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iPhotoCap App Review

1st August 2012 Leave a reply Steve August

I want to preface this review by saying that I have been creating memes for years on my computer, and just now started looking into going mobile with it. The iPhotoCap application came up as one of the captioning tools, so I decided to download it.

After downloading a score of applications that make you put captions exactly where they tell them to, it is extremely refreshing to have an application that gives some kind of freedom to put captions where you want, on any image that you have currently, can take or can download. I had originally just been looking for a meme editor, but after finding this I can think of more useful ways to use a captioning tool for creative and thoughtful messages.

Now before, I send off a picture of me giving a goofy face, I make sure that I accompany it with an equally ridiculous caption.

Something doesn’t have to be complicated to be good. So many times I have come across applications that you need to study and dissect for hours before being able to do the basic functions that it has to offer.

The iPhotoCap is comparatively easy-to-use. It does all the heavy lifting so you can do all the fun creative work. Social sharing has become a basic feature for these kind of apps and iPhotoCap too has the ability to share your works via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram.

It also allows you to email and text your newly captioned images for anyone you know to enjoy (or in my case, they are annoyed at 3am when they receive a message of the worst face I can make with a crazy caption).

I did download this program with the intent of making memes out of it to post onto memebase.com, so I would definitely like to see some kind of ability to integrate to websites or something of that nature.

I have already sent it over to everyone I know using an iOS device and hope to find a similar app for Android so that I can get that on my tablet. Without a doubt, iPhotoCap deserves a try if you want to create creative captions for any of your images.

Is there really that much diversity on the internet?

7th July 2012 8 Replies Christopher Roberts

The internet is big right? Okay it is massive. With that massiveness one naturally associates extreme diversity. Don’t get me wrong, across the entire internet, there is amazing variation, with billions of people adding their spin to the net.

What I am going to investigate in this post though is how diverse the ‘main’ internet is. What I mean by that is the internet that we use every day. How diverse is the most regularly used/visited content? Is there really as much choice as we think, or is the majority of the internet dominated by a few firms?

In order to go about this research I am going to use Alexa, who gather statistics on websites traffic. For most sites, the data isn’t that accurate, however for really busy sites, the numbers are so great, the reliability of the data is much higher, hence why I can use it.

Google

According to Alexa, Google.com is the most visited site on the web. How could it not be? Alexa estimates that 50% of all internet users visited Google.com in the last three months. Second on the list for most visited sites is Facebook, which is trailing with just 45% of internet users visiting the site.

Remember however that is just Google.com, Google has a massive monopoly over the internet. In the 100 most visited sites on the web, 18 of the sites are owned by Google – 16 localised sites, Google.com and GoogleUserContent.com (the site you see when there is an error finding/displaying a page).

Google undoubtedly has reduced diversity on the internet, having such a monopoly on the sites we all visit. The thing is, it isn’t just 18 sites. Google also owns YouTube and (the third most visited site on the net) Blogspot which is ranked 10th, Blogger at 47 (Blogger and Blogspot are now one) and Blogspot.in (India) ranked 73. That means 21 of the most visited sites on the net belong to Google, meaning it owns more than one fifth of the ‘main’ internet.

Google’s dominance on the web suggests that a lot of us are Googlites!

Can you call the internet diverse, when in the top one hundred sites, one firm owns more than a fifth of all sites? Maybe, what does the rest of the field look like?

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, the company that is arguable Google’s main rival is in second place. Yahoo and Microsoft are currently in a ‘Search Alliance’ therefore restricting competition, so I am going to count them in the list of sites that Microsoft owns/influences. Here is the list of sites that Microsoft owns/influences which are top 100 websites:

Yahoo.com – Ranked 3rd
Live.com – Ranked 7th
Yahoo.co.jp – Ranked 16th
MSN.com – Ranked 17th
Bing.com – Ranked 29th
Microsoft.com – Ranked 30th – ironic how it is lower many of the other sites it owns!
Flickr.com – Ranked 53rd and Yahoo owned

Therefore Microsoft own/influence 7 of the top 100 sites. Add that to Google’s 21, and 28 of the top sites on the net are owned by two firms. More than a quarter.

I am starting to think the ‘main’ internet is not as diverse as one may first assume.

Amazon

Next on the list of internet giants comes Amazon. Amazon.com is ranked 10th, whilst Amazon Germany (Amazon.de) is ranked 91st and Amazon Japan (Amazon.co.jp) is 95th. Amazon also owns the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) which is the 50th most visited site. Amazon owns 4 of the top 100 sites.

32 sites gone.

Alibaba Group

The Alibaba Group is a privately owned Chinese business, which owns Alibaba.com, Tmall (tmall.com), Taobao (Taobao.com) and Sogou.com. The group therefore account for four of the sites that make up what I am calling the ‘main internet’.

36 sites taken by just 4 companies. How diverse is our internet?

eBay

Next we come to eBay.com which sits 23rd on the list of top 100 sites. eBay International AG (ebay.de) is in 80th place, followed by eBay UK (ebay.co.uk) in 86th. eBay also owns PayPal (paypal.com) which is ranked 46th.

eBay steals another 4 sites, leaving just 60 of our hundred left, and so far only 5 firms are involved.

Time Warner

CNN (cnn.com) AOL (aol.co.uk) and The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) are all sites owned by Time Warner. Time Warner is the sixth business involved now, leaving just 57 sites.

WordPress

The blogging platform WordPress (wordpress.com) is ranked 19th, and its brother, which allows users to host the content management system on their own site (wordpress.org) is ranked 83rd.

There goes another two sites, meaning just 55 left, and only seven players so far.

Twitter

Ranked number 8 on the list is Twitter, however its URL shortener (t.co) is ranked 31st, meaning Twitter is also one of the big players in the top 100 sites, arguably with some form of domination over the internet.

47 sites of the top 100 accounted for and a mere eight organisations involved.

The Rest

Of the final 53 sites, 5 are adult only sites leaving 48 sites – although many of these either are a part of, or are a much bigger group.

Some familiar faces appear in the other 48 sites, Facebook (2nd), Wikipedia (6th), LinkedIn (11th), Apple (34th), Tumblr (37th), Pinterest (47th), BBC Online (48th), Ask (54th), AVG (62nd), Adobe Systems Incorporated (67th), About.com (81st), ESPN (82nd), Go Daddy (85th), Netflix (89th), The Pirate Bay (92nd) and CNET (97th).

Remove these very well known, well established, and massive brands, and we are left with 32 sites – less than a third. Of the remaining sites, around half are Chinese, showing the growing influence and usage of the internet in China.

My Verdict

In this post I have established that of the sites we visit most regularly, 47 are owned by just eight organisations. Does that really represent the freedom that we all believe the internet offers?

I was surprised by the type of content, and the limited number of different sites that there are in the global top 100. It would seem that the most visited sites consist of search engines, social media sites and news websites. Interesting statistics.

So, what is your verdict on how diverse the internet we use everyday is? I personally am not quite as convinced as I was before writing this article that the internet is quite as free and diverse as we all believe.

Please note these rankings are changing all the time, and all content was correct according to Alexa.com at the time of writing – the 6th of July 2012.

5 Reason Why Phishing Is Still A Popular Trick

14th July 2011 18 Replies Alan

Phishing had been widely used at least half a decade ago but it still remains as one of the popular method to scam internet users. Just recently, thousands of Tumblr bloggers were affected by a phishing attack which caused their credentials such as username, passwords, and email addresses to be stolen. Many of us might still be wondering why there are so many victims out there even though we had been taught from time to time to stay aware of a phishing scam. There are five reasons here why phishing is still a popular trick and below are the reasons.

#1 – It tricks the victim with fear.

One of the most common method is to trick the victim by sending them an email and tell them that their internet banking account is being compromised and need to click on a link to resolve the issue. Once the user followed the link, the user will be redirected to some forged website that looks similar to the banking website which requires the user to input his/her username and password. Once that form is sent, all the data will be transmitted to the attacker controlled server. Users who have a large amount of cash in their banking account will be scared to see this mail and some of them will follow the mail to avoid their account being compromised.

#2 – It tricks the victim with special interest.

Some scammers use the scenario such as winning lottery or viewing adult material to create a temptation for the victim to click on a link that redirects to the phishing site. Just recently, Tumblr bloggers were asked to re-verify their accounts by entering the username and password in order to continue and view the adult content. At times, it is not always money related issue can relate to phishing scam, but also special interest as mentioned can relate to a phishing scam.

A typical scam: a persuader is put out, but just as you grip hold of it, the trap snaps shut on you

#3 – It is not a rocket science technology.

Phishing attack involves creating a forged website and it might be difficult to certain people. However if it is to compare to hacking a banking server, creating a forged website is not that complicated. Therefore many novice or intermediate scammers will choose to use the phishing method over any other method in their hacking project. In short, phishing is not mainly about technical skills but it is also about how good the hacker in luring his victim into a trap.

#4 – It can be launched via many types of communication channel.

Phishing can happen not only by simply building a forged website and anticipate for the victim to come to you. It can also involve sending emails to the victims to lure them to the forged website. Besides that, a phishing scam uses as well the manipulation of a URL and post it as a comment or forum to trick them to the forged website. Apart from using the computer knowledge to lure the victim, phishing can also be done via phone calls. The conclusion is this type of scam can be done via multiple channels and multiple techniques.

#5 – Compromising one account is not the end.

After stealing one’s credentials is not the end, but it can be the beginning. Why is it so? Internet users nowadays have many online accounts for instance Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In common, most users will use the same username and password for each of the account so that remembering them is not an issue. Hence this can lead to the users’ credentials that had been stolen can be used as well for other accounts by the scammers.

In conclusion, phishing can be an old technology but it is not an out-dated technology. There are still countless internet users who fell for this old technology. To have a better IT security, we should always stay focus and caution when using the internet and pay extra attention when something unusual occurred.

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