Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tags 'Social Networking' and 'world'

Facebook cited in 20% of U.S. divorces

siljaline — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Facebook use has been cited in 1 of 5 U.S. divorce cases, according to a recent survey among American marriage lawyers.

Moreover, more than 80 per cent of divorce lawyers reported a rising number of people using social media for extramarital affairs, according to the survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

"We're coming across it more and more," psychologist Steven Kimmons of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., said in a news release on the university's website.

Full story > http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/03/04/facebook-divorce.html

Facebook's Canadian users top 16 million

siljaline — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Privacy concerns don't seem to have scared Canadians off Facebook. Canada passed the 16 million users mark in May, according to research firm Inside Network. More than 912,000 Canadians signed up for the social networking site last month, a six per cent increase in membership Inside Network says an estimated 47.9 per cent of Canadians are on Facebook, making Canadians some of the heaviest users of the site in the world. Overall, Canada is the fourth largest market on Facebook, on a per capita basis, behind Iceland, Norway and Hong Kong. About 59.6 per cent of Iceland's population has a Facebook profile. But among larger countries with at least 10 million citizens, Canada is No. 1. There has been speculation recently that Facebook is approaching 500 million users worldwide, although officially, it has only stated that it has more than 400 million users. Inside Network says Facebook now has about 465 million users in total and might be weeks away from hitting the half-billion mark. Facebook has averaged about 500,000 new users daily for the last year but spiked in May with about 30 million new members, Inside Network says. Facebook does not give specific membership numbers, but Inside Network uses data provided to advertisers to gather insights about the social networking site.

Facebook announces new privacy settings

siljaline — Sun, 30 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Social-networking site Facebook has introduced a number of new policies and settings amid growing concerns over how it uses members' private information.

The website will allow users to completely opt out of the Facebook platform, which will block any and all third parties from viewing their data, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at a news conference on Wednesday at Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters.

The option will be retroactive, he added, so users can continue to use the site but wipe any information that may have previously been shared with third parties.

Facebook will also simplify its privacy settings by allowing users to decide who sees their information all on one page.

"When people have control over what they share, they want to share more. When people share more, the world becomes more open and connected," Zuckerberg said. "Over the past few weeks, the No. 1 thing we've heard is that many users want a simpler way to control their information. Today we're starting to roll out changes that will make our controls simpler and easier."

The company said the new controls were the result of consultations held with U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and a number of privacy and consumer advocate groups,

Facebook currently has more than 400 million users around the world.

More > http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/26/facebook-privacy.html Facebook breaches Canadian privacy law: commissioner http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2009/07/16/facebook-privacy-commissioner.html

Facebook fine-tunes privacy controls

siljaline — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Facebook says it is boosting privacy by giving users control over who sees each bit of information they put on the social-networking site, and by doing away with regional and group networks.

"We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter posted on the site late Tuesday. "In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings."

More: > http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/12/02/facebook-privacy-settings.html

More: > http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=190423927130

Jackson's death slows web to a crawl

siljaline — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

In life, Michael Jackson once ruled the pop charts. With his death, he dominated the internet.

As reports of Jackson's death on Thursday spread, celebrity gossip websites crashed, news sites slowed to a crawl and traffic on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook spiked.

Few sites were spared. Jackson's sudden, unexpected death led so many people to search Google for information that the search engine's software believed it was under attack, sending searchers a message saying "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application."

Even online encyclopedia Wikipedia had problems of its own, as an editing war broke out on Jackson's biography over whether the musician had actually passed away.

Shortly after 5:15 p.m. ET, gossip website TMZ.com was the first outlet to report that Jackson had been rushed to a hospital after suffering an apparent cardiac arrest. TMZ's website temporarily shut down when the volume of traffic overwhelmed it.

As viewers rushed to mainstream news sites for more information, their websites all started to experience marked slowdowns in performance, according to Keynote Systems, an internet measurement consultancy.

News sites slow to crawl

"Beginning at 5:30 p.m. ET, the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds," said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. "During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100 per cent to 86 per cent. The index returned to normal by 9:15 p.m. ET."

From 6 until 8 p.m. ET, ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times and AOL (which owns TMZ) were among the sites that were mostly unavailable, Keynote said in a release. (Keynote had earlier reported CNN Money was also affected, but has since issued a retraction.)

Internet tracking firm Akamai reported that North America's most popular news sites saw traffic spike 20 per cent above average during the height of the story just after 6 p.m., with over four million visitors per minute, about half the traffic of last Nov. 4, the day of Barack Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential election.

As people online tried to get the latest news, social networks saw a spike in traffic, much of it Michael Jackson-related. Users flooded Facebook, and a group on the social networking site called Michael Jackson RIP was created Thursday night and has now attracted nearly 65,000 members.

Biz Stone, co-founder of the online social messaging service Twitter, told the Los Angeles Times that the frequency of Twitter posts, or Tweets, doubled after the first reports of Jackson's death surfaced.

Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was tracking Jackson-related content on Twitter and posted that Jackson had far surpassed the Iran election and swine flu as a popular topic.

"My Twitter search script sees roughly 15 per cent of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson," he reported on Twitter on Thursday. "Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over five per cent."

Those numbers have since dropped to about three per cent of all Twitter traffic as of Friday, he said in a later post.

Conficker worm sends new instructions: grow botnet, then die

siljaline — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:00:00 GMT

The Conficker worm has begun to update the machines it has infected with a new set of instructions to spread to other machines and then self-destruct, security experts say.

Security researchers tracking the worm said some of the infected computers began receiving instructions on April 7 from other infected machines. Conficker is able to send updates to computers it has infected either by directing the computers to visit websites or through a peer-to-peer network of infected machines.

Last week Conficker had computer and internet organizations worldwide up in arms against it because it was known that a variant of the worm would begin accelerating the speed with which it reached out to websites on April 1.

It was thought the worm might send out instructions that day, but instead it appears to have waited a week before doing so, and rather than sending the instructions through a website, it sent them over the peer-to-peer network.

The instructions tell the computers to attempt to contact other computers and exploit a vulnerability in older Microsoft Windows products — Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — that would allow the worm to take over the computer and expand its network of infected machines.

The instructions had appeared on previous versions of the worm but were removed in the Conficker C variant, leading security experts to believe the people behind the virus were trying to temporarily slow its growth to make it harder to track.

The new instructions also direct computers to visit established websites such as myspace.com, msn.com, ebay.com, cnn.com, and aol.com, but once there no code is downloaded or weaknesses are exploited, leading some firms to suggest the worm is simply checking to confirm the computer is connected with the internet.

The instructions also appear to have a time limit, Symantec reports. On May 3, 2009, the new instructions will not only stop running, but the worm will activate a self-removal program, although it's not known when it does this whether it will leave behind some legacy of the worm or perhaps another, different worm.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, said the self-destruction instruction is unique, and may be the virus writer's way of making it harder for users to track its progress.

"Conficker is the name on everybody's lips right now, so if you remove the traces of Conficker but leave something else behind, users won't know what to look for," he said.

Symantec has speculated Conficker might be connected to another spam bot, called Waledac.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/09/conficker-active.html

Facebook to test New Jersey's Web safety icon

siljaline — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:00:00 GMT

TRENTON, N.J. - The popular social networking Web site Facebook has agreed to test replacing its own link for reporting abuse with a bigger one developed by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office.

Under the agreement announced Wednesday, Facebook will display a "Report Abuse!" icon on a small fraction of its pages that display videos instead of its own link for reporting objectionable material.

Users that find offensive material may click on the icon to receive safety tips, a place to report the user to Facebook and the option to block the offender.

The test will involve at least 1.5 million randomly-selected page impressions over the next six months. One of the world's most popular Web sites, Facebook served 3.65 billion ad views in the U.S. in June, according to Reston, Va.-based Web measurement firm comScore, Inc.

At the conclusion of the test, Facebook will work with the New Jersey Attorney General's Office to decide whether to expand, revise or discontinue use of the icon.

In May, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook agreed to add 40 new safeguards to protect users from cyberbullies and sexual predators following talks with 49 state attorneys general.

Continue Article

Seven other social networking sites have agreed to use the "Report Abuse!" icon including Blackplanet.com and Myyearbook.com. Sites that display the icon must agree to provide quick responses once problems are reported, and to have a way for a complainant to block future posts from the offending individual.

On the Net:

Information on the Report Abuse! icon:

http://www.nj.gov/oag/reportabuse/

Information on Facebook's safety and abuse policies:

http://www.facebook.com/safety