Facebook Boston? Zuckerberg Recruits Harvard, MIT Students

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg returned to his alma mater—Harvard—today on a recruiting swing for the world's most popular social network. He made another trip to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well. I caught the (very) brief press conference at MIT, where Zuckerberg only had time to answer a few questions.

The first was about what he meant when he recently said he would have kept Facebook in Boston—he re-clarified that Facebook couldn't have become what it became had he not gone off to Silicon Valley, but knowing what he knows now, he thinks he could have kept the company here.

The second question was something along the lines of "What can we do the next time a company like Facebook comes along to make sure it doesn't leave Boston?" Zuck gave a similar answer as the one above, saying Facebook needed to be out in Silicon Valley but that there are a lot of smart people here and, as such, cool companies can be built here.

The third question was about Facebook's efforts to curb cyberbullying. "Facebook is a product where we think a lot of good comes from it," said Zuckerberg, continuing, "And cyber bullying is one unfortunate thing online that we work really hard to prevent." He talked about Facebook's efforts to curb cyberbullying by allowing people to report abusive behavior. "We just think it's a huge problem online and one that needs to be weeded out," said Zuckerberg. "And the solutions, we think, are social."

And with that, he was gone.

Clearly none of us had enough time with Zuckerberg to really get into anything substantial, but the big story here is that he's in Boston specifically on a recruitment tour of Harvard and MIT.

At MIT, Zuckerberg first met with members of the faculty and then was on his way to talk to a group of 500 students. Those particular students were selected via a lottery process that drew from 2,600 applicants and was "sampled most heavily from electrical engineering and computer science students," which is the largest major at MIT according to the school's media relations manager, Kimberly Allen. Zuckerberg is conducting a similar recruitment tour at Harvard today as well.

There's also an invite-only event tonight for a handful of students—60 invites went out, according to Allen—from both MIT and Harvard. "The whole thing is recruiting. That's his point of being here," said Allen. And according to Harvard's press office, today marks Zuckerberg's first visit back to the campus "since leaving in 2004 to launch Facebook."

So the speculation begins as to why Zuckerberg himself would make the trip all the way out to Boston to talk to select groups of students from MIT and Harvard, and then hold an even more exclusive event tonight to talk to a hand-picked group of students. Both today and during Zuckerberg's recently-reported remarks, he mentioned Boston and New York in the same breath—so keep a close eye on both those markets.

Quoted from Time

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The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry

Last week, the world was shocked—shocked!—to discover that downloading an electronic book to a device such as a Kindle actually increases the weight of the Kindle. Not by any truly measurable amount, said the New York Times, but still: adding data to a device apparently results in trapped electrons which "have a higher energy than the untrapped ones."

And though the amount of data contained in a tiny e-book file is so miniscule as to render it almost irrelevant, the results become more meaningful when you measure a much larger set of data. In that spirit, how much does all the information on the entire internet weigh?

The conclusion: about as much as a strawberry. Check out the above video for the explanation, which includes details about the Kindle stuff, too.

Quoted from Techland

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'Anonymous' Abandons Attack Against Mexican Drug Cartel?

Just days after announcing its intent to reveal information about civilians who have assisted the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, the group has seemingly backed down for fear of possible violent reprisals.

REUTERS

Two apparently self-identified Anonymous members, Skill3r and Glynnis Paroubek, were quoted in Mexican newspaper Milenio as saying, "We didn't want irresponsible administrators to condemn participants [in the operation] to death. We've discussed it extensively and we all decided to remove it."

This statement follows a post on the Anonymous Mexico Facebook page that reads in part: "Our fight is not of this kind and our ideals are not in tune with that operation. The note [announcing Operation Cartel] published in many electronic media is completely false."

The decision may be a smart one; global intelligence company Stratfor released a report yesterday claiming that "Los Zetas are deploying their own teams of computer experts to track those individuals involved in the online anti-cartel campaign, which indicates that the criminal group is taking the campaign very seriously," a comment which comes with the extra weight of earlier internet-related murders as a warning to "internet snitches" trying to intervene in the drug war.

Despite this, it's possible that Anonymous is split over the decision to withdraw from this particular operation; according to a tweet from Anonymous member Sabu, "#OpCartel is very much alive and like I said to others in private our war is on corruption on both sides of the spectrum. Vamous a GUERRA!" We may not know until November 5th whether or not the operation is still in existence... which, admittedly, may be part of the plan.

Quoted from Techland

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Our Friends Electric: Facebook Info Open to 'Socialbot' Snooping

Perhaps it's time to start paying more attention to whom you're friending on Facebook. A recent study designed to evaluate how safe social networks are from being invaded by programs pretending to be real people resulted in more than 250GB of personal information being collected from thousands of Facebook users by the researchers' "socialbots."

NORBERT VON DER GROEBEN / REUTERS

Researchers from the University of British Columbia's Vancouver campus released 102 socialbots onto Facebook as part of the eight week study, each one given a name and a profile picture so as to better convince real users that they were, in fact, entirely genuine. Each bot then proceeded to send 25 friend requests per day—limited to prevent setting off spam alerts—and within two weeks, 976 requests had been accepted.

For the next six weeks, the bots sent requests to the friends of their new friends, with 59% of that second wave accepting, leading to what the researchers call "a large-scale infiltration" of the site.

The researchers said that the exercise proved how ineffective existing safety measures are against this kind of attack, with only 20% of their socialbots being caught by Facebook's "Immune System," with even that low percentage only happening because users flagged the friend requests as spam.

A report on the experiment, "The Socialbot Network," explains the danger this presents:

"As socialbots infiltrate a targeted OSN, they can further harvest private users' data such as email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal data that have monetary value. To an adversary, such data are valuable and can be used for online profiling and large-scale email spam and phishing campaigns."

A Facebook spokesperson deflected criticism by attacking the report, saying that the company has "serious concerns about the methodology of the research by the University of British Columbia, and we will be putting these concerns to them."

Sources: Techland

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