Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rejects Settlement In Facebook Sponsored Stories Case
angry tapir writes "A U.S. District Court judge has rejected a proposed settlement in a lawsuit that alleges Facebook violated users' rights by using their names and recommendations of advertisers to be publicized through a Sponsored Stories program. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, was filed in the Northern District of California by five Facebook members on behalf of as many as 100 million users of the social networking site."
Why should Facebook get to use my picture to promote things I've never heard of? They get to display ads, isn't that enough?
So, let me get this straight... with Facebook, we are the product since they have no tangible property other than what we feed it. The proposed class-action involves an estimated 10 x10^7 people. To make everyone happy, Facebook proposes that they pay $10 x 10^6 to third-party organizations that promote privacy. Not only are they not compensating the people, they are paying roughly a dime a head to a third party organization that has no bearing on Facebooks policies and practices.
Us:"I don't like they way you're treating my data and my posted stories of my life"
Facebook:"Would it make you feel better if I gave this guy you've never met 10 cents?"
The judge feels that Facebook's 100 million affected users may not be getting adequate compensation from this arrangement—and is pondering whether it's even possible to provide so many people with compensation.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Off course that is not enough. It's facebook. All your data are belong to them.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Clearly, this is a case where the lawyers are out to get their fees, with no regard for their clients' interests. The judge should make it clear that if the lawyers propose or accept a settlement that is not clearly within their clients' interests, then legal fees will not be included.
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware
Why did you give your picture to Facebook?
it there. Bring 7olatile world of The Cathedral
Why is the judge worried about user compensation? The way a class action usually works (We all know it, sing along!) is the lawyers get 300 million dollars and the users get a $10 gift certificate to Hot Topic.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
just like software companies are trying to say that we don't OWN anything that we buy from them and therefore first sale doctrine doesn't apply, we too should have the right to only offer up pictures to facebook as a LICENSE - something that facebook doesn't own.. and if they want to use our picture to sell to someone else we should get royalties.
when they were not the ones aggrieved by this heinous theft of personal property? the lion's share of a class action should go to members of the class.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?