Save your Facebook Account from Spying

Now you can save your facebook account from syping. Researchers have designed a new screen which allows users to decide what type of information they want to share with which member. Researchers have created an interface that will help Facebook users to keep their private information secret.

Signing up for a game or application, Facebook members could overrule their global privacy settings. But now Penn State University researchers have devised a sign-up interface to tackle the problem.

Researchers claim that many Facebook app developers may try to profit from their games and tools by selling the data with advertisers and other companies. The information could also be leaked to identity thieves.

Members who sign up for an app must agree to new terms of information disclosure that are often different from their main Facebook privacy settings, they say.

Heng Xu said "The only way to find out how the information is going to be used is to go to each app's website and review the terms of use. And many people won't do that".

The sign-up screen currently is a general agreement that shows information third-party developers are requesting. If the member does not agree, the member cannot use the app.

The screen designed by the researchers allows members to decide what types of information they are comfortable sharing and with whom they want to share it.

Privacy settings allow members to determine how much information the member wants to display or share with their members of their network and Facebook.

This data can include birthdate, hometown and current city, as well as pictures the members uploaded to their pages.

Members may not consider data like hometown or birthdates vital information, but Heng said that hackers can use such information to guess social security numbers.

"Facebook has used feedback from the 800 million people who use the site to develop a strict application permissions process, where applications have to ask you what information they need in order to run."

Facebook photos get a new viewer

Facebook is rolling out a new photo viewer to all of its users over the next few weeks.

Unlike the older version of the viewer, the user stays on the same page while viewing a photo from his/her wall or elsewhere on Facebook. The images get displayed in a pop-up with a lightbox-like effect. Comments viewing and sharing has also been made easier.

According to Facebook, over 100 million photos are uploaded to the site every day and they believe that the re-designed photo viewer will increase photo views by 5 per cent. This would calculate to about an additional billion photo views every day.

The new viewer was also necessitated because the older viewer was "supported by some of the oldest code in the system and was in dire need of an upgrade."

Users can easily browse through photos either by clicking on the icons or by using simple keyboard shortcuts: Press Escape key to close the viewer; click the right or left arrow keys to move to the previous or next images in the album.

Facebook had first announced its plans about revamping its photo viewer back in September 2010, when it had began support for high-resolution images.

source 

Facebook is Planning to Launch Third-Party Commenting System

Facebook is planning to launch a third-party commenting system in a matter of weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the new product. This new technology could see Facebook as the engine behind the comments system on many high-profile blogs and other digital publications very soon.

The company is actively seeking major media companies and blogs to partner with it for its launch, part of a bigger media industry move spearheaded in part by the recent hires of Nick Grudin and Andy Mitchell, media business development executives with respective track records at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Facebook, of course, is already very present in blog comments. Currently, a digital publishing outlet--say, a blog or a newspaper's Web site--can integrate Facebook's developer API and allow users to "connect" to their Facebook accounts, or can build in "Social Comments" in a widget of related messages. Often, users can post alerts on their Facebook walls announcing that they've commented, or can have a "Social Comment" turned into a status message.

The new commenting product is a significantly deeper expansion of this, according to sources. Facebook will be able to power the entire commenting system--handling the log-in and publishing, cross-promoting comments on individuals' Facebook walls, and possibly even promoting them as well on media outlets' own "fan" pages. Undoubtedly, the Facebook "like" button will be deeply integrated as well.

CNET has not seen mockups, but it's conceivable that the whole thing could look quite a bit like TimesPeople, a commenting and social news system that The New York Times launched several years ago for its own publication.

One source hinted that the Facebook commenting product may also permit users to log in with Google, Yahoo, or Twitter IDs if a publisher chooses to incorporate them. That's a surprising move considering Facebook's curious relationship with the developer arms of both Google and Twitter--Facebook blocked a Google data-portability product called Friend Connect several years ago, and last summer it blocked a Twitter friend-finder that trawled Facebook contact lists.

On People.com, only Facebook users can comment. Is this what the broader Facebook commenting platform will look like? (The news story in question is about Justin Bieber going on a date to an R-rated movie with Selena Gomez, by the way.)

It's also not clear how--if at all--Facebook commenting will deal with the tension between Facebook's insistence that members use their real identities, and the fact that much of the commenting that takes place on blogs and other media outlets is still done behind a veil of anonymity.

Whatever the specifics are, this new comments product could have serious reverberations in the start-up community. One source who has seen the new Facebook commenting technology remarked that it's an obvious and direct competitor to start-ups that provide commenting technology, like Disqus and Echo. With Facebook Places adopting much of the "check-in" methodology that smaller competitors Foursquare and Loopt offer, and Facebook Questions operating in the same space as Quora (though Facebook has insisted it's not trying to "kill" it), the social network has shown that it's very willing to move into spaces dominated by start-ups and instantly give them a huge new competitor.

But considering the frequency with which Facebook launches new features, it's inevitable. In the past six months, Facebook has launched the Places geolocation service, a revamped Facebook Messages, and new upgrades to Facebook Photos and Groups--to name a few.

via cnet

Technology : Facebook boosts security, adds HTTPS

Facebook : In order to stay safe and protect users from getting hacked, the popular social networking site Facebook is rolling out a new set of security features.

Facebook, with over 500-million members, has added the ability for users to login and surf the site using a more secure encrypted connection, known as HTTPS.

The encryption is the same used on shopping and banking websites to secure connections, and was previously used on Facebook when passwords are checked.

"Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools," the company said in a blog post.

Facebook noted that the site may function more slowly using HTTPS, and some features, including many third-party applications, don't currently support HTTPS.

In addition to the added encryption , Facebook said it will now also offer "social authentification," a unique form of the traditional "captcha" coding that will ask a user to identify Facebook friends from their photos.

The two new security features promise to prevent Wi-Fi hackers from fraudulently accessing accounts. Facebook already uses HTTPS when users log into an external site through Facebook Connect.

Your password, which gets sent back to Facebook from the third party site, remains encrypted. This will now be extended to user activity within the site itself.

IT experts can already overcome internet security issues by adding third-party security measures and forcing an encrypted connection. However, Facebook's decision to make full-session encryption a default setting for all users will remove the burden from those that are less aware of Wi-Fi hackers.

Facebook uses captchas to authenticate users when they log in from a country that is not associated with their account. However, this is now being replaced in favour of a new photo-matching system. Users will be faced with three photos of one of their Facebook friends, and will have to correctly identify them from a list of six friends' names.

"Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are," says Facebook engineer Alex Rice. Rice admits inevitable drawbacks to the new security measures.

Page loading speed will take a hit under HTTPS and many third-party apps are not HTTPS enabled. Social network users that that collect friends by the thousand may also have difficulty identifying photos of friends at random, and friends who have cartoons or 'lookalikes' tagged under their name could be unidentifiable.

HTTP settings will not change automatically, so users can opt in or out of the new feature.

via indiatimes

Facebook founder Zuckerberg's fan page hacked

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Wednesday said a software "bug" let a hacker impersonate the social network's founder Mark Zuckerberg in a comment posted to his public fan page at the website.

The bogus update posted late on Monday suggested that Facebook turn to its users instead of banks for money and got "liked" by more than 1,800 members of the social network before it was erased.

"A bug enabled status postings by unauthorized people on a handful of public pages," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email reply to an AFP inquiry. "The bug has been fixed."

Pictures of the hacked page could be found at technology news blog TechCrunch and other online venues. The message, complete with typos, left on the page read:

"Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn't Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a 'social business' the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think?"

It was signed "#hackercup2011," an apparent reference to an international computer programming competition being held by Facebook. The link directed users to a Wikipedia page about social business.

Yunus was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping people break out of poverty with the help of micro-loans.

via indiatimes

'Facebook, Twitter making us less human'

LONDON: A leading academic in the US has claimed that social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are threatening to dominate our lives, making us more isolated and 'less human'.

Professor Sherry Turkle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has even branded the use of the technology a form of 'modern madness', reports the Daily Mail.

She argues that, under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, technology is isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

Turkle, who is leading an attack on the information age with her book Alone Together, even suggests social networking can make us mad, citing 'pathological behaviour' she has witnessed, such as mourners at funerals checking their iPhones.

Her book is part of an intellectual backlash in America calling for the people to devote less time to sites such as Twitter.

Other American academics have also criticised the growing trend of internet activity. One, Professor William Kist, of Kent State University in Ohio, has cited the death in Brighton of Simone Back who posted her suicide note on Facebook at Christmas.

None of the 42-year-old Back's 1,058 'friends' on the site called for help. Instead they traded insults on her page.

But defenders of Twitter and Facebook claim social media has many benefits and has, for example, led to more communication for people who are separated by long distances.

via timesofindia

Facebook backs down over contact info controversy

Facebook has backtracked over a new feature that would have shared users' addresses and mobile phone numbers with developers of applications on the popular social networking site.

Facebook announced the change late Monday night just three days after the introduction of the new feature was met with howls of protest from privacy advocates.

The new feature appeared whenever users installed a new application.

In the past, such actions prompted a menu in which users were asked whether they wished to share personal details such as their name, picture, friends lists and other general information with the application provider.

Privacy advocates immediately blasted this omission, and to Facebook's credit, the company acted quickly to close the security loophole by disabling the new feature. "Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data," Facebook wrote on its developer blog.

"We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We'll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."

via ciol

Google & Facebook will test IPv6

The new standard offers many trillions of new web addresses, but cannot be accessed from modems and routers that only use IPv4

Web addresses are likely to run out as soon as November and to raise public awareness Google and Facebook have decided to switch their websites to a new system for one day in June.

On June 8, a whole bunch of web giants, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, will turn on a new way of running web addresses, reports the Telegraph.

Read Also | RIM taps Web technology to drive mobile developments

The system, called IPv6, has been designed to stop the world running out of the web addresses that underlie the locating of websites and devices.

As of now, only 0.2 per cent of web users have access to the new protocol, however. 'World IPv6' Day is designed to encourage its adoption.

Vint Cerf, one of the web's founding fathers, is leading a global campaign to encourage web service providers and IT managers to switch from the current system, IPv4, to IPv6.

Read Also | American brings in ITA Software to design passenger technology platform

The new standard offers many trillions of new web addresses, but cannot be accessed from modems and routers that only use IPv4.

It is likely, however, that most of the changes needed will take place without consumers losing access to any part of the web because they will be part of the standard software and hardware upgrade cycle.

The availability of new web addresses will, it is hoped, allow more connected devices, such as tablet computers, as well as permitting more mundane devices to gain web addresses.

via The Times of India

Technology : Facebook's new profile, there's no turning back

The new Facebook profile introduced last month wasn't just an opt-in feature, it turns out, as the social networking giant is going to switch all user profies to the new theme starting today.

Facebook rolled out the improved, redesigned profile theme to users last month, which boasted improved looks. The new profile page removes the tabs that used to be at the top of your page, and moves them to navigation links on the left side of the page. There's also a strip of your latest photos in the new Facebook profile, and overall it tries to make your profile page more presentable to visitors -- it also quickly lets you establish common interests with friends at a glance.

Facebook said in a statement that millions of users had made the shift to the new profile, and the newer profiles will now be pushed to every user -- regardless of whether they like it or not.

via pcworld