Idiot Soldier Ruins Planned Raid By Posting It On Facebook
Generally speaking it’s a truism that nations send their most disposable, least educated and, often, dumbest, citizens off to war. But apparently there are some who are just too dumb to fight. Story from Reuters:
The Israeli military called off a raid in Palestinian territory after a soldier posted details, including the time and place, on social networking website Facebook, Israel’s Army Radio reported Wednesday.
The soldier — since relieved of combat duty — described in a status update how his unit planned a “clean-up” arrest raid in a West Bank area, the radio station said. Facebook friends then reported him to military authorities.
The Israeli military spokesman’s office had no immediate comment…
Resist ‘1984′ in 2010: Facebook Mass Deactivation Attempt on March 7th
This is a call to all readers,
I represent a small group of people who have chosen to permanently deactivate from Facebook on March 7th.
Although we are all aware of the website’s convenience, we are abandoning Facebook for the Promised Land that was once known as life. In order to demonstrate our acknowledgement of the website’s obvious capabilities, we created an event page using Facebook. You can find it here:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=308145337480&ref=ts
On behalf of dwindling humanity in the face of population overload, we cordially invite you to check out the page, and hope that you will consider participating in deactivation on March 7. By gathering many participants in a show of solidarity, we hope to create some awareness and generate mainstream discussion on the true implications of web 2.0.
On the page you’ll find…
Using Facebook or Twitter ‘Could Raise Your Insurance Premiums’
Richard Evans writes in the Telegraph:
Services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz can alert criminals when users are not home, according to Confused.com, the price comparison service. Foursquare, for example, shows that people are in a specific spot and, more importantly, that the user is definitely not at home, Confused.com added.It predicted that the new wave in social media could eventually lead to big rises in home insurance premiums.
Darren Black, the head of home insurance at Confused.com, said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if, as social media grow in popularity and more location-based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual’s risk. We could see rises of up to 10pc for people who use these sites.
“Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering,…
The 7 Somewhat United States of Facebook
Interesting post from Mathew Ingram on GigaOM. He focuses more on the social mobility patterns of various parts of the U.S., but if you look at the source blog Ingram refers to (PeteSearch), you’ll see a quick discussion of some social and cultural patterns he observed with Facebook data. He noted what regions of the country where God tops a Facebooker’s Fan Page, his conclusions are interesting, but no surprise…
So I learned that God actually has a Facebook Fan Page. But only 3.2 millions fans?
There’s another Facebook page calling for 100 Million Christians Who Worship God that’s reached 1 percent of its goal. In all fairness, I’m sure if I poked around more and took the aggregate number of fans from all the “God Fan” Pages that exist, there would be plenty … however, would be interesting to see how much religious diversity exists on Facebook.
Mathew Ingram writes on GigaOM:
Peter Warden, a former Apple engineer, likes to analyze data — so much so that he started scraping public profiles and photos from hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts about a year ago, and now has data collected from more than 200 million around the world. He wrote a fascinating post recently on his personal blog about what that data shows about how interconnected (or disconnected) users in the various American states are.
Gmail’s Plan To Beat Facebook As Top Social Network
Google is taking pages from Microsoft’s playbook as they subsume their rivals’ business models. From the Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. is taking a swipe at Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. with a new feature that makes it easier for users of Gmail to view media and status updates shared online by their friends.
Google could announce the new Gmail feature as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
The change adds a module to the Gmail screen that will display a stream of updates from individuals a user chooses to connect with, said one of these people. It is a format popularized by Facebook and Twitter…
Did You Log Into Facebook, and See Someone Else’s Face?
Glad to see Facebook is on top of protecting their users’ privacy. Iljitsch van Beijnum writes on ars technica:
This past week, several users reported visiting Facebook, and, well, seeing the wrong face. Without any action on their part, a number of AT&T smartphone users found themselves logged into the popular social networking site under user accounts other than their own.
The problem was quickly attributed to “misrouting,” a term that suggests that information took a wrong turn somewhere in the network. It’s not completely impossible for individual packets flying across the network to be misdelivered — although there are multiple checksums protecting against that — but misdelivered packets will be uninvited guests at the destination computer, and thus thrown away. What apparently happened here was an unfortunate interaction of some kind between Facebook’s user authentication system and the way AT&T runs its mobile data network.
Ten Privacy Organizations File Complaint with Facebook
BRAD STONE writes on the NY Times’ Bits Blog:
In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission, a privacy organization is charging that Facebook’s recent changes to its privacy policies constitute “unfair and deceptive trade practices.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or E.P.I.C., says that Facebook’s recent changes “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.”
I wrote about those changes last week. The most controversial among them is that a Facebook user’s photo, gender, geographic region, the pages they are a fan of and their lists of friends are now open and available to the entire Web public. Facebook made these changes partly to make individual users more findable among the massive haystack of 350 million users.
Ten other privacy organizations signed the complaint, including the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse,…
How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete
Julia Angwin explains why you should pay attention to those new Facebook privacy settings before your status updates show up in Google search results, for the Wall Street Journal:
Friending wasn’t used as a verb until about five years ago, when social networks such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook burst onto the scene.
Suddenly, our friends were something even better – an audience. If blogging felt like shouting into the void, posting updates on a social network felt more like an intimate conversation among friends at a pub.
Inevitably, as our list of friends grew to encompass acquaintances, friends of friends and the girl who sat behind us in seventh-grade homeroom, online friendships became devalued.
Suddenly, we knew as much about the lives of our distant acquaintances as we did about the lives of…
Facebook Unveils Postmortem Profile Option
This past week, Facebook announced that they are now offering a “memorialization” option for the profiles of deceased users. Friends and family can “memorialize” the accounts of dead loved ones, so that they are locked from future logins, stripped of contact information, and no longer appears in “Suggestions” (i.e. ‘You haven’t poked Joe in a while! Click to send him a message!’). The dead person profile option is obviously ripe for abuse. Here’s what was written about it on the official Facebook blog:
If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook. As time passes, the sting of losing someone you care about also fades but it never goes away.
…
Spammer Ordered To Pay Facebook $711,000,000
Reuters is reporting what sounds like a great victory for everyone who hates those fake Facebook emails, but of course it probably won’t change anything!
Social networking website Facebook was awarded $711.2 million in damages relating to an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace, court documents show.
Wallace did not oppose the motion or appear at the hearing on September 18, 2009, according to a filing on Thursday in a San Jose, California federal court.
The site filed an anti-spamming case against Wallace in February for accessing people’s Facebook accounts without their permission and sending phony mail and posts to the individuals’ public message wall, the company said in a blog post.
“While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent,”…
