Fears of impostors increase on Facebook

Source from http://www.cnn.com/

Without his input, Bryan Rutberg's Facebook status update -- the way friends track each other -- suddenly changed on January 21 to this frightening alert:

"Bryan NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!!!"

His online friends saw the message and came to his aid. Some posted concerned messages on his public profile -- "What's happening????? What do you need?" one wrote. Another friend, Beny Rubinstein, got a direct message saying Rutberg had been robbed at gunpoint in London and needed money to get back to the United States.

So, trying to be a good friend, Rubinstein wired $1,143 to London in two installments, according to police in Bellevue, Washington.

Meanwhile, Rutberg was safe at home in Seattle.

Rubinstein told CNN he misses the money, but it's perhaps more upsetting to feel tricked(play trick, 농간을 부리다. be tricked 속임을 당하다)by someone who impersonated(임펄/~써네이티브: 사칭하다.) his friend on Facebook, a social-networking site where millions of friends converse freely online.

"It's an invasion of your whole privacy, who your friends are," he said.

While reports of extortion and false impersonation(임펄/~써네이션:흉내.He did an uncanny Elvis impersonation.) have been common in phony phone calls and fake e-mails, similar fraud hasn't been reported on Facebook until recently. Now a number of complaints are surfacing.

In response to the trend, the Better Business Bureau in late January issued a warning on its Web site, intended for(겨냥하여) Facebook's 150 million users: know who your friends are and keep your sensitive information private.

There are primarily two ways to stay safe on Facebook, said Jim Lewis, director of the technology and policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. First, make sure your computer anti-virus programs are up to date; and tell online companies you want better privacy protection, he said.

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told CNN that impersonation schemes affect fewer than 1 percent of Facebook's 150 million users. He would not comment on whether the rate of such incidents is increasing, but said any increase in the total number of impersonations could be due to the fact that the site is growing by 600,000 users per day.

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Source from wikipedia

Facebook, formerly The Facebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 150 million active users worldwide.

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently(때때로,인터밋/튼틀리) in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to increase productivity. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised(타협하다.손상시키다) several times. It is also facing several lawsuits (러~숫트:소송)from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.


History

The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off(부산물)of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore(싸/~퍼모어.대학2년생), concocted(칸/~컼트. 날조하다.) Facemash on October 28th, 2003.
Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind :
According to the Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the “hotter” person." The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-serves but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach(브뤼치,법률,도덕 등의 위반) of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy and faced expulsion(익/스펄~션: 제적,추방), but ultimately the charges were dropped.

The Facebook on February 12, 2004
The following semester, Zuckerman founded "The Facebook," originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004.
“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it(She'll get around to it in the future 그녀는 그 일을 나중에 다시 할거야.
I'll get around to writing to her.시간을 내서 그녀에게 편지를 써야지). I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website.
In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.


Use by courts
In December 2008, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid protocol(국가간의 협약,외교상의 의례) to serve court notices to defendants(피고). It is believed to be the world's first legal judgment that defines a summons(소환,호출) posted on Facebook to be legally binding.

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Hot or Not?

The site was founded in October 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and Silicon Valley-based engineers (both graduated from UC Berkeley), as a technical solution to a disagreement they made one day over a passing woman's attractiveness. The site was originally called "Am I Hot or Not". Within a week of launching, it had reached almost two million page views per day. Within a few months, the site was immediately behind CNET and NBCi on NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains. To keep up with rising costs Hong and Young added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not", i.e. a system of range voting.[1][2] The matchmaking service has been especially successful and the site continues to generate most of its revenue through subscriptions.
In the December 2006 issue of Time Magazine, the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook similarly got his start by creating a Hot or Not type site called FaceMash, where he posted photos from Harvard's Facebook for the university's community to rate.
Hot or Not was recently sold for a rumored $20 million.[3] Annual revenue was estimated at $5 million, with net profits of $2 million. They initially started off $60,000 in debt due to tuition fees James paid for his MBA. [4] On July 31, 2008, Hot or Not launched Hot or Not Gossip and a celebrity rate box (a "hot meter") - a sub division to expand their market [2] which is run by former radio-dj, turned celebrity blogger, Zack Taylor [3]