While the world’s leading social network recently backed down on enticing users with their deceptive “Recommended Settings”, there are still several areas where user data may be vulnerable to third party snooping. Here are 4 steps ever user should take to protect their personal information.

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Italian Facebook users surprised to find they are fans of Berlusconi

Notes:

I had a facebook page up for a view days but discontinued it because I found it of little use to me and why run the security risk when you don’t have to?

Matthew White, 22, said he was surfing for pornography two years ago on Limewire — a fire sharing application that allows users to trade music, movies, games and pictures — when he discovered that some of the files he had downloaded were images of children.

Matt claims he quickly erased the files.

“It didn’t appeal to me,” he said. “I was looking for women my age, so I just wanted to download ‘College Girls Gone Wild’ and accidentally downloaded underage pornography.”

About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family’s home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn’t find anything.

Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

“I asked them, ‘Where did you get that? I don’t remember that.’ I asked them, ‘Could I access that if I wanted to?’” Matt said. “They said no.”

Facing 20 years in prison for possessing child pornography, Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence. He will also serve 10 years probation and have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

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The company confirmed it was looking into a report on technology blog neowin.net which said the details of “over 10,000″ accounts had appeared on another website.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “Microsoft has been made aware of the claims that Windows Live IDs and passwords have been made available on the web.

“We’re actively investigating the situation and will take appropriate steps as rapidly as possible.

[...]

Neowin recommended Windows Live Hotmail users “change your password and security question immediately”.

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The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code.

Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank, credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they control, or they can buy goods with the stolen credit card details.

The trojan has a list of more than 4,500 finance-related websites that it monitors, including British high street banks. Security experts warned that it was one of the stealthiest and most pervasive threats to computers using the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

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Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped down from their Eagle landing craft and took the first human steps on the surface of the moon, Google is launching a new tool designed to allow space enthusiasts and the rest of the world to digitally retrace their historic footsteps.

On Monday, the search engine giant unveiled Moon in Google Earth, an interactive, three-dimensional atlas of the Moon as part of its Google Earth 5.0 satellite imaging and mapping software, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin’s historic sojourn on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

“Forty years ago, two human beings walked on the Moon,” said Michael Weiss-Malik, product manager for Moon in Google Earth. “Starting today, with Moon in Google Earth, it’s now possible for anyone to follow in their footsteps. We’re giving hundreds of millions of people around the world unprecedented access to an interactive 3D presentation of the Apollo missions.”

Google Earth users can use the new upgrade to explore the Moon through panoramic photos, previously unreleased NASA video footage shot on the lunar surface and follow along as Mr. Aldrin and Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt offer guided video tours of the Moonscape.

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It’s not that I doubt the claim that they use a quarter as much energy as regular incandescent light bulbs and last many times longer. Nor is it that I don’t applaud their utility in fighting climate change: The Washington-based Worldwatch Institute says that if everyone in the U.S. alone were to replace traditional bulbs with the corkscrew fluorescent sort it would reduce greenhouse gas as much as taking 30 million cars off the road.

No, one of the things that’s giving me second thoughts is this summer’s advice from Health Canada. The bulbs contain a tiny amount of mercury, a cause of birth defects and harm to the nervous system, kidneys and the liver. If I were to paraphrase the ministry’s startling advice, you’d think I was making it up, so I’ll quote extensively.

In the event a bulb breaks:

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This is Hitler’s stealth fighter-bomber, a little known secret weapon which might have altered the course of the Second World War, outpacing RAF fighters and giving anti-aircraft gunners much less time to defend Britain.

The plane has been recreated and its radar-beating capability put to the test by the men who built America’s stealth bomber. Their verdict: ‘Yes, it could have made a big difference.’

The plane’s awful potential is laid out in a TV documentary, shown this week in the U.S. on the National Geographic Channel, and to be broadcast in Britain on August 4.

The all-wing Horten Ho 2-29 looked more like today’s U.S. B2 bomber than any Second World War aircraft but is only a third of the size.

Made primarily of wood and powered by Messerschmitt jet engines, it was designed for speeds of up to 600mph.

With four 30mm cannons and two 1,100lb bombs, it was also meant to pack a punch. Working from original German blueprints and the remains of a prototype in a museum warehouse in Washington, the U.S. engineers of Northrop Grumman recreated the Nazi plane complete except for the engines.

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Billy Hoffman, manager for HP Security Labs at HP Software, and Matt Wood, senior security researcher in HP’s Web Security Research Group, will demonstrate a proof-of-concept for Veiled, a new type of darknet, at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas next month. Darknets, themselves, are nothing new; networks like Tor, FreeNet, and Gnutella are well-established. The HP researchers say Veiled is the same idea, only much simpler: It doesn’t require any software to participate, just an HTML 5-based browser. “We’ve implemented a simple, new darknet in the browser,” Wood says. “There are no supporting [software] programs.”

Unlike its predecessors, Veiled doesn’t require much technical know-how to join, either. “The coolest thing about this is it lowers the barrier to entry to a darknet,” Hoffman says. “You could put some very interesting applications on top of it. It could be a way to do secure whistle-blowing, [for example]. When you have something decentralized like this, no one can control or stop it.” No one can take it down, either, he adds, all of which makes it more approachable for a wider community of legitimate users.

Darknets can also be abused by the bad guys as a way to cover their tracks, but Hoffman and Wood say they see this as more of an opportunity for adding legitimate and mainstream uses of darknets, such as anonymous suggestion boxes or other ways for users to express themselves anonymously without their IP addresses potentially giving them away. “Students are getting reprimanded at school because of their Facebook postings,” perhaps criticizing something about school, Hoffman says. “They’re being punished for free speech. Where can you freely express yourself without fear of consequences? This could be an interesting app.”

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Drive-By Blackouting

After speaking with Dr. Richard Obousy, he shared his concept for a futuristic, yet scientifically accurate, warpship design.

The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical, however. ‘Dark energy’ needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy needs to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future. That said, Dr. Obousy’s warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.

So here’s your exclusive look at what could be the future warp drive propulsion…

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Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

The two myths that dominate debate are: all file sharing is legal in Canada and, perhaps as a consequence of this, that Canada leads the world in illegal file-sharing activity. Neither claim is true.

The belief that Canada is a veritable Wild West, where it is legal to upload and download to your heart’s content has its genesis in the recording industry’s failed file-sharing lawsuits in 2004. Following the U.S. example, the Canadian Recording Industry Association filed lawsuits against 29 alleged file sharers at five Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs).

The case was a failure as then-Federal Court judge Konrad von Finckenstein (now chair of the CRTC) denied a request to order the ISPs to disclose the identity of their customers. Von Finckenstein ruled the recording industry’s case suffered from evidentiary shortcomings along with questions about privacy and copyright law. The decision garnered international attention and many mistakenly took it to mean all file sharing was legal in Canada.

The reality is Canadian law features a private copying exemption that includes a levy on blank media. The Federal Court and the Copyright Board of Canada have intimated the levy, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars, could apply to personal, non-commercial downloading of sound recordings onto certain blank media. The law therefore opens the door to some legalized music downloading, but it does not cover other content (movies or software) or the uploading of any content.

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