By Daniel Harrison, contributor
What you need to know to avoid embarrassing your kids (and yourself)
Introduction
Thirty-five percent of adults would like to know 25 stupid things about you. Actually, that's an overstatement, but 35 percent of your peers are actually using the sort of sites where that nonsense occurs.
That's right, Pew Internet Research tells us 35 percent of grown-ups (defined as anyone between the ages of 18 and dead) are now using social networking sites. Of course that doesn't mean they're necessarily on Facebook. They might be on LinkedIn (a business social networking site) or MySpace (for musicians and goth tweens), or maybe they're on Friendster. (Just kidding; no one's on Friendster.)
Still, the fastest growing group on Facebook is infamously the 35-54-year-old segment. And since grown-ups have quadrupled their likelihood of using these sites in the last four years, you might find this orientation guide to Facebook useful.
So, uh, what is it?
Facebook is what we're calling a "social networking site," which means they don't have to create content, just post what your friends write. That, however, is not actually as bad as it sounds.
What it really means is they let you create a profile, invite some "friends" to view it, and post countless precious updates so people know you're alive and doing junk. You can also use it to send e-mail-like messages or to raise your blood pressure while trying to use their simply awful IM.
Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to let college students find each other after parties. Then he saw a bazillion monetizable eyeballs outside and decided to throw the doors open. Now with all those eyeballs, a cadre of advertisers using his system to reach them, and a percentage off the top, all he has to do is tart it up to look like Twitter (apparently).
Anyway, it's fun! The two tricks to getting along well on Facebook are, don't trust anything, and if you want to remain hip, don't try so hard. Preserve that hard-won dignity you earned by surviving puberty, the prom, and possibly parenthood.
Getting started: Your picture
When you set up a profile, Facebook suggests you choose a picture to represent yourself. As with anything, your choices here can reveal some truths you would have preferred stayed hidden.
For instance, if you're not an actor or model, use a glamour shot at your own peril. You don't look reflective, brooding or perky. You look like a narcissistic jerk. Sincerity is (always) hipper than hair gel, you smug peacock.
Second, college is over and no one's buying it! You got fatter; hair migrated; and drinking caught up. What do you think happened to us for crying out loud? Let it go. Time forces what we might euphemistically call "the mantle of wisdom" upon us all; How gracefully you accept it is up to you. In short, don't lead with a picture of yourself that's older than Facebook.
Your picture, again
Since you've probably already screwed this up - there being so many ways to do so - your best bet is just to get a snapshot Simpsonized or Obama-ated and go with that.
Listen, your kids are adorable, and while we're at it, let's extend the fiction to say we're glad you finally got someone to marry you.
Nevertheless, those crowning achievements do not belong in your profile picture. Nor, by the way, does a picture of a dog (unless, that is, you really are a dog, in which case, congrats on getting online. That's impressive! Good dog!)
Here are the rules: Kiddie pics go in your gallery (we love to see them) and spouse pics go in the gallery or on their own Facebook accounts. If your spouse isn't on Facebook, maybe he or she just isn't that into you and your annoying friends. Just saying.
Accepting 'friends'
Welcome to the firing line! People who have been on Facebook for over a month inevitably find themselves asking, "who are all these 'friends,' and, what on Earth was I thinking?"
The moment you sign up, people will find you and ask you to be "friends." They want to pester you with fake flowers for a garden you don't actually have. Scientists will puzzle over this for decades to come. If these potential "friends" aren't, you know, actual friends you might want to talk to on the phone, you should probably pass.
Simply put, the more "friends" you have, the more nonsense will scud up your inbox. If you don't care about the jerky details of Jerkwad's summer "vacay," don't make Jerkwad a friend. Besides, you don't have to accept or reject "friend requests" as soon as you get them. Wait until the requester does something useful like hit the lotto.
Nothing stays in Vegas - nothing!
You'll probably end up being Facebook friends with real friends, people you dislike, workmates who can't take a hint, and God only knows who else. As this dude dressed as a fairy found out, the hard way, some of your "friends" are "friends" with people you are hiding stuff from.
If your jackass freshman roommate somehow got to be buds with your boss and put up a picture of you at a party when you were supposed to be home sick, you're hosed.
Worse yet, if said ex-roomie goes ahead and uploads that picture of you and the mule from spring break '98, and then tags you in it (for the love of Pete), all your friends get a look. Why did you make that dude a friend anyway? We talked about this.
It's theoretically possible to set your privacy settings up so none of this happens, but honestly, you're probably not smart enough.
Updates: Stay classy, San Diego
You don't have to simply suffer other people's inane updates. (Bob loves pie? Thanks for the breaking news, Bob. I'm going to write that down for future reference.) No, you can also tell your friends all the dull stuff in your own life.
Some might find your updates offensive. The cautionary tale here is one about a guy who stabbed his wife to death when she changed her status to "single." Facebook takes unfair blame for this, though. It's like blaming Nokia after calling your boss between the third and fourth rounds of shooters to tell him where he can shove his snooty attitude. Still, if your friends are crackerjack insane, don't provoke them. P.S., that's true offline as well.
Meanwhile, some announcements aren't really fit for a broadcast medium. Are you getting divorced? Should some of your acquaintances visit a public clinic soonish? If so, that's news you take door-to-door before putting it on Facebook. Your sainted Grandma never threw wide the shutters and bellowed, "What up haters? I'm pregnant!" to the assembled townfolk, now did she? Use some judgment -- it's the Internet, not a barnyard.
Comments
Mostly comments are fun. You or a friend posts a status update and people crack wise or express sympathy or whatever. Community ensues and everybody avoids doing any work for another couple of minutes.
However, be aware that some people have way too many friends. Commenting on their status, means you'll be alerted whenever their friends comment after you.
While that would be okay if your friends have chosen their friends on the basis of wit and insight, they most likely have not. In a sufficiently large population, 50 percent of everyone is below average. And now you have to listen to them sound off.
Applications
There is nothing funny to say about Facebook applications.
Applications are part and parcel of the platform that Mark Zuckerberg put at the disposal of his ad-men friends. Anyone can build a tiny program that operates on the Facebook platform, and so they have.
Some allow you to do soundly important stuff like play a fakey stock market, or challenge friends to games of Scrabble. Others let you tend pretend gardens, take endless quizzes about the 80s, or give each other fake beers. Now you've got a fake beer with a real craving chaser. Yay! Nobody wins!
Most importantly though, applications provide value to their creators in direct proportion to how many people use them. Consequently, they'll do their best to trick you into inviting all your friends to install them. And when you install them, there's a good chance they'll steal your saleable data, so that's nice.
To recap: Applications are irritating; you get them from your friends. And they're easy to spread inadvertently. This is how venereal diseases roll, too. So there's that.
Groups
Groups are some advanced Facebooking material and you should probably just forget about using them. Like anything, they can be useful if used well. In practice though, they generally suck. If you are fanatical about stuff like chalupas or Marilyn Manson's inexcusable absence from "Guitar Hero," or if the strength of your conviction that cancer is bad is enough to make you click a button, then groups may be for you.
However, unless you POSITIVELY KNOW that your friends feel the same way, leave us out of it.
Don't presume just because a digital Teddy bear was enough to get you interested in curing malaria that we're equally shallow. Or maybe a unicorn already cajoled us into raising awareness of Type 1 Diabetes and we've got scant time left for your fluffy bear and its impositions concerning our favorite diseases.
Contributor Daniel Harrison thanks Facebook pros Michael Thomas and Emma Patrash for aid in helping him avoid embarrassing himself here, like he's doing right now on Twitter.
from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29555198/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets?pg=4#Tech_FacebookGrownups
How quaint seem the days when naïve hacker wannabes phished PayPal logons, then posted them on IRC chat channels, to try to make a few bucks — but mostly for bragging rights. That was circa 2002-2003.
Phishing for financial account log-ons, common for nearly a decade, continues. By now, most Web users know enough to avoid them. However, in the ever-evolving calculus of the cybercrime, the username and password to your non-financial Web accounts — especially Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, YahooMail and AOL mail — have emerged as white hot commodities.
The messages advise recipients to click “here” to activate a “new login system that will affect all Facebook users.” This takes the victim to a mocked-up Facebook log-in page, shown below, with the victim’s email address already filled in, but the password blank. Typing your password, of course, gives up full access to your Facebook account to the crooks.
But they aren’t done yet.
As of this morning, messaging security firm AppRiver had counted 41 different Web domains sending out 600 of these targeted phishing emails per minute. “We have seen around 6 million pieces of email so far this morning,” says Fred Touchette, senior analyst at messaging security firm AppRiver.
At its peak yesterday, about 1,000 viral emails per minute were being pushed out, he says. “This was a two-pronged attack,” says Touchette. “The first purpose was to phish Facebook accounts, and the second was to attempt to deliver a Trojan onto the victim’s machine.”
One of the first programs the attackers download through the wormhole is a botnet management program that enlists the PC into the infamous PushDo botnet, one of the most prolific distributors of pharm spam, says Bradley Anstis, Vice President of
M86’s forensic work reveals that the FDIC phishing attack is also the handiwork of the same the Pushdo botnet gang behind the Facebook Bredolab phishing scam. Not at all surprising.
. This thing is apparently spreading quick.
Just an update - Over night we saw a retort of sorts from the Bredo botnet with their simple text, Facebook themed malware. This one once again uses the “password changed” ruse, and contains a malicious .Zip attachment.
Zues on the other hand, is still chugging along today utilizing now 57 domains on which they host their malware. We have seen rates on some of these domains jump up to 1600/minute, on average across all domains. We are seeing roughly 50,000 of these messages every minute with over 7 million total piled up in our filters.
Comment by Fred Touchette — 10/29/2009 @ 10:38 am
Hi Byron, you might appreciate Tony Greenberg’s thoughts about trust in the IT world… at http://www.onlytimebuystrust.com/2009/10/24/only-time-buys-trust/
Greetings from SF, X
Comment by xeniar — 11/4/2009 @ 12:52 pm
In reporting this story, some analysts refered to Bredolab as a “banking Trojan,” while Ryan Olson, of VeriSign iDefense, was insistent that Bredolab is, in fact, a “downloader Trojan.” I asked Ryan to reconcile. Here’s the exchange:
LastWatchdog: What exactly is Bredolab?
Olson: Bredolab is a Downloader Trojan. It’s primarily a gateway for other malware. The process occurs when an attacker installs a downloader Trojan to get a foothold on a system. Once the downloader is there, it contacts a command and control (C&C) server which tells it what additional malware it should download and install. This might be a banking Trojan like Zeus, a spam bot like Waledac, or maybe a Rogue anti-virus program. The key is, once a downloader is on the system. the attacker can install anything they choose! Most of the time, that is often multiple Trojans, not just one, which obviously leads to more issues.
LastWatchdog: I could not find anything about the Glacial Dracon banking trojan. Can you send me some info on that one? Is it widespread or obscure? Is it similar to Zbot/ZeuS? What’s distinctive about it?
Olson: As far as we can tell Glacial Dracon (GD) is not very widespread. The variants we’ve analyzed have primarily been targeting Spanish banks. It doesn’t really do anything special compared to other banking Trojans. GD steals POST requests and is capable of HTML injection, but that’s getting to be pretty standard. We’ve seen some C&C servers that both a GD Trojan and a ZeuS Trojan will report to, indicating that some attackers use both Trojans at once, or at least try them both out.
Comment by bacohido — 11/4/2009 @ 2:26 pm