NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 22 December
22-12-2009
by Emmet Cole
FBI probes Citigroup hack: report | Meteor launches SMS customer service
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing an alleged security breach targeting Citigroup that resulted in Russian hackers making off with tens of millions of dollars, reports the Wall Street Journal. Quoting unnamed government officials, the paper says the attack took place -- possibly last summer -- at Citigroup's Citibank subsidiary, which includes its North American retail bank. However, Joe Petro, managing director of Citigroup's Security and Investigative Services, denied any such incident had taken place. "We had no breach of the system and there were no losses, no customer losses, no bank losses […] Any allegation that the FBI is working a case at Citigroup involving tens of millions of losses is just not true," he said.
Irish mobile operator Meteor has announced that it is launching an SMS-based customer service initiative. Built on the Fizzback Engagement Platform developed by software company Fizzback, the system polls every Meteor customer via SMS immediately after a retail transaction in a Meteor store. Customers can respond to the SMS messages with their customer satisfaction rating and opinion of the experience in their own words. The system analyses the SMS content and employs process automation to route the message to the relevant member of Meteor's customer support team.
Budget airline Ryanair has announced that the company will begin accepting Laser card payments online from 31 January 2010. According to Ryanair, MasterCard Prepaid will remain the company's only free form of payment, while other payment methods, including Laser, are subject to the airline's EUR5 administration charges.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has ordered domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration. Domain names that have not been registered with the Chinese government will not be displayed in China, according to MIIT, as part of an ongoing plan purportedly designed to combat online pornography. However, the plan also calls for a so-called whitelist, which would restrict internet access within China to sites that have registered with and been approved by MIIT. The rules don't specify whether the new initiative applies to overseas websites.
A URL shortening service designed especially for the video-sharing site YouTube has been launched. In a blog posting, Google engineering manager Vijay Karunamurthy explained that those who use YouTube's AutoShare feature to link their YouTube account to social networking sites like Twitter and Google Reader can disseminate one of the shortened URLs automatically when they favourite a video on the site. The shortened URL 'http://youtu.be' can also be inserted into links manually, using it to replace the 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' code. Last week, Google announced a URL-shortening feature for its Toolbar and FeedBurner applications. URL shorteners save space on websites such as Twitter, where character counts for status updates are limited.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 