An Independence Day visit to Mashable.com shows that the online world has not yet attained freedom from hackers. The top story is about iTunes accounts being hacked, and another story tells us that YouTube was hacked (and Justin Bieber got the worst of it). Wikipedia went down, which is pretty suspiciously timed. And to top it all off, Lady Gaga beat the President of the United States to 10 million Facebook fans. On the 4th of July? Really?
iTunes hack seems to be related to the high number of Vietnamese book apps appearing as the top- ranked. Mashable reports, “Twitter complaints and a MacRumors forum thread spotted by The Next Web show that a number of iTunes users have had their accounts compromised and used to buy hundreds of dollars of apps. In particular, reviewers of the Vietnamese book apps claim in the app’s reviews section that they never downloaded the apps, and instead had their accounts compromised.”
Over on YouTube, the brouhaha points to Asian nations once again. After a vulnerability was exposed in the site’s comment system, people began adding pop-ups and malicious re-directs to mainly Justin Bieber videos, but others as well. Mashable reports, “Internet community 4chan has been waging a small cultural war against Justin Bieber, and its members exploited the bug to target the artist’s videos specifically. Last week they conspired to try and send Bieber to North Korea.”
Wikipedia seems to have merely had a power outage in their Florida data center, perhaps from all the July 4th searches from Americans brushing up on their history with internet speed. And although President Obama is popular internationally, I guess Lady Gaga has more fans online and on Facebook. At least she’s an American, as is Michael Jackson, who has even more than she does.
Tags: Internet Speed, Social Networking, YouTube