Facebook has denied that anything untoward has happened to 100 million user accounts after it was claimed that private details of one fifth of the site’s users had been made available in a downloadable file on Pirate Bay.

The file that’s causing a lot of headlines today.

It was widely reported this morning that campaigners who wanted to highlight the “terrifying” privacy policies of Facebook had made the file – which contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profiles, plus their names and unique ID – freely available online. In reality though, nothing of any great magnitude has happened to 20% of the Facebook population at all. Continue Reading

Google has updated its Gmail service to warn users if their account has seen some suspicious activity, using a new geolocation function.

Hard not to wonder now just how common scams like these are...

Word of the new functionality comes via the official Gmail blog, which is fairly quick to point out the benefits of being able to see, quite literally, where the various different login attempts hitting your Gmail account are coming from. If you find that someone else has been logging in to your Gmail account from another location, Google will immediately offer you the option to change your password. If nothing else, there’s one fairly common scam that this should help to eliminate fairly quickly.

According to the posting to the Gmail blog from its Engineering Director, Pavni Diwanji,

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It seems that the tried and tested method for users who have forgotten their passwords, the “security question” or, as it’s sometimes known, “secret question,” could well be the weakest link in online security.

The whole 'secret question' thing has always seemed a little strange...

According to research carried out by a team from the University of Edinburgh, one in eighty accounts could be broken into if attackers were given three guesses at the answer to a security question. Indeed, this number is even higher than the researchers had initially supposed, which in itself is fairly worrying. Indeed, the more you look into the research, the worse things get.

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It seems that Facebook is well into celebration mode, with the service boasting that on the week of its sixth birthday, the service should break the 400 million user mark. Still, no reason not to try and fix something that’s working…

Am I the only one who just can't see themselves buying Facebook Credits?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to the official Facebook Blog that the social network would be rolling out a few new features in celebration of the big day. Indeed, some users are already reporting that they’re seeing a new Facebook homepage when they log in, something that has, in the past, been received fairly poorly, but generally people seem to just accept it and roll on.

The post from Zuckerberg is fairly to the point, saying that,

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Facebook has levelled its not inconsiderable legal arm on marketing centric company USocial, which has been allegedly selling friends to users, bolstering friend counts and, in some cases, allowing users to profit on their profiles.

Word comes via the BBC that Facebook isn’t too pleased with the situation, claiming that what USocial does for its customers constitutes a breach of the services terms of use. USocial has responded in a manner that characterises it as something of the villain of the piece by accepting that it is to change its practices, but won’t be closing shop anytime soon.

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Apple has confirmed that the latest update to Apple’s Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.2), which rolled out yesterday, includes a fix for a particularly nasty bug that deleted all of a user’s data.

The “Guest Account Issue” as it’s come to be referred to in Apple’s own documentation of the bug, made waves among Apple users who discovered that the bug wasn’t just a once-off, but seemed to be fairly easily replicable by simply signing into the “Guest Account” in Snow Leopard. Those users effected by the bug saw their own real account, and all of the information in it, vanish once they logged out of the guest account.

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Some users of Google’s Gmail service have reported that the service has become so unreliable over the weekend that it’s effectively unusable, while others have been experiencing no issues at all.

Perhaps most interesting about all of this is that it’s not effecting everyone equally, more strangely still is the news that it’s not effecting all of those users who are experiencing issues in the same way. TheRegister is reporting that some users are having issues with the web-based Gmail client only, while others have been having no luck with their POP and IMAP clients either.

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Twitter users are being warned of a new type of phishing attack that seems to be propagating itself across the micro-blogging network, grabbing users’ passwords and potentially hijacking accounts.

Sophos is reporting having received a direct message, asking some variation on a theme of, “hi. this you on here? http://blogger.djh****.com.” Naturally this leads users to what appears very much to be a login page for Twitter. Users who enter their login details are presented with the by now familiar message that “Twitter is over capacity,” and the Fail Wail.

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Apple has issued a statement acknowledging the recently discovered issues with its Snow Leopard update to Mac OS X and going on to say that it is working on a solution.

Of course, Apple’s acknowledging the fact that there’s an issue with the Guest Account feature of its new OS doesn’t really go a long way to those who’ve already seen all of their data deleted by the bug. According to TechRadar, the statement from Apple simply reads, “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”

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