Facebook

Should students and teachers ever be friends on Facebook? School districts across the country, including the nation's largest, are weighing that question as they seek to balance the risks of inappropriate contact with the academic benefits of social networking.

At least 40 school districts nationwide have approved social media policies. Schools in New York City and Florida have disciplined teachers for Facebook activity, and Missouri legislators recently acquiesced to teachers' objections to a strict statewide policy.

Facebook raised a lot of eyebrows when it bought Instagram for $1 billion last week.

But that's actually a bargain compared with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom's original asking price of $2 billion. That spectacular number appears in Wall Street Journal, which this evening ran down the details of the intense negotiations between Systrom and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

If you want to get a lot of attention on the internet, blame the internet for causing people’s deepest problems. The Atlantic learned this in 2008 when it published a cover story headlined “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The digital dust storm that kicked up was such that the magazine felt compelled to follow up with a story asking, “Is Google actually making us smarter?”

Now here we are again with another cover story, this one by Stephen Marche, posing the question: “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” So: Is Facebook making us lonely? In a word, no.

Earlier today, security researcher Gareth Wright revealed the discovery of a security hole in the Facebook app running on Android and iOS mobile devices.  The simple 'hack' allows users to copy plain text configuration files off the device and thus effectively 'stealing' credentials / gaining unauthorized access to accounts on that iOS device. 

Facebook has executed a masterful response to Yahoo’s patent trolling that protects it legally but still makes it look like the victim. Here I examine how for almost every patent Yahoo claims Facebook infringes upon, the social network has countersued with a stronger, more specific patent for content feed sorting, advertising, and privacy.

Facebook will maintain the moral high ground, and likely bypass a costly settlement. But there’s none of Facebook’s blood in the water, nothing for the sharks to circle. It could have gone much worse. 

About 24 Facebook developers, led by former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen are working on a new search engine, according to a report published by Bloomberg last week.

About two dozen Facebook engineers are working on an improved search engine, say two people familiar with the project who did not want to be named because the company is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO. 

Senators Charles E Schumer and Richard Blumenthal confirmed yesterday that they have written to the US Justice Department and the equal employment opportunity commission, asking them to investigate prospective employers who request employees turnover Facebookl passwords during the interview process.

Kaspersky Lab researchers have found a criminal gang playing cat and mouse with Google by releasing several variations of its malware laden Chrome extensions, hosting them on the official Google Web store.

The malware pretends to be a Flash Player installer but instead downloads a trojan which writes messages a victim's Facebook profile and automatically likes certain pages. The researchers say that variations of the attacks have been found, however, it has so far largely been confined to Brazil and other Portuguese speaking nations. 

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are apparently going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking for credentials to be able to login and poke around for themselves.

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks. 

University College of London student, Shah Mahmood, along with Yvo Desmedt, Chair of Information Communication Technology, has discovered what they're labelling as a “zero day privacy hole” in Facebook.

The vulnerability which they call “deactivated friend attack” was presented at the IEEE International workshop on security and social networking in Switzerland. They say the attack works like this: