China: Large hacker training Web site shut down

Washington (CNN) -- Police in China shut down what officials think was the largest training Web site for computer hackers, local media said.

The Black Hawk Safety Net offered lessons on cyber attacks and sold Trojan software, which allows outside access to a computer when remotely installed, media reports said.

Police arrested three people who ran the Web site and charged 100 to 200 yuan ($14 to $29) for lessons, the China Daily newspaper said.

Established in 2005, the site had recruited more than 12,000 paid and 170,000 free members and collected more than 7 million yuan ($1.02 million) in membership fees, the reports said.

Authorities were tipped off to its existence while investigating a cyber attack in 2007. Some suspects arrested in that case were members of Black Hawk.

The suspects in the Black Hawk case were arrested under a law revised last year in response to cyber crimes.

China says hackers caused 7.6 billion yuan ($1.02 billion) in losses in the country last year.

Last month, online search giant Google threatened to pull out of China, saying Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering.

China's information information technology ministry called the accusations of government involvement "groundless."

The Chinese government has said that the Google case is a business dispute and should not affect relations between Beijing and Washington.

Last month, foreign correspondents in at least two Chinese bureaus of news organizations had their Google e-mail accounts attacked, with e-mails forwarded to a mysterious address, according to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China.

Credit: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/08/china.hackers/index.html

Google searches getting more social

(CNN) -- Google's move to include social networking information in its searches has gotten personal.

The search-engine giant has announced that, with a few tweaks, people using Google can now see search results related to friends, co-workers and other members of their social networks above all other results.

The Social Search feature was introduced to a limited number of Google users last year and was made available to everyone in beta status this week.

"This is just a first step in our ongoing effort to ensure that Google Web search is always as social as the Web itself," the company said in an instructional video posted to its official blog.

Watch the Google instructional video on how to use Social Search.

The tool requires a Google account. Then, a user can link their profile to friends and family via their blogs or profiles on networking sites like Twitter.

The world's largest social-networking site may prove tricky, though. Many of Facebook's roughly 350 million users responded to Google's addition of results from the site by tightening their privacy settings. The result is that Google -- and other search engines -- can only access people's public profile pages, which usually don't have much information.

If they choose, Facebook users and administrators of Facebook groups and fan pages can adjust their privacy settings to make their data accessible to others on the Web.

When searching, a Google user can now click a link -- "My Social Circle" -- to bring up anything members of the user's network had written or otherwise posted on that topic.

The user would be able to add or remove people from their profile.

In its blog, Google said that enabling Social Search could make results more valuable because they come from sources that the user trusts.

"We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface," Google said in the blog post.

Google's move comes as some of the Web's most popular sites are moving to make user experiences more personal.

Last week, Twitter changed its "Suggestions" list, moving away from celebrities and major media outlets to rotating lists of experts in various fields that users may find interesting.

The site also allows users to switch away from the site's top trending topics and instead view the most popular discussions among people who live in their area.

"[D]oes Twitter really want to serve up celebrity musings and general interest news, or would it rather provide the most interesting information streams to individuals -- reflecting our interests, perhaps, or helping us to connect with friends and local happenings?"

Mashable.com founder and CEO Pete Cashmore said this week in a column for CNN.com. "Late last week, Twitter provided the answer: Celebrities aren't for everyone."

Credit: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/29/google.social.search/index.html