Facebook has been hit with a virus that could spread to its 120 million users. The virus has been dubbed "koobface", which tries to gather personal information from users computers such as credit card numbers.

The virus dubbed "koobface" sends a message to all the friends of the infected titled "You look just awesome in this new movie". Users who opened the messaged where asked to download a fake update for Adobe flash player, which was actually the virus itself being downloaded and installed onto victims computers. If users attempted to use any of the major three search engines such as Yahoo, Google, or Live search, users would be taken to contaminated sites.
All users are being asked to run their updated anti-virus scanners to check for potential contamination. Facebook has also posted a response to help users clean infected machines on their security web site.

The "koobface" hit MySpace in August, where users had a similar situation where the virus took over their computer. Researchers believe that this is not the last of the "knobface" virus we will see, but the hacker or hackers are improving it.

There is spam in the world everywhere you look, whether it be in newspapers in the form of adverts or in your inbox as emails offering enhancements to your body or cheap priced software. But the last place you should expect spam is in your Facebook inbox.

It seems that Facebook didn’t like their users getting bombarded with stupid messages either, and they took the issue to court. On Friday, the courts ruled and now the offending spammers, Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital, must pay Facebook a total of $873 million. This breaks the previous record, $234 million, that MySpace received in a similar spamming case.

Most spamming companies turn a big profit each year, but nowhere near as much as they have been ordered to pay Facebook, so the chances of Facebook ever seeing their money is pretty slim. In addition, no one in the company will face jail time meaning the verdict is really more of a warning to other potential spammers, of what could happen if they try it.

The company was charged under a law called CAN-SPAM Act which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003.

A group of Facebook engineers - Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der and Dan Weatherford - have created a small project called Palantir at a Facebook Hackathon event. The project is named after The palantír of Orthanc, a crystal ball-like object from The Lord Of The Rings (yep, they’re nerds).

Anyway, it’s a video of the earth showing Facebook activity visually and geographically. One view shows activity as dots of light that flow upward. Another view shows connections between people around the globe as it occurs. The images above show a little of it, but you really have to see the video to appreciate it. You can see it here.

Facebook says they are strongly considering productizing this, but for now it isn’t on the roadmap. If they do go forward with it, presumably you’ll be able to watch friend connections happening all over the world.

Developers of applications for Facebook’s social networking platform were left upset on Monday, when Facebook unveiled an optional verification service for developers.

The new verification process aims to improve the quality and trustworthiness of applications on Facebook by reviewing submitted applications for their transparency and trustworthiness as well as how useful they are.

However, developers looking to have their application verified will have to pay $375 per application submitted, although the fee is reduced to $175 for students and non-profit organisations. If the application is verified, the verification will last just one year, requiring that the developer re-submits their application to the process, and pays the fee, on an annual basis.

Verified applications will get a "badge" displayed in the application listings and information pages, increased visibility in news feeds, $100 advertising credit and larger allocations of requests, notifications and emails.

While Facebook believes that verification will benefit developers, the developers most certainly disagree. Developers posted comments on the Facebook announcement with a variety of complaints about the new process.

"Users already dis-trust applications on Facebook platform. Now they will dis-trust unverified applications even more. This seems unfair - my application is already ‘well designed’, ‘trustworthy’ and ‘meaningful’ to thousands of users. And I’ve spent a lot of time making it that way, " posted one developer in the announcement thread, "why should I pay $375 a year just because Facebook allowed so many useless, spammy applications in the first place? Why should my application suffer just because I don’t spam my users with adverts (and don’t make any profits)?"

Another developer said "The irony is ALL the apps in the directory are already reviewed and approved and should meet all the standards laid out by Facebook. How can they launch this program without admitting that most apps don’t actually meet their own standards even after having been approved? What’s next, super extra verified apps for $2000"?

Verified applications will start to appear on Facebook in early 2009.

Facebook has revealed that it has hit a huge milestone, 10 billion photos are stored on the site.

Doug Beaver, a Facebook engineer, revealed the statistic yesterday evening on the company’s blog. Perhaps more impressive is that 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day. The company has just over one petabyte of photo storage and serves 15 billion photo images per day.

Beaver also revealed "To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon."

A year ago Facebook was serving 3 billion photos a day, had 160 terabyes of storage for photos and 60 million photos were being uploaded each week. The company believes the photo application is one of the most popular areas of the site.

According to Cnet, rivals Photobucket and Flickr stand at 6.2 and 2 billion respectively.
In reality, Facebook stores four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files stored altogether.

Do you hate the new Facebook?

Well as of this week the option “return to old Facebook” has been disabled, and you are obliged to go to the new Facebook.

But for the old Facebook lovers, here’s a treat for you guys.

Follow these steps to make your old Facebook come back:

1) Go to http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2345053339

2) Click “Go to Application”

3) Add the application

4) Once done, go to http://apps.new.facebook.com/?fbnew_opt_out=1

And that is basically it.

So no need to disable your Facebook account after-all.

Brought to you by Zakeh Blog Staff,

Jimmy P. Semaan

Since he started Facebook in college 4 1/2 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg has learned — sometimes painfully — that he can’t make significant changes to the popular online hangout without triggering an uproar among indignant users who preferred the status quo.

But Zuckerberg, still only 24, is hoping he has found a way to ease the journey down a different road so he won’t have to issue public apologies like he did in each of the previous two years after springing new products on users.

His theory will face a major test Wednesday when Facebook begins forcing its 100 million users to adapt to a redesigned Web site, whether they like the new look or not.

Since unveiling the makeover seven weeks ago, Facebook had left it up to users to decide whether they wanted to switch over. If they didn’t like what they saw, the converts could just click on a link to switch back to the old format.

But that option will be taken away from all users by the end of the week, a shift that Zuckerberg already knows will alienate some of Facebook’s audience and raise the risk of driving more traffic to rival social networks like MySpace and Bebo.

Read more @ Yahoo! News

When you see people at the office using such Internet sites as Facebook and MySpace, you might suspect those workers are slacking off.

But that’s not the case at the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, where bosses are encouraging their staff members to use a new social-networking site designed for the super-secret world of spying.

"It’s every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it’s much, much more," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

The program is called A-Space, and it’s a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie,CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.

The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation’s entire intelligence community September 22.

Full story @ cnn.com

Before I start rambling, I’d like to start off by saying that I never really got into the whole microblogging scene. I tried, time and time again, but it just never kept me interested for very long. Maybe that’s why one day I went as far as getting down on my knees and begged God for microblogging to go away so that I wouldn’t have to keep hearing about the latest Twitter outage from all my favourite news sites. As time went by though, I quickly realized that Twitter, and microblogging in general, was here to stay. That’s why today you’re seeing me post my first ever microblogging-related story, and as much as I find the whole ongoing development very interesting, it will probably be my last.
So why do I say that Facebook could kill off Twitter? Well, because it had microblogging before Twitter was a baby (yeah, I know, Twitter still is a damn baby). You can argue day and night that wall-to-wall posts aren’t mini blog posts, but you can’t deny that Status Updates are exactly what Twitter has been doing from the very start. Think about it. Status Updates = Tweets. Don’t believe me? Well, there is one difference between the two, and this is really the key to microblogging’s success. On Twitter, you can follow anyone you would like, without their approval. Facebook just won’t let you do that.

read more @ neowin.net

Microsoft and Facebook strengthened their existing partnership Thursday with the announcement that Microsoft would be powering the social network’s Web search and sponsored links.

The announcement was made at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting in Redmond. Sources indicate the search services will be integrated into Facebook without many changes to the overall site design.

Facebook will begin using an API from Microsoft some time in the fall. The move mirrors a similar deal between Google and MySpace made almost two years ago. The search giant paid $900 million for MySpace’s search box and ads.

Google’s deal extends across all Fox Interactive sites, which include Rottentomatoes.com, Gamespy.com, fox.com, americanidol.com, and others. In addition to search, Google also has rights to advertising on these sites.

The actual monetary value of Thursday’s Facebook deal was not disclosed, although Microsoft previously invested $240 million in the site last October. That deal made Microsoft the exclusive third-party provider for advertising on Facebook.