Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, we hardley knew ye !
A relevant quote from the ether, found though Flickr:
“I’m done with Facebook. I’ve never really seen the value in it (except Scrabulous, perhaps) and I am getting increasingly uneasy about handing over so much information to them. The recent Beacon debacle was revelatory.
So I’m saying goodbye. I do sincerely hope that all 201 of my friends will continue to be my friends — you know where to find me! Please invite me to your parties via good ol’ fashioned email (I also accept phone calls); we can compare relative hotness and trivia knowledge in real life.
As it turns out, you can only *deactivate* your account on your own. An email to customer service revealed how to fully delete it from their servers:
“If you want your information removed from our servers, we can do this for you. However, you need to first log in, delete all profile content, and deactivate. Once you have cleared your account, let us know, and we’ll take care of the rest. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Have you been thinking about leaving Facebook too? Please join me – let’s all do it this Friday at noon!” ( December 7, 2007 )
A few links here to listen to some feedback from the ether. Flickr Zuckerman himself and a Facebook movement to dump accounts (quoted above) . I don’t think a few hundred thousand leaving Facebook will make a dent, but this boils down to honesty and integrity, not really about privacy.
Google PR ‘comment spam on blogs’ attack thwarted !
Attack Of The Fake Search Results
A massive attempt to defraud search users was thwarted yesterday, according to the BBC. Hackers created thousands of booby-trapped Web sites that tricked Google, MSN and Yahoo search crawlers into ranking them very high. The hackers used comment spam on blogs to achieve the high results. The Web sites would come up in search results for terms like “Christmas gifts” and “hospice,” the report said. Users who clicked on these fake sites risked having their computers hijacked and their personal information stolen.
However, the attack was uncovered yesterday. “This was fairly epic,” said Alex Eckelberry, who heads Sunbelt Software, one of the firms that uncovered the attack. Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains were used in the attack and that most were Chinese registered and hosted in the U.S. He said the attack could be a harbinger of many more to come.
As usual, the malicious software exploited weaknesses in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. “If your machine was not fully patched, you were going to get hosed,” Eckelberry said. He added that the fake Web sites were only programmed to show on Google.com, even though Yahoo and MSN’s crawlers also indexed them. From MediaPost Link to BBC