Facebook gives users more privacy

Facebook is unveiling new privacy settings, designed to simplify the process for its 350 million users, says the BBC.

It is the latest in a string of changes that have been made to its privacy policy this year. The site claims that only 15% to 20% of users have ever adjusted their settings.

One new feature - the ability to control who sees every post made - was made following a stream of requests from users. Facebook will make recommendations about how widely available different postings should be. It suggests that status updates should be visible to everybody.

In a rare green versus green court case, a federal judge in Maryland has halted expansion of a West Virginia wind farm, saying its massive turbines would kill endangered Indiana bats, states The Washington Post.

US district judge Roger Titus ruled that Chicago-based Invenergy can complete 40 windmills it has begun to install on an Appalachian ridge in Greenbrier County.

But he said the company cannot move forward on the $300 million project that will have 122 turbines along a 37km stretch, without a special permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Xhead = Wales gets £44m supercomputing institute

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) has announced a £44 million high-performance computing (HPC) institute for Wales, writes Computing.co.uk.

Called HPC Wales, the project will be co-funded with £10 million from BIS's strategic investment fund, which was bumped up by £200 million, to £950 million, as announced by chancellor Alistair Darling in the government's pre-budget report.

The Welsh secretary Peter Hain pointed out the need to give industries real help to aid recovery and long-term growth. "This means creating the right conditions for enterprise and maintaining the UK's position as one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business," he added.

Add Amazon's EC2 to the roster of cloud-based services being exploited to do the bidding of malware gangs, reports The Register.

Over the past few days, a new variant of the Zeus banking Trojan has been spotted using the popular Amazon service as a command and control channel for infected machines. After marks get tricked into installing the password-logging malware, their machines began reporting to EC2 for new instructions and updates.

"We believe this was a legitimate service that was purchased and compromised via a vulnerability," such as a weak password, says Don DeBolt, CA's director of threat research. "It could have been any vulnerable system on the Internet."