Tom Standage on ancient social media: Papyrus, pamphlets and tweets

The Economist

Mark Zuckerberg Runs A Giant Spy Machine In Palo Alto, California

REUTERS/Jim Young

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for the start of a town hall meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at Facebook Headquarters in Palo Alto, California April 20, 2011.

Business Insider

D.B. Grady and Marc Ambinder, Deep State

Mark Zuckerberg runs a giant spy machine in Palo Alto*, California. He wasn’t the first to build one, but his was the best, and every day hundreds of thousands of people upload the most intimate details of their lives to the Internet. The real coup wasn’t hoodwinking the public into revealing their thoughts, closest associates, and exact geographic coordinates at any given time. Rather, it was getting the public to volunteer that information. Then he turned off** the privacy settings.

[**Editor's note: Facebook disputes the notion that it has "turned off" its privacy settings. We have provided a statement from the company at the bottom of this post.]

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” said Zuckerberg after moving 350 million people into a glass privacy ghetto. “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

If the state had organized such an information drive, protestors would have burned down the White House. But the state is the natural beneficiary of this new “social norm.” Today, that information is regularly used in court proceedings and law enforcement. There is no need for warrants or subpoenas. Judges need not be consulted. The Fourth Amendment does not come into play. Intelligence agencies don't have to worry about violating laws protecting citizenry from wiretapping and information gathering. Sharing information “more openly” and with “more people” is a step backward in civil liberties. And spies, whether foreign or domestic, are “more people,” too.

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, knows better than anyone how to exploit holes in the secrecy apparatus to the detriment of American security. His raison d'être is to blast down the walls protecting state secrets and annihilate the implicit bargain, yet even he is frightened by the brazenness of Facebook and other such social networking sites:

Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to the U.S. intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo — all these major U.S. organizations have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use.

It’s all there, and the Internet never forgets. But even if the impossible happened and the Internet did somehow develop selective amnesia, in the case of microblogging service Twitter, the Library of Congress has acquired every message ever posted by its two hundred million members. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the New York Times:

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew to overcome our checkered pasts.

The U.S. government isn't the only institution to notice. Early in the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers of the social networking generation uploaded to their MySpace profiles pictures of camp life in the war zones. Innocuous photos of troops horsing around in front of tent cities, bunkers, outposts, motor pools, and operations centers circulated freely on what was then described as “a place for friends.”

The U.S. military soon realized that foreign intelligence services, sympathetic to America’s enemies and savvy to the social revolution, could collect these photographs by the thousands and build detailed, full-color maps of American military bases. During the Cold War, this would have required the insertion of first-rate spies, briefcases filled with cash, and elaborate blackmail schemes. In the age of radical transparency, all it would take is a MySpace account to know exactly where to fire the mortar round to inflict maximum damage on the United States.

The Marine Corps confirmed this in a 2009 directive. “These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content are a particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries.” The directive continued, “The very nature of [social networking sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage,” putting operational security, communications security, and U.S. military personnel “at an elevated risk of compromise.”

This type of clever thinking on the part of America’s enemies is not unique to this conflict. During the run-up to the Gulf War, foreign intelligence services had a pretty good idea that the U.S. war machine was preparing for its most substantial engagement since Vietnam. The U.S. military recognized a new kind of threat — one that didn’t require foreign intelligence to insert an agent onto every base in the Republic. Open source information could be just as dangerous. Spikes in late-night orders from pizzerias near key military bases and an exceptionally busy parking lot at the Pentagon could tell hostile powers everything they needed to know.

In determining what should remain secret and what should not, the military — like each component of the American secrecy apparatus — is good at overreaction. The default answer: more secrets. To counter the MySpace problem, they banned blogs and social networks. This benefitted base security but killed morale at home. No longer could parents see their young sons and daughters safe — and even happy — in the war zone. All that remained were breathless reports of intense combat on the cable news networks. And while the average supply clerk is probably safer in Baghdad than in Detroit, every parent and spouse saw the same thing: a son or daughter in a flag-draped casket.

In 2010, the Department of Defense revised and consolidated its ad hoc policy on social media. On its official website it declared, “Service members and [Department of Defense] employees are welcome and encouraged to use new media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or deployed,” but warned, “it’s important to do it safely.”)

From "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry" by journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Reprinted with permission from D.B. Grady.

*"When the book was actually written, they were still in Palo Alto." - D.B. Grady

In a statement to Business Insider, Facebook notes:

"In reality we spend a lot of time building privacy controls, and working to make them powerful, easy to use, and also educating our users on them. For example:

- Announcing new tools in December: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/547/Better-Controls-for-Managing-Your-Content 

- (in the same post) In-product education about privacy that we did in December: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/547/Better-Controls-for-Managing-Your-Content 

- Recent flyout in the News Feed ahead of Graph Search that pointed to the new tools and highlighted how people could check their stuff: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/660/Expanding-Graph-Search-Beta"

Facebook forensics? What the feds can learn from your digital crumbs

NBC News.com

Nidhi Subbaraman/

Bits of you are all over the Internet. If you've signed into Google and searched, saved a file in your Dropbox folder, made a phone call using Skype, or just woken up in the morning and checked your email, you're leaving a trail of digital crumbs. People who have access to this information — companies powering your emails and Web searches, advertisers who are strategically directing ads at you — can build a picture of who you are, what you like, and what you will probably do next. Revelations about government counter-terrorism programs such as PRISM indicate that federal agents and other operatives may use this data, too.

"Google knows what kinds of porn everyone in the world likes," Bruce Schneier, a security and cryptography expert told NBC News. Not only are companies tracking what you are doing, they are correlating it, he said.

Since news of PRISM broke, the leaders of the tech companies have denied knowledge of government access to their information. At Facebook, one of the world's biggest data collectors, Mark Zuckerberg posted a message that read: "When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law."

But the law already permits quite a bit of digital sniffing — much of it without a warrant.

While authorities need a warrant to access the content of emails stored by companies like Yahoo and Google, they don't need a warrant for IP addresses of the computers used to access accounts, ProPublica notes. The government doesn't need a warrant to request draft emails, data stored in the cloud on services like Dropbox and Google Drive, and emails and texts that are older than 180 days old — investigators can demand them with a subpoena.

And when authorities do get a court order, the amount of available data multiplies. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper clarified in a statement to press Thursday that the government has access not to content of phone calls, but to "telephony metadata." That's a vague term, but at the very least, in includes who you called, from where, and when.

Painting a picture of you
Gather all of these shreds of metadata, apply some algorithms that spot clues in patterns, and you can put together a pretty good idea of who a person is, and what they're up to.

For example, when a group from MIT analyzed location data from cellphones of 1.5 million people in a single country over 15 months, the team could identify individuals simply by knowing where they were on four separate occasions.

When Netflix released anonymous watch histories of 500,000 subscribers as part of a public contest to create an algorithm that predicted what movie a person would like, Arvind Narayanan, a security researcher at Princeton University, and his colleague Vitaly Shmatikov, pinned names to numbers by comparing histories in the anonymized data with comments made by named individuals on IMDB. "In every case, you find two location points, or six to eight movies, or three data points ... it's enough to identify a person," Narayanan told NBC News.

Narayanan is now researching ways to make people harder to identify by their online behavior.

Facebook, as you might imagine, provides a wealth of identifying information. In a study published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences in March this year, a team of data scientists showed that they could work out a person's sexual preferences, political leanings, and a host of other character details from their "likes." In a similar manner, others can work out similar identifying characteristics from "browsing histories, search queries, or purchase histories," they write in their paper.

"Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one’s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation, or political views that an individual may not have intended to share," they add. "One can imagine situations in which such predictions, even if incorrect, could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life."

Snoop tricks
Advertisers already track our lives with astonishing accuracy going off very little information — Target has known when a woman was pregnant even before her family did. And just as advertisers are profiling you to make money, law enforcement and counter-terrorism operatives make use of these clues to hunt for suspects.

In April, the NSA released a document called "Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research." The massive work, 643 pages total, contains loads and loads of tips for hunting information that's publicly available on the Internet. One section, about "Google Hacking" isn't really hacking at all, just fancy tricks for locating accidentally published secrets.

Raytheon's Rapid Information Overlay Technology (or RIOT) software was built to make some of this searching easier. Its government customers use it to compile case files of location data scraped from checkins on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other public social outlets.

President Obama said in a statement on Friday that surveillance programs like PRISM have "helped us prevent terrorist attacks." Still, privacy advocates have consistently pointed to such initiatives as potentially over-reaching.

The key here is that, even without a so-called "back door" into Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft servers (which the companies have vehemently denied), and even without the warrants they need to get specific information about individuals from those companies, the feds — and anyone else — can see an awful lot. And they have you to thank for it. Remember that next time you post to Facebook, upload a picture or comment on an article ... like this one.

Prisoners in Jail Posting Videos on Facebook

HowTheWorldWorks

Aldo - En Tu Facebook (Los Aldeanos) 2013

LosAldeanosOficial

«Facebook Home destruye cualquier noción de privacidad»

microsiervos

mexico.cnn.com

Om Malik, Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy,

El GPS del teléfono puede enviar información constante a los servidores de Facebook [«infractor reincidente en cuestiones de privacidad»], indicando tu paradero en todo momento.

De modo que si tu teléfono no se mueve de un mismo lugar entre las 22h y las 6h durante, digamos, una semana, Facebook puede deducir que esa ubicación es tu hogar. Facebook será capaz de localizar en un mapa dónde está tu casa aunque nunca hayas indicado tu dirección personal en Facebook.

Así Facebook puede comenzar a construir un perfil de ti mejor y más completo. Puede correlacionar todas tus relaciones, las tiendas en las que compras, los restaurantes en los que comes y otros muchos datos. El acelerómetro del teléfono le dirá a Facebook si estás caminando, corriendo o conduciendo.

El problema es que Facebook va a utilizar todos esos datos —no para mejorar tu vida— sino para mejorar sus campañas de publicidad.

Gay? Conservative? High IQ? Your Facebook ’likes’ can reveal traits

cosmiclog

David Stillwell / Cambridge

A graphic from the "You Are What You Like" Facebook app illustrates how the pages you click on can tell others about your personal traits, even if you don't mean to do so.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.
The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.
OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.
The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.
"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."
Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.
"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.
"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.
Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge.
"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.
"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

The Mark Zuckerberg Era Is Over

businessinsider

Nicholas Carlson 

For a long time, Facebook was the most dramatic, exciting company in Silicon Valley, if not the world.

Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was a global icon thanks to his remarkably young age.

Before 23, he became a subject of intense scrutiny and hero-worship.

This all happened for several good reasons.

Facebook was a global phenomenon with users. It grew from a few thousand users at Harvard to a few million at college campuses around the country to more than a billion people in about five years.

As a business, its growth floored people. Revenues reached a billion dollars in half a decade, all while Facebook's valuation soared past a billion, stunned people at $15 billion, and just kept going.

Meanwhile, the stories about Facebook's founding in a college dorm room were so wild with betrayal, greed, and cunning that they made a movie about them.

Then, in May 2012, Facebook finally went public at a $100 billion valuation. That seemed like it would be the climax to the story, but it wasn't, because despite all the hype, Facebook stock halved by August.

We had a train wreck on our hands!

And then came the comeback. Showing grit, Facebook executives re-accelerated revenues and the company's valuation climbed back to impressive levels.

But now, suddenly, Facebook is a lot like many other public companies in the tech industry.

Yesterday, for example, a very normal thing happened to Facebook.

It reported decent earnings, posting accelerating revenues and a growing profit margin. 

It beat analyst expectations, but didn't have the "whisper" numbers that actual traders were hoping for, and so the stock declined a little.

On the earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how he wants to optimize Facebook ads with better targeting. 

Zuckerberg's most exciting hint about the future of Facebook was that it might get into video ads. For good measure, he poo-pooed the idea of a Facebook phone.

Woo. Whee.

The truth is, Facebook has become a perfectly good company with solid management and smart, realistic plans for the future.

But its ambitions suddenly seem limited. It's not going to re-invent TV like Apple or put a computer on your face like Google. It's not going to give away smartphones or take the shipping delay out of online shopping like Amazon.  It's not even copying all those ideas like Microsoft. 

It's just kind of doing its thing. It built a half-baked search engine. It's optimizing ads.

Which is fine! And smart!

But not very dramatic, or that much fun to pay attention to.

So … is the era of Mark Zuckerberg over?

Far before any of us thought it would be?

Influential people in Silicon Valley are already asking.

The biggest voice to do so, so far, is Hunter Walk, a Google/YouTube executive who is perhaps best known for a blog that industry insiders pay very close attention to.

Yesterday, Walk wrote a post titled: "Have We Reached "Peak Hoodie?"

For the past few years, he says, Zuckerberg has held the "most sway" with those types of people.

"He's of the same generation, he dresses like them (or more specifically, they dress like him) and they all want to respect the Hacker's Way. This gets turned into mantras like "the best code wins," and "move fast and break things." From The Social Network some have learned that you should sometimes play loose with the rules and that you need to navigate around or bull through the stupid folks who seek to slow inevitable disruption, whether they be wealthy twins, Harvard administrators or dead weight co-founders."

"But," asks Walk, "have we reached Peak Hoodie?"

"That is, are we past the halfway point on Zuck as main influence for a generation of technologists?"

The thing about the era of Zuckerberg drawing to a close so soon, is that if it really is, no one would be happier about the prospect than Zuckerberg. 

He's never been comfortable in the spotlight. It makes him sweat. Literally!

But it has also made him rich, powerful, and able to do some good.

So … maybe he'll miss it when it's gone.

And if Zuckerberg does, it won't be so hard for him to bring the glory back.

He's just got to return to his roots.

There's a model for this.

Larry Page.

Page, who co-invented Google, spent years behind the scenes at the company, allowing people he trusted to turn it into the Internet's most impressive money-making machine.

Then, a couple years ago, he grasped control of Google, and began spending big money (see: $12 billion on Motorola) to pursue crazy exciting goals.

Now, people like Walk are wondering if Page is the new icon. He writes: "Will they be someone we don't know yet or seeing a familiar face in a new light such as Larry Page?"

You can imagine Zuckerberg following a similar path. 

Certainly, the Zuckerberg we heard on yesterday's earnings call is not the one we're used to.

Way back in early 2004, just as TheFacebook.com was about to be launched, Zuckerberg sent an instant message to a friend about his first investor, Eduardo Saverin:

Zuckerberg: Eduardo is paying for my servers.

Friend: A sucker born every day.

Zuckerberg: Nah, he thinks it will make money.

Friend: What do you think?

Zuckerberg: Well I don't know business stuff

Zuckerberg: I'm content to make something cool.

Back then, 19-year-old Zuckerberg wasn't thinking about video ads that could be rolled out by third quarter or bold cost projections that might make analysts unhappy in the short term but would lay the groundwork for the future.

But maybe 28-year-old Zuckerberg isn't thinking about his 19-year-old self.

Maybe he's looking across town at Larry Page, and thinking about what he could do at 38.

Maybe the era of Zuckerberg isn't over. Maybe it's just lying in wait.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-mark-zuckerberg-era-is-over-2013-1#ixzz2Jajt8f4Q

New Facebook tool lets you search everything related to friends

Nbcnews

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new "Graph Search" feature during a press event on Tuesday.

Facebook announced a new "Graph Search" feature on Tuesday that will answer all the questions that the social network's Newsfeed and Timeline do not.

"Today we're going to take a little trip to our roots," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in making the announcement.

He described Facebook as a huge database before pointing out that "just like a database, you should be able to query it." The Newsfeed answers the question "What's going on?" and Timeline answers "Who is this person?" But what about everything else? We'll be able to answer other questions using something called "Graph Search."

In addition to launching Graph Search, Facebook is also incorporating Microsoft's Bing search results in Facebook searches. (Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook.)  Doing search on Facebook has often been an exercise in frustration, and Graph Search may help to change that. Will Graph Search challenge Google? No, but it could be a start to making Facebook's nemesis even more nervous, although Zuckerberg emphasized the new tool is "not Web search."

Graph Search is a privacy-aware search, Zuckerberg said. That means that it only searches content which has been shared with you and that your search results will differ from the search results someone else will see ... even if you enter the same exact queries.

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook's new Graph Search allows you to search through photos, places, friends, and interests.

You can initially use Graph Search search through people, photos, places, and interests. 

For example, let's say you want to play matchmaker for a friend who recently moved to New York City from Germany. You could search for all friends-of-friends who happen to reside in New York City, lived in Germany at some point, and are single. Ta da! You'll have a list of the ideal matches for your pal. Or perhaps you need to find a dentist. You can easily search for dentists who are liked by your friends.

There was a lot of emphasis on privacy and Zuckerberg explained that a message will appear on users' Newsfeeds to remind them that they should review their privacy settings. Even though Graph Search is privacy-conscious, some slightly embarrassing content could always come up and haunt you.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search is currently a beta product, meaning that it isn't quite perfect just yet. 

"Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook," he says. If you want to start using the new feature, you can sign up for the beta by heading here.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Babbage: A lucrative accident

EconomistMagazine

In this week's programme: a drone-powered internet of things, Facebook under fire and the twentieth anniversary of the text message.

Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity [REPORT]

Mashable/ By Alex Fitzpatrick 

Facebook and other social platforms are watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected, according to a report.

The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.

The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.

If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.

Keeping most of the scanned chats out of the eyes of Facebook employees may help Facebook deflect criticism from privacy advocates, but whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently is yet unknown.

The new details about Facebook’s monitoring system came from an interview which the company’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan gave to Reuters. At least one alleged child predator has been brought to trial directly as a result of Facebook’s chat scanning, according to Reuters’ report.

When asked for a comment, Facebook only repeated the remarks given by Sullivan to Reuters: “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate.”

More >>

Breakingviews: De-friending Facebook

Family robbed after idiot teen posts photo of 'large sum of cash' on Facebook

By Rosa Golijan

On Thursday, a teenage girl posted a photo of a "large sum of cash" on Facebook. About seven hours later, two robbers arrived at her family's home. Unsurprisingly, this incident prompted local authorities to issue a warning about the dangers of posting photographs online.

According to BBC News, the 17-year-old girl was helping her 72-year-old grandmother count her cash savings when she decided to snap a photo of the money and post it on Facebook. A press release by the local police force explains that this social media activity occured in Sydney, Australia at about 4 p.m. on Thursday. At 11:30 p.m. on the same day, a house about 75 miles south-west was invaded by two armed men. The girl's mother, a 58-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy were home at the time.

Brandishing a knife and a wooden club, the two men "allegedly entered the home demanding to speak with the girl about the cash" seen in the Facebook photo. After the girl's mother explained that she no longer lives at that address, the men proceeded to search the house and "took a small amount of cash and other personal property before leaving."

It is unclear how the robbers connected the girl's social media activity to her mother's home address, but authorities are nonetheless urging "users of social media to take extreme caution when posting photographs and personal information." I suspect that's a polite way of saying "Use some common sense, folks!"

Octopus Eats Seagull

By ShawTVSouthVI

Gerd Leonhard: A Facebook Data Spill? Data and Privacy

By ForaTv

The new America freedom of expression - Military board: Tea Party Marine should be dismissed

U.S. Marine Gary Stein, who has been criticizing Barack Obama on his Facebook page, says he has the right to his opinion like every American. Read >>

[Photo: Courtesy Gary Stein / AP, file]

Why Facebook’s IPO Matters

Getty Images/ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

 

business.time.com/ Justin Sullivan

Facebook’s initial public offering later this spring will create a billion-dollar windfall for its founders and early investors, so it’s easy to be cynical and view the IPO as another example of insiders cashing in on the latest web phenomenon. But the significance — and symbolism  — of Facebook’s IPO goes much deeper. Facebook’s astonishing rise is an apt metaphor for the emergence over the last two decades of the Internet itself as a tool for individual self-expression and collective organization. It’s also a dramatic example of a generational shift taking place among the entrepreneurial class, one that elevates social change as a priority along with commercial success. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook’s success is a powerful argument to the transformational impact that a free, open Internet can have on society and commerce.

Facebook’s IPO — the largest in Internet history — is a once-in-a-generation milestone in the evolution of the web. It represents a coming-of-age moment for the second major phase in the development of the Internet as a widespread platform: the rise of the social web. In the initial phase, large portals such as America Online and Yahoo established the web as a repository for vast amounts of information. It wasn’t until Google indexed the web with its search engine that this phase reached maturity, allowing users to quickly find information across the Internet, beyond the borders of these centralized communities. But even as Google democratized the web by enabling ordinary people to exercise their voices and become accessible to the broader online world, the Internet remained a largely individualized experience.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/02/02/why-facebooks-ipo-matters/?iid=biz-main-lede#ixzz1lKUdA9ib

Castros Facebook was created by a U.S.-based company

Capitol Hill Cubans

An investigative report by Penultimos Dias reveals that RedSocial, the Cuban version of Facebook on the Castro regime's restricted and closely monitored "Intranet" network, was created by a U.S.-based company.

The U.S.-based company is called YouNet, with offices in Boston, Massachusetts.

Has the U.S. Treasury Department given Younet a license to operate this network for the Castro regime, which is designed to further censor and isolate the Cuban people from the Internet?

Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook CEO and creator

By  Juan Martin Lorenzo editor del blog  Open Cuba

Mr Mark Zuckerberg:

I am a Cuban programmer living in Toronto, Canada. I also am fluent in three languages: my native Spanish (because I am a Cuban born), English and French. Last year in an interview you gave to Wired Magazine you said, about your mission with facebook you said:

“For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people”

You also listed, in the same interview, your personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, and minimalism".

I guess you defined very well your own interests as well as mine. I’m glad you did in that way. As you see, we share a lot of personal similarities, at least in our personal life. Of course, I hadn’t achieved the huge professional success you had done though.

I am also a Human Rights activist through internet social networks like Twitter and, of course, Facebook. In both I have a similar account (@jmarloren in Twitter and the same nick in your brand Facebook) in which I spread my messages against tyrannies like Iran, North Korea and my own country, Cuba. I am also a furious oppositor to Hugo Chavez and his network of allies, who only are harvesting with opportunism and corruption the possibilities that Democracy had gave them in all those countries.

Last week, in Havana, Cuba, the regime headed by Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul Castro, had created a brand of your own Facebook. I guess even without your knowledge. Castro’s copycat facebook hasn’t been created to bring “an open information flow for people” as you said in the interview I already mentioned above.

 Cuban copycat Facebook even had been brought to light in a meeting with Cuban official bloggers, those who only spread Castro’s point of view and usually use your Facebook and Twitter to spread lies, offenses and to persecute all our independent voices in Cuba. They even didn’t dare to invite our small but very active group of independent bloggers in Cuba, among them the most prominent Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.

And by the way, let me not forget this, it was sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Bruno Rodriguez, which shows not only who really is acting behind those names in Facebook, Twitter and internet, but also how political biases had influenced the very beginning of that “social network” internationally branded by yourself and now stolen by Castro's regime.

Some Cubans, like me, and many others have been trying to reach you throughout your Twitter account to advice about this topic I guess you should know. But also to let you know that the creation of that copycat Facebook in Cuba is only for Cuban agents: the only ones who have internet connection in Cuba, and their poisoned bias purposes.

Neither Cubans living abroad nor our own citizens in Cuba could open an account in that copycat Facebook. You can guess then who are the ones who are managing and supervising that “network” ( a network of fears?), and who are the ones who are opening accounts there.

The fact they tried to give, originally, the Cuban “social network” the same HTTP sub domain FACEBOOK branded by you showed that it is a violation of the international law, acknowledged by them when they changed as fast they noticed our tweets through Twitter to you, as the ones I sent you today and I quote here:

@ceoMarkZuck Mark Zuckerberg, did u know #Cuba government copycat your own brand #facebook ?

@ceoMarkZuck And you know #Cuba gov is using that copycat #facebook as an segregationist tool against Cubans, their own ppl?

@ceoMarkZuck You said in Wired Magazine: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open." #Cuba #facebook

@ceoMarkZuck Well, #Cuba gov is making its own copycat #facebook to make Cuba more isolated from the world: a virtual apartheid

@ceoMarkZuck I hope I will hear your own opinion about that !!!

Originally they use this HTTP removed immediately:  facebook.ismm.edu.cu with is a flagrant violation of International Laws. Now, they had acknowledged this HTTP address for the faked Facebook: http://neko.uclv.edu.cu 

I hope I will hear you about this very sensible matter to us, and I truly believe to yourself too. After all, nobody wants to be related with tyrannies and tyrants.

Sincerely,

Juan Martin Lorenzo

#Facebook says 600,000 accounts compromised every day

By Bob Sullivan

Facebook said this week that more than a half-million accounts are compromised every day on the mammoth social networking site.

The revelation was buried in a new security announcement issued by the company on Thursday describing the virtues of its new "Trusted Friends" password restoration technique. UK-based computer security firm Sophos first noticed the data.

The Facebook blog entry includes an infographic explaining the success of the network's efforts to beat back spam, account hijacking, and other ills.  In it, Facebook says that "only 0.06 percent of 1 billion logins per day are compromised."

That might sound like an impressive record, but doing the math, that means 600,000 accounts are hacked or otherwise compromised every day.  Facebook's 0.06 percent figure seems intentionally precise, so it's probably fair to surmise that potentially 18 million accounts per month are impacted.

"If an unauthorized party has logged into your Facebook account, then you're far from alone," wrote Sophos' Graham Cluley in a post about Facebook on Friday.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Facebook ID theft" is a serious problem which lays the foundation for all manner of other cyber misbehavior. Recently, msnbc.com reported on a woman who sent $2,000 to a criminal, believing she was communicating with her sister through Facebook chat. Other common scams include criminals hijacking friends' accounts and trying to talk users into coughing up money. Much cyberbullying also begins with compromised FB accounts.  A woman recently contacted me complaining that her son's account had been hacked and classmates had posted pornographic pictures.

"They changed his email address and his password; so my son could not get into his Facebook," the woman, who asked that she not be identified to protect her son's privacy, said. "Then they posted, more than once, pornographic pictures of men with a cut-out of my son's face on it and posted it as his profile picture. My son is only 15 and those pictures were so terrible that he was embarrassed, humiliated, and devastated over them."

It's not hard to find similar stories about the dire consequences of Facebook login compromises.  One key to solving the problem is making it easier for the rightful holder of hacked accounts to restore their access, and Trusted Friends should help considerably. Still, in a world where consumers are continually adding to the number of identities and imposters they need to worry about, 600,000 daily Facebook identity issues is not a welcome data point