LinkedIn came up with a fresh new homepage this week, and with a fresh new member, as Bill Gates gave up his Facebook account and joined the 19 million LinkedIn users in an unusual manner, by posing a question on his new favorite community site, asking for suggestions to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology.

What’s the connection between LinkedIn’s latest features and Gates’ “divorce” from Facebook? Obviously, Facebook! While still trying to catch up with its rival, LinkeIn has been also working on making the “staying” more enjoyable for cyber-visitors, through a status feature similar to that of Facebook, and by turning Facebook’s most popular user into a new “acquisition”, as strange as that may sound.

LinkedIn is currently submitted to a makeover meant to re-boost the site’s positions compared to its rivals. A good way to start was to personalize the user interface with a series of modules that allow users to organize their information on the profile page and keep their friends updated with whatever they are up to.

Gates’ presence only made things better for LinkedIn, as his profile became the most searched profile on the site. This time however, the philanthropist won’t have to worry about getting suffocated with too many friend requests, as LinkedIn will block friend requests. After all, they wouldn’t want to lose their most popular user like Facebook, would they?

At the end of the day, LinkedIn is working on improving the time people spend on the site, which allowed Facebook to be one step ahead, at least until now. The task is a difficult one, considering the differences between the two rivals. LinkedIn has an average of 6 and a half minutes per visit, while Facebook has 21 minutes. If we think of it, Bill Gates’ new account could give them a little push, but the new design should have much more to do with a future success.

The Philadelphia Eagles have released defensive end Jevon Kearse, the team announced Thursday. The move comes as no surprise to Kearse, says agent Drew Rosenhaus.

The team and Kearse had been working to restructure his contract, but to no avail. Kearse signed with the Eagles in 2004 but never really made much of an impact. He had only 7 1/2 sacks in each of his first two seasons with the team and then sustained a major knee injury in the second game of the ‘06 season.

Last season, Kearse had just 3 1/2 sacks and lost his starting job to Juqua Thomas.

“Jevon is still a very talented pass-rusher,” Rosenhaus told reporters over the weekend at the NFL Scouting Combine. “Those guys are hard to find. It’s not a deep year at that position. We think he’ll find a home pretty quickly, once he gets into free agency.”

ProFootballTalk.com reports that Kearse could return to the Tennessee Titans, with whom he was the league’s defensive rookie of the year in 1999.

YouTube was hard to reach this week following action by Pakistan to block access inside its borders for its hosting of a “blasphemous” video clip.

Analysis suggests the block was taken up by net hardware that routes data effectively cutting off the site.

But a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s telecoms authority said the problem was caused by a “malfunction” elsewhere.

Dead end

“We are not hackers. Why would we do that?” Shahzada Alam Malik, head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), told the AP news service.

The Peshawar office of the PTA issued a blocking order for YouTube last week in a bid to block access to a video clip the Pakistani government regarded as “very blasphemous”.

Analysis by net monitoring firm Renesys shows that the problems getting through to YouTube began as a result of the action taken by Pakistan Telecom to implement the block.

Essentially, Pakistan Telecom took over some of the net addresses assigned to YouTube.

Crucially the path it offered to this group of addresses was faster than the usual one used by the hardware, or routers, that speed traffic around the internet.

Pakistan Telecom let this address change propagate to the routers of one of its partners - PCCW.

Routers are constantly in search of faster ways to get the data passing through them to its destination so news about this faster path started propagating across many of the net’s routers.

However, because Pakistan Telecom was stopping the traffic reaching YouTube all the data reached a dead end.

“While it is hard to describe exactly how widely this hijacked prefix was seen, we estimate that it was seen by a bit more than two-thirds of the internet,” wrote Martin Brown of Renesys in a company blog post analysing the sequence of events.

The problems getting through to YouTube were most severe for two hours on Sunday but the problem was cleared up soon after.

Access to YouTube was restored in Pakistan on Tuesday when the video clip was removed.

iTunes Says Its Customers Top 50 Million.

February 26, 2008—Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world’s largest music catalog of over six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels.

“We’d like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes.”

Last month, Apple launched iTunes Movie Rentals featuring movies from all of the major movie studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema. Users can rent movies and watch them on their PCs or Macs, all current generation iPods**, iPhone™ and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV®. iTunes Movie Rentals will offer over 1,000 titles by the end of this month, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound which users can rent directly from their widescreen TV using Apple TV.

iTunes 7.6 is available as a free download at www.itunes.com. iTunes Movie Rentals are available in the US only and are $2.99 (US) for library titles and $3.99 (US) for new releases, and high definition versions are priced just one dollar more with library titles at $3.99 (US) and new releases at $4.99 (US). Movie rentals from the iTunes Store for Mac® or Windows require iTunes 7.6. iTunes Movie Rentals require a valid credit card with a billing address in the country of purchase.

*Based on data from market research firm the NPD Group’s MusicWatch survey that captures consumer reported past week unit purchases and counts one CD representing 12 tracks, excluding wireless transactions. The iTunes Music Store became the second-largest music retailer in the US after Wal-Mart, based on the amount of music sold during 2007.

**Movie rentals work on iPod® classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

This, combined with a raft of recent surveys around lost productivity due to staff using social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, is also raising awareness that action needs to be taken in this domain.

For example, according to a study undertaken by information security consultancy Global Secure Systems and the organisers of the Infosecurity Europe 2008 exhibition, the use of such sites is costing UK business an estimated £6.5bn per annum in terms of reduced output.

A poll carried out among 776 office workers indicated that most spent at least 30 minutes a day visiting social networking sites, while two were so hooked that they engaged in such activities for as many as three hours each day.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, other research by Computerweekly.com found that some 63% of organisations were planning to monitor or limit staff access to these sites over the next six months, while 17% intended to ban their usage entirely.

Meanwhile, a second survey undertaken by YouGov and commissioned by infrastructure software and services provider, Dimension Data, provided a breakdown of which kinds of personal web sites were being accessed most.

Of the 2,134 employees questioned, some 46% undertook online banking at work, 19% visited social networking sites, 13% indulged in file-sharing, while 10% downloaded media files such as MP3s.

Donal Casey, principal security consultant at Morse Consulting, says: “I wouldn’t say the use of social networking sites is causing chaos, but it is an issue without a doubt as it’s one of those things that can become addictive. When you talk to IT executives, they’re aware of the situation as it’s a newsworthy fact that these sites are being used. But unless it starts visibly impacting staff productivity, most aren’t overly concerned.”

Nonetheless, he adds that many organisations are keeping a watching brief on the issue by monitoring internet usage and, if and when the statistics show high levels of activity, tend to take action at that point.

But, whether social networking web sites are causing overt damage to staff productivity or not, their usage does pose various network-related and security questions.

In network terms, the problem is that if large numbers of users download content, particularly in bandwidth-hungry formats such as video, it is likely to have a negative impact on performance and, therefore, on the ability of staff involved in more legitimate pursuits to do their job.

Another risk relates to the potential for downloading inappropriate content. While Simon Jeffreys, a partner at law firm, CMS Cameron McKenna, indicates that liability for downloading and disseminating such material falls on the employee concerned, such a scenario can leave the way open for legal action against their employer too.

He says,”An employer that found out an employee had downloaded and/or disseminated [inappropriate material] would have to notify the police immediately and make strenuous efforts to stop it going to others, including its own staff. You certainly wouldn’t want other employees coming across it lest they be offended and perhaps bring a claim against you.”

A consideration of even greater concern, however, is linked to privacy, says Graham Quint, IT manager at Tewkesbury Borough Council. “People shouldn’t use their work address or contact details on these sites as it makes them a potential target for phishing,” he says. “There are also security holes that have been exposed in these systems and their privacy policies leave a bit to be desired. FaceBook, for example, only disables an account after someone wants to leave rather than deleting it.”

Ken Munro, managing director at penetration testing house, Secure Test, agrees. He says, “People have always disclosed too much information on the internet but sites like FaceBook have made the problem much worse in that the standard configuration allows anyone to view your profile.”

The concern is that snippets of information made available here and there can all too easily be pieced together and linked back to individual organisations using profiling tools such as Paterva’s Maltego.

Moreover, if a staff member puts their work e-mail address on such sites, it means that there are clues to the account name, so that malicious individuals can probably work out the password or use social engineering to get the information, leaving the corporate network vulnerable to attack.

So what can IT directors do about these worrying scenarios? According to Donal Casey, there are two options, both of which generate their own pros and cons - the first is simply to ban access to such sites outright and the second is to introduce acceptable usage policies.

One company that went down the former route is Graypen, an agency that looks after the interests of ship and tanker owners when their boats are in port. The organisation employs about 135 staff in 24 offices around the UK, but was experiencing bandwidth problems even though it had just invested heavily in upgrading its network and Citrix-based server infrastructure and had also introduced ADSL broadband links.

David Scott, IT manager at Graypen, explains, “People were saying that their systems were running slowly, but we couldn’t understand why because everything was brand new. After we’d checked the servers though, we realised that it was down to internet activity. The problem is that if half the office is downloading videos from YouTube and the other half is working, everyone gets frustrated.”

Unfortunately, however, he found acceptable usage policies ineffectual. “Even though we had a policy, we had no way of enforcing it. People just delete their cookies and history and, as soon as you walk through the door, they get off the site. So you can have all of the best practices in the world, but if you’ve no way of enforcing or controlling them, they’re worthless.”

As a result, following a conversation with a colleague at another company, he decided to trial Bloxx’s web filtering technology for 14 days. But after as little as 24 hours, Scott had enough activity data to do something about it, and took a report to the managing director.

The most frequently accessed web sites were eBay, the MSN Hotmail e-mail system, the Paypal ecommerce payment system and social networking sites, “which were the killers” because “people were downloading videos and big pictures that were taking up bandwidth and degrading our terminal services”.

Scott says, “Nearly 100 people were involved at all levels of the company and after looking at the results, the MD just said ‘block the lot’. It was a short, sharp shock and it wasn’t a popular move, but it really worked. If people complained, we just pointed out that they weren’t happy if the network ran slowly and this was the only way to sort it out, which they accepted.”

While such action is understandable given Graypen’s particular set of circumstances, Casey points out that this approach would not necessarily work for all organisations.

“A lot of companies use social networking sites for recruitment and supply chain activities these days so there are acceptable business uses being made of this technology, particularly by young folk coming into employment who are used to it. So you have to be careful with blanket bans,” he says.

Such considerations also apply to professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, which are likely to diverge increasingly from their social networking counterparts, believes Ian Blatchford, a partner at consultancy RSM Bentley Jennison.