It appears that MySpace finally tightened up security and no longer allows bulletin posts from outside of the MySpace domain. A great move if you ask us, this will keep alot of unwanted SPAM bulletiins created from unknowing MySpace users.
Sexual predators aren’t the only ones drawn to social networking sites such as Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace.com.
George W. Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center, is quoted by the Associated Press as saying as saying he’s trained “hundreds of police officials” on, “how to cull intelligence on gang membership, rivalries, territory and lingo from these Web pages” and Chicago police arrested a teenager who’d, “allegedly sprayed his gang nickname on a church by tracing the moniker to his Myspace.com account.
“His online profile included his address, photo and real name.”
And earlier this month, “two teens charged with beating a boy into a coma could be tried as adults after prosecutors showed photographs of the two from Myspace.com,” says AP. “In the images, they flashed the hand signs of a local gang.”
Notorious street gangs have gone online, “showcasing illegal exploits, making threats, and honoring killed and jailed members on digital turf,” says AP.
They’re posting potentially incriminating photos of members holding guns, messages taunting other gangs and boasts of illegal exploits on personal Web sites and social networking sites, it states.
And XV3Gang isn’t alone. Crips, Bloods, MS-13 and other gangs are online, says the AP story, going on, “Knox and others fear gangs are using the Internet to recruit new members, who can be influenced by the secret handshakes, clothing and slang of gang cultures.”
Meanwhile, “www.XV3Gang.com is fully copyrighted,” says the 18th Street site.
The Grand Forks School District has blocked the popular MySpace.com Web site on its computers, citing safety concerns and negative behavior nationwide linked to the site, including bullying and stalking.
“Outside of our schools, adults posing as youth have gained access to student chat rooms, which has led to tragedy in some cases,” said an April letter to parents signed by Ron Gruwell, assistant superintendent for secondary education, and Jody Thompson, assistant superintendent for elementary education, for the Grand Forks schools.
“Unsuspecting students have posted enough personal information that predators are able to locate their home or school address, thus becoming easy targets for predators.”
The Web site has become a favorite of child predators, cyber bullies and con artists, the letter said. Also, children, mostly ages 9 to 14, use the anonymity of the Web to post messages about others that would not be said face-to-face, the letter said. It went on to urge parents to talk to their children about MySpace, and to go to the site and register.
“Parents should be aware of what their children are writing and what others are posting on their Web sites,” the letter said.
NAPERVILLE, IL, United States (UPI) — Police in Naperville, Ill., arrested a man accused of soliciting sex with a 14-year-old girl on the Web site Myspace.com, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday.
Jay Coffield, 44, of Morris, Ill. was arrested at a coffee shop in Naperville after relatives of the girl alerted police to the meeting, the newspaper said. Coffield was taken to the Will County Jail in Joliet, Ill. and charged with indecent solicitation of a child, a felony.
Police posed as the girl and had several online chats with Coffield before the meeting, the newspaper reported.
This arrest marks the second time in six weeks that Naperville Police`s Internet Crime Unit has used Myspace.com to arrest a suspect for alleged solicitation of a minor. John R. Wentworth, 27, was arrested May 9 in a similar case.
Billy Bragg has dramatically taken his music off his MySpace site after accusing the site of exploiting musicians by taking away their rights.
In a posting on his site he says media mogul and owner of MySpace Rupert Murdoch actually owns any music that is posted on the social networking site.
“Sorry there’s no music,” he posted “Once an artist posts up any content (including songs) it then belongs to MySpace (aka Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world, without paying the artist.”
According to the small print on the site by posting content an artists agrees to: “Hereby grant to Myspace.com a non-exclusive,fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the rights to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate ,publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit and distribute such content on and through the services.”
Myspace spokesperson Jeff Berman said: “Because the legalese has caused some confusion we are at work revising it to make it every clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist’s work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends. Obviously, we don’t own their music or do anything with it that they don’t want.”
Microsoft plans to give its MSN Spaces blog publishing and hosting service new social networking features, as well as support for the company’s lightweight applications called Gadgets.
The new social networking features are being tested by MSN Spaces users in Australia and the Netherlands, and are designed to foster user interaction, says Karin Muskopf, MSN product manager.
“We’ve heard from our customers they want to be able to see who their friends are talking to, because they feel those people would have similar interests to theirs. They want to be connected to people who are like-minded,” she says.
She declined to comment specifically about social networking competitors, but News’s MySpace has revolutionised this market with its eye-popping popularity. Beloved by teenagers and young adults, MySpace ranks second only to Yahoo in page views in the US, and drew almost 5% of all web site visits in March, ahead even of mighty Google, which drew little over 4%, according to Hitwise. MySpace currently has more than 73 million registered users worldwide, and adds about 250,000 new ones every day.
MySpace’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed by large providers of online services such as Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo. Google has an invitation-only social network called Orkut and Yahoo has a blogging service called Yahoo 360. AOL recently launched AOL Pages, a social networking service tied to its AIM instant messaging service.
Ironically, MSN Spaces may also end up competing with Wallop, a startup that is developing a social networking service with technology Microsoft spun off from its research unit. Wallop plans to launch its service this year.
MSN Spaces, launched in December 2004, has always allowed users to link to other blogs on the network. But the plan now is to make this easier to do and more attractive, by letting users add a section to their blogs where they can build a gallery of “friends” who also have MSN Spaces blogs.
While this functionality is now limited to a simple hyperlink, entries in this new gallery will contain much more information about the friends, even including notes and tags the user can add about them. The social networking features will also be integrated with Microsoft’s instant message service.
The tests in Australia and the Netherlands have been going well and Microsoft plans to extend this functionality to users in other countries in the coming months, Muskopf says.
It makes sense for Microsoft to try to leverage the sizable MSN Spaces audience to go deeper into social networking. About 40 million people have set up MSN Spaces blogs, and the network receives about 120 million unique users per month, she says. Around 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day for a total so far of about 2.5 billion.
Meanwhile, MSN Spaces will also gain support for Microsoft’s Gadgets, the lightweight applications introduced last year as a way to extend the functionality of larger desktop and web-based applications. Microsoft provides a website where developers can find information on how to build these mini-applications. Muskopf declined to provide details on how Gadgets will be supported within MSN Spaces.
Security teams have discovered a new instant messenger (IM)-based phishing attack aimed at stealing the account information of users of the popular social networking site MySpace.
The scam begins when AOL Instant Messenger users receive a hyperlink promising new photos from someone in their contact list. But clinking the link leads the victim to a bogus California-based website that spoofs the MySpace.com log-in page, according to a Websense Security Labs alert. The fraudulent site captures MySpace usernames and passwords, and then forwards users to the real site.
The malicious attacker can then access the victim’s personal information, such as address and birthdates, stored on their MySpace account. The scam has since been shut down, Websense officials said in published reports.
Accessing the fake site also automatically installs a cookie on the victim’s computer, preventing the phishing attack from being displayed on future MySpace visits, the Websense alert said.
The more than 70 million users of MySpace, one of the world’s most visited websites, are becoming an increasingly attractive target for malicious attackers, experts have said.
MySpace is a very popular Web site with teenagers and college-age people. Members can create a homepage featuring photos of themselves and their friends, journal entries, graphics, music clips and more. They can link to other MySpace pages and send messages back and forth.
MySpace has developed into a huge Web-based community.
Recent visitors to Valley Mall in Halfway talked about their experiences on MySpace.
Nicole Walker, 20, who attends West Virginia University, has a MySpace page and checks out other pages. She likes seeing people’s photos of themselves. One of the funniest photos, she said, is a shot of “Milk Boy - a guy that has milk all over him.”
J.D. Rid, 21, of Hagerstown, said he keeps in touch with friends through his MySpace page. He said he has heard about potential dangers of MySpace - people sending threatening messages or stalking other MySpace members - but he’s not worried.
“There are threats all over the Internet,” he said.
Erick Armer, 20, lives in Falling Waters, W.Va. He said he uses his MySpace page to communicate with friends. He likes being able to check out other people’s profiles. As for protecting himself from MySpace related danger?
“I use common sense,” he said.
Carrie Miller, 21, of Smithsburg, said she likes meeting new people on MySpace. She feels safe but worries that it might not be safe for younger kids.
More and more elementary and middle school students have been setting up pages. MySpace does offer many things such as chatting, dating, music and so on. Members sometimes set up face-to-face meetings. It can be fun to meet virtual friends face to face, but it can be dangerous.
But most of the time, MySpace is a fun site, according to Allyson Moore, 12, of Hagerstown. She has been using MySpace since she was 9. Her safety tips include:
Know who you’re talking to.
Don’t give out personal information such as your address, school, phone numbers or e-mail address.
Never agree to meet face to face with someone you don’t know.
Don’t say nasty or hurtful things in blogs or Internet diaries.