The video was watched over 30,000 times when before it was removed with countless viewers registering their disgust at what they saw. It caused a stir across many Internet communities including Digg and Facebook before the members of those communities took it upon themselves to use the tools available to them to find out the teenager’s true identity.

The eventually found his Facebook account which gave his real identity as well as the identity of his cameraman (which turned out to be his brother). This was all the information they needed to locate him as well.

The sheriff of the town where the events took place then stepped in and began his own investigation which lead to the boys being arrested and questioned over the incident. The information has been passed on to the DA to decide if there is enough evidence to go to court.

Considering all the bad press associated with the anonymity of the Internet its good to be able to show that in actually fact your not as well hidden as you may have thought. I think all the amature investigators that helped find out the attacker’s real identity deserve lots of plaudits for doing something about it!

People spend a lot of time worrying about who holds what information, even down to who has their email and postal address. After all no one wants extra spam either. Major companies and government departments are not the only things to watch though, most people forget about a much larger source of personal information that they have more control over than anyone, Facebook.

I am a big fan of social networks, I think they are a good way to network and keep in touch with people. However it is all too easy for a scammer to pick up your details from sites such as Facebook. People will happily post their date of birth, email and telephone numbers amongst other things on there and leave their profile open for any one to access and take a copy of their data. Mind you, it’s not just scammers you should be wary of. Plenty of people have lost their jobs or a relationship due to information that appeared on their Facebook page.

With that in mind it’s worth while remembering that there are a lot of privacy settings that a user can amend on Facebook. From the simple allow only friends to see my profile (one I would suggest everyone should use) through to locking down who can see each photograph and what can be posted to your news feed.

The All Facebook Blog has some very good pointers on fine tunning that privacy level on this post. Any one worried about their privacy and who has access to their information should head over there and have a read.

There’s been questions as to how this new look would be received by the Facebook user base. Would they take to it or would they reject it. It’s been hard to predict the reaction of users of one of the biggest social media websites. For instance there was a lot of talk that the addition of the Beacon Ads system might cause an outcry due to its intrusiveness into the site, yet that barely raised a concern from the user base.

I’ve been using the new look for a while now, since I first heard talk about it on the Internet. One thing I have found is that it makes the site much easier to read and look at. I always disliked MySpace for how cluttered and mess it’s profile pages looked because users were allowed to edit them as they wanted. When I first started using Facebook I liked how clean and simple it looked. Easy to read and find the information I was interested in. Over time though this clean look has disappeared as more and more apps became available. I have nothing against apps, in face I find some of them quite amusing/a good waste of time. However what I don’t like about the apps on Facebook is the way they try to take over on a profile. A lot of apps like FunWall and Graffiti became basically just spam. They covered a person’s profile making it hard to read and unattractive to the eye. I always go with the idea that unless an app adds useful information to my profile, it gets hidden by default.

With the new look Facebook have set out to clean up the cluttered profiles. Before the a users profile always used to appear on one long page, in the new look profiles have been split into seperate tabs. There’s a tab for your Wall, a tab for personal info, a tab for photos and for boxes. The boxes tab being where all the apps that had boxes on your profile can be accessed. Users also have the ability to add other tabs of their own making for certain apps. The advantage of moving the apps away from the main profile screen for me is that now even though I have things like FunWall added they don’t clutter my main page, they are hidden out of the way and the same is now true when I visit my friends profiles too. To be honest I always found that most of the apps were filled will just people forwarding the same crap that gets forwarded on emails like “They are going to close down facebook unless….” or “Sign this petition for…”

As with big changes to things that people like, there is always a mass outcry about the change. This is the case with the new Facebook. There are a lot of users that don’t like this new look, they find it hard to navigate and use. They campaign for the old look back wanting to hang it to it at all costs (some have even made use of a work around that signing up as a developer allows you to view the old facebook so you can check your app for those users still not moved over), although after a while this option is sure to be disabled too. Given time I think most users will come to realise that this new look is actually better and much easier to use. What do you think?

For more on the reasons for the new look see this article.

Allowing other to interact with your code though can also be a source of the problem. Once in a while out of all these creative and helpful people who will interact with your project and better it, you would encounter someone with less than honourable intentions. This article on IT World points out how bad things could be when one of these people turn your project to their use. In this particular case it was only an experiement but it illustrates the point quite well.

Basically a research team created a bogus Facebook app called Photo of the Day. This app appears to puts up a new National Geographic photo each day, however what the users of this app don’t see is that everytime one of the photos is clicked on a 600 KB http request for images is sent to a victim website for images the user never sees. A 600 KB request might not seem to bad at first, but as the article points out, this app got to around 1,000 users pretty quickly without any advertising.

With the app uploaded to Facebook the developers monitored traffice on a web site they set up for it to point to. What they found is rather startling:

If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have a million or more users, they estimated a victim’s Web site could be bombarded by as much as 23 M bits per second of traffic, or 248 G bytes of unwanted data per day.

Essentially an application could be used to flood a victims web site with enough data request to produce a denial of service attack. Of course, thats not the only way this bogus app (facebot) could be used. It could easily be altered to scan for open ports on a certain host or grab someones personal details since Facebook apps usualy have access to the user’s personal information.

While the thought might be rather worrying, its not time to batten down the hatches and ditch Facebook just yet! As the article points out misuse such as this could easily be prevented by limiting the apps are allowed to intereact with the established project. The API’s should be created with the intention not to allow too much interaction with the rest of the internet. Hopefully people will follow the advice.

I’ve been on Facebook for nearly a year now. I’m no hater, in fact I have found it useful for keeping/getting in touch with people. Especially one’s that I haven’t spoken to for a long time. At the same time though, I am aware that it has also put me back in touch with some people I hoped were lost forever (not mentioning any names because some of them might be reading). Sometimes people add me and I wonder at first who they are, usually they are someone I went to high school with. At lot of the people I went to high school don’t provoke fond memories in my mind. Growing up I was something of a geek (nothings changed there then) and as most any geek will tell you, high school is not a fun time when you are more interested in maths/science than football.

This video really hits the spot when it goes through the blokes initial confusion, “It’s me, tom from school. We sat next to each other in maths. We didn’t get on”. And yet, years later this same person now wants to be my friend, most likely he is just on a quest to show his psuedo* popularity by getting as many friends as he can.

* Doesn’t that posh word just look so out of place in my usual ramblings!

Obviously I’m talking about Facebook. Personally I am beginning to get board of the whole thing, at first it was neat. A fun way to keep in touch with your friends. Then you start adding a couple of apps (maybe recommended by friends) then old school friends and other people you haven’t talked to in like 10 years start finding you and adding you. Or you look for them because your on a quest to have a friends list bigger than any one else on there. Still its not too bad, you only go on to check your inbox and such 20 times a day and most of those times its empty any way.

Then things take hold, you get a little less choosy about which applications you install. You spend more time checking your status page than you do your in box because you have that many invites to add other applications from your friends (I have one who keeps invting me to add the friends for sale app and thats at least 4 times a week we are talking). You update your status every 20 minutes so that everyone is up to date on what you are doing, or what your worried about and all of its a big ego trip because you think your friends list might be interested when infact they are doing exactly the same.

I’ve had a facebook profile since around June last year but I’m beginning to get sick of all the pointless applications that are on there, how many versions of am i hot or not do people need? You have to ask why do they wonder if some stranger on the internet thinks they are good looking. As for the friends who add you after no contact for so long, you begin to realise why you lost touch when all you get from them is the odd poke or the ever annoying request to let them bite you and turn them into a vampire/werewolf to feed there ego a little more.

You might say I’m cynical or jaded but I like to think I’m coming to terms with my addiction, isn’t the first step towards beating a problem admitting that the problem actually exists?