Facebook and Google try self-help
- From: The Wall Street Journal
- August 26, 2013
IT turns out you need lots and lots of cement when building internet superhighways.
Now web heavyweights such as Google and Facebook want to mix their
own. That threatens to eat into the profits of large internet
construction companies such as Intel and Cisco Systems. Smartly, the
latter aren't just going to let the market drive off without them.Google and Facebook buy so much tech equipment that it makes sense for them to design their own. This enables them to save money and run their websites more efficiently. Both design their own servers, for instance, of which Google has over a million worldwide, IDC estimates. Besides servers, Facebook designs much of its own storage hardware while Google also designs its own network switches, says IDC.
Now both these firms are pursuing projects that could help them sidestep Intel and Cisco, two hardware manufacturers that dominate their respective markets, making gross profit margins of roughly 60 per cent in the process.
Facebook's latest project is in network switches. The social network wants to be able to customise them for its needs, but that isn't possible with "black box" switches off the shelf, says Facebook vice-president Frank Frankovsky. These have hardware and software that is tightly integrated. That is great for Cisco, as it can charge high prices for its gear, but less so for customers seeking more control. Facebook is, therefore, working with others to design a switch that decouples software and hardware.
Facebook and Google are just two customers, but their scale translates into gravity that may pull the market in their direction over time. While Cisco chief executive John Chambers has said his company "waited too long" to do so, it is now giving customers more control over their networking gear via software.
Intel, meanwhile, is already attempting to head off another threat in server chips. Companies such as Samsung Electronics have licensed technology from ARM Holdings in order to make server chips that are cheaper than Intel's designs and also consume less power. In response, Intel is releasing cheaper, more energy-efficient server chips of its own.
That both Intel and Cisco are responding to these nascent threats testifies to the disruptive impact they could have. It is sensible for the two firms to do so; tech firms that bury their heads in the sand tend to suffocate themselves. Still, by helping to bring alternative products to the markets, web giants could still put a choke-hold on the incumbents' profits.
Facebook Blocks Kirk Cameron’s New Movie
http://unstoppablethemovie.com
Jul 18, 2013
Data center & cloud
Facebook disables some legitimate apps while targeting malicious ones
On Tuesday, a number of people complained that their Facebook developer accounts and apps were unavailable.
Facebook said it uses automated systems to identify and disable malicious apps, so as to protect its platform and users. These techniques identify a malicious pattern, find the apps that match that pattern, and then disable those apps.
"This normally results in thousands of malicious apps being disabled and improves our automated systems' ability to detect similar attacks in the future," Facebook employee Eugene Zarakhovsky wrote in a blog post.
But on Tuesday, Facebook started with a broad pattern that correctly matched many thousands of malicious apps but also matched many high-quality apps.
"When we detected this error, we immediately stopped the process and began work to restore access," Zarakhovsky wrote. "The process took longer than expected because of the number of apps affected and bugs related to the restoration of app metadata."
Facebook did not say how many legitimate apps were affected.
The company now plans to make improvements to its processes and technology, including better tools to identify overly broad patterns and better processes to verify that all the apps matched are in fact malicious. It will also address the bugs and bottlenecks that slowed down the recovery process.
Facebook has been unveiling tools to get developers to integrate their apps with its platform. In April it announced plans to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides cross-platform services and tools for developers. "By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices," it Said at the time.
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ABC NEWS Reports
Facebook May Be Making You Sad
According to the study from researchers at the University of Michigan, which was just published in the Public Library of Science, the more you use Facebook, the more unhappy you are likely to be.
"Everyday Facebook use leads to declines in subjective well-being, both how happy you feel moment to moment and how satisfied you feel with your life," says Ethan Kross, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the study, told ABC News.
WHAT TO KNOW
- The more you use Facebook, the more unhappy you are likely to be, says new study
- Many compare their lives to others
| "When you're browsing Facebook, you see people depict glowingly positive stuff." |
Other experts not affiliated with the research shared similar thoughts.
"People feel left out," said Dr. Sudeepta Varma, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University and a private practice psychiatrist in Manhattan, told ABC News. "There is this imagination or fantasy that other people's lives are better. Facebook keeps people in the know about what other people are doing," she says, "but also about what they themselves are not doing."
People also spend time on Facebook looking at "exes, frenemies, people they don't necessarily like, and people they can't be with in real life," Varma said. And it is easy to imagine that they have "more friends, more money and a more exciting life."
Facebook May Be Making You Sad
Still, the lesson in most of these studies seems to be that Facebook users should come to the social network slightly forewarned.
"People should be aware that Facebook can have these effects on you," Oscar Ybarra, one of the additional authors of the University of Michigan study, told ABC News. "Awareness is important, and it's also important to remember that Facebook is a public place where you get a very biased version of people's lives."
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Tell Facebook: Stop Censoring Political Speech
BREAKING NEWS: A range of Facebook users, from political dissidents to technology bloggers, are reporting the sudden blocking of their pages. Facebook provided no prior warning, nor was there a clear process established to restore access to the blocked pages.Will you fight back? The best way to get Facebook's attention is to make the story go viral on their own site:
If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends.
More than 50 blocked pages were political in nature, and several users have had their pages maliciously blocked through fraudulent claims of intellectual property violations. This news follows Facebook's disturbing assertions that it's willing to work with government censors in places like China, and that the company is worried that it sometimes provides "too much" free speech.
Astounding. And this disregard for civil liberties is nothing new: Facebook has consistently dodged hard questions about free speech. Last year they refused to attend a U.S. Senate hearing on "global Internet freedom" and the company won't join the tech industry's Global Network Initiative, which promotes human rights and free speech. Will you demand that Facebook start respecting civil liberties? Just fill out the form at right to sign our petition.
PETITION TO MARK ZUCKERBERG AND THE FACEBOOK TEAM:
Your callous disregard for free speech and human rights is completely
unacceptable. Your dominance of the web comes with real responsibility:
You need to stop censoring political content right away.
Just sign on at right and we'll make sure Facebook gets the message.
Click here, here, or here for more details on the page removals.| If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends. | |
| If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: |
Las Angeles Time Reports
Facebook is a bummer, study says
Facebook users in a study
led by the University of Michigan wound up feeling worse about
themselves after two weeks.
(Daniel Acker / Bloomberg)
|
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Don't press the like button: Facebook is a bummer that makes us feel worse about our lives, according to new research.
Facebook users in a study led by the University of Michigan wound up feeling worse about themselves after two weeks, and their moment-to-moment mood darkened the more they browsed the social medium. It didn't seem to matter how big their network was, how supportive they thought their friends were, nor why they went to Facebook in the first place, according to the study published online Wednesday in PLOS One.
"We were able to show on a moment-to-moment basis throughout the day how people’s mood fluctuated depending on their Facebook usage,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the study.
"We measured lots and lots of other personality and behavioral dimensions, like, for example, frequency of Facebook use," Kross said. "But none of the factors that we assessed influenced the results. The more you used Facebook, the more your mood dropped."
The study adds to a body of work examining social media's effect on well-being, much of it offering mixed diagnoses. Looking at your own profile can be self-affirming, according to a recent study. And a survey of Facebook users suggested that it modestly increased life satisfaction, social trust, civic engagement, and political participation.
But other studies have suggested Facebook can evoke envy of others' activities and profile, leaving users with diminished self-images. Another study suggested that people with low self-esteem don't reap a benefit from tinkering with their online image, either.
None of those studies, however, followed people over time. The University of Michigan study involved 82 college-aged volunteers -- a core demographic among Facebook's nearly 700 million active daily users -- who answered questionnaires five times a day for 14 days, and rated their well-being at the beginning and end.
Worry did not predict changes in Facebook use, but loneliness did, according to the study. Nonetheless, when researchers controlled for loneliness, the relationship between Facebook use and mood and satisfaction was insignificant, Kross said.
“Loneliness predicted Facebook use, and loneliness also predicted how bad people felt," Kross said. "But the effect of Facebook on how people felt was independent of loneliness.”
“One of the things we don’t know is what aspect of Facebook use is contributing to these results,” Kross said. “Facebook and online social networks more generally represent a very new way in which human beings are interacting, and we’re really just beginning to scratch the surface as to how exactly these interactions work and how they influence us.”
Catalina Toma, a University of Wisconsin communication researcher who found that Facebook users could increase their self-esteem, said seemingly contradictory findings among studies reflect the complexity of the medium and point out the need to drill deeper into what people do while on Facebook.
"I think what's happening, honestly, is that Facebook is such a gigantic space where so many different activities take place," said Toma, who was not involved in the study. "So for us to be simply talking about Facebook use is an over-simplification. Facebook use is not just one thing; it is many, many different things."
Kross and fellow researchers conducted an exploratory analysis of the data that suggests a linear relationship between online communication and face-to-face interaction. As both increase, feelings of well-being decline.
“The negative effect of Facebook use on happiness became more pronounced the more you interacted with other people within that time frame," Kross said. “It’s very likely that there are going to be a multitude of mechanisms that explain this effect.”
Like other social media, Facebook affords people the opportunity to contemplate, edit and enhance their presentation in ways that are difficult if not impossible during impromptu social interactions in the flesh. You can take hours to come up with a clever response, whereas most people have long left the cocktail party when they think of the perfect riposte.
Toma suggested that users' emotions and sense of worth may be negatively influenced by the discord between tailored online images of others and their unedited view of themselves.
"Instead of doing a person-to-person profile, you're comparing a profile and a person," Toma said.
Studies have shown that users tend to put their best foot forward, both Toma and Kross noted.
Still, other studies indicate that the information in people's profiles closely matches their actual personality -- enough so that researchers could make predictions based only on the person's "like" preferences. You are what you like, in other words.
Whether any of this will make you feel better, however, may depend on whether you're reading this on Facebook.
Facebook defends page attacking conservative minorities with racial slurs
Getty Images
August 15, 2013
On Wednesday, Facebook told Examiner that "Lawn Jockey Alert," a page that attacks conservative minorities with racial slurs, does not violate the site's community standards.
Throughout the page, posts can be found attacking prominent conservatives like Allen West with overtly racist terms like "Uncle Tom" or worse.
A post at Wisegeek.com said the initial use of the African-American lawn jockey was considered to be ugly and racist.
In 2012, Fox Chicago reported that an antique shop owner sparked controversy over a black-faced iron lawn statue that neighbors called racist.
The page also displays as its banner a picture that reminds one of slavery.
From the name of the page -- and everything it implies -- to the banner and the content, the page clearly violates Facebook's standards which specifically state that individuals or groups cannot "attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition."
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a favorite target of the page, with one post calling him the "Lawn jockey of the year."
Another post attacks Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory, a black Republican who recently switched from the Democratic Party.
Other posts openly use the "n-word," but Facebook says the page does not violate their terms of service.
This schizophrenic application of Facebook's standards is nothing new.
As we reported in July, Facebook said the page "Zimmerman must DIE" did not violate their standards.
In June, Facebook initially said a page calling for the beheading of anyone who disrespects the Prophet Mohammed also did not violate their community standards. That page was finally removed.
As a result of what many see as the site's "arbitrary and capricious" policies that seem to target conservatives while giving a free pass to others, over 19,000 users have signed on to a "Facebook Blackout" event set for Aug. 25.
Organizers of the event are asking participants to temporarily suspend their accounts that day for a period of 24 hours.
Related:
If you like this article, you can follow Joe on Twitter @jnewby1956, subscribe to receive email updates when a new article is published, or check out his Facebook page.
Be sure to listen to "Grit and Grace" every Thursday from 6-8 p.m. Pacific Time on Blog Talk Radio, where you can hear Joe discuss current events.
Throughout the page, posts can be found attacking prominent conservatives like Allen West with overtly racist terms like "Uncle Tom" or worse.
A post at Wisegeek.com said the initial use of the African-American lawn jockey was considered to be ugly and racist.
In 2012, Fox Chicago reported that an antique shop owner sparked controversy over a black-faced iron lawn statue that neighbors called racist.
The page also displays as its banner a picture that reminds one of slavery.
From the name of the page -- and everything it implies -- to the banner and the content, the page clearly violates Facebook's standards which specifically state that individuals or groups cannot "attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition."
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a favorite target of the page, with one post calling him the "Lawn jockey of the year."
Another post attacks Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory, a black Republican who recently switched from the Democratic Party.
Other posts openly use the "n-word," but Facebook says the page does not violate their terms of service.
This schizophrenic application of Facebook's standards is nothing new.
As we reported in July, Facebook said the page "Zimmerman must DIE" did not violate their standards.
In June, Facebook initially said a page calling for the beheading of anyone who disrespects the Prophet Mohammed also did not violate their community standards. That page was finally removed.
As a result of what many see as the site's "arbitrary and capricious" policies that seem to target conservatives while giving a free pass to others, over 19,000 users have signed on to a "Facebook Blackout" event set for Aug. 25.
Organizers of the event are asking participants to temporarily suspend their accounts that day for a period of 24 hours.
Related:
- Media silent as thousands set to protest Facebook's treatment of conservatives
- Facebook goes ban-happy, punishes user for saying 'thank you'
- Facebook suspends 'Blackout' event admin for post saying woman seeking attention
- Report: Facebook says invites to 'Blackout' protest event 'spammy'
- Liberals freaking out over conservative ‘Facebook Blackout’ protest
- A short list of words safe to use on Facebook
- Controversial Facebook page says Jesus Christ should’ve been aborted
- Facebook protest calls for ‘blackout’ of site over treatment of conservatives
- Conservative tells liberals to stop living off the government, Facebook bans him
- Liberals Are people Too…Mean, Selfish People
- Facebook apologizes to Kirk Cameron for blocking new movie
- What the Daily Beast doesn’t tell you about Freedom from Facebook Day
- Facebook says ‘Zimmerman must Die’ does not violate community standards
- Facebook removes ‘Kill Zimmerman’ page after saying it does not violate rules
- Questions raised after Facebook yanks popular ‘Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children’
- Facebook pages call for death of George Zimmerman, rioting for Trayvon Martin
- Facebook bans Fox News’ Todd Starnes over post supporting NRA, Paula Deen, Jesus
- Facebook: Page advocating the beheading of infidels does not violate rules
- Facebook: Beheading video ‘doesn’t violate’ standards for graphic violence
- Facebook justifies decision to not pull grisly beheading video
If you like this article, you can follow Joe on Twitter @jnewby1956, subscribe to receive email updates when a new article is published, or check out his Facebook page.
Be sure to listen to "Grit and Grace" every Thursday from 6-8 p.m. Pacific Time on Blog Talk Radio, where you can hear Joe discuss current events.
Suggested by the author
______________________________________________
Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter call for transparency on NSA spying
AllThingsD
In a letter published Thursday, the alliance — whose members include 63 companies, investors, non-profits and trade organizations — will call upon President Obama and congressional leaders to allow Internet, telephone, and Web-based service providers to report national security-related requests for information with greater specificity. Specifically, they ask that they are allowed to regularly report:
• The number of government requests for information about their users
• The number of individuals, accounts, or devices for which information was requested
• The number of requests that sought communications content, basic subscriber information, and/or other information.
'Information about how and how often the government is using these legal authorities is important to the American people.'- Coalition letter
“Basic information about how the government uses its various law enforcement–related investigative authorities has been published for years without any apparent disruption to criminal investigations,” a copy of the letter obtained by AllThingsD reads.
“We seek permission for the same information to be made available regarding the government’s national security -- related authorities. This information about how and how often the government is using these legal authorities is important to the American people, who are entitled to have an informed public debate about the appropriateness of those authorities and their use.”
Facebook pushes search feature to more users
Desair Brown hosts USA NOW, covering the Facebook Graph Search that rolled out today. Here are 3 things you need to know.
Users
who may have grown frustrated with Facebook's rudimentary search
feature are getting an updated version designed to make it easier to
find people, places and photos on the site.Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January, but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it. Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is rolling out the social search tool, called "Graph Search," to everyone whose language is set to U.S. English.
Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things like roasted kale recipes or Mizuno running shoes, Facebook's tool is most useful in unearthing information about your social circles. Graph Search lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan. Friends of friends who live near you and like hiking. Photos of your boyfriend taken before you met him in 2010. Nearby restaurants that your friends like - and so on.
But soon after Facebook launched the tool, the Internet had a field day with less innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you.
A blog called actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com posted a collection of searches ranging from "married people who like prostitutes" to "current employers of people who like racism." Both yielded more than 100 people.
While it is possible that some of those Facebook users are fully aware that what they've shared is easily searchable, it is likely that some are not. It's easy to click "like" on a page and forget about it, and it's even easier to assume that no one will search through your photos from party days at the Burning Man festival five years ago.
To avoid any unpleasantness, Facebook plans to notify users that it's "getting easier for people to find photos and other things you've shared with them" along with a reminder that they can check "who can see my stuff" under their privacy settings.
"The goal is to avoid bad surprises," said Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and safety manager at Facebook. But she stressed Facebook's view that the search tool "indexes information differently than we have ever been able to do before, in a really positive way."
It's easier, for example, to find a long-lost classmate with a common name, or to find common interests with friends of friends.
Facebook does not currently show users ads based on what they are searching for, but the company may do in the future. As Google has shown, it's a lucrative business. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook's share of less than 7 percent.
With its new search tool, Facebook is clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival. Whether this will work will become more clear as more people begin using it.
__________________________
Facebook Android App Collects Phone Numbers Without Permission -- Even From Non-Members
The Huffington Post
|
By Bianca Bosker
Posted: 06/28/2013 4:46 pm EDT | Updated: 06/28/2013 8:17 pm EDT
The bug was reported by a security software provider Wednesday and has been confirmed by Facebook, which noted the problem will be addressed in the forthcoming version of the app. A Facebook spokesman said the company believes the technical flaw was introduced in February of this year.
Symantec, the software provider, announced in a blog post that its mobile security software, which looks for apps that could pose privacy risks, found that Facebook’s Android app had been “leaking” the phone number of Android devices on which it was installed. A Symantec spokesman told The Huffington Post that any Android smartphone running the buggy Facebook app was affected by the flaw and could have had its phone number uploaded to Facebook's servers.
“The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers,” Symantec's blog post said. “You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.”
Facebook's spokesman told The Huffington Post that the social network did not "use or process the numbers in any way," and said they had been deleted from Facebook’s servers.
“This was a bug in the Facebook for Android app, and we thank Symantec for bringing it to our attention,” Facebook spokesman Derick Mains told The Huffington Post in an email. “We've fixed it in the next version of the app, which is available for anyone to download as a beta today."
Symantec estimated in its blog post that a "significant portion" of the "hundreds of millions of devices" on which Facebook's Android app have been installed were affected by the bug. Mains said that because Facebook deleted the collected phone numbers after being notified of the bug, it could not estimate how many people were affected or numbers were collected.
"Based on my understanding, the bug would have been found on any version of the [Facebook] Android application that's out there, for any device it runs on," said Satnam Narang, a security response manager with Symantec.
This article has been updated to include additional information from Symantec and comment from a Facebook spokesman.
Facebook crashes, no injuries
MICHAEL FIELD
Last updated 14:00 19/06/2013
Digital Living
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The anarchist digital group calling themselves Anonymous claimed credit for it.
Facebook itself HAS yet to say anything about it.
Users said they were unable to login to Facebook, or "a website that uses Facebook Connect" for a short period of time this afternoon.
"I get an error message that says, "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,"" Another person tweeted.
Facebook's photo-sharing service, Instagram, did not appear to be affected by the outage.
As the site resumed function, users posted complaints on the Facebook Engineering page.
One user said they were "getting error messages for everything now," and others commented, "it's down!".
"Hmm, possible shredding of documents as part of FB cover up to NSA, yeah sounds good, call it an outage!" Another user added.
Ironically, downrightnowcom - a website that monitored user reports and website outages - had also crashed.
The last major Facebook outage was September 24 2010 when the site was out of action for over two and a half hours.
On rival social media Twitter the crash caused hectic multi-lingual angst with many of the complaints coming from Brazil.
One Twitter user from Portugal said "TANGO DOWN by ANONYMOUS LEADER Blame #todopoderoso it for global warming and everything else."
None of it was explained.
Others on Twitter were lighthearted: "Where were you during the Great Facebook Crash of 2013?" and "productivity rates just sky rocketed after that facebook crash".
Allen Renfro of the US reported on Twitter: "The Facebook crash is big news. It even made Twitter."
Others were grumpy.
"Difference between Facebook & everybody else. We don't crash ever! If the servers are down, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed."
Another wondered if they were responsible: "I used "#facebook" in a status update on Facebook, & now seem to have caused the entire site to crash for the last 5 minutes. #MyBad #Sorry".
Mega founder and internet millionaire Kim Dotcom even jokingly tweeted that the crash was linked to the American NSA's PRISM programme.
"#NSA is upgrading #Prism capacity on Facebook today. Expect service interruptions on Facebook for the next few hours )
Facebook, Microsoft release information on government data requests
Published June 15, 2013
FoxNews.com
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What's known about government's massive...
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NSA leaks case puts spotlight on FISA Court
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Does Edward Snowden pose a threat to national...
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Representatives of both companies said that after negotiations with national security officials their companies have been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders requesting user data.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.
"These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat," Ullyot said.
Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on various topics. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.
Facebook was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.
Ullyot said the company wanted to reveal the information because of "confusion and inaccurate reporting" on the issue, and to show that only "a tiny fraction of one percent" of its 1.1 billion users have been affected.
"This is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more transparency, so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds," he said.
Microsoft released similar numbers for the same period, but downplayed how much they revealed.
"We continue to believe that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues," John Frank, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel said in a statement.
Frank said Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts.
Both attorneys emphasized in their statements that those affected by the orders represent a "tiny fraction" of their huge user bases.
The disclosures come after Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American who works as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, revealed to The Guardian newspaper the existence of secret surveillance programs that gathered Americans' phone records and other data. The companies did not link their actions to Snowden's leaks.
In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.
The companies have sought to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named "PRISM" that was revealed in leaks last week.
"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests," a statement from Google said. "We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."
Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users' data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.
"We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested," Ullyot said." And we respond only as required by law."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/06/15/facebook-can-now-say-more-on-user-surveillance/#ixzz2WRhBENJe
June 14, 2013, 10:54 pm 5 Comments
Facebook Discloses Basic Data on Law-Enforcement Requests
By VINDU GOEL
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press A
sign outside of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The
company on Friday disclosed information about government requests for
data, the vast majority of which did not pertain to national security
matters.Facebook on Friday disclosed for the first time how many requests for data about its 1.1 billion users it had gotten from law enforcement authorities in the United States.
The social networking company said that in the last six months of 2012, it had 9,000 to 10,000 requests for information about its users from local, state and federal agencies. Those requests covered 18,000 to 19,000 user accounts.
“These requests run the gamut — from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat,” the company’s general counsel, Ted Ullyot, said in a blog post disclosing the data.
Facebook said it was legally prohibited from saying how many of the data requests were related to national security. But generally speaking, the vast majority of the law-enforcement data requests received by tech companies are for other matters, like local criminal cases.
Facebook’s disclosure comes after negotiations with the federal government that began after the first news reports a week ago about the National Security Agency’s secret Prism surveillance program. Those reports revealed that a number of American Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, had secretly provided data about foreigners to the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The tech companies have also secretly provided data to the F.B.I. under National Security Letters, which the government uses to gather information about Americans.
Under federal law, companies generally cannot disclose even the existence of national security data requests they receive. But in recent days, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been pressing the government for permission to share more information.
“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) – which until now no company has been permitted to do,” Mr. Ullyot wrote. “As of today, the government will only authorize us to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range. This is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more transparency.”
Google had previously published a transparency report that included N.S.L. but not FISA data requests. Microsoft’s recent transparency report similarly excluded FISA requests but included National Security Letters.
Late Friday, after Facebook’s data release, Microsoft provided similar information about requests for data that it had received from law enforcement at all levels of government.
For the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from governmental entities in the United States, the company’s deputy general counsel, John Frank, said in a statement.
“We have not received any national security orders of the type that Verizon was reported to have received that required Verizon to provide business records about U.S. customers,” Mr. Frank said.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 15, 2013
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Microsoft's transparency report. It included National Security Letters requests, but excluded FISA requests. It did not exclude both types of national security requests.
Facebook adds hashtags, just like Twitter
20 hours ago
Facebook
An example of a hashtag on Facebook.
Twitter popularized the use of the hashtag, which has subsequently been picked up by other social media sites like Instagram (owned by Facebook), Tumblr and Pinterest.
Starting immediately, Facebook said Wednesday, "hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic."
Twitter's hashtag use has been very popular for connecting real-time tweets — limited to 140 characters — about news, sports and for TV watchers, sharing reactions to everything from who's wearing what at the Academy Awards to comments about the "Games of Thrones" upsets.
But on the social network until now, "there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what's happening or what people are talking about," wrote Greg Lindley of Facebook:
During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook — roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night. The recent "Red Wedding" episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. And this year's Oscars buzz reached an all-time high on Facebook with over 66.5 million interactions, including likes, comments, and posts.The introduction of the hashtag is just a "first step," Lindley wrote. Facebook, he said, will be "rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics."
Facebook users can search for a specific hashtag using Facebook's search tool — say putting in the hashtag, #Election or #NBAFinals (as Facebook itself used in its example).
Check out Technology and TODAY Tech on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.
Facebook IPO
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Here's What Really Happened in the Botched Facebook IPO
What really happened on May 18, 2012, with the botched IPO of Facebook Inc. (NasdaqGS: FB)?
Well, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just released its version of events under the guise of Administrative Proceeding File No. 3-15339.
And "In the Matter of THE NASDAQ STOCK MARKET, LLC and NASDAQ EXECUTION SERVICES, LLC (Respondents)" the SEC slapped wrists and fined the fools $10 million for screwing up Facebook's IPO - the largest-ever fine imposed on an exchange.
Of course, it's good reading. But there's something missing.
It's called "the truth." To continue reading, please click here… -
Facebook Stock Ends Disappointing Year One; Any Shot at a Comeback?
One year ago, Facebook stock (Nasdaq: FB) made its trading debut in one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings ever.
While it's okay to offer a congratulatory happy anniversary, it's been anything but a honeymoon for the company and investors.
Some 421 million shares were sold, raising $16 billion, giving Facebook a whopping $104 billion valuation.
Then the disastrous story began: Shares were priced at $38, opened at $40, and then, within 10 market hours after the pricing, Facebook stock flailed. Technical glitches at the Nasdaq caused a delayed open, late executions and reports, and mispriced trades.
Lawsuits are still pending.
To continue reading, please click here...
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If this Works, Facebook Stock Could be the "Buy of the Decade"
Facebook stock is one of the most controversial stocks in existence today.
With one billion users, investors have been waiting to see if Facebook's business model can pay off, especially after its IPO tanked.
Today, Money Morning's own e-commerce director, Bret Holmes, is going to give you the inside scoop on Facebook stock. Not some theoretical financial analysis, but what the future looks like for Facebook, from a guy who understands e-commerce and can explain how Facebook stock could be the "buy of the decade" for investors.
Click here to watch the interview.
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IPO Performance of 2013: Check Out Winners and Losers
2013 has been a strong year for IPO performance so far.
About 40 deals have been priced through the second week of April, and 33 of the deals have moved higher in the secondary market with an average gain of more than 20%.
If you missed these profits, don't worry. There is no sign of any slowing in the IPO market, as there are currently nine deals already scheduled for the next two weeks. In fact, IPO dollar volumes for the year so far are nearing the $9 billion mark, on par with the levels seen in 2012.
Let's take a look at the biggest and best IPO performances so far in 2013.
To continue reading, please click here...
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Facebook Stock Risk: New Social Media Apps Luring Teens Away
Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) is starting to get a taste of what it means to be the king of the social media hill.
Small and more nimble competitors with novel ideas have sprung up and begun to entice young users away from the No. 1 social media platform - a bad omen for Facebook stock, which 11 months after its IPO still trades 29% below its offer price.
According to Piper Jaffray's annual "Taking Stock of Teens" survey, teens are spending less time with Facebook and more with a vast array of alternatives.
The survey showed that just 33% of teens consider Facebook "the most important social network" compared with 42% last year.
Last month, the creator of social photo album app Albumatic, Adam Ludwin, conducted a focus group of users under 25.
"They gave me the typical teenage response: 'We're bored with Facebook,'" Ludwin told Business Insider.
Anyone who doubts how quickly a social media company can become yesterday's news need only look at MySpace, a once-dominant social media site that lost a third of its users in 2010 mostly as a result of Facebook's growing popularity.
"History is not on Facebook's side when the trend starts to move in the wrong direction," Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told MarketWatch.
To continue reading, please click here...
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IPO Calendar 2013 Heats Up With These Five New Offerings
After a slow start to April with just one deal scheduled for pricing, the IPO calendar is getting crowded again in the second week of the month.
The equity markets remain fairly strong and recent IPOs have performed very well so there is strong institutional demand for equities in general, and new offerings specifically.
As long as the market is propped up by an aggressive U.S. Federal Reserve policy, stock prices should stay firm and that makes for favorable conditions for new equity offerings.
Here are five to keep on your radar.
To continue reading, please click here...
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Facebook IPO Deal Leaves Wall Street Seeing Red
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday approved Nasdaq's plan to pay $62 million in compensation to brokers for mishandling the Facebook IPO. The Nasdaq missteps during Facebook's (Nasdaq: FB) debut cost Wall Street a collective $500 million and firms have fought to recoup those losses.
The amount was cleared by the SEC after Nasdaq offered to pay more than is allowed under its existing bylaws. As a self-regulatory organization, the Nasdaq enjoys certain legal protections which could have resulted in a significantly smaller settlement.
Nasdaq proposed the voluntary $62 million as more firms claimed that the exchange misrepresented facts of what went wrong in trading that day. The amount is much more than the $3 million cap its rules permit for technical glitches.
Not everyone's on board with the decision. Citigroup Inc (NYSE: C) and UBS AG (NYSE: USB) urged the SEC to reject it, saying losses within their market-making units exceed $62 million. In fact, Citigroup raised the immunity argument last August in a letter to the SEC.
"Market participants suffered hundreds of millions of dollars of losses as a result of Nasdaq's profit-driven conduct prior to and during the Facebook IPO, not a result of protected regulatory activity by Nasdaq, or routine system failures. Nasdaq should not be permitted to hide behind regulatory immunity," Citi wrote in a letter to the SEC.
UBS, which claims to have lost more than $350 million, told the SEC brokers should be made whole. Many agree.
"Why should the banks and brokers be left holding the bag for Nasdaq's snafus?" Scott Sales, a lawyer at Paul Hasting LLP who handles corporate listings and is not involved in the settlement, told The Wall Street Journal last month.
The SEC acknowledges the proposal won't compensate for all losses, but added it provides "significantly more compensation for eligible claims, outside of litigation, than would otherwise be available."
To continue reading, please click here…
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IPO Calendar 2013: Don't Miss SSNI, MODN
The IPO calendar for 2013 is starting to get more crowded as spring approaches.
The aftermarket for initial offerings has been especially strong as investors are rewarded for investing in new ventures and private equity cash outs.
Analysts expect the pace of offerings to continue to increase as the demand has been very strong and the equity markets are at or approaching new all-time highs.
There will be two deals pricing in the next couple weeks and several larger deals are expected by the end of the month, including the widely anticipated Sea World offering.
In the last few days there have been two deals added to the upcoming IPO calendar with specific pricing dates coming in the next couple weeks.
To continue reading, please click here...
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IPO Calendar 2013: Who to Watch in March
After a very quiet end to February, several high-profile deals should make the initial public offering (IPO) calendar for March 2013.
The year has gotten off to a great start with strong market performance by newly public companies. Overall there have been 20 IPOs so far this year and 17 are currently trading higher than the offering price.
One of the biggest has been Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (Nasdaq: NCLH) with a blistering gain of more than 50% in just a few weeks.
March will see a slow but interesting start with just two deals coming to market in the first week of the month.
To continue reading, please click here...
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2013 IPO Calendar: Who to Watch
After Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) went public last year with disastrous results, the IPO calendar emptied for more than a month.
But thanks to a string of successes toward the end of 2012, the IPO market is heating up for 2013.
In fact, companies that went public after Facebook's May 18 IPO were up an average 31% through mid-December from their IPO price, with the S&P 500 only up 11% in that time.
As we start 2013, the overall pessimism that engulfed the IPO market since Facebook went public has disappeared.
"To me, it feels like a meaningful shift in the market," said Tom Murphy, a partner and head of the securities-capital and markets group at law firm McDermott Will & Emery. "With those companies [that had great IPOs], all in very different industries, getting out at the top of their ranges, and above, is a really strong signal."
The IPO Rebound
The IPO market started rebounding in October, specifically during the week of Oct. 8- Oct. 12, when nine companies went public, the most since the end of March.
"There was a big hiccup with Facebook, but in general, new issues in the market are doing well," Jonathan Crane, chairman of KeyBanc Capital Markets' equity-underwriting committee told The Wall Street Journal. "People are gravitating toward anything with growth, and in that respect, I think things have returned to normal."
The best performing of those October debuts was Workday Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a provider of cloud-based applications used to organize human resources, accounting and other employee-related activities.
Workday went public Oct. 12 and opened at $48.05, 72% higher than its $28 offer price. It was the largest venture-backed IPO since Facebook went public in May, raising $637 million in cash. WDAY stock currently trades at $50.
Workday's IPO is part of a successful trend in cloud-based companies going public.
"For now, the megatrends in the IPO market include cloud-based computing - which includes companies such as Workday, Demandware Inc. (NYSE: DWRE), Splunk, ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE: NOW), Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE: GWRE) and Palo Alto Networks - and high-end branded goods such as Michael Kors Holding Ltd. (NYSE: KORS) and Prada that appeal to consumers in emerging markets," says Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of Privco, a financial dataprovider.
Who to Put on Your 2013 IPO Calendar
Based on the performance of the above companies, there are plenty of reasons to be excited for next year's IPOs.
"The positive returns helped revive global IPO activity at the end of 2012 and should support stronger issuance in 2013 from the large $200 billion global IPO pipeline," according to Renaissance Capital's year-end IPO report.
Here are some IPOs in 2013 to keep an eye out for:
Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network the facebook news report © All copyrights reserved By Mark Eberle
Facebook IPO – Money Morning - Only the News Can Profit From Facebook and Twitter
Facebook and Privacy Sucks
In a Shift, (Suckface) as Facebook Says It Will Make All Ads Social
- 06.07.13
- 6:30 AM
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Advertisers have been complaining for the past year – the $5 billion one — about Facebook’s unwieldy collection of advertising products, Facebook product manager Fidji Simo said in a blog post. As a result, Facebook will pull many ad options it had previously touted, like allowing owners of Facebook pages to embed native coupons, or “Offers” in Facebook parlance. The number of ad units will fall from 37 to less than half of that.
Facebook had also previously required advertisers to choose between inserting ads in users’ news feeds strictly by paying Facebook or by paying Facebook and generating social context, such as a “Like” from a friend. If advertisers opted for the social option, their ad would show up as a “Sponsored Story,” so that when friends “Liked” and commented on the ad, those “Likes” and comments would stick around for a long time in other people’s News Feeds.
Now, Facebook will bundle both options together, so that every ad is automatically retrofitted with a social component. Each ad, in other words, will be both a regular ad and a “Sponsored Story.”
“We know social enhances ad resonance; people are influenced by this type of word-of-mouth marketing,” Simo wrote. As Peter Kafka at All Things D notes, this new approach de-emphasizes the uniquely social aspect of Facebook marketing by treating social as an automatic enhancement to any ad.
Of course, Facebook’s advertising has been performing well enough in raw dollar terms that the company may not have to worry about encouraging advertisers to design their ads especially for social sharing. Facebook is so big at this point that many advertisers will do that on their own.
Patcnews: The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network The Facebook Report' Wall Street Hates Facebook' Mark Sucksberg CEO of (Facebook as Suckface)
© All copyrights reserved By Mark Eberle
June 3, 2013
Wired.com Reports Wall Street Hates Facebook. No One Knows Why
- 06.03.13
- 6:30 AM
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The news cycle had been successfully hijacked away from the actual market and handed to a couple of the banks that purport to predict its gyrations. “Facebook Gets a Pair of Upgrades; Shares Rise,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Facebook shares jump,” said Reuters. The upgrades traced back to reports, including one in the Financial Times, that Facebook will roll out video ads in July. Facebook bulls are betting these video ads will quickly turn into multi billion dollar businesses, just as Facebook’s mobile ad businesses exploded into a $1.9 billion revenue line over the course of just one year.
In the two trading days after the video-ad upgrades, Facebook stock rose 4 percent, ending the week just above $24 per share — a very modest gain over Wednesday’s six-month low of $23 and still well below the $32 the stock reached in late January.
The real question isn’t why Facebook got upgraded, it’s why Wall Street has returned to such a bearish position on the social network. Barely one month ago Facebook turned in better than expected earnings driven by robust growth in mobile. Again, shares briefly nudged upward (by 6 percent) before gliding steadily downward over several weeks. After beating Wall Street expectations even more widely in January, the stock actually declined, beginning a long fall from which it has never fully recovered.
Trying to extract a coherent rationale from the aggregated result of tens of millions of individual stock trades is, in the absence of a massive and truly obvious catalyst, pointless. In other words, one can only guess at the (potentially endless) reasons Facebook is in the Wall Street doghouse again, and people are of course doing just that. Here are some of our pet theories, mostly centered around the idea that Facebook is taking on more risk, launching new products in new markets and pushing the comfort zones of users and advertisers alike :
- Facebook’s bulk up is risky. Costs are rising 50 percent in 2013 as Facebook goes on a hiring binge. The company has stated revenue will not rise accordingly.
- Facebook’s new products are far from making money: Launches like Facebook’s Open Graph search engine and Home mobile apperating system generate headlines and suck up resources but will need many quarters of refinement before Facebook even begins to try generating revenue from them. On the last two quarterly earnings calls, CEO Mark Sucksberg has explicitly warned Wall Street not to expect money from these products anytime soon.
- Facebook ads are increasingly generic: Investors were initially optimistic that Facebook could disrupt the online advertising industry by offering truly social ads, ads that could only happen on Facebook, like those “sponsored stories” where your friend likes some brand and the brand pays to keep the Like showing up in your News Feed for weeks on end. But Facebook’s recent ad products have been all about turning the social network into a really good platform for essentially conventional ads. Facebook has learned to combine its extensive user demographics with information on where else you’ve been on the web, what you buy at the grocery store, what apps you have installed, and where you are physically located. It has successfully pushed its ultra-targeted ads onto smartphones and (reportedly) into videos, driving Facebook’s recent revenue growth. But anyone else with basic demographics and the willingness to rent or acquire similar databases could assemble comparable targeting capabilities; Facebook is not leveraging its fabled social graph in many of these ad products.
Facebook mogul Sean Parker ordered to pay $2.5M after wedding in coastal zone
Published June 03, 2013
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook billionaire Sean Parker's lavish, $10 million Big Sur wedding got even more expensive Monday.
The California Coastal Commission and Parker said they have reached a $2.5 million settlement to pay for coastal conservation programs after the Napster co-founder built a large movie-set-like wedding site in an ecologically sensitive area of Big Sur without proper permits.
The parties reached the agreement after officials were tipped that Parker had built a cottage, fake ruins, waterfalls, staircases and a huge dance floor near iconic redwoods and a stream with threatened steelhead trout.
The commission learned about the construction at a closed campground owned by Ventana Inn & Spa after a county investigation spurred by neighbor complaints. The Ventana is negotiating a separate settlement for allowing the construction to occur.
"Despite the continued unauthorized closure of the campground to the public, earlier this year, the property owner entered into an agreement giving Sean Parker exclusive use of the campground for several months to construct a sizeable wedding venue," the commission's staff wrote in a report.
Ventana spokesman Francisco Carrasco did not return a call or email seeking comment.
The Ventana is located within the coastal zone, an area regulated by the commission, an independent state agency that oversees coastal development. Any significant construction within the zone has to be permitted.
When staff inspected, they found the temporary structures had already been built, but they allowed the wedding to proceed anyway.
The commission started negotiating a settlement with Parker and his representatives instead of shutting the event down.
"Mr. Parker has been extremely cooperative and actively involved in working with Coastal Commission staff to reach this resolution which both addresses our Coastal Act concerns and will result in greater coastal access and conservation in the Big Sur and Monterey Peninsula areas," Charles Lester, the commission's executive director, said in a statement.
Parker, 33, the former president of Facebook Inc. who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the movie "The Social Network," married singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas on Saturday in a ceremony with gowns and sets made by a designer for the "Lord of the Rings" films.
Rick Zbur, Parker's representative during negotiations with the commission, said Parker worked diligently to address the issue once it came to his attention.
"So as soon as he was made aware of the Coastal Commission's concerns, he immediately stepped forward to discuss how he could protect the coastal area and resolve these issues," Zbur said in an email.
Parker also asked his guests, many of them extremely wealthy entrepreneurs and celebrities, to donate to Save the Redwoods or the California League of Conservation Voters in lieu of giving gifts, according to a program.
Since Parker did not get permits for the construction, commission staff will oversee the breakdown of the vast set so no damage is done to the environment. The commission said no major damage had yet been done, but it wanted to reach a deal quickly so the violating structures could be removed safely.
"Normally (negotiations) happen over a couple of months, but because of the nature of the violations here we wanted to get it out as soon as possible so Mr. Parker could go ahead and do the work the way it should be done," said Lisa Haage, the commission's chief of enforcement.
Money from the agreement may be used to purchase public easements and hiking trails in the Big Sur area and as grants for nonprofits doing conservation projects.
Also, as part of the settlement, Parker offered to produce and distribute a public education video or create a mobile app aimed at helping to identify areas where the public can access the coast.
Haage said the commission is hopeful Parker's assistance will help it spread more information about California's coastal resources.
In a statement, Parker said he was delighted to help the commission achieve its conservation goals and to help Big Sur area businesses.
The commission will vote on the agreement at its next meeting scheduled June 14.
Facebook to Crack Down on Hate Speech Posts
Email
May 30, 2013 10:48am
Facebook will tighten its policies on hate speech posts after a coalition of activist groups launched a campaign to highlight the volume of such content on the site.
New steps that the site will be taking, effective immediately, include an update to the guidelines that Facebook user operations team members follow to better recognize reported hate speech materials, and an effort to work more closely with “legal experts and others, including representatives of the women’s coalition and other groups that have historically faced discrimination.”
Users have always had the ability to report or “flag” Facebook content for investigation when a post is perceived to violate community standards.
On May 21, Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and author and activist Soraya Chemaly went public with a campaign to call on Facebook to stem gender-based hate speech on its site. Supporters have since sent over 60,000 tweets (with the hashtag #fbrape) and 5,000 emails.
“[We're now helping Facebook to remove] any kind of content that is glorifying or attempting to normalize violence against women,” Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action and The Media (WAM), told ABC News.
The WAM website shows some examples of posts that the new coalition of groups working with Facebook hope to put an end to.
One user-reported picture shows a woman’s beaten and bloodied head with the words “I like her for her brains” written on it. As WAM shows, the post was reported, but Facebook did not remove it, saying it “doesn’t violate Facebook’s Community Standards on graphic violence.”
“Over the last two years, activists and groups like ours had approached Facebook,” said Friedman. “We published the open letter last Tuesday morning, encouraging people to use #fbrape to spread awareness. Facebook eventually contacted us and sat down with us that week.”
Marne Levine, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, posted to the site Tuesday to explain the company’s new effort on content promoting hate speech, as well as its philosophy and policies regarding controversial or harmful content.
“Facebook’s mission has always been to make the world more open and connected. We seek to provide a platform where people can share and surface content, messages and ideas freely, while still respecting the rights of others,” Levine wrote.
Facebook has recently been looking into measures to keep anonymous offensive material off of the site as well. A few months ago, Facebook began testing a new system that would remove “cruel and insensitive content” that was posted by a user who was not disclosing “his or her authentic identity.” Levine wrote that this system could help other users “hold the author accountable and directly object to the content.”
Levine said the site already prohibits content deemed to be directly harmful, but, to promote “openness,” does allow content that is offensive or controversial.
Examples of things deemed “harmful” by Facebook’s community standards would be the organizing of violence or online bullying. The Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities prohibits “hate speech,” the VP’s post said, but this new effort will help to better define and identify it.
READ: Facebook Sometimes Too Much ‘Drama’ for Teens, Study Says
Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel and policy adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union, told ABC News that, since Facebook doesn’t necessarily have to allow any offensive materials on its site, he applauds their attention to the value of free speech while they carefully approach this hate speech issue.
“While it’s certainly true that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to Facebook and other private publishers, as more of our speech migrates from sidewalks and parks to social media, these companies have an enormous amount of power to influence the marketplace of ideas,” he said.
“These new gatekeepers should be commended when they apply First Amendment principles to keep their platforms as open as possible.”
Friedman told ABC News that that the specifics of how Facebook and WAM will systematically cooperate have yet to be worked out, but she said, “We’re thrilled. We’re really looking forward to seeing what comes of [the efforts]“
Suckface Block Me for Two Days on FB
[Phishing Alert] Fake Message from Facebook Security Stating You Violated a Policy
Search Option From Facebook Is Privacy Test
Stuart Isett for The New York Times
Jana Uyeda of Seattle said she was "slowly trying to close down the doors on Facebook."
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: January 18, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.
Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search
tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more
cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing
what they have already put up.
Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge
even more private details will determine whether so-called social search
is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also
determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a
lot of money.
“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting
people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will
not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the
University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social
networks.
This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool,
which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its
users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results
for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user
would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos,
check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other
information, including status updates.
“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more
about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product
doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.
Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google
employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if
Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident
people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists
they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.
The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone
searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of
Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking
more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of
their friends.
“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends
search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my
dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting
my friends know.”
Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be
desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a
friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a
restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.
“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said.
“It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”
Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more
careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators
and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.
A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of
2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they
were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many
had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly
two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.
“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are
less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather
than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of
communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study
among men and women aged 21 and 22.
Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments. Search Option From Facebook Is Privacy Test
Published: January 18, 2013
Graph search is something of a coming-of-age moment for social search. Companies from Google to Yelp to TripAdvisor to small start-ups like Hunch have all tried to make search more social,
by providing personal answers from people you know and not just links
to Web sites, in an effort to bring word-of-mouth recommendations
online. Bing, which has a partnership with Facebook, announced this week
that it would add more social recommendations to standard Web links in
search queries.
But no company has tried social search on Facebook’s scale.
“This is a watershed moment,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer science
professor at the University of Washington and a co-founder of the price
comparison site Decide.com.
“There have been other attempts at social search,” he continued, “but
it’s the scale at which Facebook operates, especially once they fully
index everything we’ve said or say or like.”
Facebook’s social search is also a step forward in a new type of Web search, one in which Google has made great strides.
Engineers call it structured or semantic search, which means search
engines that understand how people, places and things relate to one
another, and not just key words.
Graph search holds great value for advertisers seeking to target more
precise audiences — like mothers in their 30s who listen to hip-hop and
run marathons — and advertising remains Facebook’s principal source of
profit. Additionally, the more data people share and search for, the
longer they are glued to the site.
But the company is aware of concerns about privacy. When announcing the
tool, it took pains to point out that it would respect users’ privacy.
If people do not want an embarrassing photograph to be ferreted out by a
potential employer, for instance, they can make it visible only to
those who have been winnowed down as “close friends.”
Users have been encouraged to check their privacy settings in order to
fine-tune whom they wish to share with. At the same time, Facebook
eliminated a longstanding option that users enjoyed: if someone is searching for them, they will no longer be able to remain obscure.
Still, some Facebook users may be skeptical. Jana Uyeda, 35, a
photographer and social media consultant in Seattle, said, “I love my
friends, but sometimes their taste in restaurants is terrible.”
Like the subjects of the Northwestern study, Ms. Uyeda, said she was not
so sure she wanted to reveal more. “I’m slowly trying to close down the
doors on Facebook, instead of opening myself up,” she said.
Ms. Uyeda added, “There would have to be a lot of other incentives, and I
don’t even know what that would be, in order for me to add more
information about myself and be more open.”
[Phishing Alert] Fake Message from Facebook Security Stating You Violated a Policy
The Facebook message looks something like this:
Your account is reported to have violated a policy that is considered disruptive or insulting Facebook users. Until we http://www.facebook.com/security system will deactivate your account within 12 hours after you open this message if you do not confirm such reproductions.
Please confirm your facebook account below:
If you still want to use your account, please confirm your facebook account below:
apps[dot]facebook[dot]com/-security-services/
(If the link is not clickable, try copy it into your browser.)
Note: we recommend to facebook users, asked to filling data that are complete and very accurate because we are from http://www.facebook.com/security team can ensure that the ownership of the account actually exists in your control and no that is using your Facebook account without permission.
Facebook Security ™
Another popular message is shown below:
WARNING : Your account is reported to have violated the policies that are considered annoying or insulting Facebook users.system will disable your account within 24 hours if you do not do the reconfirmation.
Notice how the scammers are using the authentic link to Facebook Security to make the ruse appear more legit. One BIG, red flag is that the verification link is to a third party Facebook application. We tried to follow the link, but this particular application has been removed by Facebook. You can be sure there are others that are active and in use.
The scam likely sends the users to an application similar to the one shown below:
Another ploy is to direct users to an external website. These sites are usually designed to look like Facebook, and most all of the web addresses are easily recognized as not being Facebook. Always take a moment and verify you are actually on Facebook.com before entering any login information.
If a user submits their Facebook login credentials, then the scammer will have complete control over their account. They can access their personal information to try and steal their identity, they can send bogus messages to their friends stating that they are in trouble and please send money, they can send links to other scams to all of the victim’s Facebook friends….the opportunities for misuse and exploitation are endless!
* Users have reported receiving this message via Facebook Chat / Messages and regular email.
How to Deal with the Scam:
If you entered your Facebook login credentials on the scam page, then you need to try to reclaim your account. Check out the following article for additional steps you should take:
Four Things you need to do if your Facebook account gets hacked
Be sure to let your Facebook friends know that your account has been compromised and not to click on any links that are sent from you.
You should also check your friends list and see if you have ‘Fącebooƙ Șeȼurity’ listed as a friend. If you do, then one of your friends has been hacked. Scammers have changed the name of your friend, and they have likely replaced their profile picture with that of the real Facebook Security. Block or unfriend this account until it has been reclaimed by your friend. You don’t want a scammer having unfettered access to all of your profile information. If you are able to tell which friend has been compromised, then notify your mutual friends of the situation.
Never click on links in Facebook chat or regular email to login to Facebook or other websites. Navigate directly to the site, and enter your login information there. This will drastically reduce your chances of having your account hacked.
If you or your Facebook friends are falling for tricks like this, it’s time to get yourself informed of the latest threats. Be sure to join the Facecrooks page on Facebook to be kept informed of the latest security issues. Also check out:
Your Ultimate Guide to Facebook Scams and How to Deal with Them
How to spot a Facebook Survey Scam
Facebook Keyboard Shortcuts - If you’re spending lots of time on Facebook why not to make use of your time more efficiently while you’re at the site?CNN REPORTS Review: Facebook's Graph Search is not very useful
 |
If Mark Zuckerberg looks perplexed about Facebook's Graph Search, just imagine how you will feel.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- We tested out Facebook's new search tool and found it lacking, at least so far
- "Graph Search" was announced with much fanfare at Facebook's campus Tuesday
- Search feature lets you draw connections between people, their info and their interests
- But in reality, the data people share on Facebook is flawed and incomplete.
It also demonstrates one of the big problems with Facebook's approach to search.
The company's new tool,
awkwardly named "Graph Search," was announced with much fanfare at
Facebook's Menlo Park campus Tuesday. The new search feature lets you
draw connections between people, their profile information and their
interests on Facebook. In theory, it's a good recipe for finding
recommendations for doctors, businesses, products, TV shows or bands.
It can also be used to find people that fit a specific profile, such as "men over 30 who live in Cleveland."
Facebook unveils upgraded search tool
A powerful search
function is a logical and useful addition to the site, but the beta
version is far from being the Yelp, LinkedIn or Match.com killer that
Facebook may be hoping for. For that to happen, there would have to be
some major shifts in how people use the social network.
Much of Graph Search's
power and problems start with the Like button. People just don't wield
the Like as often and as discerningly as is needed to turn Facebook into
a useful recommendation tool. It's also too easy for those
deep-pocketed companies who can afford to maintain a social media
presence to buy more likes and come out on top.
A search for Mexican
restaurants that my friends like here in San Francisco shows 12 options,
most with just one friend's thumbs up. By comparison, Yelp has 543
reviews with star ratings for the El Castillito taqueria in San
Francisco, while Facebook has 97 likes (none from my friends), and a few
scattered wall posts on a sparse unofficial landing page.
Alternately, you can also
search for restaurants your friends have visited, which turns up
locations they have checked into using Facebook. But that information
isn't helpful without knowing if they enjoyed their meal, if they hated
it, or if they were just there as part of their job as city food
inspector.
It's not that the social
network doesn't have the data to turn it into a powerful recommendation
tool. But for it to be more effective, Facebook would have to greatly
improve how it collects information from people going forward, or expand
its search powers to comb through status updates and comments.
Every post you make
reveals slivers about who you are and what you like (not just "Like").
Technically, Facebook should be able to detect if you like cats, even if
you didn't take the time to hit the Like button for a page called
"cats." But it can't do this without rightfully alarming its already
privacy-sensitive 1 billion users.
Searching for people
presents its own set of issues. Graph Search scours your profile
information so people can find you based on what school you went to,
where you work, your religion or who your friends are. Searches can be
refined using filters for every available profile field, including
likes, work info, family connections and the Facebook apps people use.
Next time you need to
find single male models in Omaha who are Buddhist and speak Spanish, go
straight to the Facebook Graph Search.
A more practical use
would be to find job candidates, which Facebook demonstrated at its
press event. The possibility of using Facebook for job-recruiting
searches in intriguing, but beyond listing current employers, people
don't regularly update their Facebook profiles like their resumes.
Facebook profiles are crafted with friends and family in mind, not
potential bosses, and for many that's a welcome separation of worlds.
There is value in being
able to search for friends of friends who work at a company where you
are gunning for a job, but while blindly contacting someone you've never
met on LinkedIn is expected, it may be uncomfortable on a network of
friends.
Speaking of
uncomfortable, Graph Search can be used to find new "connections," like
single friends of friends who share your interests in canning and
18th-century costume dramas. Are we ready to turn Facebook into a dating
site? Friendster and MySpace doubled as online pick-up spots, but these
days people set up separate profiles on Match.com or OK Cupid if they
want to find dates.
As with LinkedIn,
dating-site profiles are constructed specifically to show one side of a
personality. The things you'd like a potential date to know about you
are not the same things you'd share with old high school friends, your
aunt or job contacts.
Facebook is also not a place people want to receive pick-up messages from strangers (even if they are friends of friends).
Facebook recently
announced you could pay $1 to send a message to a stranger outside of
your network ($100 if that stranger is Mark Zuckerberg) and go straight
to their inbox, a feature that makes a lot more sense with Graph Search.
Suddenly there's a whole world of people you might want to contact, for
jobs or articles or long walks on the beach.
Graph Search introduces
new ways to search Facebook that are great in theory. The tool works
amazingly well in the idealized Zuckerbergian world where all Facebook
members are real people who complete their profiles honestly and update
them frequently.
But in reality, the data people share on Facebook is flawed and incomplete. And so is Graph Search, at least for now.
Suckface (Facebook) lets some people email Mark Sucksrberg (Mark Zuckerberg) for $100
Sound enticing?
For most people, if you want to email President Barack Obama, basketball star LeBron James or author Vince Flynn you can certainly do so but most likely they’ll never see your message.
Scientists discover 'the Facebook chromosome'
The option to pay $100 to message Zuckerberg isn’t open to everyone, but was spotted by Mashable, which posted a screen capture of the option in action. Apparently, Facebook is playing around with a feature it introduced last month when it began allowing people to send emails to persons they’re not friends with for $1.
“For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox,” Facebook wrote in a press release. “For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.”
At the time, Facebook said the $1 test only worked between individual users in the U.S., and users could have no more than one message per week routed from their "other" folder to the inbox. Apparently the social network’s priority-email-for-a-buck trial got some traction, or it wouldn’t throw the $100 option out there.
It’s an interesting concept, but one has to wonder how effective such messaging would actually be.
Zuckerberg has 16 million followers on Facebook, after all. Unless the message is somehow flagged something like “Hey, this person actually paid $100 to get this through to you” you’d think these famous people would have inboxes all clogged up with tons of messages, making the chances of them opening one from a stranger unlikely.
Published January 17, 2013
LiveScience
-
A 616-gene sequence ("social chromosome") determines whether a single queen or many will rule a colony of fire ants, Solenopsis invictaI. Here, a queen, three smaller workers and one pupa. (Romain Libbrecht and Yannick Wurm)
Whether fire ants bow to one queen or accept many rulers depends on one long strand of genes, a new study finds.
The gene sequence is the first "social chromosome" ever discovered, according to study researcher Yannick Wurm of Queen Mary, University of London, who called the DNA sequence a "supergene."
"This was a very surprising discovery," Wurm said in a statement. "Similar differences in chromosomal structure are linked to wing patterns in butterflies and to cancer in humans, but this is the first supergene ever identified that determines social behavior
."
Choosing queens
The fire ant Selenopsis invicta is one of many fire ant
species known for nasty stings. The species is native to South America
and invasive elsewhere. One of its odder traits is a particular
flexibility about its social structure. Some members of the species live
in colonies with a single queen, while others tolerate hundreds of
queens. [Gallery: Stunning Photos of the World's Ants]
The new genetic analysis, published Thursday, Jan. 17, in the journal Nature, finds that a sequence of genes on a certain chromosome determines which social arrangement is acceptable to the ants. Much in the same way that the human sex chromosomes vary between X and Y, the ant chromosomes vary between B and b.
If all the workers in a colony carry the B variant only, they will accept a single queen that also carries only the B variant (marked as BB, because the chromosomes come in pairs). But if some workers in the colony carry the b version of the chromosome, the colony will accept multiple queens — but only those queens with a mismatched "Bb" set of chromosomes.
Smelly queens?
The chromosomal differences have been linked to a number of anatomical differences in the ants, Wurm and his colleagues wrote, from the queen's fecundity to the size of male workers and the structure of their sperm. These differences could explain how the ants "know" what sort of monarchy to accept.
"Odor is likely involved," Wurm told LiveScience. "We know the queens smell different."
The two different genes may also confer their own advantages. BB queens mate and disperse to their own colonies when they reach maturity, making them good at invading new areas, the researchers wrote. Bb queens join others near their maternal colony and, working together, produce more workers overall. This might make them more successful in previously colonized areas.
Wurm and his colleagues plan to dig deeper into the chromosome to find out which of the 616 genes in the social sequence are responsible for the differences between ants. They also hope to find out if similar sequences play social roles in other species. And the differences aren't just academic. The fire ants have spread into the southern United States as well as Australia and China, where they are major pests.
"Our discovery could help in developing novel pest-control strategies," Wurm said. "For example, a pesticide could artificially deactivate the genes in the social chromosome and induce social anarchy within the colony."
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The gene sequence is the first "social chromosome" ever discovered, according to study researcher Yannick Wurm of Queen Mary, University of London, who called the DNA sequence a "supergene."
"This was a very surprising discovery," Wurm said in a statement. "Similar differences in chromosomal structure are linked to wing patterns in butterflies and to cancer in humans, but this is the first supergene ever identified that determines social behavior
."Choosing queens
'This is the first supergene ever identified that determines social behavior.'- Yannick Wurm of Queen Mary, University of London
]The new genetic analysis, published Thursday, Jan. 17, in the journal Nature, finds that a sequence of genes on a certain chromosome determines which social arrangement is acceptable to the ants. Much in the same way that the human sex chromosomes vary between X and Y, the ant chromosomes vary between B and b.
If all the workers in a colony carry the B variant only, they will accept a single queen that also carries only the B variant (marked as BB, because the chromosomes come in pairs). But if some workers in the colony carry the b version of the chromosome, the colony will accept multiple queens — but only those queens with a mismatched "Bb" set of chromosomes.
Smelly queens?
The chromosomal differences have been linked to a number of anatomical differences in the ants, Wurm and his colleagues wrote, from the queen's fecundity to the size of male workers and the structure of their sperm. These differences could explain how the ants "know" what sort of monarchy to accept.
"Odor is likely involved," Wurm told LiveScience. "We know the queens smell different."
The two different genes may also confer their own advantages. BB queens mate and disperse to their own colonies when they reach maturity, making them good at invading new areas, the researchers wrote. Bb queens join others near their maternal colony and, working together, produce more workers overall. This might make them more successful in previously colonized areas.
Wurm and his colleagues plan to dig deeper into the chromosome to find out which of the 616 genes in the social sequence are responsible for the differences between ants. They also hope to find out if similar sequences play social roles in other species. And the differences aren't just academic. The fire ants have spread
into the southern United States as well as Australia and China, where they are major pests."Our discovery could help in developing novel pest-control strategies," Wurm said. "For example, a pesticide could artificially deactivate the genes in the social chromosome and induce social anarchy within the colony."
Copyright 2013 LiveScience
, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/17/fire-ant-monarchy-ruled-by-social-chromosome/#ixzz2IGER0AAw
SCARY: These Slides Purport To Show How The NSA Watches Your Every Online Move
EARLIER: A top-secret April PowerPoint slideshow details how the National Security Agency partnered with nine tech companies, including Apple, Microsoft and Google, to monitor users' activity, according to the Washington Post and the Guardian.
According to the presentation, the NSA got direct access to these companies' servers in order to directly watch user communications.
The program, called PRISM, is nominally aimed at foreign actors, but the Post reports that purely domestic communications could easily end up in NSA hands, so long as an algorithm estimated at least a 51 percent probability that they were foreign.
Here are the slides showing how the NSA reportedly got its hands on your data:
NSA via Washington Post
|
NSA via Guardian
NSA via Guardian
Facebook and Google insist they did not know of Prism surveillance program
Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg sharply deny knowledge of Prism until Thursday even as Obama confirms program's existence
Email
Mark Zuckerberg called the press reports about the existence of Prism 'outrageous'. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters
America's tech giants continued to deny any knowledge of a giant government surveillance programme called Prism, even as president Barack Obama confirmed the scheme's existence Friday.
With their credibility about privacy issues in sharp focus, all the technology companies said to be involved in the program issued remarkably similar statements.
All said they did not allow the government "direct access" to their systems, all said they had never heard of the Prism program, and all called for greater transparency.
In a blogpost titled 'What the…?' Google co-founder Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond said the "level of secrecy" around US surveillance procedures was undermining "freedoms we all cherish."
"First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers. Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called Prism until yesterday," they wrote.
"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process."
The Google executives said they were also "very surprised" to learn of the government order made to obtain data from Verizon, first disclosed by the Guardian. "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false," they wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, described the press reports about Prism as "outrageous". He insisted that the Facebook was not part of any program to give the US government direct access to its servers.
He said: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of Prism before yesterday."
Zuckerberg also called for greater transparency. "We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term."
Yahoo said: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."
The leaked National Security Agency (NSA) document obtained by the Guardian claims Prism operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US".
The document names AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk and Yahoo and gives dates when they "joined" the scheme, aimed at intercepting data from people outside the US.'' The presentation talks of "legally compelled collection" of data.
All the companies involved have now denied knowledge of the scheme to the Guardian.
In one slide, the presentation identifies two types of data collection: Upstream and Prism. Upstream involves the collection of communications on "fibre cables and infrastructure as data flows past." Prism involves: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
Obama confirmed the existence of the scheme Friday and said Congress was "fully apprised" of the situation and that it was being conducted legally with a "whole range of safeguards involved".
But despite Obama's acknowledgment, senior figures said they remained puzzled and surprised by the news. Speaking off the record one said their company regularly complied with subpoenas for information but had never allowed "collection directly" from their servers.
Some speculated that the wording of the document was incorrect or that the author had over-hyped the scheme.
Security experts and civil liberty figures were less convinced. "I was assuming that these tech companies were just lying," said security guru Bruce Schneier. "That's the most obvious explanation."
"Could it possibly be that there's a department within these companies that hides this from the executives? Maybe," he said. "I don't know, we don't know. This points to the problem here. There's so much freaking secrecy that we don't know enough to even know what is going on."
He said he was not surprised by the news. "There are no surprises here. We all knew what was going on and now they have finally admitted it."
"The NSA would not have done this surreptitiously, they want the tech companies on their side," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "I can't make sense of their statements at all."
He said it was clear that tech companies in general were more than happy to co-operate with the US authorities and said he was puzzled why there seemed to be such a gap between the two sides' story.
Ali Reza Manouchehri, CEO and co-founder of MetroStar Systems, an IT consultant that works closely with government agencies, said: "There are situations that come up where they have to communicate with the security agencies. At the end of the day they are working in the interest of national security."
"I can't comment on what's going on inside the company. It's hard for me to believe that Google doesn't know," he said. "It is either transparent or it is surreptitious. It is hard for me to believe that at this level, at this volume it is surreptitious." He said if the companies really did not know then "we have some serious issues."
The news has sparked widespread concern in the US. Nearly 20,000 people have signed a petition at Progressive Change Campaign Committee calling on Congress to hold investigations.
Shares of Facebook FB +5.04%
were heating up Monday, rallying almost 5% in morning trading, after a
research report from Stifel Nicolaus made the case for the social
network’s growth prospects in a favorable comparison with fellow
technology heavyweight Google GOOG +1.06%.
Looking out to fiscal 2015, Stifel analyst Jordan Rohan argues that Google goes for 10 times expected earnings (EBITDA), compared with Facebook’s multiple of 9.4. The analyst expects Facebook to grow earnings at 25% a year for the next half-decade though, compared with Google growth in the low-teens.
Rohan isn’t exactly calling for a massive rally — his price target of $29 is merely 25% above Friday’s close — but he points to a handful of catalysts that could drive Facebook’s stock higher and make his target look conservative.
For one thing, he predicts Facebook will be added to the S&P 500, an inclusion widely predicted. Facebook’s $59 billion market cap would make it the 59th largest company in the index (bigger than NIKE NKE +1.02%, Rohan notes).
While that marks a positive external factor, the analyst also sees beneficial trends internally, noting the company seems poised to improve monetization (including that from its Instagram purchase) and “is making the transition from social media to utility.”
Rohan acknowledges that the effectiveness of Facebook advertising has been called into question, but says the company taking steps to win that debate by partnering with firms like Datalogix and Nielsen.
Shares of Facebook gained 4.9% Monday morning to $24.42. The stock is still down 8.4% year-to-date and down 36% in the nearly 13 months since its public market debut.
Follow @SchaeferStreet
With their credibility about privacy issues in sharp focus, all the technology companies said to be involved in the program issued remarkably similar statements.
All said they did not allow the government "direct access" to their systems, all said they had never heard of the Prism program, and all called for greater transparency.
In a blogpost titled 'What the…?' Google co-founder Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond said the "level of secrecy" around US surveillance procedures was undermining "freedoms we all cherish."
"First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers. Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called Prism until yesterday," they wrote.
"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process."
The Google executives said they were also "very surprised" to learn of the government order made to obtain data from Verizon, first disclosed by the Guardian. "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false," they wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, described the press reports about Prism as "outrageous". He insisted that the Facebook was not part of any program to give the US government direct access to its servers.
He said: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of Prism before yesterday."
Zuckerberg also called for greater transparency. "We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term."
Yahoo said: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."
The leaked National Security Agency (NSA) document obtained by the Guardian claims Prism operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US".
The document names AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk and Yahoo and gives dates when they "joined" the scheme, aimed at intercepting data from people outside the US.'' The presentation talks of "legally compelled collection" of data.
All the companies involved have now denied knowledge of the scheme to the Guardian.
In one slide, the presentation identifies two types of data collection: Upstream and Prism. Upstream involves the collection of communications on "fibre cables and infrastructure as data flows past." Prism involves: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
Obama confirmed the existence of the scheme Friday and said Congress was "fully apprised" of the situation and that it was being conducted legally with a "whole range of safeguards involved".
But despite Obama's acknowledgment, senior figures said they remained puzzled and surprised by the news. Speaking off the record one said their company regularly complied with subpoenas for information but had never allowed "collection directly" from their servers.
Some speculated that the wording of the document was incorrect or that the author had over-hyped the scheme.
Security experts and civil liberty figures were less convinced. "I was assuming that these tech companies were just lying," said security guru Bruce Schneier. "That's the most obvious explanation."
"Could it possibly be that there's a department within these companies that hides this from the executives? Maybe," he said. "I don't know, we don't know. This points to the problem here. There's so much freaking secrecy that we don't know enough to even know what is going on."
He said he was not surprised by the news. "There are no surprises here. We all knew what was going on and now they have finally admitted it."
"The NSA would not have done this surreptitiously, they want the tech companies on their side," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "I can't make sense of their statements at all."
He said it was clear that tech companies in general were more than happy to co-operate with the US authorities and said he was puzzled why there seemed to be such a gap between the two sides' story.
Ali Reza Manouchehri, CEO and co-founder of MetroStar Systems, an IT consultant that works closely with government agencies, said: "There are situations that come up where they have to communicate with the security agencies. At the end of the day they are working in the interest of national security."
"I can't comment on what's going on inside the company. It's hard for me to believe that Google doesn't know," he said. "It is either transparent or it is surreptitious. It is hard for me to believe that at this level, at this volume it is surreptitious." He said if the companies really did not know then "we have some serious issues."
The news has sparked widespread concern in the US. Nearly 20,000 people have signed a petition at Progressive Change Campaign Committee calling on Congress to hold investigations.
(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
Looking out to fiscal 2015, Stifel analyst Jordan Rohan argues that Google goes for 10 times expected earnings (EBITDA), compared with Facebook’s multiple of 9.4. The analyst expects Facebook to grow earnings at 25% a year for the next half-decade though, compared with Google growth in the low-teens.
Rohan isn’t exactly calling for a massive rally — his price target of $29 is merely 25% above Friday’s close — but he points to a handful of catalysts that could drive Facebook’s stock higher and make his target look conservative.
For one thing, he predicts Facebook will be added to the S&P 500, an inclusion widely predicted. Facebook’s $59 billion market cap would make it the 59th largest company in the index (bigger than NIKE NKE +1.02%, Rohan notes).
While that marks a positive external factor, the analyst also sees beneficial trends internally, noting the company seems poised to improve monetization (including that from its Instagram purchase) and “is making the transition from social media to utility.”
Rohan acknowledges that the effectiveness of Facebook advertising has been called into question, but says the company taking steps to win that debate by partnering with firms like Datalogix and Nielsen.
Shares of Facebook gained 4.9% Monday morning to $24.42. The stock is still down 8.4% year-to-date and down 36% in the nearly 13 months since its public market debut.
Follow @SchaeferStreet
SEC OKs Plan for Lost Money in Facebook IPO
Facebook Lost – Money on IPO This Morning - Only the News Can Profit
Published March 25, 2013
FOXBusiness
The agreement could allow Nasdaq to move past this embarrassing fiasco and should give a financial boost to some market makers like Knight Capital Group (KCG) that were hurt by the Facebook IPO.
However, UBS (UBS), which lost $365 million from the debacle, indicated that it remains unhappy with the compensation plan despite SEC approval and has filed an arbitration demand.
In an alert to traders, Nasdaq said the SEC approved its rule change to establish a one-time, voluntary accommodation program to expand the pool available to compensate members for qualified losses arising from errors in the Facebook debut on May 18.
The exchange said the accommodation pool totals $62 million and will be paid out to approved recipients in cash.
Nasdaq said members requesting compensation have one week from Monday to provide the information needed by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, to evaluate the requests.
The technical glitch at Nasdaq left investors in the dark about whether or not their orders to buy shares of Facebook were actually executed.
The snafu created a black eye for the industry and caused heavy losses for market makers who were left to compensate their clients.
UBS said the SEC's approval of the compensation plan "does not change our opinion" that the plan is "inadequate and insufficient." The Swiss bank said it has already filed an arbitration demand against Facebook "for the full extent of our losses" due to the exchange's "gross mishandling" of the IPO and its "substantial failures to perform its duties."
Knight Capital has previously disclosed losses of $35.4 million tied to the Facebook IPO, driving an 81% tumble in earnings during the second quarter of 2012. Knight had threatened to explore legal options before accepting Nasdaq’s decision to increase its compensation plan to $62 million from $40 million previously.
Shares of New York-based Nasdaq had little reaction to the news, falling 0.06% to $32.34 in recent trading.
Follow Matt Egan on Twitter @MattMEgan5
