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Facebook Does Right by New Parent Employees with 4 Month Paid Parental Leave

We seem to most often find ourselves complaining about Facebook, so when we heard about their parental leave policy for employees, we just had to give them a pat on the back. Two thumbs up, even, for being a forward-thinking employer that gives any new parent – female or male, birth or adoption – four months of paid parental leave.

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The “Your Facebook account has been disabled by an administrator” Scam

If you get an email telling you that “your Facebook account has been disabled by an administrator”, don’t fall for it! It’s a scam, and the link in the email goes not to Facebook, but to yet another Canadian pharmacy site selling male enhancement drugs.

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Facebook Sued for Tracking Users’ Browsing History Even When Not Logged In

Facebook is being sued over its using its ability to track Facebook users’ Internet browsing history even while they are logged out of Facebook. The Facebook lawsuit, filed in Federal court in Mississippi on October 12th against Facebook, Brooke Rutledge claims that, among other things Facebook is in direct violation of U.S. Wiretapping laws. But perhaps more to the point, it is in violation of treating its users with common decency, following them with Facebook super cookies and the like. The complaint also seeks to turn the lawsuit into a class action, so others can join the law suit.

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Is Facebook Down? Facebook is Down for Many Right Now

If you are trying to reach Facebook today, and finding Facebook gone, it may be that Facebook is down. Or it may be that part of their Internet backbone is not routing traffic to them. As we write this, it seems to be a bit of both: Facebook is down for us, because part of their Internet infrastructure is hosed. Here’s a detailed explanation of how your computer gets to the Facebook website and, at the end, a work-around if you are currently unable to reach Facebook.

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Update on the Nym Wars – An Explanation of the Pseudonym Wars

The Nym Wars (nym for “pseudoNYM” and wars for, well, “wars”, and pronounced ‘nim wars’) don’t appear to be going away any time soon. The issue at the heart of the NymWars is whether or not people should be allowed to mask their true identity when posting on the Internet by using, well, a psuedonym. Google says “no”, and has taken a firm stance with their Google Plus service, leading to a lot of gnashing of teeth, and pundit pontificating.

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Is Facebook Going to Charge its Users? No, Rumours that Facebook is Charging Users are False.

Facebook to charge its users? Rumours are swirling that users are going to have to pay for Facebook. So is Facebook going to charge people to use it? Is Facebook charging its users as we speak? No. The rumours are false. And a Facebook pay to play scheme is very unlikely; in order for Facebook to start charging their users, they would have to come up with a premium service that offered a great deal of additional value, like maybe easy-to-understand privacy settings, not defaulting new apps to ‘permitted’, and not playing fast and loose with user privacy.

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Facebook Launches Facebook Timeline – a Timeline of Your Facebook Profile

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a key part of the Facebook master plan for their Facebook profile redesign: the Facebook Timeline. The Facebook Timeline is your timeline – your profile’s Timeline, from as far back as you want. In fact, there will be a “way back” section for things you can add (photos, etc.) that have to do with your past (from baby pictures on up).

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Facebook Rolls Out New Look – Now with Blue Corners

Facebook seems to fear commitment even more than George Clooney. They have changed their look again, this time shunting all the rest of your friends’ status updates over to the right-hand margin, and featuring front and center “top stories” (status updates). Perhaps what is ‘newest’ is the “blue corners”. Facebook explains that the blue corner “marks a story we think will be interesting to you.” But more interesting is that you can, apparently, train the Facebook blue corners.

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Phishing Scam Pretends to be Angry Facebook Message

WARNING: The following article contains profanity. Using social engineering, this scam spam tries to trick you into thinking that someone is very upset with you for leaving a rude message on their wall, and demanding that you “Delete your comments from my wall.” Of course, the link to “their wall” is really a disguised link to a fake Facebook login page, designed to steal your Facebook password. That fake Facebook page is hosted at la-criniere-napierville.com/ACCEUIL-HOME/facebook.html

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Did You Get a “Your Account Protection Status: Low” Alert on Facebook?

“Your account protection status: low” screams the alert on Facebook. “Increase protection” it offers. Is it a scam? A virus? Or is it really Facebook giving you a warning? It turns out that the warning really is from Facebook, but it’s not nearly as urgent as they would lead you to believe.

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Hacktivist Group ‘Anonymous’ Says it Will Kill Facebook on November 5th

The Hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’, most recently best known for its role in attacking sites that withdrew services from Wikileaks after the infamous Wikileaks leak of the U.S. State Department documents, has announced that they intend to hack Facebook and take Facebook down – apparently permanently – on November 5th. (November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night (or Guy Fawkes Day, depending on your bent) in the U.K., honoring the day that, back in 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught beneath the House of Lords, guarding a cache of explosives intended to be used to assassinate King James I.)

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Does the Ability to Mine Facebook Email Notification Data in Gmail Give Google+ an Unfair Advantage Over Facebook?

With all the hoopla over Google+ – what with some calling it the Facebook killer, and all – it is interesting to us to note that nobody has yet stopped to question what sort of advantage Google has over Facebook by being able to data-mine all of that email that flows from Facebook to its users, via…Gmail.

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Is Social Intelligence Corp Monitoring Your Social Network Status and Reporting to Prospective Employers?

Last month Social Intelligence Corp. received official approval from the Feds to monitor and search your social network status updates and other information that is publicly searchable online. So just what is Social Intelligence doing with the results of their social network search? They are providing them to the people who pay Social Intelligence Corp. for those results: prospective employers. Anything you say or post online in a public forum can and will be used against you, including remarks that can be construed as racist, photos that can be considered explicit, or anything that can be taken as evidence of illegal activity such as drug use, to name a few. Suddenly the drunk posting of a status update on Facebook from years ago can come back to haunt you and cost you that job that you really want.

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Facebook Announces Skype Integration for Video Calling

Facebook announced today that it has integrated Skype into the Facebook framework, to allow users to make video calls right from Facebook. The announcement took place days after Google soft-launched the new Google social network, Google+, which also includes a video chat feature in the form of G+ Hangouts.

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Facebook Quietly Turns Facial Recognition Software on to Scan Uploaded Photos and Suggests that Friends Tag You

Earlier this year we mentioned that Google was rolling out face recognition technology that would allow someone to pull up your personal information just by taking your picture. Now Facebook has launched their own facial recognition privacy nightmare, which “uses a comparison of photos you’re tagged in to suggest that friends tag you in new photos.” In other words, when one of your Facebook friends uploads a photo, and Facebook’s software recognizes you in that image, Facebook automatically suggests that your friend tag you in the photograph. The “feature” goes by “Suggest photos of me to friends”, and is also known as “Photos: Suggest Tags”. And the kicker is, Facebook has quietly enabled this for you – it is running now! So here’s how to turn it off!