Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday.
A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.
Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes–voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.
Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.
But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years, Tancer said. continue reading…
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Tag: Web 2.0Many web applications written using the popular AJAX programming technique are vulnerable to a JavaScript hijacking attack, security company Fortify Software has claimed.
Fortify said that the “pervasive and critical vulnerability” is present in 11 of the 12 most popular AJAX frameworks, and therefore in many Web 2.0 applications. It allows an attacker to pose as the application’s user and intercept data sent via JavaScript commands, by using the
<script>tag to circumvent the ‘same origin policy’ imposed by web browsers.“JavaScript Hijacking appears to be a ubiquitous problem,” said Fortify. It claimed that only Direct Web Remoting (DWR) 2.0, a project which dynamically generates Java classes on the server from JavaScript, is immune to the attack, but said that fixes are available or feasible for other AJAX frameworks.
It added that even if apps do not use any of the vulnerable AJAX frameworks directly, they could be at risk if they contain AJAX components that use JavaScript as a data transfer method. continue reading…
The historical trend for modern technologies has been innovation first, attempts at commercialization second and, inevitably, security breaches third (if not earlier). The Internet accelerated that cycle to new heights even in the days of early dial-up access, as Kevin Mitnick showed the world, and the Web has since produced all manner of hacks, viruses, malware, phishing and other threats. It only makes sense to expect more of the same in the openness of social networking.
This mass medium, more than any other, reflects all strata and sectors of society–good and bad. And just as is the case in brick-and-mortar neighborhoods, it’s naturally prudent to be aware of potential risks and to take reasonable precautions against virtual attacks. But perhaps the most important lesson from real life is not to panic.