Facebook Scam Pretends to Connect You With Video Calling [WARNING]

by Charlie White

Facebook and Skype teamed up to bring you video calling, but at the same time, scammers are teaming up to trick you into spamming all your Facebook friends, using the lure of the new video calling feature. Here’s how to sidestep that scam.

There’s a legitimate way to sign up for Facebook Video Calling, where you’re asked to download a program from the official Facebook Video Calling page, and then the chat window asks you to configure a few Flash settings.

That looks like the graphic below. While the service is working for some lucky users, as you can see, when I tried it a few minutes ago, it wasn’t working yet for me, notifying me that “video calling will be available soon, please check back later.”

However, the scam comes to you in the form of a wall post, enticing you to “Enable video calls.” Don’t click that link, advises Naked Security, which supplied the graphic below:

If you do click on that bogus message, it asks for access to your basic information, wants to post to your wall, to access your posts in your newsfeed and access your data at any time.

What does it do then? It doesn’t let you video chat at all, but simply tries to get you to fill out surveys so its evil creators can collect referral fees. Worse, it exposes your friends to the same trick.

Don’t click those fake links. If you want the actual Facebook Video Calling, it’s available now for some users but not others, and you haven’t already been granted access, you will be soon.

Anti-Spam Search Engine Blekko Averaging 1 Million Queries Per Day

by Jennifer Van Grove

Blekko’s alternative, human-curated search engine now averages 1 million queries a day and between 10 to 15 queries per second just three months after launch, according to January figures the startup released Monday.

Blekko’s secret sauce is its slashtags — topic tags auto-fired or appended by users to queries to limit search results to those from curated sets of websites. Blekko is reporting that there are now more than 110,000 human-curated slashtags.

Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta sees the figure as proof that the slashtag approach is resonating with users. “We’re happy at how quickly users have adopted the idea of a new search engine and have created so many quality slashtags just three months since launch,” he says.

With 66.6% market share in the U.S., search is Google’s domain to lose. Blekko’s plan of attack has been crafting a narrative that paints the upstart as renegade, most recently by eliminating all results from 20 content farm sites it labelled as spam.

In previous conversations, both Skrenta and Blekko founder Mike Markson appeared grounded in the reality that Blekko would not be making a dent in Google’s search share anytime soon. Still, at launch, the pair shared that Blekko’s model is such that it could be a profitable company at 1 million to 2 million queries per day. Having hit the smaller end of the spectrum, the question is whether the startup will begin to employ ads on the currently pristine site to start generating revenue.

Blekko has raised $24 million since being founded in 2007. Earlier this month, the startup released an iPhoneand Android application with features similar to those available on the web.

Hide Your Real Email Address With Hotmail

Matt Rosoff

Lots of people have multiple email addresses: one for work, one for personal use, and then one or two that might be called "spam-catcher" addresses -- used for low-priority e-commerce transactions, sharing on public Web sites (like comment boards), or communications with people or organizations who you don't trust with to keep your real email address private.

The problem with these spam-catcher accounts is that they require more maintenance than they're worth. You have to remember to check them periodically, and when they get overwhelmed with spam, you have to kill them and then sign up for a new one.

On Friday, Microsoft's Hotmail made it much easier to create and maintain spam-catcher accounts with a new feature called aliases. You simply enter a new email address in a special window, and Hotmail will let you send and receive messages from that alias as if it were your main Hotmail account. When you no longer want the alias, you can shut it off and all emails sent to that alias will stop showing up.

Hotmail will let you create up to five aliases per year, and up to fifteen total.

Hotmail already offered another way to create aliases by adding a "+" to the end of your email address -- for instance, "mattrosoff@hotmail+spamcatcher.com". But you have to create special rules to sort the "+" addresses, which is a hassle, and it's too easy for spammers to guess your real email address simply by stripping off the "+" portion at the end.

Microsoft has been steadily adding features to Hotmail over the last two years in hopes of staving off Google's Gmail. Hotmail is still the most popular service in the world, with more than 300 million users, and Yahoo's a close second, but Gmail is coming on strong with close to 200 million users.

Facebook 'Instant personalization': How to disable it, and why

By Zack Whittaker

Facebook’s ‘instant personalization’ feature allows the walls between the social network and the world to be broken through for a seamless experience for all.
While many have not been able to access the instant personalisation feature yet, many have found that it is turned on by default so many will be entirely unaware the feature even exists.
However, this raises concerns amongst the 500 million and growing population of the social network, with the potential for better targeted adverts and more of your data handed out to other websites. Information that is set or has been set to ‘Everyone’ may have already been copied elsewhere.

How it works

Provided you are logged into Facebook, certain websites like Pandora and Bing can ‘personalise’ their sites with data provided from your account. Any information which is set to ‘Everyone’, like your name or your birthday can be used to make the website appear more friendly and tuned in.
Only certain sites can access this, and permissions need to be granted to do this. However, to be on the safe side, it is better simply to turn it off completely.

How to turn it off

1. Log into Facebook. In the top right hand corner, click Account, and then Privacy Settings.
2. Under the heading Apps and websites, select Edit your settings.
3. Under the heading Instant personalization, select Edit settings. You may see a popup called ‘Understanding instant personalization’. Just hit Close.
4. At the very bottom of the page, simply untick the box labeled Enable instant personalization on partner websites. This will instantly turn off partner websites accessing your data.

If, however, the option is greyed out but still ticked, this means that Facebook has not yet activated instant personalization just yet. It takes time. Check back in a few hours, or the next day.

What next?

From there, it is also advised that you check out the latest revision of the Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide (shameless plug, I know) to ensure that as much information on your profile is restricted, allowing nobody outside of your friends list can access your information.

• Read more: January 2011: The Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide including four comprehensive step-by-step galleries
• Related: Is Facebook ‘Sponsored Stories’ turning its users into spammers?
• Related: Facebook settings: A tale of two defaults

Update: Instant personalization was initially launched in April 2010 and was significantly improved during the first three months. Facebook’s perspective can be found here on the matter of instant personalization. For many, it will offer a more social experience to third-party partner sites. But it is always pertinent to understand the privacy settings and policies of any site, to ensure that your data is firmly in your control.