Facebook snatches up Parakey
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Blog: Popular social-networking site makes its first buy: Parakey, a Web start-up created by Firefox's co-founders.
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The launch of Facebook&#39;s Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as&#160;Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users&#39; activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook&#39;s chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site&#39;s policies to the public.IDG News Service recently caught up with Kelly for a telephone interview. He answered questions about Beacon, saying the company is happy with it now after some revisions but acknowledging that the work isn&#39;t over, so we may yet see further modifications that address remaining privacy concerns.He also tackled other hot topics, such as the company&#39;s efforts to protect minors from sexual predators as well as&#160;data portability, or the ability for users to move their data between different social networking services. Kelly said Facebook is in favor of data portability in principle but wary of it in part because of concerns about user privacy. That might surprise the critics who raised red flags over Beacon, but Kelly said there are legitimate concerns about privacy --&#160;and security as well --&#160;with data portability.The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:IDGNS: There has been a lot of talk recently about data portability, specifically about letting users of social networks export their data to other sites and applications. What&#39;s your take on data portability?Chris Kelly: We&#39;ve made it clear that we don&#39;t have a philosophical problem with data portability. The problem comes in because there are all sorts of privacy and security worries [related to it], and there are a whole bunch of people out there who would gladly attempt to exploit somebody else&#39;s personal information if they could get one point of entry into a network, for instance, and try to export as much data as possible.So we want to make sure there are rules and controls around that to minimize the possibility of something going off. That is a critical part of all of the discussions, and it&#39;s something that, in a rush to call for data portability, most proponents haven&#39;t effectively considered. We&#39;re trying to make sure that everyone considers that. We joined the Data Portability Workgroup because we want to show that we&#39;re serious about having that conversation. But to just say that you can have a completely open system ignores that there are serious privacy and security challenges about that.IDGNS: So given the privacy, security, and legal considerations that need to be taken into account, is a satisfying solution to data portability even possible?Kelly: Any system needs to reflect the actual preferences of the end-user of the data, and the end possessor of the data is the data subject. At Facebook, we&#39;ve obviously invested a great deal in building a preference-capturing system around that, and any portability scheme needs to reflect that type of information. We&#39;ll press for any data portability scheme to reflect the preferences of data subjects. That&#39;s a very important part of building an effective data portability setup.IDGNS: What&#39;s your current position regarding Beacon, which has been such a big source of controversy?Kelly: We&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a point where it gives users control over the information they&#39;re bringing into Facebook from third-party Web sites and sharing with their friends. The users are coming to understand the technology better. As Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook&#39;s founder and CEO] has said, we made some mistakes in the launch, but we think we&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a very good point. We think users will have a great deal of comfort with how they share or don&#39;t share -- based on their own preferences -- actions on third-party Web sites off Facebook.IDGNS: Mark Zuckerberg has indicated in recent interviews that Facebook continues to work on and refine Beacon to further address lingering privacy concerns. Is that your understanding?Kelly: Yes, we learn a lot from user feedback and are constantly working to make the site more effective for our users.IDGNS: Could you articulate the importance of the bill that&#160;New York&#39;s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders are pushing and that Facebook, among others, is backing?Kelly: It&#39;s very important because it allows us to have unique identifiers that focus on sex offenders that we want to exclude from our site. We&#39;ve been asking for this type of help from Attorney General Cuomo and some of the other attorneys general. State legislatures are listening right now and trying to make it required that when people register as sex offenders, they record any Internet and online IDs [they have] and to make it a crime to access the Internet using anything besides those identifiers. This is a big assistance to us because it lets us easily check if anybody is trying to sign up with those addresses.IDGNS: How effective is that, considering you can get an e-mail address anytime without any verification as to who you are? Isn&#39;t this a cat-and-mouse game?Kelly: This is where the social factor of Facebook&#39;s real-name culture comes in and the privacy controls that we have. Those are very effective in protecting people from those who might attempt to misrepresent themselves. But we also want to make sure that anyone who would do our users harm is easily excluded, and this bill will help with that quite a bit.IDGNS: How feasible is it to come up with a tool or technology that lets social-networking site operators verify people&#39;s ages, in particular to identify -- and thus more closely protect -- underage users?Kelly: You can have effective indicators of whether or not someone is actually a member of a community, like a high school. Facebook has always had technology to try to determine whether someone is a member of a network or not and has restricted access to their information based on that. That has a great effect in pushing towards a type of proxy age verification. It&#39;s not perfect, though, and a lot of the discussions of age verification have focused on attempting perfection in determining whether or not someone is of a certain age, and that type of perfection can&#39;t be legislated effectively.IDGNS: A couple of weeks ago, MySpace and almost all state attorneys general announced an initiative outlining safety guidelines for social networking sites. Is that something Facebook plans to sign on to?Kelly: That agreement substantially reflected an agreement we had previously reached with Attorney General Cuomo, and we&#39;re very glad that MySpace has stepped up in this effort. We think that going forward, there will be a variety of principles agreed upon among certain leading Internet sites.IDGNS: Is it fair to say that the relationship between U.S. state attorneys general and social networking companies has significantly improved in recent months? It used to be quite adversarial and contentious.Kelly: At Facebook, we&#39;ve always tried to maintain a very open and honest dialogue with all the attorneys general and law enforcement agencies, and I think we&#39;re getting to a very good point with these law enforcement agencies and the industry in a broader way.IDGNS: How realistic is it to expect a site like Facebook, which has about 60 million active users, to properly monitor what so many people are doing to prevent inappropriate or illegal behavior?Kelly: We use very sophisticated social designs in terms of limiting access to people&#39;s information based on networks that they share in their real-world lives, and further, we use technology to look for anomalous behavior, things that may be concerning. It helps to keep our users safer and also to prevent spam and to create a more comfortable environment for our users. We have a pretty large customer service team that deals with both reports and with the potentially anomalous behavior highlighted by the technology.IDGNS: Have you improved your response times when members report complaints about content or actions on the site? That seemed to be a big complaint Attorney General Cuomo&#39;s office had with Facebook at some point.Kelly: Yes, absolutely.IDGNS: Does Facebook do enough to make sure its average member understands how to manage the very granular privacy settings you offer?Kelly: I think the average Facebook user understands very well that we take privacy extraordinarily seriously. There&#39;s always a balance to be struck between the ease of use and completeness in providing privacy control. We try to strike that balance very well, but we always listen to user feedback about that in terms of how we give them more control over what information they share and with whom.IDGNS: How much monitoring do you do of, say, photos or videos uploaded to the site? Do those go through automated screening, or do you depend more on members manually flagging stuff they see?Kelly: Most of the automated tools we&#39;ve tested in terms of recognizing inappropriate images and things like that are ineffective. We&#39;ve found that users are some of the best reporters on that, and our reporting infrastructure is extraordinarily effective in removing inappropriate content quickly and in holding those users who attempt to post them responsible by cutting off their account.IDGNS: As chief privacy officer, what are some of your goals for this year?Kelly: As the site and the Internet as a whole evolve, we want to continue giving people a great deal of control over what personal information they share and with whom. We want to continue to reflect the social graph very accurately, and privacy is a critical part of that, so we&#39;ll continue to bake it into the design of the site and provide people with the most effective privacy controls on the Internet.
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Bebo has developed a system to let applications written for Facebook run on its social network.
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Members of social networking services  like Facebook will soon be able to update their profiles by  simply making a phone call, instead of having to type on a  computer keyboard.
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Privately held social networking  site Facebook Inc. said on Thursday it has acquired Internet  startup Parakey, run by the co-founders of Web browser Mozilla  Firefox, for an undisclosed sum.
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Also: Your iris as photo watermark. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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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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Blog: Popular add-ons could have their update process hijacked by man-in-the-middle attacks.
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Developers, developers, developers...stop spamming Facebook has changed its rules for developers to cut down on the myriad irritations which have afflicted it since it opened up to third party applications in May.â¦
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Serves up ads for deceptive security software Facebook has become the latest website to be found pushing services that deliver highly deceptive security warnings designed to trick users into buying software.â¦
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Paul Reinheimer, one of two behind the funcaday website (providing details on one PHP function each day and special content on the weekends) has posted a supplement to this weekend's posting covering escaping.   The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. [...] You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.   The comments on his post back up his suggestions (and include other tips like a recommendation to cache on an even higher level - page blocks).
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A word game that has proved hugely popular with Facebook members could soon disappear.
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Online fraudsters are targeting Facebook users with the same scam tactics that have been used for years to steal passwords for banks and PayPal. While the target is different, the motive remains the same: money.
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FOAF/LOAF  and bloom filters have a lot of interesting properties for social network and whitelist distribution.  I think we can go one level higher though and include GPG/OpenPGP key fingerpring distribution in the FOAF file for simple web-of-trust based key distribution.  What if we used FOAF and included the PGP key fingerprint(s) for identities? This could mean a lot.  You include the PGP key fingerprints within the FOAF file of your direct friends and then include a bloom filter of the PGP key fingerprints of your entire whitelist (the source FOAF file would of course need to be encrypted ).  Your whitelist would be populated from the social network as your client discovered new identit ...
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Mozilla disclosed Monday that it had opened up a vulnerability with a previous security fix for its Firefox, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird clients. According to an advisory issued Monday, a new JavaScript issue was introduced that would allow coding from Web content to be exploited to execute arbitrary code.
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Serves up ads for deceptive security software Facebook has become the latest website to be found pushing services that delivers highly deceptive security warnings designed to trick users into buying software.â¦
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Social networking sites like Facebook have wooed millions of users with their easy format for keeping in touch but left them navigating the pitfalls of interacting online -- is it really private?