robert_cringely
Columnist

Geek Week in Review

analysis
Nov 2, 20072 mins

In your Face... book. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And if you can't buy 1.6% of them, round up their competitors to beat them to a pulp. Google's response to losing out to Microsoft on the Facebook deal was to sign up virtually everyone else in the social networking space – including MySpace, Linked-In, and Salesforce.com – to its OpenSocial application development platform. Virtually overnight, OpenSocial g

In your Face… book. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And if you can’t buy 1.6% of them, round up their competitors to beat them to a pulp. Google’s response to losing out to Microsoft on the Facebook deal was to sign up virtually everyone else in the social networking space – including MySpace, Linked-In, and Salesforce.com – to its OpenSocial application development platform. Virtually overnight, OpenSocial gains an audience five times as large as Facebook’s. That’s exactly what the Web needs: more ways to hurl sheep, launch zombie attacks, and generally waste each other’s time.

Duck and cover. In case you weren’t paranoid enough, comes news from Israeli anti-terror site Debka.com that Osama Bin Laden is poised to introduce “Electronic Jihad Version 2.0.” According to the site, al Quada will launch attacks against non-fundamentalist Web sites starting on November 11 thanks to the Electronic Jihad software’s easy point-and-click interface. I understand terrorists who upgrade from version 1.0 also receive 24/7 support and three additional virgins in the afterlife.

The sound of one hand typing. Clever spammers are using Trojans masquerading as virtual strippers to defeat those Web applets designed to prove you’re a human and not a bot. A lingerie clad “Melissa” pops up on screen, offering to remove one item of clothing for every squiggly number you enter correctly. The numbers are sent to a server and used to sign up for Web accounts. And this ruse works because…. it’s really hard to find naked pictures on the Web? There’s certainly no shortage of boobs.

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