I have seen some stupid thing this one might just rank right up there!

Sat Jul 31
LAS VEGAS (AFP) – Hackers are weighing in on the Facebook privacy controversy with creations that help people strengthen privacy or empty profile pages at the world’s leading social networking service.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) technology fellow Chris Conley showed off an arsenal of such applications at the infamous DefCon gathering, which kicked off Friday in Las Vegas.

“They are needed because people don’t have control of their privacy and don’t really understand,” Conley said after the presentation.

“They give people options.”

A program written by Conley displays pictures, posts, or other profile data being accessed by applications at Facebook accounts. People can then see what personal information programs are gleaning from their pages.

News stories about privacy control issues at Facebook may slip people’s minds by the time they sit down at their computers, but Conley’s application grabs their attention with a winning subject — themselves.

“People love to hear about themselves, that is the thing that Facebook is great at,” said Ceren Ercen, who worked briefly for the California company and wore a T-shirt bearing the words “Disgruntled Facebook ex-employee.”

“People don’t have the attention spans to carry over concerns they have to actual Facebook usage.”

Ercen added that during her brief stint at Facebook she had “serious problems” regarding the privacy of users and that she wasn’t alone.

Applications shared by Conley included a software tool that helps people change Facebook privacy settings using simple color coding to demystify the process.

Other programs let people pack-up Facebook profile data in order to take it elsewhere or stop the social-networking service getting automated feedback about where members go elsewhere on the Internet.

“The long-term goal is they should become obsolete because Facebook has addressed this in some way,” Conley said. “We would like Facebook to be doing this.”

Conley’s application, available online, at dotrights.org has been used by 150,000 people.

“I think people don’t see the real potential damage of their information going out the door,” a DefCon veteran who asked not to be named said after attending Conley’s presentation.

Facebook this week launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” highlights news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the social-networking community.

The new page augments a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans.”

The number of people using Facebook recently topped the 500 million mark, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social network.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by the ACLU and other privacy activists and governments that Facebook give users more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – In case 10 minutes isn’t enough to show off your guitar solo skills or Lady Gaga impersonation, YouTube has raised the limit it places on video uploads to 15 minutes.

The Pirate Bay’s homepage and seven other pages relating to the BitTorrent tracker website have been removed from Google’s search engine, following a DMCA complaint.

Anyone attempting to locate thepiratebay.org via Google will be greeted with some results to access the website, but none that point directly at its homepage.

We’ve asked Google if it could tell us more about removing some of the site’s pages from its search engine, but at the time of writing it hadn’t got back to us with comment.

The Pirate Bay mouthpiece, Peter Sunde – who actually quit his position as the website’s main spokesman a few months back – asked on his Twitter account this morning “why is ‘thepiratebay.org’ (the frontpage) removed from your [Google’s] index?”

A DMCA notice at the bottom of a “thepiratebay.org” search query via Google reveals that Mountain View has simply reacted to a takedown request.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” reads a notice.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing returns the correct result on its search engine, so it’s clearly not been slapped with a similar DMCA notice yet.

Google’s possible move into offering competitive mortgage quotes has sparked a lawsuit.

The search engine giant is allegedly in talks with Mortech, a provider of technology that helps automate lender offer pricing. Mortech already supplies this pricing engine technology to LendingTree, which is far from pleased at the prospect of its partner getting into bed with Google to offer a competitive loan aggregation service.

LendingTree, which offers consumers conditional loan offers as well as mortgage quotes, sued Mortech over alleged contract violations. In a statement, LendingTree explained that it called in its lawyers after failing to resolve the case amicably. The lawsuit seeks a preliminary injunction preventing Mortech from assisting Google.

A hearing before the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina (website) has been scheduled for 2 September. Dockets on the case can found here, though it requires a subscription to the US Court’s PACER system.

Google is allegedly poised to offer loan quotes online almost immediately (at least in the US), The New York Times reports.

LendingTree has reportedly obtained screenshots of a trial version of Google’s service that shows how the search giant plans to present loan offers alongside contact information for various financial services firms.

Google, which is not a party to the suit, responded to the NYT’s queries by saying it was looking into the competitive mortgage quotes business, at least in the US, without giving too much away about its product plans.

“We’re constantly looking for new ways to help people find what they are looking for on the Internet. As part of that effort, we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the US,” it said.

Google Merchant Service experimented with a service in the UK that allowed customers to compare loan offers after submitting information about themselves last year, the New York Times adds.

by Erick Schonfeld

Bowing to privacy concerns by Canada, Facebook is going to change the way all apps work on Facebook, particularly how they access user data. Facebook will be further fine-tuning its privacy controls. The biggest change will be how third party applications access a user’s personal data and that of his or her network of friends. Currently, when you install a Facebook app, you get a pop-up box which asks you to allow the third-party app to access personal information. Once you give permission, the app can work.

Now, the apps will have to ask repeatedly for permission as they request new types of information, and users will have to “specifically approve any access to their friends’ information.” What this amounts to is basically more privacy notifications explaining exactly what type of data is being shared and giving users more control over what they want to share. Facebook explains on its developer blog:

When users authorize an application, they will have the opportunity to opt out of giving certain pieces of information. There may be some fields that, at minimum, are necessary for the application to function. We will make it clear that the user must authorize the required fields in order to use the application. We also anticipate that users will need to opt-in to giving applications access to their friends’ data.

On a conference call today, Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin noted, “We certainly think that good privacy is good business.” But there is also a tension between privacy controls and the smooth functioning of social apps which require access to the semi-private social data on Facebook in order to work properly.

Asked if these new polices would make it more likely for apps to break, Morin tried to downplay that possibility: “This change will not likely cause many applications to break per se, but cause users to more clearly understand what information they are sharing with the application.” Of course, if users decide to shut down access to key parts of their social data, many apps won’t work. But that, of course, is up to each user.

On the call, Facebook was also keen to point out how much privacy controls users already have when it comes to third party apps. Currently, users can block any app or authorize access to data at a very granular level. Although they didn’t say this in the call, I’d expect many of these controls to become more explicit.

Dilshan Kathriarachchi
So you’ve been on Facebook for what seems like forever, and it seems like all your friends and family have gone through the same great migration, too. The social networking service has grown on you so much that you can’t remember the last time you used email to send out a quick note to someone.

With years worth of private conversations, thousands of trigger-happy photos and practically a complete account of your recent social existence residing scattered across Facebook’s extensive data farms, do you really know how well sensitive material is locked away from prying eyes? Do you really know who has access to your personal data?

The rise of Facebook was predominantly based on its primary competitors not providing adequate security and privacy controls to users. For this very reason, the service has allocated a significant portion of its resources towards maintaining its image as the most secure repository of social data.

Facebook allows two distinct ways for third parties to gain access to your personal information: Facebook Connect and Facebook Applications. Both options provide plenty of control that allows you, the user, to decide who gets access to your information and in which capacity. For instance, you could revoke the permissions for updating your Facebook Status with that status-spamming zombie role-playing application, which somehow managed to recruit all your friends. This is made possible through Facebook when users grant third-party applications access to some aspects of your account, while imposing restrictions on others.

However, there has been a growing trend of spammers and identity thieves abusing this trust-based system of dealing with personal data. It usually comes in the form of a shabbily put together application, but is occasionally cleverly piggy-backed on a seemingly professional and useful service. Once the unsuspecting user grants access the service illegally scrubs the user’s account for profile data, photos, videos and even possibly attempts to propagate itself to the user’s friends through Facebook invites.

To counter this particular privacy and security breach, Facebook introduced a voluntary application verification process last year, which eventually came out of beta last month. For a fee of $375, Facebook analyzes the functionality, scope and security of a given application. The findings from this review process determine if Facebook verifies the given application or not on it’s Applications Directory. Verified applications are distinguished from the rest by a green check mark under the application’s listing and looking out for this sign is a great way to avoid sketchy apps from third-party developers. Furthermore, only verified applications find their way onto the featured list within the Applications Directory, providing a great incentive for developers to undergo the verification process.

While the new verification process seems largely restricted to Facebook Applications, there are definite signs of it being extended in the future to the now popular Facebook Connect service that allows interaction between the service and external sites.

With Facebook branching out into new and exciting functionality such as payment processing for services and virtual goods, along with sharing your information and activities with other external sites via Facebook Connect, understanding how to protect your identity on the service becomes increasingly more important.

he Pirate Bay is to change hands in a matter of days and many users are unhappy about the change of ownership. Fear not, Pirate Bay fans! For now, you can download the entire site and start your own version.

Alright so realistically, not a lot of people will have the hardware to run something as big as the Pirate Bay. However, those of you who wish to pirate the Pirate Bay, for just to have a back up, can grab the 21.3 GB of data, including an archive of all 873,671 torrent files hosted on the Pirate Bay’s servers and a basic but working site.

The user who compiled the index and then uploaded it said he did so because he was worried all the torrents would disappear once the site changed owners. “I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again,” he told TorrentFreak.

Anyone actually going to go and do it?

Google Apps is a service from Google which allows users to customize domain names with several Google products. Google Apps offers a free service and a paid version. The Standard Edition, which is free of charge, rewards even the tighest of budgets. This edition also supplies the user with storage space — the same amount offered as regular Gmail accounts. While the Premier Edition (paid service) of Google Apps offers 25 GB of e-mail storage.