Social networking to replace e-mail

According to Gartner, the business benefits of social software platforms will lead to e-mail being replaced as the primary means of communication by 2014, says Computing.co.uk.

Increasing business use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook has resulted in more demand for such systems, says the firm, which predicts that 20% of organisations will use them as their key communication medium by 2014.

Greater security, the availability of the so-called “white-labelled” social networks and more tolerance from organisations allowing use of personal accounts at work are among the factors influencing the business uptake of such tools, says the study.

Apple's iPhone is vulnerable to exploits that allow an attacker to spoof Web pages even when they're protected by the SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol, writes The Register.

The fault lies in a feature that makes it easy to configure large numbers of iPhones so they meet an organisation's IT policies, says Charlie Miller, a researcher at Independent Security Evaluators. Not only does the provisioning feature work over the Internet, it can be tricked into accepting malicious configuration files.

"If the user accepts, the attacker can make changes to the phone's configuration which can cause harm," Miller says.

A Downing Street petition is calling for the UK government to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and move to a more modern browser, reports the BBC.

The petition says IE6 has security flaws and uses outdated technology, creating a burden for developers.

The petition comes as the Department of Health advised the National Health Service to move away from the old browser.

Twitter had to reset the passwords of a small number of accounts compromised in an external phishing attack, states PC World.

"As part of Twitter's ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite," Twitter wrote in a statement.

Twitter said it took the security action because of a "combination of multiple bad acts". One, it believes, is accounts being compromised by Twitter users signing up for what it described as "get followers fast schemes" luring people to a non-Twitter site.