Facebook apps leaked users' personal data to advertisers, other third parties, for years

A Facebook security hole allowed advertisers and other third parties to access user accounts and personal data, according to a blog post today from internet security firm Symantec. They identify the exposure as having been active for as long as Facebook has offered applications on its platform, beginning in 2007— so, four years.
That unintended access included "profiles, photographs, chat, and the ability to post messages and mine personal information," wrote Symantec's Nishant Doshi, who is credited with finding the issue along with colleague Candid Wueest. "Fortunately, these third-parties may not have realized their ability to access this information."

Facebook today said the problem has been fixed, and there is no evidence that any actual private data was leaked. More from the Symantec post:

Symantec has discovered that in certain cases, Facebook IFRAME applications inadvertently leaked access tokens to third parties like advertisers or analytic platforms. We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.
Access tokens are like 'spare keys' granted by you to the Facebook application. Applications can use these tokens or keys to perform certain actions on behalf of the user or to access the user's profile. Each token or 'spare key' is associated with a select set of permissions, like reading your wall, accessing your friend's profile, posting to your wall, etc.

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Triple Cheetah Cute Sound Madness

Now we don’t wanna overload you on cat videos, but we’ve got a perfect pair for you here today. What’s the problem with kittens? They turn into cats and they get a little less cute. But cheetahs seem to have solved this problem by retaining their cuteness into adulthood. Case in point:

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Why Microsoft is Buying Skype for $8.5 Billion

midnight: Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion, in an all cash deal. The deal closed a few hours ago. 
is close to finalizing a deal to buy Skype for between $7 billion to $8 billion
. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the news after we had first reported it yesterday. The announcement is likely to come out later today or tomorrow morning, according to several reports. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft is said to be a big champion of the deal, the largest in the history of the company. Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates will host a press conference in a few hours.
Skype has been up for sale for some time, thanks to some very antsy investors. My sources indicated that the both eBay and Silver Lake Partners have been getting nervous about the delayed initial public offering and have been pushing for a sale of Skype. Facebook and Google were said to be earlier dance partners for Skype, and Microsoft was a late entrant and is now close to walking away with the prize.
It won’t surprise me if Microsoft comes in for major heat on this decision to buy Skype — and the software company could always botch this purchase, as it often does when it buys a company. The Skype team is also full of hired guns who are likely to move on to the next opportunity rather than dealing with the famed Microsoft bureaucracy.
I also don’t believe that Facebook and Google were serious buyers. Google, with its Google Voice offering, doesn’t really need Skype. In essence, I feel that Microsoft was bidding against itself. Even then, I personally think this is a bet worth taking, especially for a company that has been left out in the cold for so long.

• Skype gives Microsoft a  boost in the enterprise collaboration market, thanks to Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities, especially when competing with Cisco and Google.
• It gives Microsoft a working relationship with carriers, many of them looking to partner with Skype as they start to transition to LTE-based networks.
• It would give them a must-have application/service that can help with the adoption of the future versions of Windows Mobile operating system.
• However, the biggest reason for Microsoft to buy Skype is Windows Phone 7 (Mobile OS) and Nokia. The software giant needs a competitive offering to Google Voice and Apple’s emerging communication platform, Facetime.

Guess Who’s The Big Winner
The biggest winner of this deal could actually be Facebook. The Palo Alto-based social networking giant had little or no chance of buying Skype. Had it been public, it would have been a different story. With Microsoft, it gets the best of both worlds — it gets access to Skype assets (Microsoft is an investor in Facebook) and it gets to keep Skype away from Google.
Facebook needs Skype badly. Among other things, it needs to use Skype’s peer-to-peer network to offer video and voice services to the users of Facebook Chat. If the company had to use conventional methods and offer voice and video service to its 600 million plus customers, the cost and overhead of operating the infrastructure would be prohibitive.
Facebook can also help Skype get more customers for its SkypeOut service, and it can have folks use Facebook Credits to pay for Skype minutes. Skype and Facebook are working on a joint announcement and you can expect it shortly.
Why Did Skype Want To Sell?
Skype had filed for an IPO and was going to do about a billion dollars in revenues and was on its way to becoming profitable. So why sell? Silver Lake and eBay were both getting impatient and wanted to lock in their profits. Some sources also believe that Skype’s revenues had stalled.
The company had bet heavily on is video sharing service. The premium version of video calling and sharing was a way for Skype to increase its average revenue per user and move into the enterprise market. However, given Skype’s DNA is that of a consumer Internet company, the challenges are not a surprise.
So Who Made What?

• Using the $8.5 billion price as the likely sale price, eBay gets $2.55 billion for its 30 percent stake in Skype. So in the end, eBay did make money on the Skype deal.

The Skype Founders

• Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the co-founders with their 14-percent stake, take home about $1.19 billion. Damn, these guys know how to double dip!
• Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.
• Andreessen Horowitz had 3 percent of the deal and made $205 million profit on their $50 million initial investment.

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AN INTERESTING CHALLENGE FOR YOU

There are more than 100 world known personalities on this painting. If you can name a minimum of 25, you may consider yourself a well-informed person.

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Frog Baby

On 2006, this bizarre-looking baby was born in Nepal, attracting a huge number of onlookers to witness the astonishing sight. The bizarre baby, however, died after half an hour of its birth. the baby has a condition called anencephaly, a neural tube defect (like the cyclops baby), with no proper brain formation.

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There is a town in Colorado called Dinosaur.

In 1966, Artesia, CO changed its name to ‘Dinosaur’ in order to take advantage of the nearby Dinosaur National Monument. As a result, many of the streets in town have subsequently been given dinosaur names, including: Brontosaurus Boulevard, Stegosaurus Freeway, Triceratops Terrace, Cletisaurus Circle, and Tyrannosaurus Trail.

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The longest full name ever of a person.

The longest full name ever is Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Jack Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft, Sr.

Adolph Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft, Sr. was born in 1904 near Hamburg, Germany. was born in 1904 near Hamburg, Germany.

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Toward the end of his life, billionaire Howard Hughes was known for storing his urine in bottles.

During Hughes’ later years he was probably best known for the dramatic eccentricities he displayed. He became extremely germophobic, insisting that anything handed to him be wrapped in tissues. A painkiller addict, Hughes also refused to cut his hair or fingernails and wore Kleenex boxes as shoes.

During the last decade of his life he would travel sporadically, working for days without sleep and in complete solitude in darkened hotel rooms. And yes, he used to store his pee in large jars.

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Mathematician William Shanks spent 15 years calculating the value of pi to 707 places…but he made a mistake on the 528th digit.

Luckily, this discovery was made over 60 years after his death – Shanks would not have been pleased to know that he’d accidentally written a 5 instead of a 4 – which threw off the next 179 calculations!
Pi is an irrational number that describes the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It has an infinite number of digits, but that doesn’t stop mathematicians from calculating it to as many places as they can.
Thankfully, now that we’re calculating pi to trillions of places, we have advanced computers to help, so no more careless human errors!

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Some hair bands manufactured in China are made of recycled condoms.

Supposedly the condoms are unused rejected ones, but it’s not clear whether or not they were repurposed after having served their originally intended function. In that case, this could lead to the spread of disease.

According to government regulations, the prophylactics (technical term for condoms) should have been sent to a plastics factory and broken down first. Instead, the rubbers were just inserted directly into the center of the hair bands in their original state. When some women took their hair bands apart, they found out what they were made of.

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