One night, I was thinking of loosing some weight. Turns out, in the past three years, I’ve been “saving” almost 15 pounds, so I decided it’s time to do something about this.
Since I am such a prolific Twitterer, I published my decision there:
Now check what I received in a couple of minutes:
Now… this is way to cool man! Targeted commercials on twitter! This is even better than the commercials twitter will use :p.
The next day, this tweet was gone (maybe I have something to do with this since I replied to his tweet (phishing?)). The next day I did the same experiment: “test no. 2: I want to lose weight”.
Guess what:
1. PhD Thesis
2. Twitter, Blog and SNS Spam Solutions
3. Some Patents
4. I do have some management and presentation skills that have to be improved 
5. Driving License
6. I think its time to play some tennis (from 0 h/month to 2 h/month)
7. Twitt & Blog more!
In the menu:
1. Tweet Spam Ex. “Hey man, check this out”
2. TrackBack (let’s call it trackback for now) spam. Ex: “Dude! You Rock! @catalincosoi” (supposing i will follow the guy who said i rock! – twitter will notify me when tweets containing @catalincosoi will appear in the network)
3. Follow Spam ( X starts to follow me hoping that I will follow back – usually 7 out of 10 followers get a follow back response)
4. Trending Subjects Spam (MJ dies, the world starts tweeting on this subject, spammers retweet MJ related tweets but with different URLs).
For points 2 and 3: Once you follow a spammer, you can either get spam tweets or direct spam messages.
by the way: follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/CatalinCosoi
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import twitter
import time
api = twitter.Api()
api = twitter.Api(username=’my_twitter_username’, password=’my_twitter_password’)
users = api.GetFriends()
done = [];
todo = [];
done.append(“my_twitter_username”);
for u in users:
todo.append(u.name);
print u.name;
while (len(todo) > 0):
s = todo.pop();
while (s in done):
s = todo.pop();
users = api.GetFriends(s);
for u in users:
todo.append(u.name);
print s, len(users);
logfile = open(‘twitter.out’, ‘a’)
logfile.write(str(s)+” – “+str(len(users))+”\n”);
logfile.close();
done.append(s);
time.sleep(1)
Almost finished my paper for this year’s Virus Bulletin Conference. Turns out, I will be presenting Friday 25 September.
Web 2.0 is all about social networks. It’s all about user interaction, simplicity and usability. Content is submitted, reviewed and downloaded by users only. For many, this can be considered the definition of freedom – but where few laws apply, many bad things can happen. Each social network represents a single or group of entities (networks).
Each of these networks have a scale-free property and their degree distribution follows a power-law, or in other words each of these networks is a social fractal – a network that scales up and down with equal facility. In this social fractal, information distribution follows different patterns and new connections are added by using simple mathematical rules.
This paper will try to approach the spam detection problem in an innovative way, especially social network spam, by using fractal network properties. We will show different methods for finding anomalies in these fractal patterns and ways to use these features for security purposes. Further on, the developed methods will allow us to identify unwanted profiles, unsolicited messages, undesired malware and provide phishing protection.
Look what the cat dragged in! 
