Attention: Facebook and Other Networking Sites User

 Why you should never post your vacation pics on Facebook

The Internet does a whole bunch of things. One thing it doesn't do is forget.
Increasingly, that hard lesson is being taught to Canadians by insurers and employers.
In the latest instance, a Quebec woman has lost her disability benefits after her insurer, Manulife, discovered photos on her Facebook profile of her vacationing. Nathalie Blanchard, 29, had been off work for more than a year. When her monthly benefits stopped, she phoned her insurer for an explanation.
She was told that Manulife had discovered a series of pictures of her on vacation and no longer believed she was disabled. Blanchard countered that the short trips were suggested by her doctor as curatives. The case is headed to court Dec. 8.















  





One of the vacation photos that Nathalie Blanchard posted on her Facebook page that led to her losing her medical payments for depression.




Blanchard's dilemma is one of a growing number of conflicts revolving around the intersection of social networking and the legal system.
"(Searching social networking sites) is fairly common now," says Joe Martins, co-owner of Toronto's Infinity Investigation, a private detective agency.



He described finding pictures of the targets of his investigations on vacation and out at night in bars and clubs.
"Often, they're in the picture doing some sort of physical activity. Then they turn around and say they can't perform it," Martins says.
Is he surprised by what people post publicly online?
"Absolutely," says Martins. "It's like you're putting it into a modern-day encyclopedia."
Blanchard's lawyer, Thomas Lavin, has moral, rather than legal qualms, with the burgeoning investigative tool.
"It's on the same level as insurance companies that hire private detectives to hide behind people's hedges to photograph them mowing their lawn when they're supposed to have a back injury," Lavin says. "It's an invasion of privacy, but it's not illegal."
Blanchard's position is increasingly common.
In September, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia took Mirae Mayenburg to court over Facebook photos that showed her hiking and cycling.
Mayenburg contended that a car accident left her incapable of working certain jobs and made it painful to participate in some of her favourite hobbies. The judge allowed the ICBC to present 69 photos that it argued proved otherwise. (Though the photos were considered, the judge ruled they did not undercut Mayenburg's case.)
"(The Internet) is a commonly used investigative tool for us," says ICBC spokesperson Mark Jan Vrem.
Investigators are keen to point out that they don't use workarounds – posing as long-lost friends to get behind people's Facebook firewalls, for instance. All of the info they've accessed is publicly available, perhaps, as Vrem suggests, because users don't properly understand how to configure Facebook's privacy settings.
Says Vrem: "Some people are not as circumspect as they perhaps should be."
In other cases, a British worker was fired for complaining about being "bored" at work. A Swiss insurance worker (oh, the irony) was let go for Facebooking while at home sick.
"This is not unusual," says Peter Biro, a partner at Toronto's WeirFoulds LLP. "You're going to see kajillions of cases like this out there."
"If the people who are using social networks are at all vulnerable in any areas of their life, they should be very careful about what they post," says defence attorney Lavin, "because whatever they post is part of the public domain."
In the end, even the pros know that when the kids get cautious, it's time to be wary.
"I take my cues from my son," says the ICBC's Vrem. "He told me, `Dad, don't use Facebook. It'll come back to bite you.'"


This is true. People who uses social networking sites should be aware of what their posting because it is almost the same as letting people into your personal lives.. One more thing is, don't lie. Don't tell people things that you are not because they might just come back at you.. Buti na lang wala na din ako Facebook.. GGness..

"Jail broken" iPhones hacked by new virus!



By Jim Finkle

BOSTON - Hackers have built a virus that attacks Apple Inc's iPhone by secretly taking control of the devices via their Internet connections, security experts said.

The virus has been detected in the Netherlands and can only attack iPhones whose users have disabled some pre-installed security features, according to analysts monitoring the progress of the virus.

The hackers are trying to use the virus to obtain passwords to banking sites, according to Graham Cluley, a researcher with anti-virus software maker Sophos. When an iPhone user tries to access a bank website, the Duh Worm directs the browser to a look-a-like site controlled by the hackers, Cluley said.

A spokeswoman for ING Group said the Dutch banking giant discovered a criminal network that attempted to steal banking credentials via hacked iPhones. Dutch clients of ING have been targeted, but there was no indication that clients outside the Netherlands have to worry, she said.

ING has not received any reports from clients that their credentials have been lost, but the bank was monitoring client accounts for suspicious transactions, the spokeswoman said.

The only iPhones that are vulnerable to the Duh Worm are "jail broken" phones, where users disable key Apple security features to get around the terms of usage agreement that they are designed to enforce, analysts said.

For example, Apple prevents users from switching service providers to unauthorized carriers and limits users to the approximately 100,000 programs that the company has vetted for installation on the device. There are thousands of unauthorized programs covering areas including Internet phone calls, WiFi access and pornography.

"The vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones, and for good reason. These hacks not only violate the warranty, they will also cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison.

Three independent security experts said that it is best for iPhone users not to jail break their devices because the security risks are greater than the benefits.




"They're leaving their back door open. Every one else knows what the key is to open that door," Cluley said.

The ING spokeswoman said: "People who use their iPhones in a regular way have nothing to fear."
The case, which was widely reported by security experts on Monday, is the first in which iPhones have been recruited into a "botnet," or army of infected devices that hackers can control from a central "command and control center."

Early this year an unknown criminal gang built a botnet with millions of PCs using a worm known as Conficker. Security researchers feared that it might wreak havoc on April 1 based on code in the worm's software, but that date passed with little fanfare.

Since then, security researchers say that a limited number of Conficker-infected PCs have been used to spread spam, sell fake anti-virus software and perpetrate identity theft.

Mikko Hypponen, an expert on Conficker and chief research officer for security software maker F-Secure, said that Duh could spread from the Netherlands to other countries.

Like the authors of Conficker, the hackers who wrote Duh are motivated to spread the worm because they too are looking for a payoff from their work, he said.

"It's clearly written to make money. That's a first on the mobile side," Hypponen said.
To be sure, iPhones that have not been jail broken face their own security challenges. Yet so far Apple has been able to stay ahead of the hackers.




In July the company issued a software patch to fix a critical bug uncovered by two researchers that made the device susceptible to secret attacks using the SMS system, which mobile devices use to send text messages.
Apple shares rose 3 percent on Monday to $205.88 on the Nasdaq.




 -Yahoo News