Analysts suggest the search giant is seeking a share of the social-networking growth its rival enjoys, writes Sonja Ryst. The tweet sent a quiver through the blogosphere: “Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon.” That line, from Kevin Rose, the entrepreneur who founded content-sharing site Digg, unleashed a sense that the online world as...
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The personal details of more than a fifth of Facebook’s estimated 500 million users have been “leaked” to the internet by campaigners highlighting its “terrifying” privacy fears. The list, which has been published in a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profiles, their names and unique ID. Campaigners warned the...
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Trend Micro security researchers caution that a latest version of the notorious Koobface worm is circulating on Facebook through Direct Messages (DMs). The spam entices users towards a harmful site by informing them that someone has posted their video on YouTube. The company states that as common with these kinds of harmful attacks, the...
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McDonald’s. Blockbuster. And now Facebook? The social network and its controversial privacy policies are teeming with new complications as regulators overseas increasingly start to regard them as a suspicious, Americanizing import. Last week, data protection officials in Hamburg, Germany, sent a menacing missive in Facebook’s direction, accusing the social network of partaking in illegal...
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I could clamber onto my soap box and rant all day about Blizzard’s pathetic, poorly thought-out Real ID implementation – but – as this isn’t a games blog, I’ve been told to keep it short and sweet. So, straight to the diabolical point: Real ID is just the beginning. With StarCraft 2′s launch at...
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We’ve all been there. You’re either at work or school or university and you desperately need to visit LiveJasmin — or play FarmVille. But the computer won’t let you! ‘Page not found’ it says. 404 my foot! You’re being firewalled! You’re being blackholed! You’re being COCKBLOCKED! Fortunately, in most non-enterprise cases (if you work...
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Its new Open Graph protocol, an extension of its Facebook Connect, is a clear challenge to Google but may not prove useful for many Web searches When Facebook launched its Open Graph protocol in April, blanketing the Web with “like” and “recommend” buttons, it seemed obvious that one of the company’s goals was to...
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You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video Columbia Pictures has just released the very first teaser trailer for its upcoming film, The Social Network. Like the poster that debuted last week, the teaser is sparse in its detail, but intriguing and provocative at the same time. The Social Network,...
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project have released a public beta of a new Firefox extension that lets people encrypt their communications with Facebook, Twitter and other sites. The HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension was inspired by Google’s encrypted Web search option, the EFF said in announcing the tool last week. In addition...
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Yahoo and Facebook are to tie their services closer together. The tie-up means people with a presence on both sites can have updates to one service mirrored to the other. It also means that it will get easier for users of Yahoo’s other services, such as Flickr, to share what they do with friends...
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T security and data protection firm Sophos is advising Facebook users to be cautious following a widespread clickjacking attack that hit hundreds of thousands of users on the popular networking site over the holiday weekend. Affected profiles can be identified by having apparently ‘liked’ links with titles including: “LOL This girl gets OWNED after...
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When adults talk about personal privacy on sites like Facebook, someone is bound to contend that that young people are too self-absorbed, or too naive to care about securing personal information that’s stored in various places stored online. Well, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, that person is...
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Security experts are warning of a clickjacking worm spreading via Facebook which tricks users into posting it on their status updates, although it does not appear to be malicious. According to F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hyponnen, the worm posts the following message: “try not to laugh xD http://www.fbhole. com/omg/allow.php?s=a&r=“. Clicking on the...
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