Smart Energy

Get ready to take another clickin' from Facebook -- the "social" network that beats you silly and keeps coming back for more.

The only time you make an announcement on Friday night is when you want it to get lost in the weekend shuffle. The professionals are off, and sports and recipe-fillers are top of the hour and top of the page.  In the PR and news business, this is called “putting out the trash.” Witness Facebook’s latest piece of trash:

On Friday, Facebook made yet another change to its privacy policy, enabling third-party application developers to access your street address and cell phone number. This information was made public Friday night on the Facebook Developer Blog.

You really have to dig to delete your cell number, or whatever else of your personal info you don’t want shared. And, note, you have to DELETE the info — you can’t simply say, No, don’t share it with those guys. You must delete it, a process that requires at least four clicks (see the link below if you need step-by-step).

IMHO, you’re better off deleting Facebook from your life. But, hey, you wanna be a click farmer, a digital peasant, then go right on ahead. Just remember, every click you make on Facebook is making those guys money. And what, really, is it doing for you?

via How to delete address, cell number from Facebook | Safe and Secure – CNET News.

This might well be your tax dollars at work. The ultra-secret U.S. security agency N.S.A. (“no such organization”), as well as the Department of Gnomebrand Security, is capable of launching such attacks, according to information in an article by Seymour Hersh in the Nov. 1 issue of The New Yorker. The following is excetped from an article in Computerworld; warning: the site has multiple pop-ups:

WikiLeaks, the focus of attention since it released a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables two days ago, is again under a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, Internet researchers said today.

The site remained online with some short interruptions, however, as did a secondary site, cablegate.wikileaks.org, where nearly 300 U.S. State Department internal messages have been published thus far.

WikiLeaks echoed Labovitz’s take on today’s attack. [Labovitz is a chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a supplier of anti-DoS technology.] According to the organization’s Twitter account, Tuesday’s attack quickly reached 10Gbit/sec (gigabits-per-second), or two-and-a-half to five times larger than Monday’s.

A few months ago a worm called Stuxnet attacked an Iraqui nuclear power facility’s computers; speculation at the time was that the Pentagon could well be behind the attack but, some experts said, Israel was an even likelier source of the worm, which spread world wide. In his New Yorker article, Hersh mentions this speculation but does not confirm or comment on it.

More from Computerworld:

Although a single hacker, who goes by the nickname of “The Jester” — penned in leetspeak as “th3j35t3r” — claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack, which one security expert said was not launched via a botnet, today’s DoS looked more coordinated, said Labovitz. He wasn’t able to tell, however, whether it originated from a single source or from a botnet.

“There’s enough publicity surrounding WikiLeaks [and the leaked cables] that this will be an ongoing event for them,” Labovitz said.

No doubt, but you have to wonder, what with the ongoing embarrassment WikiLeaks has been to the U.S. government: is this DoS harassment funded or directed by U.S. security agencies? It’s hard to believe they (Spooks R Us) are not in some way involved.

Ever wondered what the FBI has on you? Here’s a Freedom of Information request made simple. (The FBI has nothing on me. Not sure if that’s good or bad.)