Friday, November 21, 2014

• "Social Media Bots Offer Phony Friends and Real Profit": Numerous reports have found that celebrities, politicians and companies often buy fake followers to enhance their perceived importance online. The practice is so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, has a web tool called the Fake Follower Check that it says can tell how many fake followers a person has. According to that tool, 6 percent of Ms. Kardashian’s followers are fake, as are 12 percent of Mr. Sheen’s. Here’s how the pyramid works: With minimal effort, I downloaded a piece of software called Twitter Supremacy. For $50 for a six-month license, the software (which violates Twitter’s terms of service agreement) lets me fabricate an unlimited number of friends. Furthermore, I can program these fake accounts to tweet, retweet and follow others automatically, as if they were living, breathing users. (There are dozens of similar services that do this for Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook.) With an army of fake friends at my disposal, I can now charge people who want to increase their number of followers or promote certain tweets. One bot creator I talked to (who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because his work violates user agreements with social media sites) said that he manages hundreds of thousands of Instagram bots and makes a good living by pushing posts to the app’s popular page. He can also manufacture all kinds of engagement, including following accounts and commenting on photos. Who pays for these services? The bot creator said that his clients include well-known celebrities and brands, along with everyday people who want a social media ego boost. (The bot maker wouldn’t let me share whom he works with, but the list includes A-list celebrities and a fast-food chain.)

• "Cable & Wireless helped Britain spy on the world: Channel 4": Telecommunications firm Cable & Wireless helped Britain eavesdrop on millions of Internet users worldwide, Channel 4 reported on Thursday, citing previously secret documents leaked by a fugitive former U.S. National Security Agency contractor. Cable & Wireless, which was bought by Vodafone in 2012, provided British spies with traffic from rival foreign communications companies, Britain's Channel 4 television said, citing documents stolen by Edward Snowden. Channel 4 said Cable & Wireless gave Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency access by renting space on one of the arteries of global communications, a cable that runs to the southern English region of Cornwall. The Channel 4 report, which was impossible to immediately verify given the secrecy of the surveillance programs, said Cable & Wireless carried out surveillance on Internet traffic through its networks on behalf of British spies.

• Amazon's typical data centers have 50K-80K servers, and there are 28 such data centers globally: Amazon has 11 cloud regions across the world, said James Hamilton, an Amazon distinguished engineer, during a presentation at re:Invent. Each region has multiple sets of data centers, and there are 28 total sets across the world. Each of those has one or more data centers, with a typical facility containing 50,000 to 80,000 servers. A conservative estimate puts Amazon over 1.5 million servers globally. Lydia Leong, an analyst at research firm Gartner, puts it at 2 million or more. By comparison, Rackspace Hosting has a little over 100,000 servers spread across six data centers. Google has three regions with eight total sets, and Microsoft has 17 regions. Last year, Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's CEO, said the company had over a million servers within its data center infrastructure and that Google had even more. Amazon's cloud could soon get even bigger. Hamilton told me that he saw no reason why Amazon couldn't eventually have a data center in every U.S. state if companies adopt cloud computing as enthusiastically as people predict.