PCFormat Forum Archive

Slashdot wrote:Although we think it's generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook's auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That's right—Facebook in its current state is now illegal. The German government, which possesses perhaps the world's most adamant privacy laws as a result of postwar abuse, considers Facebook's facial recognition a violation of 'the right to anonymity.'

Get ready - it looks like Facebook is gearing up for another update – one that’s bound to get on the nerves of those who value their privacy. If you were miffed about how Facebook was taking liberties with our data in order to attract advertisers, then you’ll probably not be a fan of the upcoming update to the News Feed.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is pilot testing some new features on a small portion of its users. The changes will be made for the benefit of the advertisers – though you can bet that they’re going to market it as a ‘cool, new feature’ that will supposedly make our Facebook experience “so much better”.

Advertisers have long since griped about how their advertising campaigns don’t really stand out in Facebook’s newsfeed. Whenever a user ‘likes’ their page, it hardly shows up in the newsfeed of others. More often than not, the little bit of interaction that the advertisers get is just a small blip in the continuous stream of photo uploads and status updates that the average user sees in his newsfeed and often goes unnoticed. Sometimes, the update doesn’t even show up at all because of Facebook’s filtering function.

Facebook’s solution to this is to give up filtering altogether. When their new update goes live, you’re going to see pretty much everything that your friends do and everything that they like. Their comments on the advertiser’s pages will be readily visible.

They’re also going to update the ‘Like’ Button and expand it so that it could better reflect what people really mean. Specific options discussed were “Want” and “Need”, but there may be others when it is all said and done. Facebook is shifting towards more specific functions – which, in turn, allows them to gather more data about who you are and what your preferences are. This info, as you can expect, will be used to make their targeted ads even more effective.

Of course, none of this is final as of yet. Some aspects can still change over time as Facebook has not officially launched the new features. We expect, however, to learn more about the new updates in the coming F8 Conference which will take place some time this year, though the schedule has yet to be announced. We'll stay on top of this issue and keep you up to date as more information becomes available.
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Facebook has launched an all-in-one messaging app that blurs the line between social networking and texting.

The standalone app, available for both iPhone and Android handsets, is set-up to be logged into a Facebook account. Users can then send a message to one friend or multiple people at once. To select recipients, the user simply types in the name and the app brings up results from both the phone’s contact list and the user’s Facebook friends list.

The app automatically sends each message through an appropriate medium: if the contact is another Facebook users, it appears as a Facebooks notification; if the contact isn’t on Facebook, it’s sent as a text message. The app also gives the user the ability to see all previous Facebook messages and chat sessions.

Slashdot wrote:Facebook is making a series of design changes to the site to make it clearer to users who can see the content that they post, an issue Google has been criticizing Facebook about since it launched its own social network, Google+, in June. 'You have told us that "who can see this?" could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward,' Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday. The main change is that Facebook will now display the intended audience for a photo, a text post, a tag or any other piece of content right next to it. Until now, those controls have been on a separate Settings section of the profile. 'Your profile should feel like your home on the web — you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there.' Another change Facebook is introducing is allowing users to modify the audience of a post after it's published, which they couldn't do before.

Facebook login details stolen by Ramnit worm

A pervasive worm has expanded its reach to now steal login and password details for Facebook users, warned security vendor Seculert, which found a server holding 45,000 login credentials.

The worm, called Ramnit, infects Windows executables, Microsoft Office and HTML files, according to a profile published by Microsoft. It steals user names, passwords, browser cookies and can also function as a backdoor, allowing a hacker to do other malicious actions on an infected computer.

Researchers from Seculert discovered a command-and-control server for the worm and found that it had harvested some 45,000 credentials from Facebook users, mostly in the UK and France, according to its blog.

Aviv Raff, CTO and cofounder of Seculert, said Ramnit's authors may be finding that attacking social networks is a more productive way to collect people's sensitive data. "We see a growing trend of malware writers embedding social networks in the malware instead of sending the malware itself via email spam," Raff said. "This is the same for Ramnit."

Once the Facebook login and password have been collected, it is suspected that the victim's account is then accessed and a link is posted on their Facebook profile that leads to Ramnit, which will try and infect the computer. "We suspect that they use these credentials to continuously spread the Ramnit malware through Facebook," Raff said.

Another security vendor, Trusteer, noted last year that Ramnit appeared to have been modified in order to commit financial fraud, acquiring similar capabilities as the famous Zeus and SpyEye malicious software programs.

Ramnit can inject HTML fields into a web page and ask for information on a banking site that would not normally be asked, Trusteer noted on August 22.

Seculert estimates that some 800,000 computers were infected with Ramnit between September through the end of December. A Symantec report from July 2011 put Ramnit as the most common piece of malware it blocked in June and July 2011.

Ramnit's mining of Facebook could yield passwords that people have re-used on other websites, a common mistake that gives hackers an easy in.

"Many users use the same password for Facebook and other organisation web services, such as SSL VPN or Outlook Web Access," Raff said. "The attackers may use this to gain remote access to corporate networks. Same goes for their online bank account."

Facebook Subscribe Means Porn, Spam

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.1014203

When the Travel Channel's Nisha Chittal launched her public profile on Facebook Subscribe, she looked forward to connecting with a community that shared her wanderlust and passion for social media. Instead, she got sexually explicit messages, pornographic photos, and spammy, irrelevant messages from thousands of users around the world.