The Channel 13 Facebook Hoax. Your Data Is Never Private
So many of you have probably seen long Facebook statuses talking about 'Channel 13,' proclaiming that Facebook cannot use any of their profile data. I've seen a lot of our readers jump on this train, so it's time to set the record straight. This is a hoax, which has been around for more than a couple of years. And the fact you're posting it is ironically making your online information more public.
Anonymous Plan To Take Down Facebook On 5 November?
Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Given the hacker groups' affiliation to the Guy Fawkes mask, the decision by hacker collective Anonymous to take down Facebook on bonfire night seems far from coincidental. But posting a warning to Zuckerberg and co. and social gaming giant Zynga in a stern warning message earlier this week, that's exactly what it intends to achieve.
From The Guys Who Brought You 'Date A Gamer' Comes Shag A Gamer.com!
From everyone's favourite gamer dating site (not entirely verifiable) Date A Gamer comes a new match-up website dedicated to just one thing: bringing together geek gamer boys and girls for, in their own words, a “quick shag”. Chivalry really might be dead...
Study Shows Mobile Phone Use Makes You Selfish
The technology may have granted the public the ability to communicate with thre rest of the world in a way that's not been possible; but it turns out that very technology could be making us close off from the world. A study by the University of Maryland has found that people after using their phones are more likely to engage in behaviour that would soully benefit themselves and not others, than those who didn't, or just used Facebook instead.
Socl: Microsoft's secret social network goes live, then disappears again
Microsoft let the social cat out of the bag tonight, publishing Socl.com to the web temporarily, then removing it promptly with this spash-screen. A creation of the FUSE research group, we managed to take a short look around, and managed to find a few key pointers to the service.
Go behind the scenes with Google's Think Insights
Ever been curious about people's search habits around Google? How many videos are watched on Youtube? How many blogs are posted in a day? The public facing side of analytics, Think insights, came out of beta yesterday.
Researchers retrieve 250GB of personal data with socialbot
Ever had those random adds from attractive (or extremely photoshopped) ladies wearing next to nothing, who have an extremely bare profile and don't talk to you? Chances are that's a Socialbot, and as researchers from the University of British Columbia have concluded, they prove extremely effective at infiltrating Facebook's circles of friends and harvesting data.
Editorial: Why real-time social environments will never return.
"The technology is there and, at last, the right psychology is in place that will make these services explode. And I, for one, welcome our new avatar overlords." A formidable conclusion in a Mashable editorial on the subject.
But I, for one, sees some major flaws in this most vicarious of conclusions. The likes of Habbo Hotel in the late 90s became a success because we weren't aware of what social networking could be defined as. In that vain, we tried to recreate virtual worlds, go to virtual parties, take part in virtual diving competitions and spend our weekly phone credit on credits for virtual sofas (cool Habbo references bro).