networking sites

The mayor of New York City has advised teachers to have no contact with pupils on social networking sites such as Facebook. It follows reports that at least three teachers have been fired or suspended over inappropriate comments made online. The ... three teachers, all based in the city, had been accused of posting comments on pupils' profile pages that were clearly unsuitable. Another teacher had reportedly offered extra credits to students that added him as a friend on Facebook: that teacher wasn't disciplined. Although nobody has attempted to defend the behavior of those posting inappropriate ... (view more)

While most people in the media take this time to offer interesting retrospectives on the year that was, security company McAfee has prepared its predictions for hacker threats in 2010. It forecasts a troubling year for Adobe software, which McAfee ... believes will be heavily targeted in 2010. McAfee made the forecast in its 2010 Threat Predictions report, which argued that popular tools Adobe Reader and Flash would become big targets for hackers intent on spreading malware across the worldwide web. McAfee also predicts social networking sites and HTML 5 could be threatened, too. Adobe Offers ... (view more)

More than 70% of British office workers claim they don't use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace while at work. A survey showed that only 38% were not signed up to any such sites. However, 22% say they chose to only use the sites ... outside working hours, while a further 12% don't have the choice because their employers have blocked access. The employees ranked social networking sites, along with instant messaging, as a very minor distraction to their productivity -- far below more traditional distractions like pointless meetings and loud colleagues. The survey was a publicity ... (view more)

The Internet's most popular social networking sites might also turn out to be the most dangerous. Lack of age verification and deliberate or inadvertent bugs on these sites have been used to harvest private information, implant spyware, or enable ... child predators. It would seem that the old "danger: stranger" warning to young children is still appropriate to users of social networking sites. MySpace.com, with over 100 million active users worldwide, is a case in point. Two weeks ago, district attorneys in Queens announced that two underage girls using MySpace were enticed into the home of a ... (view more)

Facebook appears to have decided not to fight Google's plans to bring social networking sites together. Jim Breyer, an investor and board member at Facebook, reportedly says the company would be willing to join Google's OpenSocial platform. That's a ... scheme by which programmers can more easily create applications that run on many different social networking sites. For example, a user could make a single blog post that is instantly viewable by their friends on both MySpace and Bebo. One of the main reasons for Facebook's success to date is that users can create their own applications such as ... (view more)