Slashkey, the developers behind FarmTown, is actively alerting users to a new virus going around thanks to rogue advertising being displayed within the game. The advertising tells users to beware of a new virus on their computer and once clicked, they are infected with malware even though there was no virus installed on their computer to begin with. Below is a copy of the alert being sent to users.
According to Sophos, Slashkey has posted the following alert within their forums:
If you suddenly get a warning that your computer is infected with viruses and you MUST run this scan now, DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK, CLOSE THE WINDOW IMMEDIATELY. You should then run a full scan with your antivirus program to ensure that any stray parts of this malware are caught and quarantined.
If you do research on many of these spyware programs you will also find a myriad of sites proclaiming they are the only ones who can rid you of these programs. This is not true and on a personal level I urge you to use great caution as some of these so called wonder cures are as much of a scam as the malware you are trying to remove.
Apparently hundreds of users have already been affected but the company is now alerted to the problem and should be filtering out these advertisements. This isn’t exactly a new tactic, as other sites have had similar problems in the past, however FarmTown users have been consistently falling for this scam [...]

Germany’s consumer protection minister is expressing her concerns over Facebook’s privacy policy, and has written an open letter to the social networking company. Ilse Aigner is worried about Facebook’s recent announcement that changes will allow the site to share personal information with “pre-approved” third-party web sites. This sharing of information has had its share of concern around the web, and the fact that now a government official is addressing it may be worrying Zuckerberg and co.
Facebook has defended its position, stating that users can opt out of sharing their data. That does mean that by default, users’ data will be accessible by third-party sites. The only reason I can see that Facebook would take such a risky move in terms of bad PR is that the final service offered to users will be great, or they are going to make a lot of money by selling this data. Certainly, Facebook doesn’t refer to their changes as “selling data”, and probably have plans to allow users to get customized versions of sites based on their preferences, thereby improving their web experience. But nonetheless, at the end of the day, this is what a lot of Facebook users have been worried about: their intimate data being spread across the web. Also, a recent Sophos poll revealed that 95 per cent of Facebook users oppose the privacy changes.
“I was astonished to discover that, despite the concerns of users and severe criticism from consumer activists, [...]

The latest ComScore numbers for the search market reveal an interesting fact: Facebook’s search query volume is rapidly approaching that of the smallest major search engine, Ask. Citi Group, in its own take on ComScore’s numbers, noted Facebook’s 647 million queries in March, which was in turn picked up by Liz Gannes at GigaOm.
That number is equal to about 2.7 percent of all searches performed in the U.S. market — a big number, especially for a company whose business isn’t really search at all. But with almost half a billion users trying to find their way around an ever more sprawling social network, there’s a real need for all those queries.
Measuring Facebook against, say, Microsoft’s Bing does sound like an apples-and-oranges comparison at first. Then again, ignoring the site would create an excessively narrow definition of what search is. It’s not unheard of for large destination sites to become search portals of a sort; YouTube, for example, serves as a portal for a lot of kids, some of whom will go straight to the video site when they need to look up something. Over the years, YouTube has grown big enough that it can actually serve a general search audience, especially with the help of content creators like Demand Media.
The purpose of search on Facebook is a bit more narrow. People tend to be searching for something in particular: a person, a group, an event or an application. Yet over time, if Facebook becomes a central location for those categories [...]

While Facebook is not a company known for pot jokes, the company has decided to limit status updates posted through applications to 420 characters, in contrast to Twitter’s 140 character limit. The status message length was confirmed via a quick post published by Facebook this afternoon, notifying developers of changes to the stream.publish API call.
Due to complications, any status updates that include attachments will be published as general stream stories and will not have the status updated at the top of a user’s profile. While Facebook has limited status updates to 420 characters for some time now, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook publicly acknowledge the limit. Makes one wonder when this limit was imposed and how it was determined.
My guess is that it was an arbitrary number but one would imagine it was somewhat of a youthful decision to chose this limit. Rather than dwelling on the status update length, I’ll let any developers go check out the stream.publish API documentation.
This blog is taken from allfacebook.com by Nick O’Neil

As Facebook makes its way into the inner workings of how governments interact with the public, we’re comparing how different governing entities — from small communities, big counties and entire states and countries — are using its tools. We’ve previously looked at other areas, like parks and libraries. This week, we compare how different governments large and small are using Facebook to get the word out about elections in the US.
Although national and state elections won’t be happening until this November, the topic is relevant today for a few reasons. One is that many local elections happen throughout the year, meaning local governments are busy trying out Facebook as a new place to encourage voting. They’re likely encouraged by seeing Facebook’s relevance in big 2008 campaigns, when both major US political parties, and especially President Barack Obama’s campaign, used the service to promote themselves.
Facebook has also grown by more than 200 million monthly active users in the last year or so, 60 million of whom are in the US. Today, more than 112 million people are using the site every month — that’s a third of the US population, and another reason Facebook is a venue that governments can’t ignore.
But before we start digging in, we should note that there are always a bunch of caveats when it comes to governments and the way they use the web. A variety of laws and established bureaucratic processes define which employees can interact with the public, and what information they can share. [...]