Gomez’s Twitter & Facebook Hacked

Selena Gomez has warned fans to ignore a series of hateful messages posted on her Twitter and Facebook.com pages, after her online accounts were targeted by hoaxers.
The Wizards of Waverly Place star’s pages on the social networking sites were taken over by hackers earlier this week.
Imposters confused fans with a series of profanity-riddled messages, including, “THE KID ON 4CHAN.ORG IS A LIEN F**KER HE DIDNT HACK S**T!!!!,” and, “This message is for puha, YOU SUCK B**CH!!!”
The unauthorised posts have since been deleted.
And Gomez has taken to her Facebook page to warn fans to ignore the mean messages, assuring them the problem is being fixed.
She wrote, “Sorry everyone. My Facebook Page and Twitter account has been hacked and we are cleaning it up.”

Facebook Numbers - How does it work?

Following the last viral campaign which saw millions of Facebook users change their profile pictures to their favourite cartoon character, the latest craze set to go viral may be "The Number Game".

Just in case you have seen seemingly random numbers pop up in your friends' status updates, here is an explanation of how it works:

The Facebook Numbers Status game is based on a friend being identified to you by a number. The trick is to ask the friend for a number (this could be his or her favourite number) using a private message, so the number is only known to you.

You then post a message about the friend on your wall, identifying the friend only by the number. So, an example could be (after having received say number 55 from your friend):

"Number 55: You are one of the kindest people I know".

Your friends will all see the status update and will be left guessing who you are referring to, but your friend with number 55 will know. 

The game seems a little silly at first, but can be great fun as it helps people learn about your true feelings for your friends, and vice versa. It's also fun when duplicate numbers appear!

The Facebook number game is hoping to go viral and achieve 1 million members by Christmas. At the time of writing, that number stood at 8,314. It still has some distance to go.

Click the link to visit the official Facebook page for the Number Game.

Bing Adds Facebook 'Likes' to Search Results

Microsoft and Facebook announced a deep partnership that would bring Facebook data to the Bing search results. A couple of new features have been announced, the possibility to see what your friends have 'liked,' if it's relevant to the query, and a people search feature based on Facebook. 

"Today, we're partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends' recommendations to online search," Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook, announced. 

"Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend's profile to see which restaurants they like, we're bringing everything together in one place," he said. 

The first new feature, arguably the most interesting, is a new section which will sometimes show up in Bing search results. Bing taps into Facebook Like data to add links from your friends if they are relevant to your query. 

In theory, links that your friends liked should be a lot more relevant to you than algorithmically determined results, especially if those links wouldn't show up in the results otherwise. 

The second feature is people search which now adds Facebook data. With 500 million users, Facebook is clearly the best place on the web to find someone. 

Essentially, Bing becomes part of Facebook's Instant Personalizationprogram which enables websites to customize the experience for each user. 

While Yahoo has had a deep partnership with Facebook for the better part of a year, Bing is the first to introduce this sort of feature. Yahoo added the possibility to find your friends' Facebook photos with Image Search a couple of days ago. Bing can do this because it has full access to the Facebook data stream. 

Google was actually first to introduce a social search section, initially in Labs and later for everybody. Google taps into several data sources for Social Search, including Facebook, but it has nowhere near the type of access Bing does. 

Note that much of the 'like' data is available through Facebook APIs, like the OpenGraph. However, there are restrictions and Google using OpenGraph to get 'like' data for each query would prove a huge burden for Facebook. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the company is open to working with everyone for this. However, Taylor later clarified that it is unlikely something like the Bing integration revealed now would be available for others any time soon. 

The new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks in the US. The integration seems to be hit and miss for now, according to initial opinions, but there is definitely potential. 

Both Microsoft and Facebook stressed the fact that this is just the first iteration and that they plan to improve the features as well as add new ones based on feedback.

Download All of Your Facebook Photos, Posts and Friends List

Facebook has just unveiled the brand-new Groups feature which promises to change the way most people use the social network. But it also introduced a crucial new feature for those seeking for more openness from the social network, the possibility to export and download much of the data you've added to Facebook.

"[W]e've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information," Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and cofounder of Facebook, announced.
 

"If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download," he said.

"To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. We'll begin rolling out this feature to people later today, and you'll find it under your account settings," he added. 

This has been one of the most requested feature from privacy and advocacy groups but also from individuals. 

You'll be able to get all of the content you've uploaded to Facebook as well as all of the messages, posts and so on in a single archived file. You will also be able to get a list of your friend's names, but, crucially, there will be no contact data, like email addresses, included. 

This is a good privacy measure as it protects the contact data of your friends which they may not want to share with other sites or services. However, it also makes it harder to move to another service since there would be no way of contacting those users or ensuring that your friends come with you. Just their names is not information enough. 

DDOS attackers continue hitting Twitter, Facebook, GoogleDDOS attackers continue hitting Twitter, Facebook, Google

The distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that knocked out Twitter for hours and affected other sites like Facebook, Google's Blogger and LiveJournal on Thursday continued all day Friday and may persist throughout the weekend.

In its latest update, posted to a discussion forum of its third-party developers at 11 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday, Twitter it's still fighting the attacks.

"The DDoS attack is still ongoing, and the intensity has not decreased at all," wrote Chad Etzel, from Twitter's application development platform support team.

This means that Twitter will maintain a set of defensive measures that have allowed it to keep the site up but that also have affected the interaction of third-party applications with the site via its API (application programming interface). "At this point, removing any of those defenses is not an option," Etzel wrote.

The real bad news for developers of affected Twitter applications and for their users? Twitter has no idea when it will be able to switch its application platform back to normal. "There is no ETA on fixing any of this," Etzel wrote, adding that Twitter staff plans to work around the clock this weekend to deal with the DDOS attack.

"Things will continue to be rocky as long as this attack continues. They may get worse, they may get better. That should not be read as 'we don't care about fixing it' or 'we're not going to fix it until everything blows over' but instead as 'we can't promise when things will be back to normal, but in the meantime we are working on fixing ASAP,'" Etzel wrote.

As was the case on Thursday, Twitter wasn't the sole target of the DDOS attacks on Friday. Google's Blogger blog publishing service felt the sting of the attacks on Friday afternoon as well. "A small percentage of Blogger users have experienced error messages this afternoon as the result of what appears to be an ongoing distributed denial of service attack aimed at multiple services across the web," a Google spokesman said via e-mail.

"Google has a variety of systems in place to help counteract these types of attacks, and we believe the majority of affected users can now access their blogs. We're continuing to work to minimize the impact to affected Blogger users. No other Google products have been affected," the spokesman said on Friday afternoon.

Facebook, whose site experienced some performance problems on Thursday due to the attacks, acknowledged on Friday afternoon that the attacks had continued. "The requests from the botnet continue but we have been able to isolate them

and provide normal levels of service to our legitimate users," a Facebook spokesman said via e-mail on Friday afternoon.

According to news reports and information from companies affected, the attacks appear directed at silencing a blogger in the country of Georgia who has been critical of Russia's actions and policies toward that neighboring country.