Last week Facebook suffered an "error" that had an astounding ripple effect, as users of thousands of popular websites were inadvertently redirected to a Facebook error page. It was shocking to learn that Facebook Connect could disrupt every site it linked to -- but even more troubling was the glimpse it gave us of future hacker attacks.
Facebook has deleted all European facial recognition data, the Irish data protection commissioner and a German data protection regulator confirmed independently Thursday after reviewing parts of the social network's source code.
Facebook's new Graph Search has security experts warning people who use the social network to raise their privacy settings in order to avoid embarrassment or becoming victims of cybercriminals.
Graph Search, which Facebook introduced this month and is rolling out gradually, lets people use naturally phrased queries, such as "Mexican restaurants my friends like," and receive personalized results. The service makes a lot more useful information available to people, and it gives Facebook a new venue for selling advertising.
The UK's Guardian newspaper went for broke yesterday with a headline speculating what Facebook's "big announcement" on Tuesday morning would be.
The Guardian's strapline (that's jargon for subheading, by the way), backed one of three guesses by industry analysts: a smartphone, a new-look news feed, or the introduction of per-message charging.
Tweaking your Activity Log just became a necessary and tedious new part of being a Facebook user. Thanks to the service's new Graph Search feature, all that profile info you've painstakingly updated over the years (employer, home town, relationship status, movie likes, etc) and all the photos you've added over time, are now to become data in a database of the social network's trillion connections between a billion users.
Before Facebook rolls out this new search engine to the masses, it is rolling it out in a very limited beta to select users.
It’s that time of the year again – Facebook has just opened up registration for its annual Hacker Cup, “an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the title of world champion.”
This is the third Hacker Cup that Facebook has hosted.
Employers in California and Illinois will be prohibited from demanding access to workers' password-protected social networking accounts and teachers in Oregon will be required to report suspected student bullies thanks to new laws taking effect in 2013.
In all, more than 400 measures were enacted at the state level during 2012 and will become law in the new year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
Users who send and receive Twitter messages via text message from their mobile phone are vulnerable to a weakness that could allow anyone to post a tweet to their account, according to a developer and security researcher who discovered the flaw.
Jonathan Rudenberg said in a blog post on Monday that all the attacker needs to know is the target's cell phone number. Then they can spoof the originating address of the text message, or SMS,
WikiMartyr in waiting Julian Assange has emitted another screed in which he shares his belief that democracy is being dangerously undermined by government monitoring of the internet, and that Facebook and Google are helping those efforts.
Chatting with RT, Assange has outlined his belief that nations now conduct surveillance on a massive scale, because “it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.”
Since 2004, October has been dubbed "National Cyber Security Awareness Month," and many security-minded individuals, businesses and organizations make it a point to mark it.
For the second time in a row, Facebook has celebrated "Hacktober" by testing their own employees with simulated attacks and threats.
