Gates Foundation to fund 78 more health projects

The fourth round of grants will fund research projects in 18 countries.

 (Credit: Grand Challenges Explorations)

In its fourth round of funding, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations grants have been awarded to 78 science projects, with each collecting $100,000.

Through its grants, the five-year, $100 million initiative aims to foster "creative projects that show great promise to improve the health of people in the developing world," and as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative is supported by the Gates Foundation.

This latest round of grants brings the total number of Exploration projects receiving funding to 340. Although the group originally anticipated funding roughly 60 projects per round, it is averaging closer to 80.

The foundation reports that the winners come from universities, research institutes, and nonprofits, with research spread across 18 countries on six continents.

The wide range of projects includes a "seek-and-destroy" laser vaccine, cell phone microscopes to diagnose malaria, ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, and disposable paper-based diagnostics devices. All project topics from the four rounds are listed here.

"We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to new innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives," says Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Program, in a statement.

The group says round 5 is open for submissions until May 19, and round 6 will open in September. 
Throughout the initiative, "priority areas of focus" include: enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases. Other areas center on integrated health solutions for: family planning; nutrition; maternal, neonatal, and child health; tobacco control; and vaccine-preventable diseases.

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 

 

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The Bailout Era

The Bailout Age?

The printing press already has its own prominent place in history, so we’re not sure what else to call the first couple decades of the new millennium, but after Monday's news, there’s little debate: time to fire it up!

The European Union and International Monetary Fund announced a plan that comes straight out of the United States’ playbook: smother debt flare-ups with truckloads of “free money” while the central bank manipulates rates.

European leaders unveiled a $957 billion plan to save themselves and their currency. Here’s the quick and dirty:

• The EU will pony up $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion in existing deals for the GIIPS nations (as we’ve taken to calling them...no reason to give pigs such a bad rap)

• The IMF says it's ready with $321 billion

• The European Central Bank (ECB) has abandoned its old stance (and credibility) by launching a program to purchase government and corporate debt.

“This is like pouring Chanel No. 5 on a French ‘lady of the evening,’” Rob Parenteau, editor of The Richebacher Letter, wrote us early this morning, “after a night of wanton debauchery. More public debt will be issued as public debt guarantees and other fiscal assistance are put into place. German bunds are now the most screaming short."

But Parenteau warns that a quick move is not necessarily a smart one. "I would not put on shorts on the euro or euro banks or buy a credit default swap (CDS) on banks until this rally flares out, which I expect by June, if not sooner. By then, you will have an even more advantageous point to pick at the carcass of the fatally flawed by design -- as many argued over a decade ago -- euro zone.”

What of the implications for investors who have been taken on a wild ride of late. "This weekend's actions heavily reinforce the three-to-five year investing case for gold, because there's little reason for investors to view the euro as a relatively ‘hard’ currency," Parenteau argues. "This weekend's actions also weakened the ‘safe haven’ status of German bunds; expect bund yields to keep rising if German politicians approve funding for the off-balance sheet strategic investment vehicle (SIV) contraption that was set up to evade the ‘no bailout’ clause of the euro treaty.”

“The short covering rally should be fierce, but quick,” Parenteau advises, “given the tremendous oversold/overly pessimistic position markets were in going into this weekend. Savvy, cynical professional investors are welcome to go long risky assets like EPP or IBB (a Pacific ex-Japan ETF and biotech ETF, respectively) for the ride, but you must be ready to rip these positions out within a week or two.”

Addison Wiggin 

The Bailout Era originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning, which offers a uniquely refreshing perspective on the global economy, investing, gold, stocks and today's markets. Check out our new special report Investing in Offshore Oil

Addison Wiggin is the executive publisher of Agora Financial, LLC, a fiercely independent economic forecasting and financial research firm. The executive producer of the acclaimed documentary film I.O.U.S.A. and 3 time New York Times best-selling authort, Addison is also the editorial director of Agora Financial’s daily 5 Min. Forecast and The Daily Reckoning. 

The Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution. The Gilded Age. The Cold War. The Information Age.

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May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born

1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.

In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind.

The structure consisted of a plane made of wires and magnetic rings called cores. Each ring contained one bit of data. Every bit on the memory plane could be accessed with a single read-and-write cycle.

In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed. The time it took to request and retrieve information from memory was a microsecond — hundreds of thousands of times slower than memory today, but nonetheless a magnificent achievement in the 1950s.

“When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory,” said Bernard Widrow, who worked on Project Whirlwind with Forrester, in a 2009 interview with Edison Tech Center.

Forrester applied for a patent on his invention May 11, 1951. Project Whirlwind stayed active until 1959, though the technology was never used for a flight simulator.

Source: Today in Technology History; Edison Tech Center 
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Photo: Magnetic core memory removed from an Olympia 15-digit Nixie calculator.
Synx508/Flickr
See Also:

• March 8, 1955: The Mother of All Operating Systems
• Feb. 1, 1951: TV Shows Atomic Blast, Live
• Feb. 4, 1951: Major Assist Removes Enormous Cyst
• April 5, 1951: Happy Birthday, Mr. Pied Piper of Technology
• May 1951: Lockheed, Convair Get Contracts to Build VTOL
• May 8, 1951: DuPont Debuts Dacron
• Oct. 31, 1951: We’ll Cross That Street When We Come to It
• Dec. 5, 1951: ‘Your Car Is on the 12th Floor, Lady’
• May 11, 868: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
• May 11, 1997: Machine Bests Man in Tournament-Level Chess Match

How did bad tax policy contribute to the financial meltdown?

Tax policy and the global financial crisis

 

IT has been widely held that one of the immediate causes of the 2008/2009 US financial crisis is the subprime housing loans there, which via various ingenious financial instruments had at some point in time seriously put at risk the whole global financial system.

Policymakers, meanwhile, are engaged in a debate as to how new regulations could be introduced into financial systems to curb the assumption of excessive risk-taking and, at the same time, look into how banks and financial institutions be subjected to new capitalisation rules going forward.

One area that has not been widely looked at is the role of tax policy in the crisis.

The immediate response by many countries was to cut corporate tax rates as a short term measure to cope with the sharp economic contraction.

But how did bad tax policy contribute to the crisis?

It was only recently that the Internatianal Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produced two reports in response to the questions: “What aspects of the tax system has helped cause or exacerbate the crisis, and whether tax policy needs to be reevaluated” in light of what has happened.

The reports looked at the US income tax system and lessons can be learnt from them since our own system can adopt some of these policy initiatives.

Preference for debt vs equity financing 

This is seen as an obvious link to the crisis.
When a company wishes to finance its business, should it look to borrowings (debt) or should it finance through capital (equity)?

Most tax systems, including Malaysia’s system, favours debt financing over equity financing because of the deductibility of interest payments and the non-deductibility of the cost of equity capital.

Thus, this obvious bias for debt financing is recognised particularly at the corporate level.
With the surge in corporate borrowings in the last decade or so, including leveraged buyouts and the intense activities of private equity funds, the possibility that this bias may have contributed to the risks in the system is a serious consideration.

There is little doubt that under such a bias system, corporate finance will always respond positively to tax considerations.

This tax preference for debt has been long-standing and widely recognised by tax practitioners, something which could make an otherwise non-profitable investment profitable.

The position in Malaysia so far seems to reflect the common bias towards debt financing although the introduction of thin capitalisation rules, which are being awaited, could change that scenario.

The US housing bubble

The bubble is generally understood to have been the effect of increased household borrowings and high house prices.

The tax rule in the United States allows mortgage interest taken out on a home to be fully deductible against income from employment earnings.

Thus with the expectation of increases in home prices, this has raised the expected returns on borrowings to purchase houses.

Analysts believe that this could be a contributing factor but are unable to point to empirical evidence, given the range and complexity of the various instruments that were in place when the bubble burst.

Tax planning and lack of transparency

The need to give further study to this possible link is recognised - that the development of complex financial instruments could in part be spurred by the tax avoidance opportunity that could arise.

Thus, swaps have been used to avoid withholding tax.

The use of offshore low tax jurisdictions to hold funds has helped create an opaque environment.
The G20 initiatives last year in curbing such practice have seen countries with low tax jurisdictions responding to a global initiative to conclude agreements for the exchange of information.

Malaysia is a signatory to such agreements.

Restriction in the transfer of tax losses 

This refers to where losses are not available for carry-forward in the case of a change in ownership.
Economists see this rule as lacking neutrality as they have always argued that tax losses should be refunded or at least be allowed to be carried forward.

The further argument is that such restriction acts as an impediment to efficient acquisitions. The similar restrictive rule in Malaysia, although introduced in law, has been modified in its operation.
This is particularly helpful.

The widely held practice under a VAT (value added tax)/GST(goods and services tax) regime to exempt financial services is seen as a bias towards households using financial services.

What it means is that it encourages consumers to borrow rather than save until they are able to pay for fully-taxed products.

Malaysia’s GST tax rules, which have yet to be enacted, appear to have adopted the same exemption although details as to how these would operate are not yet known.

Conclusion 

The adoption of the New Economic Model (NEM) is perhaps an opportune time to look at our tax policies. New policy approaches should be in sync with the NEM. For example the implementation of the GST, if accompanied by a marked reduction in the corporate income tax rate, should get rid of the bias towards debt. The loss of tax revenue could be made up by higher GST collections from an increase in per capita income, a key aim of the model.

Kang Beng Hoe is executive director of TAXAND MALAYSIA Sdn Bhd, a member firm of the TAXAND Network of independent tax firms worldwide. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the firm. Readers should seek specific professional advice before acting on the views.

Head-Direct HiFiMan HM-801 Audio Player

Suck It, iPod: Meet the King of Geeky Portable Audio Devices

 Reviewed by Eliot Van Buskirk  • May 06, 2010

It used to be there were only two ways to improve the sound quality on your portable music player: Ditch the shoddy included earbuds for real headphones, or hook in a headphone amplifier.

Now there's a third option, in the form of the HiFiMan HM-801 Audio Player.

This is, without a doubt, the first audiophile-worthy portable digital audio player I've encountered in the past 13 years of covering portable audio technology. Sure, some players have had slightly better sound than the iPod, but none could really deliver sound the way sharp-eared audio purists desire. (We're talking about people who own gold-tipped connection cables and headphones that cost more than your laptop.)

But the HiFiMan delivers audio that even the snootiest sound snob will find little to gripe with. It does this with a first-of-its-kind preamp (swappable if there's another preamp your ears desire) and the support of not only standard formats (MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG), but multiple lossless formats (APE, WMA, FLAC). There's even 24-bit resolution and a 96-kHz sampling rate for FLAC files.

That means HiFiMan not only plays lossless files that sound as good as CDs but also 24-bit files that sound better than CDs, with much wider frequency and dynamic ranges. That equates to reproducing very high pitches (even ones outside the human hearing range, which some say colors the sound we can hear), and music with more gradations in volume that allow dynamic nuances to shine through.

HiFiMan connects to your computer via USB (16-bit 48 kHz) or home stereo system with its digital coaxial input (16-bit 44.1 kHz or 24-bit 96 kHz). Bonus: It can double as an excellent home headphone amplifier through its Burr-Brown PCM1704U digital-to-analog converter.

Paired with high-quality headphones, the HiFiMan sounds better than an iPod Classic, reputedly the best-sounding model Apple makes, even when playing the same files. We perceived no hiss or distortion, backing up the strong audio specs (102-dB signal-to-noise ratio) and everything from deep bass frequencies to ultrahigh cymbals sounded clearer, punchier. Sonically, it's drastically better than the iPod in every conceivable way.

We squeezed just over seven hours out of the HiFiMan playing a combination MP3s, lossless files and 24-bit FLAC files. If that's not enough juice, you can pick up a spare battery for another $80. Also worth mentioning is the clean analog volume attenuator that allows smooth, precise control of sound.

Now the bad news: This thing costs $790. By audiophile standards that's a pittance but for the uninitiated that's plain crazy, especially for a rather homely device with a button-driven interface. Oh yeah, the device has no on-board memory — hard drives cause too much audio interference — so you'll have to supply your own SD cards to store your tunes. Forget about popping this monster in your pants either; at 4.4 x 3.1 x 1 inches, it's a bit too big for pockets. A velvet bag and a mini-briefcase come with it for transportation, but who wants to tote something around that qualifies as carry-on luggage?

But the most significant reason you might not want to drop nearly 800 bones on the HiFiMan is that your ears simply might not care enough. Sound quality is a game of decreasing returns, and some people don't get the same charge out of ultraclean, expansive, dynamic, crisp, properly imaged sound that audiophiles do.
But if you're willing to put up the cash and endure its design shortcomings, the HiFiMan's rich quality of sound will enrich the quality of your life.

WIRED Audiophile-pleasing deep, rich, clean sound. Pulls double duty as portable and home-stereo headphone solution. Walkman looks shout "don't steal me." Modular components (amplifier, battery). Comes with screwdriver and schematics for alternate amp designs.

TIRED Barely portable — large awkward chassis hard to carry. Menu and button configuration clearly traveled via flux capacitor from 2001. Only a small selection of 24-bit music is available for sale online. No docking station. You'll need high-quality headphones to enjoy the player's sounds.

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ECB May Kiss Credibility Goodbye: Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer

Commentary by Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer

May 11 (Bloomberg) -- There is an old saying among central bankers that credibility is earned in years of hard work, but can be lost overnight. On Sunday night, the European Central Bank may have said goodbye to its credibility when it agreed to buy the government bonds of euro nations in trouble.

This casts a dark shadow over the euro area’s 750 billion- euro ($980 billion) stability package, which was dressed to impress, and seems to have worked so far. Markets will probably advance in the near term as short positions need to be covered.

A major casualty of the emergency decisions was the ECB. With its move to prop up the failing bonds of governments in financial distress, it has allowed itself to be transformed into an agent of fiscal policy. The intention to sterilize bond purchases means, in effect, that it taxes euro-area private borrowers to support governments in difficulty. In the long run, this is likely to undermine confidence in the ECB and the euro.

Markets last week gave their thumbs down to the Greek rescue program led by the euro area and the International Monetary Fund, probably for two reasons: fears that Greece can’t implement the program, and that Greece wouldn’t return to solvency even if it did.

Here is what has scared investors (apart from the riots in Athens): Even if the IMF program were fully implemented, the Greek debt ratio is projected to rise to 150 percent of gross domestic product by 2013. Assuming an interest rate of 5 percent, Greece would pay 7.5 percent of its GDP to bondholders. With more than 80 percent of creditors being foreign by then, the country would transfer at least 6 percent of its GDP abroad.

No Trust

How likely would it be that Greece can generate a structural current account surplus before having to make interest payments of this magnitude? Traders saw little likelihood of this and expected an eventual debt restructuring. And because they didn’t trust the package that the IMF and euro- area governments have offered Greece, they didn’t trust other euro-member countries in fiscal distress to find a viable solution. This, and not a conspiracy of speculators, was the brew that generated contagion.

The huge stability package has stopped that contagion for the time being, but to ensure lasting success of the coordinated effort, the European Stability Mechanism and the loan guarantee scheme have to be developed into a European Monetary Fund, capable of running adjustment programs and of managing orderly defaults of insolvent countries in the region.

Managing Debt Burdens

Earlier this year, we proposed the creation of such a fund designed to manage fiscal crises in the euro area, including a possible bond restructuring of a member country unable to cope with its debt burden. The fund could issue its own debt and create the nucleus of a common euro-bond market. The European stabilization mechanism agreed by the Council of Finance Ministers opens the door to such an instrument.

Whether the measures announced on the weekend will prove successful depends on whether governments follow up and construct this framework. Without it, the management of public finances will remain ad hoc and crisis-prone. Monetary union may degenerate into the feared “transfer union,” as discretionary bailouts would fuel moral hazard of weak governments.

The ECB has now joined the list of major central banks that have lost their innocence during this financial crisis by moving closer to fiscal policy than seemed possible not long ago. However, the descent of the ECB from the path of virtue has been the most dramatic. The Maastricht Treaty, on which monetary union was based, states that every country is responsible for its own finances and that the central bank is independent from governments. With its decision to buy failing sovereign debt, the ECB has undermined both principles.

Fiscal Agent

To the extent that it does not sterilize the effects of its intervention, it monetizes government debt. To the extent that it does sterilize the purchases, it acts as a fiscal agent, taxing other euro-area borrowers to support a government in fiscal distress. The claim that intervention serves the purpose of creating orderly market conditions seems unconvincing when governments or the ECB decide which market movements are justified and which aren’t.

The ECB may now have years of hard work to restore the credibility that it put on the line on Sunday night.

(Daniel Gros is the director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Thomas Mayer is the chief economist of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt. The opinions expressed are their own.)

--Editors: David Henry, James Greiff.,
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Twitter hit by major disruption

 

The fllaw could have been exploited by spammers 

 

Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends. 

The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to "follow" them on the site.

People who typed "accept" followed by a person's Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers.

The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them.

It could have easily allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts.

Web flaw

  Twitter quickly closed the loophole but was forced to temporarily reset many accounts as it cleaned up the damage. The reset made it look like many users had no followers and were also following no one.


"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to 'force"' other users to follow them," the site said in a blog post.

People were still able to use the service during the disruption.

Twitter allows users to post messages - known as tweets - up to 140 characters long.

People can see what others are writing by choosing to "follow" them. However, unlike many social networks, both parties do not have to reciprocate the friendship.

The new bug allowed many people to force celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, to follow them by simply typing "accept @ladygaga".

This would make it appear that Lady Gaga had chosen to follow them and would also inject a user's tweets into the singer's feeds.

The flaw only worked on the website and not through third-party software used to access the service, such as Tweetdeck.

Twitter has exploded in popularity since 2007, when it was launched, and now has more than 100 million users.
News of the flaw follows the discovery of a recent high-profile security bug at Facebook, another poster child of the social web.

The exploit - now fixed - exploited the site's privacy settings and allowed users to eavesdrop on their friends' live chats and see their pending friend requests.

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Five hidden dangers of Facebook

Facebook claims that it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers, and unwanted marketers? 

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know, when you log onto the social-networking site, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

Facebook came under fire this past week, when 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that the site, among other things, manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use. Also, some Facebook users found their private chats accessible to everyone on their contact list--a major security breach that's left a lot of people wondering just how secure the site is.

In two words, asserts Goodchild: not very.

On "The Early Show on Saturday Morning," Goodchild spotlighted five dangers she says Facebook users expose themselves to, probably without being aware of them:

1. Your information is being shared with third parties
2. Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
3. Facebook ads may contain malware
4. Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
5. Scammers are creating fake profiles

Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

Is Facebook a secure platform to communicate with your friends?

Here's the thing: Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world. Security holes are being found on a regular basis. It is not as inherently secure as people think it is, when they log on every day.

Certainly, there are growing pains. Facebook is considered a young company, and it has been around a few years now. It is continuing to figure this out. They are so young, they are still trying to figure out how they are going to make money. It is hard to compare this to others; we have never had this phenomenon before in the way [so many] people are communicating with each other--only e-mail comes close.

The potential for crime is real. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, victims of Internet-related crimes lost $559 million in 2009. That was up 110 percent from the previous year. If you're not careful using Facebook, you are looking at the potential for identity theft, or possibly even something like assault, if you share information with a dangerous person you think is actually a "friend." One British police agency recently reported that the number of crimes it has responded to in the last year involving Facebook climbed 346 percent. These are real threats.

Lately, it seems a week doesn't go by without some news about a Facebook-related security problem. Earlier this week, TechCrunch discovered a security hole that made it possible for users to read their friends' private chats. Facebook has since patched it, but who knows how long that flaw existed? Some speculate it may have been that way for years.

Last month, researchers at VeriSign's iDefense group discovered that a hacker was selling Facebook usernames and passwords in an underground hacker forum. It was estimated that he had about 1.5 million accounts--and was selling them for between $25 and $45.

And the site is constantly under attack from hackers trying to spam these 400 million users, or harvest their data, or run other scams. Certainly, there is a lot of criticism in the security community of Facebook's handling of security. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the company rarely responds to inquiries.

Do people really have privacy on Facebook?

No. There are all kinds of ways third parties can access information about you. For instance, you may not realize that, when you are playing the popular games on Facebook, such as FarmVille, or take those popular quizzes--every time you do that, you authorize an application to be downloaded to your profile that gives information to third parties about you that you have never signed off on.

Does Facebook share info about users with third parties through things such as Open Graph?
Open Graph is a new concept for Facebook, which unveiled it last month at its F8 conference. It actually is basically a way to share the information in your profile with all kinds of third parties, such as advertisers, so they can have a better idea of your interests and what you are discussing, so Facebook can--as portrayed--"make it a more personal experience."

The theory behind Open Graph--even if it has not implemented it--is its whole business model, isn't it?

That is the business model--Facebook is trying to get you to share as much information as possible so it can monetize it by sharing it with advertisers.

Isn't it in Facebook's best interest to get you to share as much info as possible?

It absolutely is. Facebook's mission is to get you to share as much information as it can so it can share it with advertisers. As it looks now, the more info you share, the more money it is going to make with advertisers.

Isn't there also a security problem every time it redesigns the site?

Every time Facebook redesigns the site, which [usually] happens a few times a year, it puts your privacy settings back to a default in which, essentially, all of your information is made public. It is up to you, the user, to check the privacy settings and decide what you want to share and what you don't want to share.

Facebook does not [necessarily] notify you of the changes, and your privacy settings are set back to a public default. Many times, you may find out through friends. Facebook is not alerting you to these changes; it is just letting you know the site has been redesigned.

Can your real friends on Facebook also can make you vulnerable?

Absolutely. Your security is only as good as your friend's security. If someone in your network of friends has a weak password, and his or her profile is hacked, he or she can now send you malware, for example.
There is a common scam called a 419 scam, in which someone hacks your profile and sends messages to your friends asking for money - claiming to be you--saying, "Hey, I was in London, I was mugged, please wire me money." People fall for it. People think their good friend needs help--and end up wiring money to Nigeria.

A lot of Web sites we use display banner ads, but do we have to be wary of them on Facebook?
Absolutely: Facebook has not been able to screen all of its ads. It hasn't done a great job of vetting which ads are safe and which are not. As a result, you may get an ad in your profile when you are browsing around one day that has malicious code in it. In fact, last month, there was an ad with malware that asked people to download antivirus software that was actually a virus.

Is too big a network of friends dangerous?

You know people with a lot of friends--500, 1,000 friends on Facebook? What is the likelihood they are all real? There was a study in 2008 that concluded that 40 percent of all Facebook profiles are fake. They have been set up by bots or impostors.

If you have 500 friends, it is likely there is a percentage of people you don't really know, and you are sharing a lot of information with them, such as when you are on vacation, your children's pictures, their names. Is this information you really want to put out there to people you don't even know?
This interview, "Five Hidden Dangers of Facebook," was originally published on CBSNews.com.
 
Facebook flooded with fake profiles

Spammers and malware writers exploiting site to infect users

Up to 40 per cent of new Facebook profiles could be fictitious registrations created by spammers and malware writers to infect end users, security firm Cloudmark has warned.

Neil Cook, European head of technology services at Cloudmark, told vnunet.com that research carried out by the firm revealed that between 20 and 40 per cent of new profiles on the popular social networking site could be bogus.

Cook explained that, once set up with a portfolio of fake profiles, virus writers encourage users to click on links to malicious sites by including them on postings on other users' walls or blogs.

Another tactic is to try and get users to visit their profile pages through friend requests or personal messages. The profile page then redirects visitors to a malware site.

"Social networks are very collaborative so it's great for spammers and virus writers to attack," said Cook. "As soon as social networking took off, so did the attacks."
Cook also predicted that SMS spam would eventually seep into the UK market, spreading from China and other Asian countries.
 

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Topics:

Privacy and data protection