Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek Privacy Security

Fake Linkedin Profiles Worryingly More Difficult to Spot

As others have mentioned, Fake Profiles Are Killing LinkedIn’s Value. The few fake invites I receive are generally easily to spot, for example because they use a private e-mailaddress from a known spam-domain such as mail dot ru, or because the profile is filled with spelling errors.

Today was different. Peter Fleischmann, CEO of the German consulting company FIMAD GmbH, invited me to contact him. He looks like an agreeable kind of guy, as you can judge for yourself from this screen capture of his Linkedin profile:

The good looking "Peter Fleishmann"
The good looking “Peter Fleishmann”

Peter’s profile looked okay to me. Granted, I didn’t know the guy personally, but as a journalist it’s often impossible to remember whom I’ve been in contact with through e-mail, chat, at a conference or on a social network.

Generally I do not connect with people I do not remember at all, but since Peter had 500+ connections, was a paying Linkedin Premium-member, which sets you back between 226 and 899 euros a year (sales tax not included), and even shared one connection with me (whom shall remain unnamed), I decided to accept his invite.

A few minutes later, I received this Linkedin message from dear Peter:

A subtle offer from Peter
A subtle offer from Peter

A subtle offer indeed. This screams spam, phishing, I know not what.

Dr. Morris Chang and TSMC are very much real, but I sincerely doubt that the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. would want me to contact him through his gmail.com address, which he probably doesn’t even have, and use the CEO of a small German consultancy company as an intermediate.

A reverse image search gives the scam away. “Peter Fleischmann” uses the picture of Dr. Shaun C. Williams, an endocrinologist  from Connecticut.

Dr. Shaun Williams bio at RMA of Connecticut
Dr. Shaun Williams bio at RMA of Connecticut

The person(s) responsible for the fake Linkedin profile of “Peter Fleischmann” probably stole his picture from Dr. Shaun’s bio at RMA.

Dr. Shaun's Facebook profile
Dr. Shaun’s Facebook profile

I responded to Peter and asked him to give me some more details about his “subtle offer”, but I haven’t heard back from him. I do not dare to send a message to the fake gmail-address, so the precise nature of this “offer” shall remain a mystery to me.

You can report profiles with inaccurate employment or education information, or a profile that is impersonating someone with the Linkedin Notice of Inaccurate Profile Information form. I have done this for “Peter Fleischmann” and am awaiting Linkedin’s reaction.

According to Facebook, between 5,5 and 11,2 percent of its members are fake. Linkedin hasn’t reported such statistics, but if the same ratio applies and based on Linkedin’s 300 million plus-user base, between 16,5 and 33,6 million of its users are fake.

We know now that some of these users are even paying members of Linkedin, which is worrying to say the least…

Update: the fake profile has been removed:

Fake profile removed
Fake profile removed
Categorieën
Internet

De oorsprong van het woord lynchen

Weinig mensen weten dat acteur Michael Caine auteur is van enkele amusante boekjes met feiten die weinig mensen weten. Ik weet sinds gisterenavond ook iets dat weinig mensen weten. Het woord “lynchen” gaat terug op Willie Lynch, een 18de eeuwse slaveneigenaar die er heel eigen methodes op na hield om opstandige slaven te onderdrukken (zoals ze te vierendelen terwijl hun vrouw en kinderen toekeken). Dit weinig gekende feit weet ik dan weer na het bekijken van de uitstekende en zelfs emotionele film The Great Debaters (2007) van en met Denzel Washington. MAAR… nu blijkt dit weinig gekende “feit” gewoon een hoax te zijn, althans volgens de Engelse wikipedia. Wat niet betekent dat slaven niet ernstig werden mishandeld of zelfs gelyncht als ze niet “braaf” waren… het blijft me voorlopig onduidelijk waar het woord lynchen écht vandaan komt.

Categorieën
Internet

Personal digital disorder

Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft. I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It’s tragic. As chief executive of the British Library, it’s my job to ensure that this does not extend to our national memory.

Lynne Brindley, baas van de British Library, in The Guardian. Jason Scott drukt hetzelfde sentiment iets plastischer uit op zijn (overigens slecht leesbare) blog:

So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek

Are sixteen minutes that important?

We reported it on Twitter exactly 4 minutes AFTER it actually happened, without any crew at the scene or nearby. (It took local media some 20 minutes more to my information..)

Michael van Poppel writing about his popular twitter-newsservice @BreakingNewsOn. Technically, he and his growing team can and do beat many traditional news outlets in speed. (Mainly thanks to 24/7 monitoring of all 750 local US news affiliates.) The question remains: are those 16 minutes (20 minus 4) that important? Important enough to make money out of it? No question such a service costs money to run and maintain. No question is it is valuable to some. But I think you never can monetize it enough to cover the cost, or even make a profit. And if you can, the big guns will jump in and crush the little guys. Just my 2 cts and I hope I’m wrong.

Categorieën
Internet Journalistiek

Maakt dat mee…

Dan werk je bij het enige IT-weekblad van het land en dan blokkeert je werkgever Facebook (en andere sociale netwerksites)?

Het wordt hier hoe langer hoe leuker met die it-guys. Misschien moeten we maar eens een stukje schrijven over hoe it-journalisten nuttige informatie – ja zelfs nieuws – halen uit Facebook en andere sociale netwerken.

En ‘to add insult to injury’ zijn de mailboxen van de werknemers ook nog eens beperkt tot een paar honderd megabyte. Gmail geeft ondertussen gratis aan iedereen die het wil tot 8 GB weg… tja…