Facebook has won yet another massive judgment against a spammer who already owes $234 million to MySpace.
A California federal judge on Thursday granted Facebook’s request for a default judgment against Sanford Wallace, who is known to have been involved with spamming since the mid-1990s and with junk faxing before that. Court documents indicate that Wallace and an associate who was later dropped from the case spammed Facebook users with phishing messages. Those who clicked on the links and submitted login information to phishing sites allowed Wallace and his associate to then spam the phishing victim’s friends, in turn generating more potential phishing victims. Facebook claims that Wallace also received payment for redirecting some spam recipients to Web sites that pay for referrals.
Facebook sought damages of more than $7 billion dollars, as allowed under the CAN-SPAM Act and the California business code.

Expressing skepticism in his ruling that such a figure would be proportionate to Wallace’s offences, Judge Jeremy Fogel instead awarded Facebook $710,737,650.

“The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,” Fogel said in his ruling.

Fogel also said that because of Wallace’s willful violation of a temporary restraining order and injunction, the Court has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

Facebook won’t have an easy time collecting its award. Wallace already owes MySpace $234 million from a judgment rendered in May, 2008.

Last November, Facebook won $873 million in damages — the largest award to date under the 2003 Can-Spam Act — from spammer Adam Guerbuez and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital.

Asked to specify how much of that award Facebook has been able to collect, a company spokesperson responded, “We continue to work on collecting as much as possible from Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue (likely far less than the full amount) and have hired a firm to help with this.”

Facebook lets people leave their marks online after they have passed away, with profiles of the dead remaining as tributes in the global social networking community.

“When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” Facebook director of security Max Kelly said in a blog post yesterday.

“To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialised’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.”

Privacy settings on memorialised accounts only let confirmed friends or family members see them.

An Australian company is “selling” friends for lonely Facebook Inc. members, according to reports.

Online marketing firm uSocial.net — who reportedly sold Twitter followers in the past — offers 1,000 friends for about $177.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook warned that people should be careful before taking advantage of such offers.

The company prohibits personal profile use for commercial gain.

Meanwhile, Facebook says its Mobile service reached a milestone — more than 65 million users.

Eight months ago Facebook Mobile had 20 million users, the company said.

This was an article taken up from a news site, which details about Facebook and Relationships:

Married couples, beware of Faceboook. It fuels jealousy in your spouse.

The more time you spend surfing this social networking website, the more jealous your partner feels, says a new Canadian study.

The study also finds that the need for popularity drives young people to disclose more personal information on Facebook than they normally would reveal.

In their study, Emily Christofides and Amy Muise of the University of Guelph near Toronto say Facebook use leaves many triggers for jealousy in your partner.

Says lead author Amy Muise,”You check your partner’s (Facebook) page and you see a post from someone you don’t know that says, ‘It was great seeing you last night’.

“Even though it could be something very innocent, it can easily be interpreted another way.”Once triggered, she says, Facebook-fuelled jealously leads your spouse to dig for more information about your chat partners, thus setting in motion a vicious cycle.

If it is not stopped immediately, your relationship may soon go from “married” to “complicated” to divorced.

According to the study, though the majority of people (76 per cent) are concerned about privacy and information control, they still disclose a great deal of personal information in online environments.

“They share and show more about themselves than they might in other social settings. We wanted to find out if different psychological factors are involved in that behaviour,” says co-author Christofides.

This includes information about birthdays, email addresses, hometowns, school and degree major, and intimate photographs, she says.

Christofides says that the nature of the social networking website is a contributing factor as Facebook includes a template where users fill in information – from their name to relationship status to even their religion.

“This creates ‘norms’ regarding what specific information to disclose based on what others have disclosed,” she says.

As a result, people may choose to leave out revealing information., she adds.

“The need for popularity was (also) found to be a significant predictor of information disclosure,” adds lead author Amy Muise. Thus information disclosure becomes the key factor in assessing one’s popularity on Facebook.

“What others share and say about you is also a part of Facebook. The people who are the most popular are those whose online identity is actively participated in by others. So the more you share, the more others respond,”says the study.

Thus, popularity and disclosure become inextricably linked, the researchers say.

“People with a high need for popularity may indeed care about their privacy, but they may not be willing to sacrifice their popularity by implementing privacy controls,” according to Christofides.

As part of their study, the two researchers surveyed 343 Facebook users, all university students between the ages of 17 and 24.

Facebook, which has over 200 million users worldwide, is also the most popular networking website in Canada. The study has been published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behaviour

Talk about Facebook creating a bad impression among employers, But its not facebook, its just their policy, read this article which was on cnet to know more:

The word around is that Facebook users risk having a lower GPA. Using the social-networking site could have another unpleasant side effect: getting you fired. At least that’s what happened to a Swiss insurance worker who lost her job after surfing Facebook while out sick, her employer said Friday.

The unnamed woman said she had to be away from her monitor lying in the dark, but was then seen to be active on Facebook. Insurance company Nationale Suisse said in a statement that behavior had destroyed its trust in the employee.

“This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract,” a spokesman for the firm said.

The woman admitted to having used Facebooked on her iPhone, but accused the insurance company of spying on her by sending a mysterious friend request that made the company see her activities. The company denied the accusation and said a colleague stumbled over her activity, before Nationale Suisse banned use of the popular site in the company.

But she said she is not suing the company and that she is happy to have gotten a neutral termination letter and doesn’t want to go back. “My trust for this employer is gone,” the 31-year-old woman told Swiss daily newspaper 20 Minuten.

“Facebook is dead for me,” she added.

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