Security on social networks such as Facebook continues to be a major concern. A recent article on zdnet.com says that scammers looking to guess security settings for a user on other services could befriend a person on Facebook and study them closely for clues.
The article gives the example of how often a person’s mother’s maiden name is used as a security question. Studying someone’s Facebook account can yield such information sometimes if the person is careless about such things, and people often are.
I speak often of the practice of businesses and scammers using data mining, which is simply collecting every bit of information on someone they can find and then using it for some task. Facebook is a gold mine for such activity, simply because so many people are so neglectful of their security and privacy settings. This seems to be getting worse as people rely more and more on Facebook for their primary contacts and interaction.
* The Apple iPad gets most of the media love these days, but Amazon just made an announcement bound to please publishers. The company will now pay publishers 70 per cent of payment for their publications on the Kindle platform as long as the document can be read on all Kindle devices and apps running on various platforms.
This is a smart move and shows that Amazon isn’t going to give in to the iPad easily. Many actually prefer the Kindle devices for reading e-books and magazines, saying that its display is clearer and less distracting. You do, of course, also have many iPad fanatics taking the opposite view, but it’s great that we will have this competition for various periodicals and e-books. Anything different is good.