Here's looking at you

A major policy change for Facebook has been announced, as the social networking site will open member profiles to public scrutiny via various search engines, according to The Register.

It had previously stood by the belief that no major search engines shall have access to its member database.

It's not a train smash, however. The site is giving users ample warning and members still have time to change their privacy settings.

Some clever spammers' newest tactics involves the creation of image spam rendered in a pseudo 3D layout, says The Register.

Although image spam has been used to confuse spam filters for months, this new 3D effect has been modified by adding colours, changing fonts and inserting random dots and lines.

It makes one wonder how many frustrated artists have turned to spamming.

Sophos has identified China as the leading host of malware-infected Web sites, with as much as 44.8% originating from there, explains Geek.com.

Coming in at a far second is the US, with only 20.8%.

The problem of infected Web sites is increasing, with Sophos seeing 5 000 new infected pages appearing on average every day in August.

It has been determined that a crime of cyber origin is committed every 10 seconds in Britain, according to AFP.

[Facebook] had previously stood by the belief that no major search engines shall have access to its member database.

Ilva Pieterse, ITWeb contributor

This estimate includes all 'crimes', from unwanted sexual approaches to online fraud.

There were 850 000 instances of sex crimes, 207 000 financial fraud crimes committed last year (up more than 30% from 2005), 92 000 cases of identity theft and 144 500 cases of hacking into another PC.

If that's what Britain's statistics look like, I wonder how a similar study will pan out for the likes of China and the US?

A quick warning for all Firefox users - despite a recent update, research firms have found another means by which the program can be exploited, says Search Security.

The researchers found a way to exploit a common handler with a single unexpected URI (uniform resource identifier). So, it seems that although the conditions which allowed for remote command execution in Firefox 2.0.0.5 have been addressed with a security patch, the underlying file type handling issues have not been addressed.

The researchers said they've contacted Mozilla and that "they are working on it". No exact details are being given out about how exactly the flaw can be exploited.

An interesting case has come to light between media company Zango and Kaspersky Labs, and the US has now ruled against the media company, according to InformationWeek.

It seems Zango has been more than a little bit upset about Kaspersky's classification of adware as "spyware", and has sued the Lab to change it.

The judge threw out Zango's lawsuit on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act. Part of the Act states a provider or user of an interactive computer service shall not be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to material that the provider or user considers to be "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable".

Isn't adware all of the above?