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Facebook changes creeping out some customers

September 26, 2011
Filed under: Tech News — Cole @ 6:38 am


At the F8 conference yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off some of the most drastic changes ever made to the company’s service. And though Zuckerberg is excited by those changes, many folks across the Web aren’t so quick to celebrate.


The fear among some users relates to what some say could become a potentially worrisome privacy situation on the social network, led by Timeline and changes to Open Graph.


Timeline provides users with a way to view “the story of your life,” according to Zuckerberg, including a collection of all the “stories” uses have shared on Facebook over the years, as well as the pictures they’ve posted and the applications they’ve used.


Facebook’s updated Open Graph will make the social network far more “sticky.” Zuckerberg said users will have the ability–thanks to Timeline and a new addition, Ticker–to see what a friend is doing, like watching a movie on Netflix or listening to a song on Spotify, and engage in that same activity from within the social network. The Facebook CEO said he believes the improvements will help create “a completely new class of social apps” that will let users share every single facet of their lives on the social network.


“All those activities people perform with these apps–listening to a Bjork tune, reading about same-sex marriage laws, cooking Arroz con Pollo, running four miles, donating to Amnesty International–will be stored permanently and made accessible (if the user allows it) on a greatly enhanced profile page that will essentially become a remote-control autobiography,” Wired’s Steven Levy wrote about the update.


It’s that concept of Facebook becoming an “autobiography” that’s scaring some folks.


“Is there any way I can upload my browser history, bank statements, and medical records to Facebook?” Twitter user @adrianshort asked today. “Might as well do this properly.”


Those sentiments were echoed earlier today by CNET commenter “OneAmazedHuman” who said that the social network’s additions are making some people consider leaving the site.


“Frankly, after this last round of messing around with Facebook, there are a whole lot of us thinking seriously about dumping it,” OneAmazedHuman wrote. “[I] hate everything they threw at us lately. What happened to ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?’


“Facebook is getting too intrusive and sneaky,” OneAmazedHuman continued. “If I can find another place to play Scrabble, I’m probably out of there. I can live without it nicely. When it was fun, it was fun. It isn’t that anymore. Thanks, Zuckerberg. Why didn’t you just create something new to mess around with and leave Facebook as is?”


Mark Zuckerberg talks about Ticker and the Open Graph at F8 yesterday.


However, there are some people who have already left Facebook because of the changes. One Twitter user, @qwghlm, tweeted earlier today that “after F8 last night, I decided to finally quit Facebook.” CNET commenter “JamesOnTheWay” said that he too dropped Facebook and has moved over to Google+.


Drastic measures aside, there are some who are taking a wait-and-see approach to Facebook’s changes. Twitter user @JulesHanna tweeted yesterday that the F8 presentation “reinforced my belief that Facebook’s becoming the operating system of the human Web. Brilliant, yet alarming in its implications.”


Though the outcry over Facebook’s changes is strong, the company has survived such complaints in the past. In 2009, following a major redesign of the site, the social network was hit hard by users who complained about the changes. At the time, a Facebook app that polled users on their thoughts about the changes found that hundreds of thousands of users were upset by the move. And like now, many of those folks said that they would leave the social network.


That said, at that time, Facebook had more than 175 million users. At the F8 conference yesterday, it was revealed that Facebook now has over 800 million members worldwide. So if those departures did, in fact, occur, they certainly weren’t crippling to the social network.


Also playing into Facebook’s favor this time around, there isn’t near-universal outcry over the changes like there was in 2009. In fact, there are some people that are quite pleased with the company’s modifications.


“Got my new Facebook timeline looking good,” Twitter user @angelarenee09 tweeted today. “Love these fun changes!”


So, while that might just be one opinion, it’s quite clear that in the social world, everyone has a different idea of what’s good and bad. And Facebook–for better or worse–is learning that all over again today.


By: , CNET



Cyber Monday: Beware the malware

November 28, 2010
Filed under: Virus Alert — Cole @ 1:11 pm

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving and you’re sitting at your work computer suffering from food coma. Too bloated to get any real work done, you decide to do something that doesn’t occupy too much of the brain–online Christmas shopping.


There’s more at stake here than the cost of shipping and handling, though. First off, your boss probably doesn’t want you to be surfing Amazon when you have spreadsheets to complete. Secondly, you could be opening up the corporate network to malicious hackers during what is known to be a particularly risky period.


Scammers are ready for unsuspecting online shoppers to be hunting for holiday bargains that hit on what has become known as Cyber Monday (given that more than 40 percent of you will be buying holiday gifts online, according to this survey). There will no doubt be malware hiding on retail sites, fake sites created just for distributing viruses and Trojans, and e-mails with malware-laden attachments and links leading to nastiness.


Once inside the corporate network, the malware can easily spread to other computers in the company and leave back doors that can be used later for nefarious purposes, putting corporate data at risk.


Unless a company forbids Web surfing on company time and uses software to monitor and enforce the policy, there is little recourse once workers start browsing. IT departments should do what they can to protect the networks before then, by using the most up-to-date spam filters and anti-malware software and adjusting the enterprise Internet settings to alert users when a program attempts to download something.


Communication is key, too. Corporate IT personnel should consider sending an alert to remind employees of the dangers and to report suspected malware downloads, advises Adam Chernichaw, a privacy expert and partner at the law firm White & Case. Also, they should tell employees to not click “Agree” or “OK” to close a window, but to click the red “X” in the upper corner or press “ALT + F4″ instead.


Employees should practice safe browsing. CNET contributor Lance Whitney wrote about some general tips for Web surfers from Webroot, including typing URLs in directly instead of following links and keeping a close eye on PayPal and other payment accounts.


Be careful of electronic greeting cards, because they are an easy way to trick people into downloading malware. Verify that the merchant or site a greeting card is sent from is legitimate, warns the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. If you get an e-card from someone you don’t know, be suspicious. You can always ask friends in an e-mail to confirm that he or she sent you something.


If you are buying gift cards online, only shop at reputable retailers and not through online auction sites, says the National Retail Federation. Gift cards sold through online auction sites may be counterfeit or stolen and once you buy it it’s yours. The group has more online shopping tips on its Web site.


And for people wanting to donate to charity, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has a charity checklist with tips such as asking groups seeking donations for more information about who is behind the operation, being wary of charities that spring up overnight in response to disasters, and not sending cash or donations.


Web searches can be dangerous any time of year as scammers use search engine optimization tactics to lure people to their sites. But holiday shopping online presents an attractive pool of potential victims. Be extra cautious when doing searches related to “holiday sale” and “Christmas specials” during this time of year. F-Secure has compiled a Holiday 2010 Cyber-Watch List of popular search terms that are expected to be used by scammers to poison search results, which features “Kinect for Xbox” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops” at the top.


And make sure you don’t do too much shopping at work or you’ll instead be online checking out the job wanted ads.


Bounty offered for open-source Kinect driver

November 7, 2010
Filed under: Tech News — Cole @ 12:58 pm


The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft’s much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a $2,000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer.


Kinect, which launched today, is currently available solely for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that’s not enough.


And that’s why Adafruit–led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip Torrone–is offering two grand to someone who can figure out how to decouple the hot new device from Microsoft’s gaming machine.


The bounty will go to the “first person or group to upload code and examples under an open-source license to (social-coding site) GitHub.”


“It’s amazing hardware that shouldn’t just be locked up for Xbox 360,” Torrone told CNET by e-mail. “Its ‘radar camera’ being able to get video and distance as a sensor input from commodity hardware is huge.”


But Microsoft isn’t taking kindly to the bounty offer. “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products,” a company spokesperson told CNET. “With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”


Still, according to Torrone, Adafruit is hoping someone will figure out how to use Kinect in education, robotics, or “fun outside the Xbox.”


“We think First Robotics could use this,” Torrone said. “We think educators could use this. Look at all the cool stuff people did with the Wii remote.”


Torrone added that while Adafruit could likely come up with a Kinect driver itself, “we don’t have the time. We can offer a bounty…and we think we’ll see a million ideas flourish once anyone can plug this in to whatever they want.


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