Social networking drives cyber squatting

Businesses using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter do not have enough protection against damaging “cyber-squatters”, online business network Ecademy has warned, writes Kate Horstead, in is4profit.

According to Ecademy, fraudsters are taking advantage of inadequate verification procedures on some social networking sites, and cyber-squatting.

This is a process where fraudsters set up accounts with similar names to existing members, and use them to express opinions or release false information that can damage that individual's reputation.

EBay Australia marks its 10th anniversary Down Under, having sold more than 173 million items at a rate of one item every 1.8 seconds, reports AustralianIT.

The site has gravitated from an auction-based collectables seller to an online shopping mecca, now contributing about $2.6 billion to Australia's GDP, eBay Australia says.

More than 52 700 Australians now make a primary or secondary income out of eBay, while 5.79 million unique visitors were recorded in September this year. The site now has eight million registered users, up from 9 000 in 1999.

YouTube is now serving one billion videos a day to clip-happy Internet users, says Computing.co.uk.

Chad Hurley, chief executive and co-founder of YouTube, said in a blog post that the milestone represented a great moment in the firm's short history.

"Three years ago today [YouTube co-founder] Steve [Chen] and I stood in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the 'burger kings' of media," read the post. "We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organising the world's information (in our case video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere.