FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th!

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be shut down in March. Managing the site has become too stressful.

“Facebook has gotten out of control,” said Zuckerberg in a press conference outside his Palo Alto office, “and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness.”

Zuckerberg went on to explain that starting March 15th, users will no longer be able to access their Facebook accounts.

“After March 15th the whole website shuts down,” said Avrat Humarthi, Vice President of Technical Affairs at Facebook. “So if you ever want to see your pictures again, I recommend you take them off the internet. You won’t be able to get them back once Facebook goes out of business.”

Zuckerberg said that the decision to shut down Facebook was difficult, but that he does not think people will be upset.

“I personally don’t think it’s a big deal,” he said in a private phone interview. “And to be honest, I think it’s for the better. Without Facebook, people will have to go outside and make real friends. That’s always a good thing.”

Some Facebook users were furious upon hearing the shocking news.

“What am I going to do without Facebook?” said Denise Bradshaw, a high school student from Indiana. “My life revolves around it. I’m on Facebook at least 10 hours a day. Now what am I going to do with all that free time?”

However, parents across the country have been experiencing a long anticipated sense of relief.

“I’m glad the Facebook nightmare is over,” said Jon Guttari, a single parent from Detroit. “Now my teenager’s face won’t be glued to a computer screen all day. Maybe I can even have a conversation with her.”

Those in the financial circuit are criticizing Zuckerberg for walking away from a multibillion dollar franchise. Facebook is currently ranked as one of the wealthiest businesses in the world, with economists estimating its value at around 7.9 billion.

But Zuckerberg remains unruffled by these accusations. He says he will stand by his decision to give Facebook the axe.

“I don’t care about the money,” said Zuckerberg. “I just want my old life back.”

The Facebook Corporation suggests that users remove all of their personal information from the website before March 15th. After that date, all photos, notes, links, and videos will be permanently erased.

Lawmakers seek more answers from Facebook CEO Zuckerberg

Reps Markey, Barton seek information on new feature designed to provide user data to third parties

For the second time in less than six months, two influential U.S. Congressmen have sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg questioning the social network's data-sharing practices.


The latest letter from U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) was prompted by Facebook's plan to make the addresses and mobile phone numbers of its users available to third-parties.

The feature, unveiled in January, aims to let external application developers and publishers access the full physical address and mobile phone numbers of Facebook users -- although only with their permission.

Facebook withdrew the feature a few days later amid privacy concerns. The company said it plans to relaunch it in a few weeks after some updates.

In their letter dated Feb 2, Markey and Barton, co-chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, asked Zuckerberg's nearly a dozen questions related to the proposed roll-out.

For instance, the pair ask Zuckerberg whether the updated feature will open more information to third-parties.

It also sought information on measures that Facebook plans to protect personal information of children and teenagers from being accessed by third-parties.
, an author of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), is working on a bill that would prevent advertisers from tracking the online browsing habits of kids.

The letter also seeks information the opt-in and opt-out options for the new Facebook feature, and on how prominent they will be.

The letter also pointedly notes that Facebook announced the feature in a blog post aimed at developers, and asks how the company plans to formally notify users of the new feature.

The Congressman also ask Zuckerberg to provide details on what information Facebook collected about users before it suspended the feature.

The first letter Markey and Barton sent to Zuckerberg last October sought information on reports that popular Facebook applications such as FarmVille and Texas HoldEm Poker had been collecting and sharing user information with dozens of advertising firms.

Noting Zuckerberg's response to that letter, the Congressman asked: "Why is Facebook, after previously acknowledging in a letter to Reps. Markey and Barton that sharing a Facebook User ID could raise user concerns, subsequently considering sharing access to even more sensitive personal information such as home addresses and phone numbers to third parties?"

In response to a request for comment on the letter today, Facebook e-mailed a statement that made no direct reference to Markey and Barton's letter. "As an innovative company that is responsive to its users, we believe there is tremendous value in giving people the freedom and control to take information they put on Facebook with them to other websites," the statement said.

The statement stressed Facebook's commitment to ensuring that user information is shared only with the explicit consent of users and notes that its system of user permissions was designed in collaboration with privacy experts.

The Facebook state acknowledged the need for additional privacy enhancements before the new feature can be enabled. "Great people at the company are working on that and we look forward to sharing their progress soon."

Facebook wannabe Diaspora hit on security issues

Testers of an early version of the source code say it's full of holes

The open-source project called Diaspora is being pitched as a secure and more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook, but it is already running into early criticism over security issues by those who say they have tested it.

The team behind Diaspora this week released a pre-Alpha version of their source code on the open-source hosting site GitHub. The code is designed to spur development activity around the platform.
The code release was accompanied by a warning that it is by no means bug free. "We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable," Diaspora said in announcing the Alpha release.
Even with that caveat, though, early reviewers have been unsparing in their criticism of Diaspora's security features -- or lack thereof.
"Basically, the code is really, really bad," Steve Klabnik, CTO of CloudFab, wrote in his blog. "I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but there are really, really bad security holes" in the code.
Diaspora was born earlier this year largely in response to privacy issues related to Facebook's data collection and usage practices. The effort is being spearheaded by four New York University students: Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
In the months since the effort began, it has attracted growing interest from Internet users and more than $200,000 in donations on sites such as Kickstarter. It has also received considerable attention from mainstream media such as the New York Times which ran a lengthy profile soon after Diaspora was launched.
The basic premise behind Diaspora is that it will allow users to have social networking functionality similar to that offered by Facebook, but with far greater control over personal data.
According to a description on the project's Web site, Diaspora will allow users to set up 'seeds' or personal servers, that they can use to store their personal data and share it directly with their friends instead of routing it through a centralized hub as with Facebook. "Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub," the site says. "Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them."
But initial reviews and comments on sites such as GitHub, Y-Combinator and Slashdot suggest that many are disappointed over the quality of the code released so far.
Klabnik himself described security errors in the code as the sort that a professional programmer would not make. In an interview, Klabnik said the sort of errors he discovered are of the sort that allows anyone to change another user's name, password, profile, images and other details easily. "There's nothing you can't do to someone else's account," he said.
While it's natural to expect some errors in pre-release code, the sort of flaws present in Diaspora, and the sheer number of them, is unusual, he said. "The whole point of this is Facebook doesn't protect privacy. If that's the goal, people have a reasonable expectation that this would be better."
Meanwhile, Patrick McKenzie, a blogger and software developer based in Japan, has been using Twitter to warn users to stay away from early versions of Diaspora because it is "screamingly unsafe." McKenzie said he has so far discovered at least five major vulnerabilities, with the first one found less than five minutes after he downloaded the source code.
The sort of security issues he discovered include cross-site scripting flaws, code injection vulnerabilities as well as authentication and authorization flaws. The fact that the code is freely available to anyone on the Internet means that many people will install and use it without being aware of the security issues, he said.
On GitHub, reviewers have so far raised more than 140 issues, several of them dealing with security concerns such as cross-site scripting errors and code-injection errors.
Diaspora did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment. However, the project has its share of supporters. Many of those commenting on the release of the Alpha code said that bugs being uncovered in code at this stage are not all that uncommon.
"This code was released to developers as an incomplete preview," cilantro said on Y-Combinator. "I'm not sure why people are holding it to the same standards as a finished product that's being released to end users. Seems like a pretext to talk trash."
Read more about Web 2.0 and Web Apps in Computerworld's Web 2.0 and Web Apps Topic Center.

Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting

Facebook has downplayed the significance of a company-wide meeting to discuss privacy issues.

The blogosphere described the meeting as a panic measure following weeks of criticism over the way it handles members' data.
Several US senators have made public calls for Facebook to rethink its privacy safeguards.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, launched a petition directed at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
It called on him to regain the trust of users by giving them control over all the information shared via Facebook.
Earlier this week European data protection officials weighed in on the controversy and called privacy changes "unacceptable".
A number of high-profile users have also deleted their Facebook accounts after the site introduced a new feature that lets non-Facebook websites, or third parties, post the personal views of Facebook users without their consent.
'Back to basics'
Facebook described its internal get together as part of its "open culture" giving employees "a forum to ask questions on a topic that has received a lot of outside interest".
Industry watchers said the company, which is the world's biggest social network, has shown it has "lost touch" over the issue.
"Most of us got onto Facebook because we want to know what our high school quarterback is doing or to reconnect with old school friends, not worry about how our information is going to be used," Catharine P Taylor, media blogger with news site BNET.com told the BBC.
"They need to get back to basics, throw out their policy and start all over again," she said. "It's way too complex for most people to understand how to change their settings and if they can't make it simple for people to make choices, it will cost them."

A report this week by the New York Times revealed that Facebook's privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options.
The paper also found that the policy is longer than the US Constitution with 5,830 words.

  'How to quit'
Recently the issue of how to deactivate a Facebook account has gained traction.
The blog SearchEngineLand reported that anyone who typed the query "How to quit..." into Google got as their number eight automated result "how to quit Facebook". It followed results for how to quit smoking, your job and drinking.
A number of well-respected technologists have pulled the plug on their account.
Peter Rojas, co-founder of the gadget site gdgt.com, told ABC News he quit because he "was spending more time managing my account than actually using my account.
"Having to constantly monitor the privacy settings was way too complicated. You can never be sure you caught everything."
As a result of the disquiet over Facebook's approach to privacy, a project that is being viewed as an alternative has been getting a lot of attention.
Diaspora is the brainchild of four students from New York University, which they described as "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
The students originally set a target to raise $10,000 to get their open source project off the ground over the summer but to date more than 3,300 backers have pledged in excess of $125,000.
"This is proof that people are scared and they don't have anywhere to go," Diaspora co-founder Max Salzberg told BBC News.
"I think a distributed social network is what people want. People value all their information online and we want to put users back in control of what they share."
Diaspora is just one of many other alternatives to Facebook starting to spring up that includes OneSocialWeb, Elgg and Appleseed.
Security upgrades
On the same day as the all-hands meeting at Facebook, the company launched new security measures to battle spam and other malicious attacks.
The upgrades include being able to approve the devices users commonly use to log in and being notified when that account has been accessed via a device that has not been approved. Another feature is giving users the ability to block suspicious logins before they happen.
"We're confident that these new tools and systems will do a lot to prevent unauthorised logins and the nuisance they can cause," said Lev Popov, a software engineer on Facebook's site integrity team.
"As always, though, the first line of defence is you. We need you to help by practicing safe behaviour on Facebook and wherever you go online."

Facebook rolling out new security features

Facebook´s millions of users are a lucrative target for Internet criminals looking to steal passwords and more. To combat malicious attacks, phishing scams and spam, the online social network is rolling out new security features.

You can ask to be notified by e-mail or text message when your account is accessed from a computer or mobile device you haven´t used before. The log-in attempt may be legitimate when you´re traveling, but if you haven´t left home in a week, you probably ought to change your password.
Facebook is also adding roadblocks when it notices unusual activity, such as simultaneous log-ins from opposite sides of the planet. For example, you might be shown a photo with your friends tagged, and be asked to correctly identify who they are before the second log-in goes through.

Users will also be able to check where the latest log-ins have come from. This is similar to a feature Google Inc. offers on its Gmail service, where users can view the date, time and location of the most recent log-ins to their account. Gmail also states whether the account is open on another computer at the same time.

Some of these changes are already available, while others are still being tested and will launch over the next few weeks. Facebook typically rolls out changes over several days, if not weeks, so not all users will see them at the same time.

The new features come as Facebook faces growing criticism over the way it handles users´ privacy. It has been pushing them to share more about themselves with one another and with the outside world. The security upgrade is a sign the company is working to keep its users´ trust in the way it handles the private data they post, even as it fends of complaints from privacy advocates, users and politicians.

Hemanshu Nigam, former chief security officer at Facebook rival MySpace, said Facebook has many incentives to be mindful of privacy complaints.

"A little thing like this can turn into a big thing, and could turn into an advertiser saying, ´Well, I can take my dollars elsewhere,´" said Nigam, who now runs online security firm SSP Blue but still consults for MySpace. "The moment a lawsuit or government investigation begins, advertisers get very nervous of that."

Facebook already has automated systems in place that detect when users access the site in a way that "doesn´t make sense," said Jake Brill, product manager at Facebook. This can include sending out an avalanche of messages or logging in from different countries at the same time.

The secondary account verification system that Facebook is rolling out makes sure that when people log in from elsewhere, they are authorized to do so. Many websites try to do this by asking people to type words displayed in an image to prove they are human, rather than a computer seeking automated access. But this only helps keep those software robots out, not people, Brill said.

The requirement to enter information that only you would know — such as the identity of your friends — can help stop unauthorized access should your password somehow become compromised.

To get notified when someone accesses an account from a new computer or device, you have to turn that feature on. To do this, go to "account settings," scroll down to "account security," then click "change." There, you can choose to be notified of log-ins by e-mail or text message.

Facebook is asking users to activate, or "opt-in" to, the security setting, even as it takes an "opt-out" approach with some of its marketing and personalization features. With opt-out, participation is automatic unless the user takes action.

Without giving an exact figure, Facebook says only a tiny percentage of its users have their accounts compromised. But a small percentage of 400 million can still be sizable.

The site´s users are a good target for cybercriminals because of the implicit trust people place in Facebook. They are more likely to respond to scams and other messages that appear to come from real friends, but are actually sent by hackers able to game the system.