Associated Press hacked

On Tuesday the official website of the Associated Press was overtaken by the Syrian Electronic Army, shocking the cyberspace. The first tweet sent by the hackers was “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured”. Within a few hours of this tweet, the AP sent out a message from its Facebook account, informing users; “Please do not respond to news posted there in the last 20 minutes.” The account in the meantime had been suspended by Twitter.

Tell-tale signs that the Tweet was a hoax included; the language of the tweet, which was out of the company’s signature AP style; the word “breaking” was not capitalized; AP typically refers to Obama with the term “President” before his name; the tweet came directly from the web, and the company usually uses the tool Social Flow to send tweets.

Had the Tweet been real, this is what it would have likely looked like:

Image source: Mashable

AP is not the only major organization that has had a security breach, in 2011 organizations such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and Sony became part of the list as well.

Read more about the story here.

**Arguing Emirati’s goes viral **** **

First up, we have a clever little video from Etisalat. We all know how infuriating it is when people start talking during a movie! But what makes this video funny is the fact that from the outset, the viewer is made aware that it is a stunt with an actor and hidden cameras. As the movie starts, the actor obnoxiously answers his mobile, visibly bothering those around him. As his conversation gets louder, an Emirati man steps in and asks him to hang up the phone or leave. As the dispute becomes more animated, the actor stands and pauses the movie, saying “You’ll not miss anything, here you go, pause. No need to get upset – I’ll play it back for you.”

With over 250,000 views in its first week, this video proves that simple is effective. Read more here.

Churnalism

Every day we are exposed to oodles of information and content on the web, and by the end of the day our brains are overloaded with things that aren’t necessarily essential. Ever wondered how much of that information is actually trustworthy? Even credible publications and professional journalists sometimes regurgitate information without giving it a careful vetting, a process often referred to as “Churnalism”.

The Sunlight Foundation has unveiled a tool that will help overcome this. How does it work?

Developed to be an open-source plagiarism detection engine. ‘It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected “churn,” and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side.’

Churnalism will be available both on the website and as a browser extension.

Read more about the story here.

Baby & Me campaign

Evian are rediscovering their “inner baby”. Using the ‘Live Young’ concept from previous campaigns such as ‘Rollerbabies” and “Baby Inside”, the water brand from Danone has returned with this feel-good video showing a group of adults seeing baby versions of themselves in a shop window, then successively dancing with them. The result? Well, see this super-cute cut for yourself.