Facebook Cracks Down on Developer Spam
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Three months after it opened its platform to outside developers, Facebook Inc. is taking steps to prevent some third-party applications from engaging in what the social networking company considers inappropriate actions.
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Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday.The company already encourages developers to build applications that work with its site, publishing details of the tags and APIs (application programming interfaces) needed to exchange data.Now it plans to license those details for use by other social networking sites and platforms, according to the Facebook Developers blog . The idea is that developers will only have to write their widget or small application once if there is a common platform for structuring how the applications integrate with sites.The initiative runs in parallel with Google&#39;s OpenSocial project, which revolves around creating standard APIs (application programming interfaces) for social networking applications. APIs let applications exchange information and are crucial to building programs that, for example, take information from Facebook profiles and blend it with some new functionality or feature.Facebook already has a taker. On Wednesday, social networking site Bebo said it would use Facebook&#39;s standards for its own Open Application Platform. Bebo isn&#39;t taking sides, however: it will eventually support Google&#39;s OpenSocial too, it said.MySpace, the largest social networking site, has also said it will support OpenSocial.Facebook said its architectural platform is composed in part of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) related tags and methods for building applications.It published details of FBML , its set of tags for formatting data exchanged between applications and users. Some of the tags enable developers to build programs with the same design elements as Facebook&#39;s site, so the application blends in.External developers have created about 7,000 applications since Facebook opened up its site in June. The applications have offered a commercial opportunity for developers, although Facebook has been under fire for how those programs respect users&#39; privacy.Google&#39;s OpenSocial platform got off the ground last month with Plaxo&#39;s Pulse, the first application to use the APIs. Pulse, which aggregates and delivers new information from social networking and other Web sites, is a feature of Plaxo&#39;s Web-based address book service.&#160;
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Facebook.com, the No. 2 U.S.  social network site that is quickly expanding beyond its  college student base, has been met with a sudden privacy  backlash by users after it made design changes this week.
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InfoWorld - Three months after it opened its platform to outside developers, Facebook is taking steps to prevent some third-party applications from engaging in what the social networking company considers inappropriate actions.
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Ziff Davis - Commtouch's anti-spam software update halts spam by tracking e-mail server sending patterns.
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Open-source spam blocker gets legal makeover with switch to Apache license. Oh, and tech upgrades.
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Lycos Europe has released a special screensaver for Windows and the Mac OS platforms that will attack spam web pages. The screensaver âMake Love No Spamâ will overload a variety of spam servers by flooding
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook.com, a fast-growing U S social network website has sparked a privacy backlash that has quickly become one of the broadest cyber-protests ever with more than 600,000 members signing an online petition by midday yesterday.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Popular social networking site Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its Web site by the makers of Scrabble, as reported by PA.
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THE spammed can now hit back at the spammers with new software from Lycos called Make Love, Not Spam. The software sits on your PC and when the machine is not in use, it generates traffic on the sites of known
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Belated move to counter Facebook MySpace will open up to third party developers within the next few months.â¦
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Researchers at security gateway vendor Fortinet have uncovered an adware-distribution scheme being carried out on the Facebook social networking site considered to be the first attack propagated on the wildly popular online portal.Disguised as a legitimate "Secret Crush" request on the site designed to inform Facebook users about other members who find them attractive, the application instead attempts to secretly install an adware program made by Zango after it has been successfully downloaded.The Secret Crush program also tries to lure people who download the file to pass it along to other Facebook members they know, according to Fortinet's research.The security vendor also contends that as many as 3 percent of Facebook's almost 60 million registered users have already downloaded the adware-bearing program.And while it appears that the attack has been unearthed by Facebook users themselves as worthless -- as the program does not actually deliver the social networking function it originally promises and has been highlighted as such on the site by people who have already downloaded it -- Fortinet experts said that the threat should be viewed by users of the portal, and its operators, as a sign of more dangerous attacks that will come.Facebook officials did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment on the Secret Crush adware threat.Dubbed specifically as a "malicious widget" by the security researchers, the attack illustrates the growing capability of badware distributors to tap into the trusted relationships fostered among users of social networking sites to pass out their latest threats.MySpace, an even larger social networking site with an estimated 250 million users, has been subverted on multiple occasions by malware attackers during the last year."The main thing people haven't realized is that in the current threat landscape, where all the threats are monetized, traffic equals money in the eyes of the attackers, and you can find more traffic than ever at these social networking sites," said Guillaume Lovet, a regional manager of Fortinet's Threat Response Team.Lovet said that because Facebook and MySpace users tend to trust content coming from members they are already familiar with, the social networking sites, when compromised, represent an ideal opportunity for malware distributors seeking a new environment to carry out their scams."At its core, Facebook is an incredible online marketing tool, people are on there openly providing their names, birthdays and a wealth of other information about their religious and political views, or their favorite books and movies," Lovet said. "If attackers have access to all that data, they can use it to craft attacks and use popular demographics they discover to create additional threats that tap into any of those themes."For instance, if attackers are able to mine Facebook profile data to deduce that a large number of people within a certain age group have recently seen a particular movie, they might attempt to create a threat that poses as content related to the film and send it out to everyone who fits in that demographic, Lovet said.The inherent power of social networking sites and their ability to allow individuals to find each other and communicate directly will help attackers use people, rather than technology, to spread their latest work in the future, according to the researcher.People are also more likely to provide more information about themselves or their contacts to an unknown application once they have begun downloading it, simply to gain the initial functionality it has promised, he said.Fortinet refers to this trend as the "escalation of commitment" effect."In the case of Secret Crush, it's worth noting that this is a social worm, not something traditional being spread via some malicious code. It is manipulating humans to pass it along it on their own," Lovet said. "And once people have been pushed into installing an application, it's easier to ask for more information to get them to finish the install. Once people have already invested some of their time, and shared some of their information with a new program, they are far more likely to share even more data to get access to the capabilities it is offering."Security experts have tabbed the use of social networking sites including MySpace and Facebook for the delivery of malware as one of the most significant trends they expect to emerge during 2008.As such, many vendors are actively encouraging businesses to block or monitor use of the programs to protect their networks and computers from being infected by nefarious applications."Businesses need to adjust their security and usage policies to address the realities of the Web 2.0 world," said Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at security gateway maker Secure Computing."Their Internet use policies need to include social networking sites, blogs, and music and video-sharing sites, and the permissions need to be spelled out specifically," Henry said. "Beyond that they need technical safeguards to help enforce those policies where necessary. The troubling part about this is that most companies are still having problems dealing with far more traditional threats."
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The Blue Frog system crippled spam-advertised websites by deluging them with opt-out requests, until a retaliatory cyberattack killed it.  Now activists are redeploying the technology to send political messages that can't be ignored. By Ryan Singel.
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By JESSE NOYES  Some students and young professionals might be toning down their MySpace and Facebook profiles in fear of employers searching social networking sites for the skinny on potential hires.  But Boston-based Experience Inc.
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Facebook.com, the No. 2 U.S.   social network site that is quickly expanding beyond its   college student base, has been met with a sudden privacy   backlash by users after it made design changes this week.
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A small step for the budding social network's quest to be the anti-Facebook: Plaxo has opened up a portion of its source code dedicated to helping users manage their various social networking identities.