Steroids Sold on MySpace, Official Says
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Steroids have long been sold in gyms and locker rooms, through the mail and at weight-lifting competitions. It appears teenagers can now purchase them by browsing their favorite social-networking Web site.
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Two more people linked to a nationwide investigation into the illegal sale of steroids were arraigned Tuesday on drug-related charges as a published report implicated more athletes, including the winner of the Ohio bodybuilding competition named for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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(InfoWorld) - Stepping up efforts to keep sex offenders off MySpace.com, the popular social networking Web site has partnered with an online identity and background verification company to build a U.S. national sex offender database and dedicate staff to checking the database against MySpace profiles. Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. will build a searchable database containing information on sex offenders in the U.S. who are registered with various federal and state law enforcement agencies. The database, which will be frequently updated, will include details such as name, age, physical appearance and distinguishing features like tattoos and scars. MySpace staff will monitor the site 24-hours-a-day for sex offenders who are on the list. They'll remove any matching profiles that they find. MySpace has been lobbying for new legislation that could help it take the program one step further. The company wants a law that requires sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses in a national sex-offender database. The law would stipulate that the use of an unregistered e-mail constitutes a parole or probation violation, forcing offenders back to jail. If such a law is passed, MySpace can more easily identify sex offenders that have profiles on its site, the company said. MySpace has been criticized for enabling profiles by registered sex offenders. Earlier this year, journalists around the country began cross referencing sex-offender databases with MySpace profiles, finding matches and publicizing their results. MySpace responded by hiring a chief security officer to oversee safety and law enforcement affairs and introduced an advertising campaign to promote online safety. MySpace still faces some thorny issues. For example, most sex offenders aren't legally forbidden from creating a MySpace page so it's unclear if MySpace will receive some backlash for removing profiles.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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A New York prosecutor said athletes and celebrities were involved as customers in an illicit Internet-based steroid sales network that produced at least four arrests yesterday.
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News Corp.'s (NWSa.N) Web network  MySpace has been in talks for several months with online  auction company eBay Inc.  about a partnership, the  Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people  familiar with the matter.
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(InfoWorld) - The social networking site MySpace.com is under what one computer security analyst calls an "amazingly virulent" attack caused by a worm that steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites. The worm is infecting MySpace profiles with such efficiency that an informal scan of 150 found that close to a third were infected, said Christopher Boyd, security research manager at FaceTime Communications. MySpace, owned by News Corp., is estimated to have at least 73 million registered users. The worm works by using a cross-scripting weaknessÂ found around two weeks agoÂ in MySpace and a feature within Apple Computer's QuickTime multimedia player. The exploit starts with a user who visits a MySpace profile infected with an embedded QuickTime movie. The movie loads JavaScript code that overlays a row of menu options on a MySpace profile with a bogus menu. A QuickTime function, called the HREF track, can direct the player to use JavaScript commands to load Web pages into a browser frame or window. The JavaScript feature in QuickTime has legitimate uses, "but there are a lot of legitimate uses for technology that can be misused," said Ross Paul, senior product manager with Websense Inc. If an option in the bogus menu is clicked, the user is directed to a fake log-in page hosted on another server where the person's log-in details are captured. Websense has posted a screenshot of the fake log-in page. MySpace's "seemingly random tendency" to expire user sessions or log out users makes it less noticeable to victims that an attack is under way, according to a Nov. 16 advisory by the Computer Academic Underground . Additionally, the worm places an embedded QuickTime movie on the user's profile, which will then repeat the infection process for anyone who visits the profile. The worm has another malicious function. Once a profile is infected, the worm sends spam to other people in the user's contact list. Those spam messages contain a file that appears to be a movie but instead is a link to a pornographic site that also hosts adware from Zango, Boyd said. Zango, formerly 180 Solutions,Â settled last monthÂ with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $3 million over complaints it didn't properly ask the consent of users before its adware was installed. Boyd said he's heard anecdotal stories of users removing the worm's JavaScript manually from their profile, but the worm reappears after some time if one of their friend's profiles is infected. Several variants of the worm have also appeared, he said. While some of the Web sites hosting the malicious QuickTime movie have been taken down, others have appeared, Boyd said. The Firefox 2.0 browser was flagging some of the bogus log-in sites as phishing sites, Boyd said. However, phishing sites can be active for several hours before they are flagged, he said. MySpace officials in London couldn't immediately comment Monday morning.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Former No. 1 NFL draft pick Tim Couch had doping regimens that called for anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, according to documents obtained by Yahoo.com.
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A controversial new report into MySpace alleges that its founders came from companies involved with spam, spyware and adware.
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By Melody Mcdonald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Jun. 17--FORT WORTH -- Tarrant County prosecutor Lori Varnell looked at the teen-age girl's MySpace page, and a red flag went up.
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Patriots star Rodney Harrison was so brazen - or naive - about buying human growth hormone through an allegedly corrupt system on the Internet that he made no effort to disguise his name or home address, according to law enforcement authorities.
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A federal grand jury has issued a subpoena to MySpace.com in a probe stemming from the suicide of a Missouri teenager who received cruel messages on the networking site that turned out to be a hoax, a newspaper reported.
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By Tony Rizzo, The Kansas City Star, Mo.  Jun. 16--The Missouri Highway Patrol is sifting through 178 names provided by MySpace to determine how many are among the state's registered sex offenders.
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A federal grand jury has issued a subpoena to MySpace.com in a probe stemming from the suicide of a Missouri teenager who received cruel messages on the networking site that turned out to be a hoax, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
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Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that at least two high-profile baseball players used illegal steroids to chemically help make themselves stronger.
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More than 140 sex offenders convicted in New Jersey had profiles on the networking Web site MySpace, the state's attorney general said on Tuesday.
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FakeYourSpace.com offers users of MySpace.com a way to enhance their pages by hiring âfriendsâ for money.
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Faced with legal demands from state attorneys general, MySpace.com said yesterday that it would release information on registered sex offenders it has identified and removed from the social-networking Web site.