Twitter investors may be speculating about the value of social-networking sites, but no one is speculating about their popularity.In the U.S. alone, the number of minutes people spend on social-networking sites has increased 83 percent year over year, according to Nielsen Online. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year over year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the number-one social-networking site for the month.
“We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space,” said Jon Gibs, vice president of online media and agency insights for Nielsen.
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June 3rd, 2009
Apple has issued patches for its QuickTime and iTunes software. The patches fix critical vulnerabilities and a bug that was partially revealed in a book, The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, by Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, released in March.In all, the updates fix 10 QuickTime vulnerabilities and one bug in iTunes. The flaws affect Windows and Mac users alike. The patches came bundled in the QuickTime 7.6.2 and iTunes 8.2 releases Apple published on Monday.
According to security 
researchers, most of the flaws were not yet known before Monday. Attackers would have to craft new exploits to target unpatched machines in order to cause damage, but plenty of damage could be done if an attacker were to succeed in exploiting one of the security flaws.
“If left unpatched, the security holes could be exploited by hackers who could create a booby-trapped movie or audio file, programmed to execute malicious code on computers,” said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos.
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June 3rd, 2009
