Taylor Swift’s ACM date hospitalized
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Taylor Swift‘s date to Sunday’s Academy of Country Music Awards won’t be joining the country crooner at the awards show, a Facebook post revealed Saturday.
Kevin McGuire, the high school senior who famously asked Swift, 22, to be his prom date in February, was readmitted to the hospital over the weekend, his sister informed friends and supporters.
“I am so sorry to announce this devastating news, but Kevin was admitted to the hospital last night, and is unable to attend the Academy of Country Music Awards with Taylor Swift,” sister Victoria wrote, adding that the New Jersey teen was battling a 103-degree fever in addition to intense chemotherapy.
McGuire, 18, has suffered from leukemia since first being diagnosed at the young age of 13. This is his second bout, after being declared cancer free in 2010.
Earlier this year, Victoria took the initiative to start a Facebook page for her younger brother – “Taylor Swift take KEVIN MCGUIRE TO PROM” – meant to grab the singer’s attention.
Swift caught wind of McGuire’s request and replied in kind on Facebook.
“Kevin, I’m so sorry but I won’t be able to make it to your prom,” she wrote. “But I was wondering, the (Academy of Country Music) Awards are coming up … Would you be my date? Love, Taylor.”
The high schooler was shocked by the singer’s response.
“Obviously, I said yes,” he told the Cherry Hill Courier-Post at the time.
Now, however, with their evening plans dashed, Swift hopes to make it up to her would-be awards show date.
“Just talked to Kevin McGuire,” she tweeted Saturday. “He’s not well enough to join me at the ACMs. Please keep him in your thoughts. I’ll make it up to you, Kevin!”
jchen@nydailynews.com
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US Senator on Facebook, Google: Privacy is a casualty
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
The 360° Conversation around Cloud Computing
TECH VISUALIZER brings the social conversation to life… powered by Brocade
Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/us-senator-on-facebook-google-privacy-is-a-casualty/11255
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Facebook may up eating disorder risk: study
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Wasting time on Facebook isn’t just bad for your productivity – now it could be endangering your health, as well.
Fifty-one percent of the Facebook users surveyed in a new study said they felt more self conscious about their bodies after seeing photos of themselves on the social network, according to The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt.
“Facebook is making it easier for people to spend more time and energy criticizing their own bodies and wishing they looked like someone else,” the Center’s Director, Dr. Harry Brandt, said in the report.
“In this age of modern technology and constant access to SmartPhones and the internet, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to remove themselves from images and other triggers that promote negative body image, low self-esteem and may ultimately contribute to eating disorders,” Brandt said.
Eighty percent of those surveyed said they logged into Facebook “at least once a day,” making it nearly impossible to avoid encountering photos of themselves and their friends.
That level of exposure proved damaging for a significant chunk of the users surveyed: 44% said they wished they had the same body or weight as a friend when looking at the photos, and 32% admitted feeling “sad when comparing Facebook photos of themselves to their friend’s photos.”
Thirty-seven percent said they also felt the need to “change specific parts of their body when comparing their bodies to friends’ bodies in photos.”
The findings suggest that time spent looking at photos on Facebook may lead people to obsess about their weight in ways that could prove dangerous.
“As people spend more time thinking about what’s wrong with their bodies, less time is spent on the positive realm and engaging in life in meaningful and fulfilling ways,” Dr. Steven Crawford, the Center’s associate director, said in the report.
“When people become more concerned with the image they project online and less concerned with holistic markers of health in real life, their body image may suffer and they may even turn, or return, to harmful fad diets or dangerous weight-control behaviors.”
The study, published on Wednesday, sampled 600 American Facebook users between the ages of 16 and 40.
Article source: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/facebook-increase-risk-eating-disorders-self-esteem-study-article-1.1054164?localLinksEnabled=false
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Student who abused Fabrice Muamba on Twitter ‘should not have been jailed’
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
The Swansea student given 56 days in prison for posting racially offensive comments on Twitter should not have been jailed, according to Europe’s most senior human rights official.
In an interview the day before he left office, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe‘s commissioner for human rights, said the sentence imposed by British courts on 21-year-old Liam Stacey was excessive.
After six years in his post at Strasbourg, the Swedish official used his departing comments to plead for greater freedom of expression and to question blanket imposition of traditional media restraints on the internet.
Stacey, who admitted an offence of racist intent, made repeated, offensive remarks on Twitter after the Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed during a match. The student’s appeal against sentence was dismissed last week.
But Hammarberg told the Guardian: “It was too much. He shouldn’t have gone to prison. To put him in prison was wrong.
“Politicians are at a bit of loss to know how to … protect internet freedom while also having regulations against [such problems as] hate speech and child pornography.
“There are limits to freedom of expression but regulators don’t know how to handle this. It would be useful to have a more enlightened discussion at a European level, otherwise we are going to have different practices in different countries.
“In traditional media there are editors who are responsible for print content. It’s not so easy to have to the same legal procedures when it comes to action [against lone online voices].
“People are at a loss to know how to apply rules for the traditional media to the new media. It’s tricky and that’s why there needs to be a more thorough discussion about this.”
His comments are directly at odds with the enforcement practices of British courts and the views of the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, who has warned that social media and other microblogging sites must not flout the law over such issues as privacy, incitement to hatred or libel.
Dismissing Stacey’s appeal against sentence on Friday, the judge, Mr Justice Wyn Williams, sitting with two magistrates, observed: “There are no applicable sentencing guidelines. We have been referred to no previous decided cases either in the court of appeal or at the crown court to assist in determining an appropriate sentence for this type of offence.”
The question of how severely online comments should be dealt with echoes the debate over the jailing of several youths who posted remarks encouraging local riots during last summer’s disturbances.
Hammarberg also repeated his call for Britain to grant prisoners voting rights and to raise the age of criminal liability – currently one of the lowest in Europe.
He praised the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, for his support for rehabilitation. “My feeling is that he agrees with our assessment … and would like to take another approach to help prisoners rebuild their lives,” he said.
“His approach is what we would like the government to take but it is not popular.”
The outgoing commissioner reserved his harshest comments for eastern European countries.
He said he had been shocked by what he had seen in countries such as Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Azerbaijan, where there is widespread corruption and “people do not believe that they get justice in courts”.
The next human rights commissioner in Strasbourg is a Latvian, Nils Muižnieks, who starts work on Monday.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/01/twitter-jailing-wrong-thomas-hammarberg
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McNabb toTebow: Drop the rah-rah fan tweets on Twitter
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Donovan McNabb’s looking more like a future ESPN analyst and less like an active NFL QB every day. On Friday’s First Take morning show, McNabb ripped Tim Tebow for his rah-rah tweets promising to “play” his heart out for New York Jets fans earlier this week.
McNabb advised Tebow to tone it down on Twitter — and spend more of his time preparing for the 2012 NFL season:
Let it go. At some point let’s focus on getting into camp and learning a new offense. There’s no need to keep trying to have the fans behind you. Every time that we look up there’s something. He’s reaching out to fans, telling them ‘I love you, I’m working hard.’ As an NFL player, and as a veteran in this game, no one cares what you’re doing during the off-season…They only care about what you do on the football field. This is why a lot of people in the Denver Broncos locker room had an issue (with Tebow).
When No. 1 Tebow fan Skip Bayless said his boy was “the most unfairly, over-criticized quarterback” in league history, McNabb disagreed:
Negative — I am, I am…Nobody has been criticized as much as I have.
Tebow vowed to “play my heart out” for Fireman Ed and the rest of Jets nation on Twitter Thursday. ” J-E-T-S JETS! JETS! JETS!,” tweeted the ex-Broncos QB.
McNabb, currently a free agent, said Thursday he doesn’t see Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III as a good fit with his old Redskins coach Mike Shanahan.
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Keith Olbermann’s firing: Twitter reacts
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Reuters
5:02 p.m. CDT, April 1, 2012
Article source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/sns-rt-us-olbermannbre8300i2-20120401,0,6383398.story
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Study: Chatwing Announces Improved Support for Facebook Group Makers
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Facebook group makers can now use Chatwing to find more members. Chatwing is a free widget integrated with real-time communication. This application can also be installed to blogs, improving their ranking.
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 01, 2012
A Facebook group is another way to reach out to the online community. There are thousands of Facebook groups out there, specializing in different niches. However, because of the immense number of Facebook groups, creating one can sometimes be a drag. Group makers are now using chats to work with Chatwing in order to evade competition. The application’s global reach is a very important factor to consider.
Chatwing may be similar to other chat boxes out there, but it is more powerful. This is because of the fact that users can log in using their Facebook and Twitter accounts. This allows an easier exchange of profile information. People can also use different types of avatars and emoticons to make any conversation exciting.
Through Chatwing’s social network log-in method, Facebook group makers can invite people easily. This is more effective if they have blogs. The blogs will serve as recruitment hubs and lounges of the Facebook groups. Combined with fresh and witty blog posts, Chatwing’s connectivity rate is the best for any free chat widget.
It is also important to know that many people want to have website chat because it can be another informational source. People can learn more information about the website while chatting with other visitors. The developers of Chatwing have understood this basic need.
Embedding Chatwing to a blog for web chat is really easy. The user must first register his blog’s domain name. Following that, he must set up an official account that will serve as his dashboard. Customization is the third step. The user can edit the widget’s height, length, color, and name. Once everything has been completed, Chatwing will generate a special HTML code that must be embedded to a blog or website’s custom design panel.
Facebook group makers who want great results in their marketing campaigns can use Chatwing as one of their leverages. More information is provided in the Chatwing website, and it is updated oftentimes. The Chatwing blog is also full of rich information that anyone can use.
About Chatwing.com
Chatwing.com has developed live chat software for websites and blogs. The Chatwing.com website offers users the ability to signup and create a customizable live chat feature in 1 minute or less. Users have the ability to customize the size, color, and fonts of the chat product. The ability to chat via social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter enable Chatwing to offer a personal and unique real-time experience to all sites. Chatwing is 100% free web software.
http://www.chatwing.com
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/4/prweb9357096.htm
Article source: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/press-releases/article/Study-Chatwing-Announces-Improved-Support-for-3450829.php
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Glitch mixes up Facebook profile pictures
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Answer: When my wife showed this to me on her iPhone 4, I thought it might be an isolated issue. I shouldn’t have wondered — when hundreds of millions of people regularly use a site, there are few singular glitches.
I was reminded of that after I asked on Twitter if other people had run into this problem and quickly got 15 responses along the lines of “yes, all the time.” Their reports didn’t suggest much of a pattern, however; some saw pals’ photos replaced by those for other friends, while others saw those pictures swapped out for profile images of pages they’d liked.
Further confirmation came from Facebook Monday evening, courtesy of an e-mail from spokesman Derick Mains: “This is a bug in the iOS app. We’ve fixed it and it’s included as part of an update that’s been submitted to Apple for approval.”
“The photos that get mixed up are ones the user has previously seen (another’s friend’s photo or a liked page, etc),” he said, adding that the product managers involved thought that less than 1% of Facebook photos were affected.
(Friday evening, Mains wrote to say that this 4.1.1 update was on its way to the App Store, but it had not shown up on my wife’s iPhone by mid-afternoon Saturday.)
But I also heard from a few users who said they saw the same mixup when browsing Facebook in Google’s Chrome browser. Mains said his colleagues had not seen any evidence of that.
Thinking about it, I’m amazed that we haven’t witnessed more more glitches like this at Facebook. With more than 845 million monthly active users as of December, the Menlo Park, Calif., social network has to maintain one of the largest, most complex databases in the world — one that hackers and spammers constantly try to exploit, and one that Facebook itself keeps revising every time it updates its features.
The weakest link in Facebook remains its users, who often click on suspect links that get their accounts hijacked. But if you someday see not one but a large batch of your friends appearing under the wrong photos or posting the wrong messages, maybe the worst has happened at Facebook. In that case, try e-mailing or calling those friends to see what’s really up with them. If they’re close enough, stop by their homes to say hi.
—
Tip of the week: Make sure your computer can recover from a hard-disk crash
Most computers include a hidden or semi-hidden recovery partition, on which the manufacturer has stashed a backup copy of the operating system and other critical files. Should things go sideways with part of the drive, you can summon help from this segment of it with the right keystrokes as it boots up.
But if the entire hard drive goes sideways, the recovery partition could also be out of reach —as a reader reminded me during a recent web chat.
To avoid having to wait for your computer’s vendor to send you a new set of discs in the mail, possibly at extra cost, take advantage of the software most provide to create a backup recovery tool.
In Windows — for example, Dell and HP‘s sites offer guidance on this — you usually run a designated application to copy the contents of the recovery partition to a set of CDs or DVDs or a USB flash drive. You’ll have to check the computer’s documentation to figure out which program will do this.
On a Mac, Apple’s Lion operating system allows for a remote startup and restoration of your system software from Apple’s servers. But if you installed Lion on some older models, you will need to install Apple’s Lion Internet Recovery software update to enable this option.
—
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based in Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-04-01/pegoraro-facebook-glitch/53896508/1
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Facebook Ownership Case Faces Key Juncture
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Facebook is seemingly on top of the world as it continues to bring in ad revenue and prepares to go public, but a lawsuit that aims to bring iconoclastic founder Mark Zuckerberg down to Earth is nearing a key juncture.
Mark ZuckerbergThe legal team for Paul D. Ceglia, who claims to own at least 50 percent of the social network, is expected Wednesday to present its discovery plan in court related to evidence in the case. It is common in lawsuits for both sides to seek documents from the other and fight it out with a judge when there are disputes.
If the plan is approved, it could empower Ceglia’s lawyers to look at vast amounts of information about the early workings of Facebook and Zuckerberg — an unwelcome prospect for a company planning to raise some $5 billion in an IPO later this year.
“We look forward to examining records from computers that Mr. Zuckerberg used when he was a freshman at Harvard and other records that will help answer questions about the ownership of Facebook,” Sanford Dumain of the New York City law firm Milberg LLP said in a statement.
“We hope that the court will rule that the time has come for that process to begin,” he added.
Milberg is the latest law firm to take up Ceglia’s cause in court. Its entry into the case is significant because it’s a high-powered law firm known for its involvement in high stakes lawsuits.
Since Ceglia began raising his legal claims to ownership in June 2010, Facebook has been dismissing them as frivolous, or worse. Last week, it filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit claiming it’s nothing more than a “fraudulent shakedown.”
In its motion, Facebook declares “Ceglia, a career criminal and hustler, has perpetrated a massive fraud on the federal courts and Facebook.”
Paul CegliaNeedless to say, that’s not the view of the case taken by Milberg.
“We took a good hard look at all of the information available, including evidence in Mr. Ceglia’s favor, and we believe he deserves to have his day in court,” Dumain declared when Milberg announced its intention to enter the fray.
“It should be up to a jury to weigh the contradictory claims, including evidence that supports Mr. Ceglia’s case, such as his email correspondence with Mr. Zuckerberg and experts’ testimony about the authenticity of the contract,” Dumain added.
The jury scenario seems unlikely, though, and chances are Facebook will pay Ceglia to go away before things get too hairy, as it did with the Winklevoss twins, who received $160 million to settle their ownership claims on the social network.
In his complaint against Facebook, Ceglia claims he hired Zuckerberg in 2003 to perform work relating to StreetFax.com, a website previously operated by Ceglia.
The complaint also alleges that agreement provides that Ceglia would pay Zuckerberg $1,000 to finance his work on “The Face Book.” In exchange, it maintains, Ceglia would own a “half interest (50%) in the software, programming language and business interests derived from the expansion of that service to a larger audience.”
In its motion to dismiss, Facebook, which pulled in $3.7 billion in revenue last year and has more than 800 million users, claims the contract submitted to the court by Ceglia is a forgery created by him to support his fraudulent lawsuit.
Facebook’s experts found the authentic StreetFax contract on Ceglia’s own computer hard drive, the motion explained. That authentic contract concerns only the limited website development work that Zuckerberg performed for StreetFax. It says nothing about Facebook.
It added that the authentic StreetFax contract proves that Ceglia’s fraudulent Work for Hire is just a recently doctored version of the actual contract between Zuckerberg and StreetFax.
Meanwhile, Ceglia alleges that the real fraudster in the case is Facebook. He told Emil Protalinski, of ZDNet, that the putative “authetic” contract discovered by Facebook’s forensic experts was planted on his computer to discredit his case and that his lawyers could prove the document was a phony.
Whether Ceglia’s case is dead in the water or will continue on what’s been a Byzantine path could be decided when both sides appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie Foschio on Wednesday.
Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.
Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/252986/facebook_ownership_case_faces_key_juncture.html
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Basson requests Twitter probe
April 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
2012-04-01 14:32
Johannesburg – Cardiologist Wouter Basson has instructed his legal team to investigate a false Twitter account opened in his name, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
His legal team viewed the Twitter account as a serious threat to Basson’s personal safety, the Rapport newspaper reported.
On Wednesday, Basson’s legal team asked the prosecutor in a hearing of the Health Professions Council of SA to withdraw from the record his allegation that Basson and the SA Defence Force (SADF) waged a chemical war against the South African population.
Basson described the “wild” submission as “scary, because it never happened”.
Basson is appearing before the HPCSA on four charges of unprofessional and unethical conduct.
The charges relate to his conduct as a medical doctor when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare research programme for the SADF force in the 1980s and early 1990s, during the apartheid era.
Feel threatened
On the fake Twitter profile, Basson’s hobbies are listed as including chemical and biological warfare against historically disadvantaged South Africans.
Basson was the former head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme Project Coast.
“You can imagine what the uninformed members of the public think about it [the submission]. I immediately felt threatened because I have had good relationships with the South African population in the past few years,” he told Rapport.
“At a point (from 1997 to 2002), I was in a witness protection programme the government placed me in during and just after the (criminal trial).
“But we went to trouble to set at ease all the people who were possibly angry with me.
“And now, suddenly, this man [the prosecutor, advocate Salie Joubert SC] makes an allegation that we waged a chemical war against the population.
Puts lives in danger
“You can now think how easy it is to abuse such a submission to whip up a few guys to say go and kill him.”
He claimed the submission also placed other people’s lives in danger.
According to Rapport, Basson previously laid charges at the Brooklyn police station, in Pretoria, over a similar false Facebook page set up under his name. It had since been closed.
Article source: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Basson-requests-Twitter-probe-20120401
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