Last year, Facebook introduced a new feature on the social networking site called "Live Ticker" which displayed a live activity stream of your Facebook friends. Facebook Ticker was hated by a lot of users and also led to a few Facebook scams including the one where users were duped into believing that they could stop posts from showing in Facebook Ticker.

In the past, we wrote about different ways to hide the Facebook Live Ticker. However, Facebook now allows users to hide the Live Ticker easily with the recent changes they have made.

If you are looking to hide the Facebook Ticker in your Facebook feed, you can now simply click the UP arrow key on the Ticker to hide the Facebook Ticker from view. Once that is done, you will no longer see the Ticker on your feed. If you want to see the Live Ticker again, you just have to click on the down arrow key and it will show up again.

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However, one must note that hiding the Ticker will only hide it from view. There is no way to stop your posts from showing up on all your friends profile so don’t forget to stay away from Facebook scams which tell you that you can stop your posts from showing up in the Live Ticker.

One of the biggest problems that the Internet has faced for years, and is facing still, is spam. It is estimated that more than 90% of the total Internet traffic is email spam. The figure has come down considerably, after Microsoft hunted for and took down a number of botnets. Nonetheless, the volume of spam is still high enough, that it is a matter of concern.

Spam is so popular and widespread, there are businesses based on spam, which thrive on the naiveness of the casual Internet surfer. Most of these spammers gather personal data or credentials, using phishing attacks.

This time, all tech giants, namely Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, PayPal, Facebook and LinkedIn are going after spammers. They have decided to verify if the email sender is indeed the actual sender. Ars Technica writes on this, claiming that SMTP is too old to, and the concept of emails has become complicated since its birth.

Although methods like SPF and DKIM  have been used in email phishing protection already, they have their limitations. Instead, these tech giants are working on a new protection scheme called DMARC.

As with SPF and DKIM, DMARC depends on storing extra information about the sender in DNS. This information tells receiving mail servers how to handle messages that fail the SPF or DKIM tests, and how critical the two tests are. The sender can tell recipient servers to reject messages that fail SPF and DKIM outright, to quarantine them somehow (for example, putting them into a spam folder), or to accept the mail normally and send a report of the failure back to the sender.

As DMARC stores extra information about the sender, it has to record all the senders, to function effectively. This makes a global rollout compulsory for DMARC to be effective in fighting spam. In the next few months, we will see how the Internet community receives DMARC and whether it is effective against spam.

Google+ has restricted its usage to those above 18 years of age, since its launch last year. However, in a new development, Google has announced that going further, it will allow teenagers to create a profile on their social network. Besides opening up to teenagers, Google+ also introduced a new set of privacy policies and safety information to ensure an enjoyable Google+ experience for them.

Teenagers on Google+ can only be contacted by people in their immediate circles. They will also be warned every time they post a public post, and these are just some safety features for teenagers on Google+. While announcing Google+ for teenagers, Bradley Horowitz says,

Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet [1]. And surprise, surprise: they’re human beings who enjoy spending time with friends and family. Put these two things together and it’s clear that teens will increasingly connect online. Unfortunately, online sharing is still second-rate for this age group.

With Google+, we want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression. Today we’re doing both, for everyone who’s old enough for a Google Account (13+ in most countries [2]).

Teenager profiles on Google+ will enjoy special safety features when it comes to content sharing, and hangouts. This makes Google+ ideal for young adults, who face numerous problems like bullying and stalking online. Do not forget to read the Google+ teen safety guide and the updated pages at Google+ Safety Center.

Google+ has enforced a strict policy, when it comes to names. Google has made it mandatory that all Google+ users must compulsorily use their real names in Google+. Details on name policy can be found on this page. As with any other social network, Google+ was also facing problems of fake celebrity accounts, and they addressed it conventionally with the verified account feature. However, these measures were not enough to keep fakers at bay.

Recently, a Google+ profile has been discovered, which easily features among the top 1000 Google+ accounts worldwide, but is actually a fake account. The Google+ account of Victoria Nigar has attracted a lot of attention lately. She is in over 42,550 circles, and is ranked 545 among top Google+ users in the world, #10 in Canada. Clearly, she has a huge following, but the people who follow her looking at her profile have not the slightest clue that its a fake profile.

Whoever owns this profile is in violation of one of the Google+ account terms.

Don’t pretend to be someone else.
Impersonation is a serious issue. Pretending to be someone else could cause your profile to be deleted. If someone is pretending to be you, go to their profile and click Report this profile.

This graph at Circle Count shows the growth of Victoria’s circles over time.

Even the display picture on her Google+ profile is a fake, and is of Susan Coffey, who happens to be a model.

This profile has been playing it smart, and has managed to stay one of the top Google+ profiles. However, what gave her away was probably her “About” page, which has the word “Google” written in every field. So, she has worked at Google for 10+ years from 2000, her bragging right is “Google”, her occupation is “Google” and even the “other name” field on her profile says Google.

If you visit her profile recently, you will see that the employment details have been taken down. Even Louis Gray, the famous Google+ evangelist fell for this fake profile, and shared her profile as part of one of his circles.

This is easily the biggest con on Google+ until now, and it has left everyone clueless with the only hint being, the first few tweets from the account were in Russian, whereas she claims to have lived only in California and San Francisco.

A year ago, on this very day, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone from Twitter wrote a detailed post on their blog, outlining their efforts with transparency, censorship of Tweets and keeping the flow of tweets alive. The dramatic headline was “The Tweets must flow”, and it raised some valid concerns regarding the Twitter platform and the content that people share on it.

An excerpt from the page reads,

Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed. While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can so they have a fair chance to fight the request if they so choose.

After an year, today, the Twitter blog has posted another article titled “The Tweets still must flow” and this time, they have announced an improvement to their implementation of censorship. Until now, all geopolitical tweets, which were banned, were removed entirely from the Twitter account of a user. However, starting this year, Twitter has an innovative plan to remove a tweet only from the geographical region that considers it sensitive. Additionally, the user will be notified whenever some content undergoes this partial-censorship on Twitter.

This new policy will help Twitter enter new geographical regions, which have stringent laws regarding free speech. It will also safeguard a user from strict and harsh free-speech laws within some countries. However, it might end up diminishing the user’s accountability, which again will be an excuse for Governments to raise the bar on their version of censorship.

When Facebook unveiled Timeline for the first time and we caught a glimpse of it at their F8 developer summit, it was clear that Facebook has big plans for this feature. Timeline was a major upgrade for the social network, and it was definitely going to stay. What we did not know, was how far Facebook would keep developing it, before rolling it out to the public permanently. Well, the wait is over, and stating today, Timeline is an official Facebook feature, available to all Facebook users. The final rollout of timeline took Facebook four months from its first preview.

In these four months, Facebook acquired Gowalla possibly to improve Timeline, or to integrate location services (Facebook places, in this case) with Timeline in some way. Timeline was also released on 15 December as an opt-in feature in New Zealand, where you had to enable Timeline for your account by yourself, if you wanted to use it. This time though, Timeline will be the default view on your profile. Although you can select to opt-out of Timeline for a few more days (at facebook.com/about/timeline), eventually, your account will be upgraded to use Timeline.

I have been using Timeline for quite some time now, using a trick that was revealed right after the first preview of Timeline (irrelevant now). Timeline has some interesting UX aspects that make it wonderful for a walk down memory lane. It gives more meaning and organization to the stream of Facebook posts, presenting it as a meaningful stream of thoughts over time.

Timeline is available on both the Facebook website, and on the Android Facebook app. If you have not seen Timeline on your profile yet, you will get it very soon. Tag your photos properly and clean up your albums for a meaningful Facebook Timeline experience on your profile. Here is the Facebook Timeline introduction video for those did not get a chance to see it yet.

According to a report from the Kaspersky Lab, a new phishing attack on Facebook has been discovered that primarily attempts to steal account information of Facebook users and compromise the account. The attackers then attempt to gather the financial information including credit card data and other sensitive information from the victim.

According to Kaspersky Lab’s David Jacoby, the attackers are not just tricking users to visit a phishing site, but are trying to scare them by sending them warning messages by using a fake “Facebook Security” account. The compromised accounts will be used to steal available personal information and then change both the profile picture and name to try the trick on other Facebook users.

The profile picture will be changed to the Facebook logo and the name will be changed to “Facebook Security” with special ASCII characters replacing the letters such as “a” “k” “S” and “t”. Here is a screen shot of the message sent from a fake account -

The message – “Last Warning: Your Facebook account will be turned off Because someone has reported you. Please do re-confirm your account security by: [LINK] Thank you. The Facebook Team,” is used as a warning message sent to users via Facebook Messages and Facebook Chat.

The link used in the message leads users to a phishing site. When we tried opening the page using Google Chrome, the following warning message was displayed – “Phishing sites trick users into disclosing personal or financial information, often by pretending to represent trusted institutions, such as banks.”

The site, however, is designed to look like a Facebook page and prompts the victim to enter the name, email address, password, security question, email account password, country, and date of birth. After having provided with all the information, the victim will be redirected to another page with the heading “Payment Verification” that asks for the first six digits of the victim’s credit card. Accordingly, in the following pages, the user is asked to enter the full credit card number along with the expiry date, CVV code (Security code), and the billing address.

If you’re an active Facebook user, then the most important thing that you must know is that Facebook never asks its users to enter their password(s), or credit card details. Check the URL of the site that you’re visiting and make sure it is genuine. Most of the sites that require users to enter any financial information, have a secured HTTPS connection, which are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems, which was not true in this case.

Also Read: Google Chrome Now Blocks Insecure Scripts on HTTPS

If you’ve been warned with such a message on Facebook, then ignore it. Alternatively, you can contact the Facebook Security team here and check if they sent the message or not. We have reported a similar Facebook Security Network Phishing Attack back in August 2011.

“These scams are just getting more popular and we really recommend not giving out personal information, especially not email, password and credit card information over social medias,” Jacoby wrote. “It is also recommend[ed] that you contact your security vendor and the social media vendor if you encounter these sites.”

Facebook announced that they have now extended its comments plugin (the Comment Box) to work on mobile supported websites. Websites with the Comment Box plugin embedded in them will enable its mobile visitors to use the plugin to add their comments and views.

“Today we’re launching the Comments Box plugin for mobile to make it easier for media sites to engage people across the web and mobile devices, and for people to comment on news regardless of where they’re reading it,” Facebook announced.

Installing the plugin for mobile devices requires no additional tasks. When a user visits a website supporting the feature, the Comment Box will be automatically displayed on the mobile version of the site. The plugin is designed to automatically recognize when a user is on a mobile device and unlike its previous versions, the plugin ensures to ignore the width parameter so that the comments are displayed at 100 percent.

However, Developers or Webmasters can disable the automatic width feature by setting the mobile parameters to false and can manually control the width settings. A complete documentation of this can be viewed from here.

Facebook unveiled the completely revamped Comment Box for websites earlier in March 2011. This intended to reduce spam comments on websites, since commenting using the box would require the user to login to his Facebook account first. Comments posted by a user will also appear on the commenter’s profile, unless the user manually chooses not to “post” comments by changing the user Privacy Settings.

Back in November 2011, we found out that comments added using the Facebook’s commenting systems were indexed by the search engine giant, Google. Queries like “commenter name and commenter title” will display all the comments the commenter may have written on different websites using Facebook or equivalent services.

Having the Facebook Comment Box plugin work on mobile devices might improve interactions and reduce spam, and of course, it does make life easier for website owners and its regular readers that use the plugin.

Facebook has an internal policy which “memorializes” the personal profiles of users who have died. The account of the deceased person is sealed from future login attempts and is not shown on search results and friend suggestion sections. If any of your friends or family members have recently died and you want to close his/her Facebook account permanently, head over to this form and complete your request.

Some savvy Facebook users are rather worried about the fact that they wont get their last chance to update their Facebook profile, when they are dead.

“Is there any way to authorize someone else to post on behalf of me and announce my death on Facebook?” The short answer is that as long as you don’t share your Facebook username and password with the person whom you want to post on behalf of you, there is no way you can execute this crazy idea. I agree the thought is grim but to some blind Facebook addicts, this is a concern. An important one.

An Israeli company named Wilook thought that if users have spent their entire life on Facebook, they have the right to post their last status update or publish a sweet video message to their friends and followers. The Facebook app “If I Die On Facebook” is the first and only Facebook application that lets “you” create a video or a text message that will only be published after you die. Super creepy!

The app lets you compose a text message as your “farewell speech” and then designate three of your friends as “Trustees”. When you are dead, these trustees will have to confirm your death and then your custom farewell messages will get posted on your profile. There aren’t any limitations on the number of messages you can create, so this is one good way to achieve a state of “social media immortality”.

Personally, I would just share my Facebook username and password with a close friend and request him to post a “farewell message” on behalf of me (of course when I am dead). But if you want your virtual friends to “Like” your death and comment upon it until eternity, you might want to use this app. Just make sure your “trustees” don’t have any grudges against you or this thing can misfire. The following video explains how the app works:

Sadly, you can’t “poke” someone from your grave. If I am forced to use this app, I would leave one short message – “You are next.”

Facebook introduced its new profile layout “Timeline” in September, 2011, and after a long waiting period, the company finally rolled out the new style to all its users in December, 2011. Users were forced to change the look of their profile with the new layout and were left with no option to revert. Many users who found the Timeline too cluttered and confusing, are finding out ways to disable it, or revert and go back to the previous layout.

After releasing the Timeline to all its users, a spokesperson for Facebook had to say this -

Once you click “Get Timeline,” you will have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it.

If you choose, you can publish your timeline right away. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically after seven days. Your timeline will replace your profile.

Eventually everyone on Facebook will be rolled over to timeline.

Being aware of this despair, scammers are taking advantage of it by posting scam messages on Facebook indicating how one can disable or remove the Facebook Timeline completely. Facebook has taken every measure to educate its users about the new layout. Despite that, some people are still falling for the trap set by scammers and hackers. A search on Facebook for the phrase remove “Facebook Timeline” filtered more than 10 Facebook Pages that have gained thousands of “likes.”

“We work hard to educate users on how to be safe through our blog and the Facebook and Facebook Security pages,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We regularly update the Facebook Security page and its over 5 million fans with tips and information about new threats. We also work with outside experts on education initiatives.”

There are a number of scam messages and rouge application/browser extensions claiming to show you the steps on how you can disable the Facebook Timeline. Installing these browser extensions, or linking your account to applications will give access to all information, and this is definitely a serious threat to your account. Here are the results obtained via the Facebook Search bar -

There is no way you can disable or remove the Facebook Timeline. It is a permanent change, until Facebook decides to implement a new layout. Therefore, the best option you have is to get used to it, or you can go with the second best option – Deactivate your Facebook Account.

However, if you’re finding the new layout too cluttered, then you can try disabling the ticker and chat. We had posted an article earlier on how you can disable the news ticker on the right. We have posted an in-depth guide about Timeline. I recommend you to go through it and know all of its features. Who knows, you may start loving it.

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