Pipe & Dropify, Two Apps That Could Change Facebook Forever

January 22, 2013 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Digital Media, Mobile Phones, P2P technology, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Pipe & Dropify, Two Apps That Could Change Facebook ForeverSharing content through Facebook is easy as pie, but there’s more to it than just photos and YouTube links. Pipe and Dropify, two web applications dedicated to online social interaction, are about to change the way we “facebook”.

Pipe is a yet to be released application that will allow Facebook users to share/send files (music, video content, photos, etcetera) of up to 1GB in size. The transfer, according to the company’s claims, is going to be secure and in real-time.

The other web application, Dropify, was founded in Cologne back in May 2011 by Alex Heilmann, Mike Lieser and Chris Striepecke. Through it Facebook users can publish and explore files, including .PDF and .doc files, audio and video content, archives, and so on.

“Dropify is a fun way for people to both publish and discover awesome free files. Traditional file downloads have very limited visibility. With dropify, people share the download activity with their friends on their timeline and news feed. With more than one billion people who use Facebook each month, this results in major coverage, while people discover new artists, brands, and other content creators they have never heard of before,” Dropify’s official website reads.

The application is compatible with mobile devices and features drag-and-drop capabilities, embedding, monitoring, and more.

Furthermore, Dropify could help developers and content creators to get noticed by creating an activity feed whenever (their) files are downloaded, thus making the links go viral on Facebook.

Although the service is free, one can also opt for a subscription of $9 to $99 a month and enjoy the application’s extra features.

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Facebook Brings File-Sharing Feature For All Groups

May 15, 2012 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

No less than a month ago Facebook launched Groups for Schools; now they’ve enabled file-sharing for all groups.

The number one social network (Facebook) is now offering the ability to send files to all groups. This update will become available to everyone the following days. If you can’t access this feature yet, Facebook wants you to know that you’ll have it “soon”, a Mashable report reads.

Facebook’s “Groups for Schools” was launched a month ago and enables anyone with an .edu e-mail address to share files.

Users can upload common file types of up to 25MB, the exceptions being music files and executable files. E-books, comics, music videos and other small movies are green.

To prevent the spread of malicious, inappropriate or copyrighted files, “users can report files the same way they can with other content across the site,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

More than 380 million people use Facebook Groups, and enabling file-sharing was one of the most common requests from groups’ users, the spokesperson said.

This is how the new file-sharing feature is going to look:

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Facebook Releases “Groups for Schools”

April 17, 2012 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Facebook has recently launched a collaborative campus tool called “Groups for Schools”. At the moment only U.S. colleges and universities (soon to include worldwide institutions) can create groups related to their activities (dorms, classes, student events).

Back in Facebook’s early years Mark Zuckerberg attempted to launch a file-sharing service called Wirehog, and failed, but did not give up. Yesterday Facebook came out with yet another feature – Groups for Schools. As part of this program, students can upload files, but Facebook included some limits: you cannot send any .exe files (from obvious reasons – to avoid viruses spread), and a 25MB upload limit. Lastly, Facebook is going to monitor all uploads in order to avoid copyrighted files from getting shared.

The fact that Facebook bought the file-sharing service Drop.io in 2010 could be a hint that Zuckerberg is planning out a cloud-based service, but we may be wrong.

And since we’ve mentioned Zuckerberg’s failed project Wirehog, let’s get a little into that. Wirehog was part of Facebook until 2006, when Sean Parker shut down the program so that Facebook stays online and far from copyright infringement lawsuits.

Groups for Schools may just revive one key section that Facebook lost during the years. Anything posted within this group can be accessed only by students who use their .edu e-mails in order to authenticate, a key feature if you don’t want your future employer to see compromising pictures of you at some party.

Lastly, Groups for Businesses could be a project in Facebook’s agenda, so companies like Yammer or Google should get busy pretty fast. More news about this as soon as we find out.

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Google, Facebook and Zynga, Ally against SOPA

November 17, 2011 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues 

In an attempt to stop the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga and other web companies have sent a letter (pdf) to important members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, saying that the act “pose[s] a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.”

The letter’s aim was to underline the dangers within the SOPA act before entering the hearing held by the House Judiciary committee on the 16th of November. eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL and LinkedIn are just few of the web companies that signed the letter, asking politicians to “consider more targeted ways to combat foreign ‘rogue’ Web sites.”

If SOPA passes through and becomes law, it can send “rogue” sites into oblivion by simply erasing them from the face of the Internet. The key word here is of course “rogue”, as it’s still unclear which websites are to be considered a liability and which not.

The announcement of the hearing makes Lamar Smith’s (House Judiciary Chairman) position clear; it reads that SOPA reflects a bipartisan “commitment toward ensuring that law enforcement and job creators have the necessary tools to protect American intellectual property from counterfeiting and piracy.” Among supporters of the bill we can find Republican or Democratic leaders of the House and Senate committees, America’s Union Movement or AFL-CIO, and the US labor union Teamsters.

Trying to gag the voice of freedom Mr. Smith repeatedly refused to invite EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) and other opposing groups to the hearing as he needs no counter-arguments to the legislation; those invitations were sent instead to the MPAA, AFL-CIO and Pfizer. However, Google will be the only company speaking at this hearing against SOPA, a tactical advantage from which the supporters of the bill may benefit.

The web companies’ letter will let Katherine Oyama (Google’s policy counsel) prove that the opposing voice is louder than they think. A press briefing was also held this morning inside the Capitol Visitors Center complex, with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) being invited to speak on the SOPA issues.

CNet updates show that letters keep coming in. Members of Congress have sent a letter of their own (pdf), signed by Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo, both California Democrats, and Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate from Texas, among others. In their letter, they say that SOPA will invite “an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation.” They’re not the only one writing anti-SOPA letters. Other civil-liberties and left-leaning advocacy groups (Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands, the Electronic Frontier Finland, Reporters Without Borders, and US’s Free Press and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) are speaking their mind, saying that “through SOPA, the United States is attempting to dominate a shared global resource.”

Last but not least, a letter (pdf) signed by law professors, including Stanford’s Mark Lemley, Elon’s David Levine, Temple’s David Post, and UCLA’s Eugene Volokh was written, warning that SOPA “has grave constitutional infirmities, potentially dangerous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, and will undermine United States foreign policy and strong support of free expression on the Internet around the world.”

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Facebook Malware on P2P Networks

August 19, 2011 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Originating back in 2008, BOOKFACE (anagram for Facebook) is a computer worm that targeted popular social-networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Recently the worm has spread among the file-sharing community as well, by infiltrating and infecting torrent files posted on famous trackers.

TorrentFreak’s report on the worm reveals how it actually works. By using an already infected computer, KOOBFACE sends messages containing malicious links to Facebook users. Instead of, let’s say, playing a video the person who clicks the link would be redirected to a fake update link for Adobe Flash Player and thus becoming infected if he’s unwise enough to fall for the hoax. Then the computer would be affected by various malware that block its access to certain websites (such as anti-virus vendors) and even have its license keys stolen.

Trend Micro (http://blog.trendmicro.com/koobface-propagates-via-torrent-p2p-file-sharing/) posted new information on this worm as it chews its way through the file-sharing community. According to them, KOOBFACE appears as a “loader” by using fake torrents. Once the “loader” – WORM_KOOBFACE.AV – targets and infects your machine it then runs in the background as a fake uTorrent version. The fake client then downloads several dangerous files onto your computer.

“The shift from concentrating on propagating through social networks to torrent P2P networks may be a result of the efforts by the targeted social networks to prevent the KOOBFACE botnet from abusing their framework,” says Trend Micro’s Senior Threat Researcher Jonell Baltazar.

“Despite this change, users should be aware that the KOOBFACE gang has not stopped in coming up with schemes to infect users’ systems. They are simply looking for other means to do so.”

A list of the infected torrent files has been posted by Trend Micro. Here’s a part of it:

65_Silent_Scream_The_Dancer.torrent
67_Dark_Ritual.torrent
68_Celtic_Lore_Sidhe_Hills.torrent
69_Lightroom.torrent
71_SystemCare.torrent
72_Voodoo_Whisperer.torrent
73_Allore_And_The_Broken_Portal.torrent
74_Secret_of_Hildegards.torrent
75_Mystery_Chronicles.torrent
76_Magical_Mysteries.torrent
WinrRAR_4_Beta_7.torrent

A guide about how to avoid being infected has been posted by TorrentFreak.

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