PI Newswire

In our previous article about blogging, we gave you 8 reasons to start a bail agent blog. Starting a blog can be intimidating, but following these steps can help you breeze through the process.

Step 1: Choose a Blogging Platform
There are several free or inexpensive, easy-to-use blog platforms with features bail agents can use for simplified blogging. Some popular sites include:

■Blogger – Blogger is a platform with an ease of use comparable to sending email. Linked to Gmail accounts and offering posting options through Microsoft Word, Blogger targets users with limited technological experience. Layouts, posting, and adding media and links are done through straightforward commands. As a traditional blogging platform, Blogger is easy to set up and maintain.

■WordPress – Though it caters to a more experienced blogger, WordPress is another option for traditional blogging. Like Blogger, WordPress has many layouts and features, but it also offers more customizable functions and the ability to alter HTML. Though it showcases advanced options, WordPress is a great option for the inexperienced blogger.

■Tumblr – Tumblr is a great site for microblogging, and the platform of choice for bloggers looking to post shorter, less formal, and media-centric entries. Somewhat similar to a Twitter feed, Tumblr is the best option for bloggers looking for quick posting. The ability to completely alter the HTML makes it the platform of choice for the technologically savvy, and with apps for various gadgets, Tumblr makes blogging quick and easy.

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Complexions, a New York based spa, recently saw itself kicked off Facebook after a spa with the same name based in California complained about intellectual property infringement.

There was no prior notification.

As it turns out, Complexions is not alone. Dozens of business and well-known websites have been summarily kicked off Facebook for alleged infringement without a prior investigation by the social network.

Editors of Ars Technica, a popular website that covers technology and related policy (including intellectual property), was surprised to find that Facebook had removed their page Thursday morning.

The site took it upon itself to investigate the matter, finding that Facebook removed its page because a third party had claimed that the site had wrongfully posted its intellectual property.

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An Ironton man running from the law still wanted a hot date for New Year’s. He got a stay in the Lawrence County jail and a future engagement with the judge.

All was thanks to a creative bail bondsman and a popular social networking website.

A bondsman picked up Nicholas C. Sycks, 24, of 3466 County Road 181, Ironton, on Dec. 31. The bondman created a fictitious account on the social networking site Facebook. On the account, the bondsman claimed to be an attractive female and requested a date for New Year’s Eve, he said. When Sycks showed up, his “date” was ready to take him into custody, Judge Charles Cooper said.

Sycks is charged with two counts of fourth-degree failure to appear, fifth-degree aggravated drug possession and fifth-degree escape in three separate cases.

He was arraigned Wednesday in Lawrence County Common Pleas Court. Cooper set bond at $100,000 cash or surety and set a pretrial hearing for next week.

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The White House wants additional power to snoop on private e-mail and social-network communications in the interest of national security. These are thorny issues, not easily resolved. Our advice is to go slowly.

Once government intervenes, even for the best of motives, that authority rarely is rescinded. There also promises to be unintended consequences and perhaps more damage than benefit if the federal government plows ahead without regard to tradeoffs and costs.

The New York Times recently reported that “law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet.” Authorities say they are losing ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects because people increasingly communicate online rather than by telephone. This is a legitimate concern.

However, the White House reportedly wants Congress to require all Internet communications services, such as “encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking websites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging, like Skype,” to make technical changes to give government, if authorized by a court wiretap order, the ability to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The administration plans to submit a bill to lawmakers next year, the Times reported.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, told the Times. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

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As more businesses turn to social networking sites to reach new customers, a recent study has found they also put their corporate data at risk.

The survey, conducted by a California-based email security firm, investigated data loss among 261 organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Twenty percent of respondents experienced data loss through social media during the past 12 months. In response, 20 percent of those respondents reported disciplining an employee for releasing corporate data through social networking and 9 percent actually removed an employee.

The survey also found that, even though they may have security policies that cover the websites, data-leak prevention is essential as many employees find a way around their employers’ regulations and risk corporate data on social networking sites.

Some of the most popular social networking sites are responsible for corporate data loss. Facebook and LinkedIn were recognized as a high data loss concern for 53 percent of respondents. However, just 31 percent of respondents prohibit LinkedIn at their offices, and 53 percent prohibit Facebook.

The trend has posed a number of security threats to business networks, as a recent study found 33 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses experienced a malware infection through social networking sites.

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Facebook has launched its Places feature in Canada, which allows users to “check in” to locations using the GPS on their smartphone and share the information with friends.

The social networking website launched the feature in the United States in August and expanded it to Canada on Friday. Places was immediately available to users of Facebook’s iPhone app and can be accessed on other touchscreen smartphones by going to touch.facebook.com. The company said it hopes to add the feature to BlackBerry and Android apps soon.

For Facebook users, Places can help friends connect with each other in the real world while businesses can also use it to attract new customers, product manager Michael Sharon said during a briefing on Friday. The feature was added because many users of the website were already sharing their locations with friends via their status updates.

“Whenever we add features to Facebook, we do it based on what people are already doing,” he said.

As with many features on the social networking website, Places comes with a variety of security setting options. Users can choose to share when they check in to locations with everyone on Facebook or just with their friends. Users can also tag their friends’ locations, although their friends have the option of disallowing others from identifying them.

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Last year, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada began an investigation of Facebook on the grounds that its privacy policy didn’t satisfy Canadian legal standards. Facebook has since made some alterations, and the commissioner is giving the social networking site her approval, though she says there’s still room for improvement.

The commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, had a total of 22 complaints last year, which included gripes with the control users had over their account settings, as well as the way information was shared with third-party applications: Previously, Facebook users had to make all of their information available to third-party apps. Now, however, users are told in advance which parts of their profiles the third-party facebook apps will be granted access to.

As a result, Stoddart released a statement saying that Facebook’s permissions model is a “vast improvement” and that the office is satisfied with its “simplified privacy settings.”

However, the Canadians stopped short of giving Facebook a full stamp of approval. Rather, the privacy office has asked that Facebook continue to improve oversight of application developers, and it urged Facebook against making more user information available to the whole Internet. It also requested that the default setting for photo albums be more restrictive.

Yeah, so, thanks, Canada. That’s great and all that you’re keeping an eye on Facebook. Applause all around.

But, alas, sometimes all of the regulations and privacy controls in the world aren’t enough to protect user privacy. Yes, unfortunately, it also comes down to the users themselves to make the right decisions — and all too often they fail.

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Canada’s privacy commissioner announced Wednesday that she has completed her formal investigation into Facebook in the wake of the company’s recent privacy policy updates.

The social-networking site is not completely free of the commission, however, as it will continue to monitor Facebook features, including the “Like” button.

“The changes Facebook has put in place in response to concerns we raised as part of our investigation last year are reasonable and meet the expectations set out under Canadian privacy law,” Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a statement. “The issues related to the investigation … have been resolved to my satisfaction”

Stoddart has been working with Facebook since August, when an inquiry from her office prompted Facebook to beef up its privacy notifications and embark on a year-long overhaul of its developer platform. In January, she announced that her office was examining online tracking, profiling, and targeting of consumers by businesses – including sites like Facebook.

In May, Facebook introduced an updated privacy policy that provided a one-stop shop for selecting privacy settings, made less information publicly available, set controls for Pages, and allowed users to opt-out of third-party applications.

Stoddart said she is “pleased that Facebook has developed simplified privacy settings and has implemented a tool that allows users to apply a privacy setting to each photo or comment they post.”

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A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.

The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.

Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.

The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people’s activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don’t include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.

Selling the data is legal, but controversial, especially when it involves young people. Two companies identified by the Journal as selling teen data initially denied doing so. Only when shown evidence that they were offering data for sale—in one case, it was labeled “teeny boppers”—did they confirm it.

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He’s one of the most powerful people in world policing, but on Facebook Interpol chief Ronald K. Noble is just as vulnerable to identity theft as anyone else.

At last week’s inagural Interpol Information Security Conference in Hong Kong, secretary general Noble revealed that criminals had set up two accounts impersonating him on the networking site during this summer’s high-profile global dragnet, ‘Operation Infra-Red’.

The fraud was discovered only recently by Interpol’s Security Incident Response Team.

“One of the impersonators was using this profile to obtain information on fugitives targeted during our recent Operation Infra Red,” Noble told delegates.

Operation Infra-Red, which took place between May and July of this year, was a global, Interpol-led operation to crack down on named criminal fugitives accused of murder, paedophilia, fraud, corruption, drug trafficking and money laundering, who had fled national jurisdictions. The operation led to 130 arrests.

Noble is not believed to have had a professional profile on Facebook although his organisation does.

“Cybercrime is emerging as a very concrete threat. Considering the anonymity of cyberspace, it may in fact be one of the most dangerous criminal threats we will ever face,” Noble was quoted as saying.

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Social networking and Generation Y have had a profound impact on how companies perceive casual Web surfing by employees. The effects on security and productivity can have dire consequences for all involved — everything from a little bad press to a major data breach and employee dismissal with possible civil and criminal action. This is why more companies are performing monitoring and enacting policies to address employee Web and e-mail activity at work and off-hours.

Companies are taking on Web monitoring for a number of legitimate reasons. On the corporate IT side, the concerns center around the increase of malware taking advantage of social networking sites and the potential of sensitive data being posted on a site they do not control. On the flip side, management is caught in a Catch-22 trying to increase productivity by blocking popular social networking sites while trying not to negatively affect Gen Y employees’ likelihood to move onto a more “open” company. The choice to monitor and filter Web content is not one that should be taken lightly. It forces management to make several critical decisions, like who will be responsible, the level of monitoring to put in place, and which sites and content are deemed inappropriate. The chance of sensitive data leaking through social media or a workstation becoming infected with data stealing malware is not something companies want to risk. No one likes to consider themselves “big brother,” but more and more companies are choosing to put the onus of monitoring and reporting of employee Web surfing activity onto IT — a task most do not relish. Seven percent of respondents to the InformationWeek 2010 Strategic Security Survey said they spend a great deal of time monitoring employee behavior. That doesn’t sound like much, but the number of respondents who said they monitor is much higher. In 2010, the percentage of organizations jumps 8 percent — to 73 percent who monitor employee behavior to reduce the use of inappropriate websites. With nearly three-quarters of the survey’s respondents focused on preventing access to inappropriate Web content, it’s a little surprising that less than half were focused on increasing user productivity since that is the most common argument from management.

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BIRMINGHAM, AL (WBRC) – A growing number of people are members of a social networking site. Sometimes, those very people share too much information…..information that can get them in to a lot of trouble.

Posting too much information can compromise your safety, identity, or cost you your job.

I spoke to an expert who says people have become way to comfortable and trusting on these sites, which causes some major problems for themselves.

Gary Warner is an expert in computer forensics at UAB. He says sites like Facebook and Twitter are great places for information.

Some things he says you should not do include posting your home address because it makes it easy for anyone looking to harm you.

Also posting vacation plans can be dangerous. It lets burglars know when you’re away.

Profiles can also reveal password clues for crooks to hack into your online accounts. Things like posting your birthday or hometown could lead to identity theft. Posting certain pictures can cause big problems because employers are now checking up on applicants on these sites.

“They go on the Facebook, find their Twitter accounts and see what they’ve been talking about,” said Warner. If you have a professional person talking about drug use or see them at parties wasted in photos on Facebook maybe this is isn’t the kind of person you want working for you.”

Kristyn Burks says, “I do tend to put pictures up sometimes maybe that I shouldn’t put on there.”

Eric West says, “I don’t really put anything about what I do all day. I know some people do.”

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