Here is how social networks can take dumb criminals and make them even dumber.

A thief who stole a computer and other items from a woman’s house logged into the the woman’s Facebook account and boasted about the theft, even going so far as to say that the Television in the her house wasn’t good enough to take.

The items were taken from Victoria Richardson, who resides in the UK. The thief took an iPhone, a Nintendo DS, a handbag, some cash and credit cards and a computer. After the crime had been committed Victoria logged into her Facebook account only to find that the bragging bandit had left messages on her profile, stating:

“on my new laptop”

“Listening to music on my new phone feels so good.”

“I have the laptop , phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it, ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make”.

“regards your night time burglar”.

Victoria Richardson stated: “I felt very spooked. I have never felt like that before. It felt like they were rubbing my nose in it.”

However, the social networking bandit shows that the criminal isn’t very bright. Publishing a record of their crime on Facebook can only help the police with their investigation. It wouldn’t even be surprising if the thief has a Facebook profile of their own, since they had no trouble figuring out what Facebook is and using it as a tool for their bravado.

Using Facebook’s social search, you could take the comments above as examples of the thief’s writing style and compare it to comments on other Facebook profiles whose geographic location is near the victim’s.

Source: Mashable

Spokeo search allows you to track people and friends on your email contact list across most of the top social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Myspace.

Users can login to the Spokeo search service using their logon from various popular email accounts and Spokeo will search their contact list for users that are registered on the dozens of social network sites that Spokeo indexes.

In addition, Spokeo also offers special services for law enforcement, job recruiters and human resource professionals.

You can try the Spokeo service for yourself below.

ExecTweets is a new social networking service from Federated Media and Microsoft that allows users to find and follow top business executives and CEOs on Twitter.

ExecTweets is a social network search that aggregates the tweets of the top business executives and allows people to follow the most high-powered business tweets.

You can check out the ExecTweets web site at Exectweets.com

Some of the executives that can be found on ExecTweets.com are:

Adam Brown, Coca-Cola
Barry Judge, BestBuy
Brad Smith, Microsoft
Craig Newmark, Craigslist
Evan Williams, Twitter
Jay Adelson, Digg
John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing
Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks, HDNet
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Pete Cashmore, Mashable
Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com
Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media

In what may be a historic first for both the legal profession and online social networking, lawyers in Australia convinced a judge to allow them to serve legal documents on a couple using the social network Facebook after failing to serve the documents in person.

The Australian couple had defaulted on their mortgage and have now been served legally binding court papers through the Facebook social network.

Attorney Mark McCormack thought up the Facebook plan after it became obvious that the couple was intentionally avoiding being served with the legal papers.

The couple had failed to respond to numerous emails from McCormack’s law firm and missed a court appearance on Oct 3.

McCormack stated that the couple had basically “vanished”, so he looked to Facebook as a viable alternative to traditional process serving methods.

McCormack said: “It’s somewhat novel. We don’t know of any other lawyer who has used Facebook in this way.”

McCormack also said that he believes there was no other way to find the couple, noting: “They weren’t available at their residence. They no longer worked at the place given in some documents as the last place of their employment.”

The Facebook profiles showed the couples’ birth dates, email addresses and friend lists.

The personal information found on their Facebook profiles was enough to convince the court that Facebook was a legally viable method for contacting the defendants.

However, in giving permission to use the Facebook site, the judge required that the legal documents be sent via private email so that other Facebook users could not read the contents of the papers.

Courts have previously allowed judgements to be sent by email, but it is not known if Facebook or any other social networks have been used for this type of process serving.

The Facebook social network currently has more than 140 million users.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

A recent military intelligence report draft from the U.S. Army’s 304 Military Intelligence Battalion Open Source Intelligence Team warns that the Twitter social network could be used as a communication tool for terrorists planning an attack.

The report outlines three possible scenarios where terrorists could use the Twitter social networking tool, citing the use of Twitter by activists during the Republican National Convention to update each other on police activity as well as Hezbollah-organized Twitter feeds as examples of how the popular social network has already been used by radical groups for communication.

The three possible Twitter terrorist scenarios listed in the report include:

1. The use of cell phones with a Google maps/Twitter mash-up to plot where they are, terrorists could use the Twitter social network to communicate in near-real time with updatea about troop locations and movements.

2. One terrorist has two cell phones — one for Twitter updates and another which is connected to an explosive device or a “suicide vest.” A second terrorist also has two cell phones — one for Twitter updates and the other to detonate the bomb. They could communicate using Twitter to synchronize the “exact” time for an attack.

3. A terrorist uses the Twitter account of a member of the US military. The terrorist gets information out of the target and uses it for identity theft, hacking or physical attacks.

You can read the report below:

Source: WashingtonPost.com

Today IBM launched it’s business social network service called Bluehouse. Bluehouse will offer business professionals the best of both social networking services and business-collaboration tools.

Bluehouse is a software-as-a-service site. Bluehouse will be free during its public beta release. Once the beta testing is over, in a few months, subscription prices will start.

Bluehouse will feature a set of online collaboration tools, including instant messaging, networked conferencing, file sharing, profiles, directory and tools to build business social networks.

Linkedin.com and Facebook.com are two of the top social network sites that are currently used by some companies for business collaboration and networking. Like Facebook, Bluehouse will allow people to quickly collaborate with one another. However, Bluehouse has special management options to ensure that privacy and other security controls are in place for businesses.

For more information on the Bluehouse social network, visit bluehouse.lotus.com.

Source: ComputerWorld

Almost 25 percent of companies restrict employee access to Facebook.com, MySpace.com and other social network sites. The statistic comes from a survey of 200 HR professionals.

The number of Americans using social networks has tripled in the past few years and the use of these sites has grown during business hours. People 35 and older are using Facebook.com and MySpace.com in large and growing numbers.

Some companies overlook the use of social networking during work hours but others view social networks as “productivity killers”.

Around 8 percent of businesses reportedly encourage workers to use social networks, and 10% of companies surveyed say that social networks are valuable sites for marketing, networking and sales efforts. In addition, some companies say that banning the use of social networks like Linkedin.com and Facebook.com could make it difficult to recruit young employees.

The majority of businesses aren’t formally dealing with the issue of social networks. Fifty-nine percent of companies do not have a formal corporate policy on using social networks during work hours. Almost 50 percent of companies reported that social networks aren’t an issue as long as employees complete their work. So far, formal company policies on social networks are minimal because social networking is such a new phenomenon.

A recent study from a U.K. network security firm Global Secure System showed that employees are using 30 minutes or more per work day on social networks. Lost productivity is not the only reason that some companies ban the use of social networks at work. Computer viruses and the exposure of private company information are some of the dangers raised by too much social network usage.

More than two out of three information technology employees surveyed by Network World in 2007 reported that they use social networks. IT employees are more likely to use the professional social networks like LinkedIn.com, but Facebook.com and MySpace.com are used as well.

Source: Network World

A man whose personal information was posted on a fake Facebook profile has filed a landmark lawsuit for damages in the UK.

A fake personal profile for Mathew Firsht was created on the Facebook social network using his name, date of birth and falsely showing him as a memember or some gay groups.

The fake profile also falsely stated that Firsht was ‘Looking for whatever I can get’ in his relationship entry and had avoided repaying personal loans.

Firsht has now filed a lawsuit against former friend and classmate Grant Rapheal for libel and misuse of his private information. This is believed to be the first defamation case involving Facebook in the UK.

The suit alleges that Mr Rapheal setup the Facebook profile called ‘Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?’ after they had a falling out.

Mr Firsht’s lawyer Lorna Skinner stated that the private personal information that was posted to the false Facebook profile included his location, activities, date of birth and relationship details.

The Facebook profile also falsely indicated his sexual orientation and political affiliations.

There were also false claims that Firsht’s business could not be trusted and were a credit risk.

The profile was on the social network for 16 days before Mr Firsht’s brother found them. They were then removed by Facebook employees.

Source: ThisIsLondon.co.uk

A judge in Viera, Florida has ordered two teenage boys to post an apology on video-sharing site YouTube.com as punishment for a drive-through window prank that led to battery and criminal mischief charges.

The prank, called “fire in the hole”, occurred last July and involved fast-food employee Jessica Ceponis at a Taco Bell drive-through window.

Ceponis handed the teens their soft drinks. After returning to the window to give them their change, they yelled, “Fire in the hole!” and hurled a large drink at Ceponis and then took off in their car.

The boys posted a video of the prank on YouTube.com, along with other video clips showing similar pranks. The teens to post the apology video on YouTube today. The video will show them facedown and handcuffed on the hood of a car.

The prosecutor, judge and defense attorneys who created the YouTube video apology as punishment hope it will serve as a deterrent to other people.

Police and prosecutors point to the increasing number of kids and teens who film sick pranks and post them online in an effort to achieve some level of internet fame.

Ceponis said she originally thought the prank was a personal attack but learned from some of her customers that a video of the incident had been posted on the YouTube website. She used the YouTube video to trace the teens’ MySpace accounts.

“They were bragging about what they had done and how funny it was,” Ceponis said.

She managed to befriend the troublemakers online, while keeping her real identity a secret. After she had enough information to confirm that they were behind the attack, Ceponis used a phone book to track down one boy’s mother. The mother the provided the names of the other boys involved, she said.

Source: USAToday.com

Human rights activists are using a clever combination of Facebook and Google Earth to find wanted Darfur war criminals and bring them to justice.

A Facebook page has been created on the social networking website encouraging people to report the sightings of Ahmed Haroun and Ali Kushayb.

Both men were indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes a year ago.

Neither men have been captured and brought to justice.

Dr James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust which set up the Wanted for War Crimes Watch List page on Facebook.com said “The men are suspected of hundreds of thousands of murders. Someone, somewhere, knows where they are.”

Google Earth and Google Maps are being used to map known movements of the two Sudanese men, each wanted on more than forty counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Darfur.

The Watch List even lists Ahmed Haroun’s phone number and office address.

Mr Donovan stated “He isn’t a fugitive hiding in a cave somewhere, but a bland looking man in a suit, sitting behind a desk in Khartoum.”

Khartoum has refused to surrender Mr Kushayb and Mr Haroun to the Court.

Rather, Mr Haroun has been promoted to the position of Sudan’s Minister for Humanitarian Affairs. He is currently responsible for the welfare of the victims of his alleged crimes.

As well as having vast power over humanitarian operations, he is responsible for liaisons with the International UN/African Union peacekeeping force tasked with protecting civilians against such crimes.

The other suspect, Mr Kushayb, was in custody in Sudan on other charges at the time that the ICC warrants were issued, however, last October the Sudanese Government announced he had been released, reportedly due to ‘lack of evidence’.

Source:Telegraph.co.uk