The Blog of the International Computer Science Institute

Social networks make it easy to instantly share information, photos, and videos online. For many people, this is a fun way to stay up-to-date with friends and family, but they may not realize the privacy implications of all this sharing.

ICSI scientist Gerald Friedland studies cybercasing, the use of online information to mount attacks in the real world, and, and recommends users consider the following before posting anything online.

1. Who can see/read this post? Public posts can be seen by anybody in the world, including your boss, governments, and even criminals. So rethink: Is the post appropriate for any audience?

2. Will my post offend people, and am I okay with the potential results of offending people? If the information in this post is shared with people I didn't anticipate sharing it with, will that cause any problems (for me, or for others mentioned/shown in my post)?

July was a busy month at ICSI. Here are a few highlights:

• Our new visitor program with Singapore was announced, to start in September 2012.
• Chuck Fillmore won the Association for Computational Linguistics's Lifetime Achievement Award.
• Director Roberto Pieraccini was named a 'Speech Luminary' by Speech Technology magazine.
• Our collaboration with Microsoft on human-machine interaction was featured by Network World, Windows IT Pro, Speech Tech Mag, and TMS.net.
• Postdoc Nils Peters won a best paper award at the Sound and Music Computing Conference.
• Our faculty associate, Christos Papadimitriou, was a recipient of the 2012 Gödel Prize.
• Several new papers were published on recent ICSI research - you can browse them here.
• ICSI's annual picnic took place on July 27th in Tilden Park.
• Professor Lotfi Zadeh from UC Berkeley gave a talk at ICSI on July 31st.
• Chuck Wooters returned to ICSI as a senior researcher with the Speech Group.

Spammers who posted almost half a million Twitter messages in order to silence debate over Russia’s election in December likely purchased fraudulent accounts in bulk and posted the tweets from botnets, groups of malware-infected computers under the command of a single person. According to Networking Group researchers, the campaign took advantage of an underground economy based on spam, a phenomenon that researchers are studying in an attempt to improve methods of eliminating spam.