Puppy Love, Army Trojans and Perfecting the Phone Call

I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.

Love on the net

Teenage social networking isn’t so bad, according to the MacArthur Foundation. According to the lead researcher on the project, called the Digital Youth Project, “their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers online for more than 5,000 hours.

The bit I like in the NYT report is the shameless flirting that goes on, cleverly disguised:

First, the girl posted a message saying, “hey ... hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment ... u sud feel SPECIAL haha.” A day later, the boy replied, “hello there ... umm I don’t know what to say, but at least I wrote something ...”

U.S. Military Under Attack

Spooked by the rapid spread of a worm called Agent.btz, the U.S. military has banned everything from external hard drives to "floppy disks."

USBs are a problem: Lenovo this week offered a software package to XP users with a Trojan dropper called Meredrop, found in one of the drivers.

And Telstra earlier this year handed out USB drives at a security conference that were infected with malware.

Could it be China?  The conclusions reached in this year's US-China Economic and Security Review are far more dramatic than before. In 2007, it says, about 5m computers in the US were the targets of 43,880 incidents of malicious activity — a rise of almost a third on the previous year.

Much of the activity is likely to emanate from groups of hackers, but the lines between private espionage and government-sponsored operations are blurred. Some 250 hacker groups are tolerated, and may even be encouraged, by Beijing to invade computer networks. Individual hackers are also being trained in cyber operations at Chinese military bases.

How to Make the Perfect Phone Call

According to the UK Post Office, the perfect phone call should last nine minutes, 36 seconds and contain a mix of chat about family news, current affairs, personal problems and the weather.

Three minutes of that should be spent catching up with news about family and friends, one minute on personal problems, a minute on work/school, 42 seconds on current affairs and 24 seconds on the weather. Chat about the opposite sex should last 24 seconds. 12 seconds of every call should be set aside for a little quiet contemplation.

One in five people said they spent most time on the phone to their mother. The research, by the Post Office, revealed that the phrase “I’ll get your mother” is common. Only three per cent of people named their father as the person they spent most time on the phone with.

Susan042764

“Please help!,” she writes. “I took my husband’s iPhone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an email to a woman in his sent email file. When I approached him about this, he admitted that he took the picture, but says that he never sent it to anyone.

“He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him it is an iPhone glitch – that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an email address and appear in the sent folder, even though no email was ever sent.

“Has anyone ever heard of this happening?,” she asks. “The future of my marriage depends on this answer!” Read more here.