Tag: Facebook

Facebook unprecedented reveals search warrant of hundreds of accounts

Staff Writer

Facebook revealed that since last summer it’s been fighting a court order that required it to disclose social-media information involving hundreds of people. “This unprecedented request is by far the largest we’ve ever received — by a magnitude of more than ten — and we have argued that it was unconstitutional from the start,” Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, wrote in a statement Thursday. The situation raises concerns over privacy in the digital age, when much of a person’s sensitive information is often available online and on mobile devices.…

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Tim Wu,The Father of Net Neutrality Returns to Do Battle With Comcast

Staff Writer

Tim Wu saw firsthand how people can mess with the internet. Fifteen years ago, he landed a marketing job with a network equipment maker called Riverstone Networks. Riverstone made network routers, among other things, and it sold many of these to Chinese internet service providers who then used them to block traffic on their networks. After about a year, he left Riverstone, disillusioned but wiser. And today, Wu says that the time he spent there helped cement the idea that has made him famous: net neutrality. First proposed in a…

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Heartbleed bug hit list, Why you need to change your password now

Staff Writer

An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug is already being called one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. The bug has affected many popular websites and services — ones you might use every day, like Gmail and Facebook — and could have quietly exposed your sensitive account information (such as passwords and credit card numbers) over the past two years. But it hasn’t always been clear which sites have been affected. Mashable reached out to various companies included on a long list of websites that could…

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Twitter Ban :The Turkish media experiment

Staff Writer

Countries who seek to gain control over their people through the internet have their own agendas. They are in search of larger governmental control or even censorship online. — Marietje Schaake, European Parliament Member, Feb 2014 Politics, claimed the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Exceed that limit, and you are bound to make a hash of it.  By all means, care to dream, but be aware of limitations.  The Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has given that sentiment substance.  Ahead of the…

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Facebook’s shot at WhatsApp data gets both companies an FTC complaint

Staff Writer

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook’s $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp based on privacy concerns, according to a document released Thursday. EPIC and CDD’s problems with the acquisition center around the fact that WhatsApp staked its reputation on—that it’s a company keeping a reasonable distance from its customers’ data. Now that it will fall under the aegis of Facebook, its users stand to lose those privacy guarantees, even though WhatsApp told its users nothing…

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Facebook-WhatsApp Deal Haunted by Past Web Merger Flops

Staff Writer

Facebook Inc. (FB) investors who pushed the company’s shares to a record after it unveiled the $19 billion deal for WhatsApp Inc. would be well served to remember — every Internet takeover of more than $10 billion has flopped. Last week’s proposed purchase would be the biggest Web acquisition in more than a decade and only the fifth ever to top that threshold, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That puts it in the same category as AOL’s merger with Time Warner and Terra Network SA’s takeover of Lycos, which…

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How Facebook will have to radically transform itself in order to justify buying WhatsApp

Staff Writer

There has been endless high-quality discussion about why Facebook was willing to pay more than what half of the S&P 500 companies are worth for WhatsApp. My biased distillation of the consensus is, basically, Facebook wanted to keep WhatsApp out of the clutches of Google, and the sale was in stock at a time when Facebook’s share price is at an all-time high, so Facebook didn’t have much to lose. Or you might choose to believe Facebook’s stated reason, which is that WhatsApp could go to a billion users and that, with the…

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Facebook to Pay $19 Billion for WhatsApp

Staff Writer

Messaging Startup to Operate Independently, Retain Brand, Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of the WhatsApp mobile messaging service ranks as the largest-ever purchase of a company backed by venture capital. Facebook Inc. FB +1.13% agreed to buy messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock, a blockbuster transaction that dwarfs the already sky-high prices that other startups have been able to recently command. The 55-employee company, which acts as a kind of replacement for text messaging, has seen its use more than double in the past nine months to…

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Facebook & Google Move Up On Social Network Creep Index

Staff Writer

Google and Facebook gave the anti-social networking crowd new ammunition as they made moves that kicked them up a notch on the social media creep index. Let’s put it this way: If you were looking for an excuse to give up on these companies, these recent announcements certainly don’t give you good reasons to reconsider staying. As I define it, the creep index is like the Defcon Warning System of social media. Instead of defining how close we are to nuclear war, it measures just how intrusive and creepy our…

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Facebook’s Internet.org aims to get billions online

Staff Writer

An initiative to bring internet access to the “next five billion” people has been launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The social network has teamed up with Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others, to lower the cost of mobile data. The group said it wanted to help those in developing countries to become part of the internet community. But one expert said those nations had “other priorities” to deal with first. Mr Zuckerberg said the goal was to make “internet access available to those who cannot currently…

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