News

Facebook’s “authentic name” policy is causing strife in the Native American community. Facebook’s policy prohibits using “words, phrases or nicknames in place of a middle name.” This causes issues for people like Dana Lone Hill, a Native American who was shut out of Facebook when she used her last name and was forced to send in three forms of ID in order to get access to her account. For more on this troubling story, click here:: Facebook is telling Native Americans their names are fake
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Students from the University of Saarland in Germany discovered that 40,000 MongoDB databases, many of which are connected to commercial web servers, are vulnerable to hackers. The German researchers say they were able to read and write access to the databases without even needing special hacking tools. MongoDB is currently working on this issue. For the full story, click here:: 40,000 Unprotected MongoDB Databases Found on the Internet
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Around 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily and one man had the power to take them all down. Laxman Muthiyah found a bug in Facebook that allowed him to deleate any image he was allowed to see. Thankfully, Laxman reported the bug rather than exploited it, which in turn Facebook gave him $12,500 as a thank you. For a full article on this story, click here:: How one man could have deleted any photo album he could see on Facebook
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The latest credit card theft trend is coming from the pump. Credit card skimmers have been found at various gas stations at their automated pumps. Be alert and see which pumps have been tampered with by looking for red tape that indicates that the machine has been compromised. Customers should also use their credit cards at the pump rather than debit cards since they’re easier to report fraud and won’t compromise your bank account. For more on gas station skimmers, click here:: Fuel Station Skimmers: Primed at the Pump
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A tweet by @jeffrybooks that stated “I seriously want to kill people” caused a visit to the account’s owner by Dutch police. Turns out Jeffry van der Goot, the account owner, didn’t write the tweet, but a bot created by “Wxcafe” did. This incident falls under freedom of expression, however incidences such as this have yet to appear in front of a judge. For more details on this story, click here:: Robot tweets “I seriously want to kill people”, prompts police response
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