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Never Mind Social Media, How About Social Hacking?August 13th, 2008 at 3:31 pmSource:Mashable! Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS: Company Name: I Heart Movies 20-word Description: I Heart Movies is a movie based social network and DVD collection organization site. CEO’s Pitch: I Heart Movies is a movie and television based social network that at its core allows users to join and rate movies. The users can tag, categorize and mark films or TV shows as favorites to help them organize their list. The site has the ability of adding friends to see their ratings on films to help you choose the best films for you. Films and TV shows are loaded with information (casts, plots, trailers and photo galleries) to give users the ability to step beyond just watching a film. Users also have their own profile pages that display their recent activity, show comments from other users and give the basic info about that user. Each user is also assigned a Dashboard that they can personalize (similar to Google IG) with widgets to their likings. The site also features a dynamic homepage that’s updated depending on the happenings on the site. Mashable’s Take: Do you heart movies? Then you might want to visit I Heart Movies. Sure, it’s a bit sparse. It could use a little more umph in the design department. But the networking features that accent the site may be worth your while. In addition to tagging and rating and all that fun stuff, I Heart Movies is geared to put central emphasis on discussion of things coming out of the media world as well as lots and lots of archival goodness. Yes, sites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and the like manage to pull in vast amounts of traffic and thus chart countless pages of lively conversation. But this relative newbie seems to offer a fresh slate, as it were, and even sports some features that other players in the market don’t have. As the above description makes clear, I Heart Movies is a movie rating system that carries atop it a social dimension. This goes for basic communication among members, as well as things like tracking lent and borrowed DVDs. It’s somewhat unfortunate that the design of I Heart Movies doesn’t highlight the best aspects of the network, but if you opt for an account and manage to establish a reasonably substantive lists of friends and favorite flicks, the value you can glean from the site may well induce ample stick-with-it-ness. For garnish, the movie trailers in evidence on the site are a nice addition. They are easily accessible, they don’t inhibit browsing (they don’t require you to pay a visit to a static movie info page, though you may do so if you like), and the quality is appreciable. As the site expands its coverage, it may well come to be one of the highlights to rise above the fold. Observing that growth will be pretty interesting indeed. Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Netflix Needs to Change Things if it Wants to Make Streaming BigJoost Partners with Paramount PicturesJaman’s New Search Recommendation ToolSeven Films I Wish I Could See At SXSWMake Mashable Your Twitter Valentine, Win 1 Year’s Free SchwagiTunes UK To Soon Launch Movie Sales And RentalsFancast: Comcast Launches Rival to IMDB
One of the basic tools of any good hacker has always been the ability to utilize the concept of social engineering as made famous by people like Kevin Mitnick and the Badir Brothers. The idea being -– according to Wikipedia — that “All social engineering techniques are based on specific attributes of human decision-making known as cognitive biases. These biases, sometimes called "bugs in the human hardware," are exploited in various combinations to create criminal attack techniques.” While this type of ploy has been used to gain access to computer systems for various reasons, it also raises an interesting idea of it being used to get people to willingly do things on the Web that they might not think of doing on their own. Some might suggest that this is just another form of the mob mentality that we see in things like flash mobs, but I wonder if this isn’t just another form of social hacking. Long before things like social networks and social media were the hot buzzwords used to spark VC feeding frenzies, things like Web forums and newsgroups were the main social communication tool. People would go from Web forum to Web forum to spread news about people or products, good or bad. The overall effect of this type of promotion was usually limited, but it was still possible to get people riled up over something on a much larger scale. Then along came blogs and the ability to instantly publish or comment about a person or a product. It provided a much easier way to galvanize people into acting, even if only verbally. To this mix now come things like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, or any number of instant social tools that can broadcast your message instantly around the world to a potentially unlimited number of people. The effect being that within minutes you can galvanize an immense number of people into a single action. One of the best of the classic online flash mobs can be seen anytime anyone says something negative about Apple products. The moment someone posts something like this, whether on a Web forum or a blog, you can be sure that in very short order the site will be inundated with Apple’s faithful arguing against whatever has been said. This varies from intelligent discussion to hateful things being said about the person who wrote the post. Bring this forward to today and we see, as Svetlana Gladkova at Profy.com points out in a post, just how easy it could be to cause a major news group to pull down a service because of a social hack. I believe CNN editors expected to receive opinions from the site’s main target audience (which definitely is not in Russia) but what it received instead were mainly votes from Russia with the first answer getting 92% of votes (or over 329 thousand of people). How did this happen? Very simple actually. The information about the CNN poll quickly made it to the Russian blogosphere (it is impossible to determine where it all started because of the huge number of posts on the topic) and bloggers started encouraging their readers to go to CNN and vote for the first option. The news was quickly disseminated over an enormous number of the Russian blogs and the results were predictable: 92% supported the official point of view of the Russian government. The reality is that even with the simple social media tools that we have today it would be incredibly easy to use them to organize people unknowingly to attack the Web presence of a person or brand. Just as we can see daily on services like Twitter, where people are being directed to charities or new products, this group mentality could potentially be used as in the CNN story to cause damage. Why use things like botnets when you can just as easily obtain the same results by using social media - and it’s legal to boot. We see evidence of the mob mentality on an almost daily basis within social services like FriendFeed, albeit they are of a small and benign nature. Is it really that large of a step before incidents like the one that happened with CNN become part of the norm? Are we really beyond being used in such a way without even realizing that we have been a part of a social hack attack? Would you even realize it if you had been socially hacked? —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Facebook Sues Porno Company For Hacking AttemptsScoble Caught Hacking Facebook20 Step Plan Emerges to Re-Lock Your iPhoneNorth Dakota Judge Rules On Things He Clearly Doesn’t UnderstandOrbitz Moves Closer to IPOTrippert: A Blogger for Travel ExpertsO’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference Discount
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