and logins, this one doesn’t require the victim to type  anything at all.

According to security blog Malware City, the tool can extract info by just searching for key words saved by the user’s web browser.

The solution is to disable auto-remember or auto-complete features in all programs — including your web browser, said Asia Pacific head of technology at Sophos Paul Ducklin.

Another trick is to keep different passwords for different accounts – most people keep same passwords for all their accounts.

This means once scammers get the information from your Facebook account, they could have access to your email or other sites as well.

Currently, Facebook is facing other issues within – the ‘like’ button, which when clicked, signs the user as a fan and promotes it to all their friends, the bait-and-switch scam and the more recent ‘install dislike button’ that milks the user’s profile.

Nearly all these scams entice users with the promise of an outrageous video clip or story, as long as they complete a survey first.

When you complete the survey, the scammer gets a commission. But even if you don’t, the rogue application has already accessed your data and implanted itself in your account.

"The Internet is fun but that doesn’t mean you have to throw caution to the wind," said Ducklin, commenting that although security seems to be an ever-growing issue, people too have to be equally responsible and sensible.

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