Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Mark Zuckerberg Suggests Kids Under 13 Should Be Allowed On Facebook

May 21st, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

According to a Consumer Reports study, over 7.5 million of Facebook’s users are under 13, a problem Senator Jay Rockefeller recently called “indefensible.” But CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that kids should be allowed on Facebook at a very young age.

In an interview with John Doerr, first reported by Fortune, Zuckerberg said that the future of education will be enabled by technology, including social networks like Facebook. Currently, Facebook does not allow children under 13 to join, which Zuckerberg says is due to the restrictions regarding such members. But according to Fortune, Zuckerberg says he hopes all that will change.

“That will be a fight we take on at some point,” he said. “My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”

Facebook has faced ongoing scrutiny over privacy concerns. In a recent study of 65 participants, all 65 found that they were sharing information through Facebook that they had believed private. Another report, by Symantec, reported that millions of users’ profile information had been leaked through over 100,000 third-party apps. Facebook currently allows users to share home addresses and cellphone numbers with third-party apps.

Alongside privacy problems, Facebook also presents the potential for a variety of other cyber-dangers. Consumer Reports found that over 5 million households had had serious issues on the site, including identity theft, scams, computer viruses, and cyberbullying.

Facebook is also currently being sued for failing to get parental permission before using minors’ personal information in its social ads.

Despite all of this, Zuckerberg promises that if children were allowed on the site, that proper security measures would be taken.

“Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process,” Zuckerberg said. “If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works. We’d take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe.”

source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

  • Facebook’s Zuckerberg wants to let kids under 13 onto site (news.consumerreports.org)
  • Minor controversy: Zuckerberg wants young kids on Facebook (news.cnet.com)
  • Mark Zuckerberg Wants Kids Under 13 To Use Facebook (techie-buzz.com)
  • Zuckerberg: Kids under 13 should be on Facebook (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
  • Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook minimum age limit should be removed (zdnet.com)
  • Zuckerberg Wants Kids Under 13 on Facebook [Blockquote] (gizmodo.com)
  • Kids Under 13 Should Use Facebook, Zuckerberg Says (allfacebook.com)
  • Indianapolis Attorney Named Mark Zuckerberg Cannot Join Facebook (shoppingblog.com)
  • Facebook reportedly disables account of attorney Mark S. Zuckerberg (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
  • Senator Rockefeller confronts Facebook over Consumer Reports findings (news.consumerreports.org)
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Profile Stalkers on Facebook? Check out the viral scam that’s spreading

May 21st, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Another scam is being spammed out across Facebook, tricking users into helping its spread by fooling them into believing they will discover who is secretly viewing their profile.

Using a cartoon image of what appears to be a chimpanzee looking through binoculars,
the messages are being sent from other Facebook users who have already fallen into the trap of clicking on the link and following the scammers‘ instructions.

Clicking on the link contained inside the message (which I have obscured in the screen grab below) is a big mistake, as it takes you one step further into the criminals’ trap.

WICKED! Now you can see who views your facebook profile.. i saw my top profile stalkers and my EX is still creeping my profile every day

Checkout your PROFILE stalkers
[LINK]
Now you can see who stalks your profile daily

If you do click on the link you are taken to a third-party webpage which urges you to cut-and-paste some JavaScript code into your web browser‘s address bar. The page claims that it is your unique code to view your Top 10 Profile Spys – but it’s not true at all.

This is a trick being commonly used by scammers at the moment. If you paste their code into your address bar, it will typically pass the message onto other Facebook users – including your online friends. We recently saw it deployed in a Facebook scam offering a “Dislike” button for instance.

Ultimately scams this typically end up with you being taken to a webpage which asks you to complete a survey – and the scammers earn commission for each survey completed.

Don’t let the scammers make a monkey of you, and don’t risk spreading a scam like this to your online friends.

Source : - http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

 

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‘Traditional Search Is Failing’ – Bing Director Stefan Weitz

May 20th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Most people think about search as a simple series of actions: type in a phrase, cross your fingers it brings up what you need, and then click around a page of blue links till you get what you were looking for.

But Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft‘s search engine Bing, says that we should expect more out of our search experience. He criticizes “traditional” search engines — namely, web giant Google, Bing’s main competitor — for failing to keep up with the changing needs of users by sticking with the the search model they’ve always used, which is based on an algorithm measuring the strength of backlinks.

“When Google launched, they wanted to organize the world’s information, that was their mantra — it still is,” Weitz said in an interview. “It was a great vision that assumed really the web of yore, which is a web of documents, literally pages and the connections. Google’s whole mission was to leverage those connections and say, ‘Okay, I can see that the connection between these two pages is almost as important as the page content itself in defining what these things are about’ — it was a brilliant, brilliant model.”

But what worked ten years ago doesn’t work as well anymore, Weitz said, noting that the amount of information available online today, and the range of activities people seek to do there, have made the simple search that currently exists less effective.

“Search itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in the past 12 years,” he said. “Traditional search is failing. The standard notion of search … looking at the texts in the page, the backlinks, all that stuff doesn’t work
anymore.”

Yet for all the flaws Weitz might find with Google, Bing offers a similar set of features, such as searches keyed to news, images, and maps, as well as the ability to calculate sums, define words, and check the weather. Moreover, Google has maintained its dominance in the search market. It claims 65 percent market share to Bing’s 14 percent — a dominant position that has attracted scrutiny from government regulators, who are investigating whether Google’s search dominance is anti-competitive. Microsoft, itself convicted of antitrust abuses, has supported regulators’ investigation of Google in Europe, and Weitz added that in his estimation, the government probe into Google’s activities is understandable, given Google’s power in the area.

“I think whenever you have a player who has, depending on who you’re looking at, two-thirds of the market, it’s natural for regulators to look into this,” he said. “In Germany they have 98 percent share. It’s natural for folks to just look into what’s going on there. This is a place that controls so many people’s livelihoods, you want to make sure its a level playing field.”

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Google has started to include social results in its search in an attempt to make searches more relevant to users. Its new +1 feature lets users “like” results in search and see when friends and other users have “liked” that result as well. But Weitz said he didn’t think the feature was particularly useful.

“+1 today is only on search results,” he said. “I don’t really like search results very often. I like the sites, but I don’t like the result itself. I don’t know how helpful it is, frankly, to like the results.”

Bing is attempting to get a leg up on Google with its own take on social search results. The company recently unveiled a feature that pulls information from Facebook to show what sites, articles and other content Facebook friends have “liked.”

Bing’s approach to social data is to focus on delivering what it believes will characterize search in the future: An engine that anticipates a user’s needs and helps make decisions, finding the most relevant information without the user having to put in an undue amount of effort. But whether it will be able to distinguish itself from Google’s efforts to go social remains to be seen.

“Our mission is literally to deliver knowledge by understanding intent. What that implies is that we understand the web as this digital representation of the real world,” Weitz said. “We’ve now mapped almost every single square inch of the planet, we know where buildings are, we know who the people are, we know what tasks people are accomplishing — we are literally creating a semantic model, or a model, for everything in the world.”

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing’s Stefan Weitz: A Web of Verbs, Not Nouns! (stonetemple.com)
  • Is Traditional Search Passé? (technologizer.com)
  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing Increases Facebook Integration to Outsocial Google (wired.com)
  • Bing Gets Friendlier with Facebook (technologyreview.in)
  • Bing Makes Facebook Data To Use, Personalized Bing Results By Facebook (seroundtable.com)
  • Bing’s Social Search Won’t Always Rely On Facebook “Likes” (fastcompany.com)
  • Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search (readwriteweb.com)
  • Bing Taps Facebook Data for Fight With Google (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
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Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video scam spreads virally on Facebook – beware!

May 20th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Another scam is spreading virally across Facebook, posing as a video in a scheme to make money for the confidence tricksters behind it.

The messages show what appears to be a thumbnail of a video showing a man standing closely behind a scantily clad woman to give her golfing advice.

The Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video - LOL
[LINK]
Watch the Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video Don\

Another version of the scam uses football rather than golf as the lure:

The Most Funniest & Hottest Footbal Video - Must Watch!
[LINK]
Watch the Funniest & Hottest Footbal Video - Must Watch!

The links in the messages we have seen so far have pointed to a webpage at blogspot.com, although this could – of course – be changed by the scammers in future variations.

If you make the mistake of clicking on the link in the hope that you might see a funny saucy video you will find that you have fallen straight into the scammers’ trap – as your Facebook page has been updated to say that you also “Like” the page, thus sharing it virally with all of your friends.

You will also be encouraged to complete an online survey for “verification” purposes, which in reality only earns commission for the bad guys who kicked off the money-making scheme in the first place.

Unfortunately, when I tested the scam I found no evidence that Facebook’snewly introduced security measures to intercept scams and warn of dangerous links had been effective.

How to clean-up the scam from your Facebook page

If you have been unfortunate enough to have been hit by this scam, here’s how you clean-up.

However, your mouse above the offending entry on your Facebook page and you should see an “X” appear in the top right hand corner of the post. You should now be able to mark the post as spam (which will remove it from your page).

Unfortunately, this hasn’t also removed the page from the list of pages you like, so you will need to edit your profile to manually remove it. You should find it listed under “Activities and Interests”.

Be sure to remove any other pages you don’t recognise in that list also.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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5 things you should never share on Facebook

May 18th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Almost every user likes to share everything on their Facebook page but certain updates can lead to criticism, embarrassment and even job termination.

So here’s a shortlist of what you shouldn’t share on the social networking site, reports CBS news.

1.That your job sucks.

If you say this, you could be fired.

2.That you hate your ex.

In the event that you and your boyfriend get back together, or you and that friend you had a falling out with start talking again, you’ll look like a total sucker. It’s okay to let your emotions govern your thoughts but keep your feelings off your Facebook until you’ve started to think clearly about said ex.

The important thing to remember about social networks is that although you have the option to delete your comments, sometimes it can be too late. It’s immediate and someone might’ve laid eyes on it before your retraction.

3.That you’re going on vacation and then give the dates you’re away.

You could be robbed. A recent study found that thieves scan social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for folks in targeted neighbourhoods before they strike.

4.That you love yourself.

In fact, don’t give any indication that you’re your biggest fan. Your followers will only think the opposite. It’s the biggest barometer of insecurity. Researchers at the University at Buffalo also found that women who base their self-worth on appearance and what people think of them tend to upload pictures very frequently.

5.That you’re mean.

Saying mean things about people can only make you undesirable-for potential employers, dates, friends and strangers.

Source :- www.yahoo.com

  • Visit the New Facebook? Hacker warning spreads like wildfire on social network (blogoholic.in)
  • PREVENTING SPAM scam on Facebook does exactly the opposite (blogoholic.in)
  • Facebook, Twitter & Google Oppose Law That Would Protect Your Privacy (marketingpilgrim.com)
  • Mining Facebook to Make a Real Photo Album (solution.allthingsd.com)
  • Who Controls Your Child on Facebook? (chris.pirillo.com)
  • Facebook photos fury (theage.com.au)
  • Facebook Launches Non-Profit Resource Center (mashable.com)
  • Are Facebook Confessions Good For The Soul? (allfacebook.com)
  • Why Facebook will be the next $100 Billion company. And how it gets there. (wpromote.com)
  • Meet Local People For Real-Life Offline Activities With Zenergo (makeuseof.com)
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