Tag Archives: technology

| Gang stole $45m from cash machines across globe in hours, say prosecutors!

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Gang stole $45m from cash machines across globe in hours, say prosecutors ~ Associated Press in New York, guardian.co.uk.

‘Virtual criminal flash mob’ used bogus swipe cards loaded with data from hacked bank databases to commit thousands of thefts.

cash machine theft

Seven people are being held in connection with a case US prosecutors describe as a ‘massive 21st-century bank heist’. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP

A gang of criminals stole $45m (£29m) in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, US prosecutors have said.

Seven people were being held on Thursday in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from machines using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved quickly, working in cells to loot financial institutions around the world.

US attorney Loretta Lynch called it “a massive 21st-century bank heist”.

One of the suspects was caught on surveillance cameras, his backpack loaded down with cash, authorities said. Others took photographs of themselves with giant wads of notes as they made their way up and down Manhattan.

Here’s how it worked:

Hackers got into bank databases, eliminated withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards and created access codes. Others loaded that data on to any plastic card with a magnetic stripe – old hotel key card or expired credit card worked fine as long as they carried the account data and correct access codes.

A network of operatives then fanned out to rapidly withdraw money in multiple cities, authorities said. The cells would take a cut of the money, then launder it through expensive purchases or ship it wholesale to the global ringleaders.

It appears no individuals lost money. The thieves plundered funds held by the banks that back up prepaid credit cards, not individual or business accounts, Lynch said.

She called it a “virtual criminal flash mob”, and a security analyst said it was the biggest cash machine fraud case she had heard of.

There were two separate attacks, one in December that reaped $5m (£3.2m) worldwide and another in February that brought in about $40m in 10 hours in about 36,000 transactions. The scheme involved attacks on two banks, Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman, prosecutors said.

The plundered machines were in Japan, Russia, Romania, Egypt, Colombia, Britain, Sri Lanka, Canada and several other countries. Law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen countries were involved in the investigation.

The accused ringleader in the US cell, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pena, was reportedly killed in the Dominican Republic late last month, prosecutors said.

An indictment accused him and the other seven New York suspects of withdrawing $2.8m in cash from hacked accounts in less than a day.

Such cash machine fraud schemes are not uncommon.

Some of the fault lies with the ubiquitous magnetic strips on the back of the cards. Much of the world has abandoned them in favour of chip and pin cards. But because US banks and merchants have stuck to cards with magnetic strips, they are still accepted around the world.

Lynch would not say who masterminded the attacks globally, who the hackers are or where they were located, citing an ongoing investigation.

Lajud-Pena was found dead with a suitcase full of about $100,000 in cash. Dominican officials said they arrested a man in the killing who said it was a botched robbery.

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| Your online freedom is worth fighting for, isn’t it?

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Your online freedom is worth fighting for, isn’t it? ~

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      We need to find a means of realigning the balance between who profits from personal information and who loses.
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Courtesy of technology, we are all authors today as well as audiences – not to mention our own part-time publicists, social secretaries, agents and ambassadors. Though some people still shun social media, for most of us “identity” is something we forge in the eyes of the world, composed of countless comments, tags, status updates, images, and half-forgotten submitted forms.

If there’s one thing that publicists and ambassadors alike have long known, it’s that we cannot control the afterlife of our words. As soon as they are written or spoken they become the property of the world, grist to its mills of rumour and opinion and to a vengeful eternity of quotation and misquotation. When it comes to our online outpourings, forgetfulness is equally impossible. Data only accumulates, and the uses to which it can be put defy all anticipation.

This doesn’t mean anticipation isn’t a game worth playing, though. What might the thousands of words and images sent out by a teenager today be used for decades down the line, not to mention the gigabytes of data representing their recorded actions and preferences? The right algorithms can crunch this information into almost any context, from credit scores to health and motor insurance premiums; from indexes of employability and influence to net worth.

Hence the European Union’s recent emphasis on revising the rules around data protection, and on our so-called right to be forgotten – a proposition that raises important questions: what counts as personal data in the first place, where burdens of proof and administrative effort will lie, and how amenable present business models are to such a notion in the first place.

For some people it’s a losing battle, and scarcely worth debating. When you sign up to the terms and conditions of a particular service, they argue, you should know what you’re getting into. And if you’re using that service for free, you should accept that your words and actions themselves form the product that’s being sold.

It’s an appealingly absolute argument: shut up and put up, or opt out. Yet what it fails to acknowledge is the degree to which many alleged options are becoming less optional. Don’t want to own a mobile phone, have a social media account or provide your personal details to online merchants? Count yourself out of the running for an increasing number of jobs, insurance schemes and government services. And don’t forget that the gaping holes in your data will set red flags waving across a host of algorithms every time you do pop up on the grid.

baby's and man's hand on keyboard

What might the gigabytes of data representing our recorded actions and preferences be used for decades down the line? Photograph: Garry Gay/Alamy

Apocalyptic pictures are easy to paint, of course. Yet personal privacy already looks like the rock on which one utopian vision of technology will founder. This is the notion that openness is a certain good, and that “free” is automatically aligned with “freedom” – a faith that’s hard to maintain in the light of the consequences of putting so much of our identities into the hands of third (and fourth, and fifth) parties.

As the author and computer scientist Jaron Lanier puts it in his recent book,Who Owns the Future?, “It is all too easy to forget that ‘free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.” As they stand, most free and open online business models rest on a grotesque inequality between what is given by the many – detailed, constantly updated personalised data – and what is taken by the few: profit, knowledge, and the indefinite and largely unaccountable possession of both.

Realigning this balance is a more complex business than just earmarking certain types of data for deletion. It’s also, though, a battle eminently worth fighting. To protect our rights as 21st-century citizens, able to participate in society on an equal footing, means affording our digital shadows some of the same protections that guarantee our own freedom – freedom from lies and abuse, from indefinite detention, from the unappealable verdicts of unseen tribunals.

All of the above describes the ways in which some information systems work now – as if we were nothing more than data ourselves. Yet – to quote Lanier again – “people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all”. We must not betray the great gifts of our tools by valuing ourselves too little.

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online spying BB CYBERCRIME

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| More money than sense: Prince Alwaleed ‘Severs Ties’ With Forbes Billionaire List — Claims Bias Against Mideast Investors!

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Prince Alwaleed ‘Severs Ties’ With Forbes Billionaire List — Claims Bias Against Mideast Investors ~ 

Today Forbes came out with its latest billionaires list. 

After the publication of the 2013 edition, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal has informed the publication that he would no longer like to be included (thank-you-very-much).

According to a press release from the Prince’s investment firm, Kingdom Holding Company, he sent a letter to Steve Forbes severing his relationship with the list. That means Forbes will no longer receive information from Kingdom about its finances.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Kingdom claims that it has discovered “what appear to be intentional biases and inconsistencies in the Forbes valuation process…”

From the press release:

Shadi Sanbar, CFO of Kingdom Holding explained, “We have worked very openly with the Forbes team over the years and have on multiple occasions pointed out problems with their methodology that need correction. However, after several years of our efforts to correct mistakes falling on deaf ears, we have decided that Forbes has no intention of improving the accuracy of their valuation of our holdings and we have made the decision to move on. KHC puts a premium on tracking the true value of our investments and it is contrary to both our practice and nature to assist in the publication of financial information we know to be false and inaccurate.”

This year Kingdom says it found four glaring errors/inconsistencies in Forbes’ reporting (from the press release):

  • A sudden refusal after six years to accept share values as listed by the Tadawul – Saudi Arabia’s fully regulated, 21st century, high-tech stock exchange that services the largest economy in the Middle East and is a member of the World Federation of Exchanges.
  • A completely unsupported and biased allegation based on rumors that stock manipulation “is the national sport” in Saudi Arabia because “there are no casinos.”
  • The application of differing standards of proof for different individuals and organizations resulting in an arbitrary and confusing set of standards that seems demonstrably biased against the Middle East. For example, the valuations of other emerging markets such as the Mexican stock exchange are accepted while those of the Tadawul are not.
  • Unexplained and purely arbitrary discounts applied to holdings not backed up by brokerage statements when pre-IPO investments such as those in Twitter and China’s 360Buy would not appear on any brokerage statement, and after impressing on Forbes that KHC’s investments are covered by confidentiality agreements.

The real killer here is at the end of the release where Kingdom says that it will continue to work with Forbes’ rival list, the Bloomberg Billionaires List, since they “ use a more accurate method of calculating financial holdings.”

Brutal.

Prince Alwaleed

Forbes responded to these allegations in an e-mail to Business Insider saying, “Prince Alwaleed has issued a press release in response to fact-checking questions from Forbes. For our 27th annual Billionaires ranking, released today, Forbes has listed Alwaleed at $20 billion, which is $2 billion more than what he was listed at last year but $9.6 billion less than he claims he is worth. Forbes has been investigating the prince’s finances for several years, and will detail its findings in a feature story in the magazine, which will be released online tomorrow morning.”

Check out some screenshots of Kingdom’s press release below:

 

Prince Alwaleed Press release page 1

Kingdom Holding Company

 

 

Prince Alaweed press release

Kingdom Holding Company

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commonsenseAAA

 

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| Facebook hacked but says no user data compromised!

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Facebook hacked, says no user data compromised ~ Heather Kelly, CNN.

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  • Facebook says it was hacked in January when employees visited a compromised website.
  • The social network has found no evidence that any user data was obtained by the hackers.
  • This is latest in a string of high-profile hacks this year. _______________________________________________________
(CNN) – Facebook says it was recently hacked, though it says no data about its more than a billion users was compromised.

The company described the “sophisticated attack” in a blog post on Friday, saying it took place in January when a small number of employees visited a compromised website that installed malware on their machines.

“As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement and began a significant investigation that continues to this day,” Facebook Security said in the post.

Facebook, the largest social network in the world, is the latest high-profile site to be hacked this year. Twitter announced a similar intrusion earlier this month, and major news organizations including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have also admitted to being hacked.

The news sites attributed the breaches to hackers working for the Chinese government, but neither Facebook nor Twitter mention China when describing their attacks.

“Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well,” said the blog post. “As one of the first companies to discover this malware, we immediately took steps to start sharing details about the infiltration with the other companies and entities that were affected. “

Unlike Twitter, Facebook said it has found no evidence that any user information was compromised. Twitter said that user names, encrypted passwords and e-mail addresses for as many as 250,000 users were potentially grabbed by the hackers. It reset passwords for all affected accounts.

The string of hacks have primarily exploited vulnerabilities in the programming language Java, which is installed on most computers by default. Facebook said the site responsible for its attack took advantage of a previously unknown Java vulnerability, which Oracle patched on February 1.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about the security-challenged software and recommended people turn it off on their computers. Apple turned off Java by default for its OS X users as a precaution. Full instructions on how to disable Java on any computer can be found on Oracle’s website. If you must use Java, make sure that you have downloaded the latest updates, which include key security patches.

Facebook said it will continue to work with law enforcement and others in the industry to prevent future attacks.

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FB Hack 1

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| Maths: Largest known prime number discovered!

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Largest known prime number discovered ~ , Science Correspondent, The Telegraph.

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The largest known prime number, comprising more than 17 million digits, has been discovered by American mathematicians.

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The number, expressed as 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1, can only be divided by itself and by 1, making it by far the largest prime number ever identified.

Although there is an infinite quantity of prime numbers, the gargantuan 17,425,170-digit figure identified by Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri far outstrips the previous record holder which was a mere 13 million digits in length.

The new record holder and its predecessor, discovered in 2008, were both found using a vast network of computers dubbed the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).

Incorporating 360,000 different processors which are joined in the common goal of identifying prime numbers, the network can make about 150 trillion calculations per second.

The result is of very little importance in the field of mathematics, but is a tremendous badge of honour for researchers who compete to find ever larger examples.

George Woltman, the retired scientist who created the GIMPS network, said the task of finding a new prime number is “analogous to climbing Mt Everest”.

He told Scientific American: “People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that’s never been known before.”

The number, the third prime number discovered by Dr Cooper, is part of a rare group known as Mersenne primes, which are expressed in the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number, minus 1.

Although the group was first described by a French monk called Marin Mersenne more than three centuries ago, the new discovery is only the 48th known example.

Dr Cooper will be awarded a $3000 (£1,900) prize from GIMPS for his discovery, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation has offered $150,000 (£95,000) for the first 100 million digit prime number to be found.

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Abacus 2 ALSO SEE:

Prime number

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. A natural number greater than 1 that is not a prime number is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because only 1 and 5 divide it, whereas 6 is composite because it has the divisors 2 and 3 in addition to 1 and 6. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic establishes the central role of primes in number theory: any integer greater than 1 can be expressed as a product of primes that is unique up to ordering. The uniqueness in this theorem requires excluding 1 as a prime because it is the multiplicative identity.
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| Tax-dodger Apple shelters almost $1bn a week from US tax man!

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Apple shelters almost $1bn a week from US tax man ~ The Telegraph.

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Technology giant Apple shuttled $11bn (£7bn) into offshore tax havens in the fourth quarter of 2012, an analysis of its corporate filings has revealed.

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A giant Apple logo can be seen as customers wait for the new Apple iPad 2 in front of the Apple-store in the southern German city of Munich on March 25, 2011

Apple is estimated to have avoided more than £550m in tax in Britain in 2011. Photo: AFP

The iPad maker has slashed its tax bill by paying less than 2pc on its overseas profits, as it moves money through offshoots in low-tax countries such as the British Virgin Islands.

Apple’s completely legal tax avoidance strategies bring the total the company has sheltered from the US tax authorities to $94bn, according to a Sunday Times analysis.

Corporation tax on Apple’s overseas operations amount to just 1.9pc of profits, compared with a tax rate of up to 24pc in the UK and 35pc in the US.

Apple is estimated to have avoided more than £550m in tax in Britain in 2011. Its latest accounts show UK turnover at just over £1bn and profit at £81.3m, generating a tax bill of £14.4m.

However, analysis of its filings in America suggest a more realistic figure for UK turnover is £6.7bn. This would imply an estimated profit of £2.2bn and, at the then corporation tax rate of 26pc, a £570m tax bill, the Sunday Times reports.

Apple is the latest in a line of large companies that have been exposed for using legal tax holes which result in the company paying less tax.

Prime Minister David Cameron last week told tax-avoiding companies to “wake up and smell the coffee”, comments which drew threats from Starbucks’ UK managing director of suspending millions of pounds of investment in Britain.

Starbucks took an unprecedented step of pledging to pay £20m corporation tax in the UK, after it came under fire for paying nothing last year despite making sales of £398m.

Facebook has been accused of “immoral” behaviour after accounts showed that the social media giant paid a corporate tax bill of just over £238,000 last year, despite estimated revenues of £175m.

At the end of last month David Cameron demanded an investigation into claims of large-scale avoidance while Brussels moved to close European VAT loop-holes enjoyed by Amazon, Skype and Netflix.

The Prime Minister said HM Revenue & Customs should “look carefully” at cases where international corporations have legally been able to pay no corporation tax – or very small amounts – on billions of pounds of UK revenue.

Apple could not be reached for comment.

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Dark Metal Apple 1

| Former CIA Officials: US + Israel behind new Batchwiper Malware found in Iran!

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Former CIA Officials: US and Israel Behind New Batchwiper Malware Found in Iran ~ Softpedia.

US and Israel named as being behind the new data-wiping malware found in Iran- US and Israel named as being behind the new data-wiping malware found in Iran
A few days ago, Iran’s CERT issued an alert to warn organizations about a new data-wiping malware. Unnamed CIA sources say that this is actually part of a joint US-Israel cyberattack.

Former senior CIA officials close to the investigation have told ISSSource that the US and Israel are behind the attack, but it remains uncertain what the targets are.

After analyzing the malware, which they’ve dubbed Batchwiper or GrooveMonitor, security experts have found that it’s not sophisticated at all. However, they’ve warned that this doesn’t stop it from being effective.

The malicious element – which deletes all the files from the Deskop and the partitions labeled D through I – is interesting because it only performs its activities on certain dates.

This isn’t the only time when the finger is pointed at the US and Israel after a cyberattack on Iranian organizations. The countries have also been named responsible for creating and planting the notorious Stuxnet inside Iranian nuclear facilities.

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| Droning On: One man is now tweeting every US drone strike known to man!

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One Man Is Now Tweeting Every U.S. Drone Strike Known to Man ~ CONNOR SIMPSON,  Open Wire.

Josh Begley set out to tweet a complete history of known U.S. drone strikes Tuesday with the goal of doing it all in ten minutes. Except there were way too many strikes to tweet, so his original plan fell apart pretty quickly.

You might recognize Begley’s name. He is the guy who designed the iPhone app that mapped all the U.S. drone strikes worldwide using publicly available information. Apple removed it multiple times from the App Store this summer. So Begley set out anew to tweet the entire history of drone strikes, spanning over a decade, from an account he created especially for the project, @DroneStream:

Nov 3, 2002: In the first known US targeted assassination using a drone, a CIA Predator struck a car, killing 6 (Yemen) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.s…

— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

That was the first one that went up this morning. Each tweet accompanies a corresponding news story reporting the strike. Begley told the Daily Beast that his project is for an NYU graduate class called Narrative Lab. Begley said the effort is “about the way stories are told on new social media platforms.”

The amount of strikes outnumbered the amount of tweets he could properly deliver in ten minutes, so his original plan was foiled:

Alright, I lied. Too many strikes to tweet. @dronestream is going to take a lot longer than 10 minutes.

— Josh Begley (@joshbegley) December 11, 2012

Begley’s little — or not so little — social media experiment is a chilling reminder of the vastness that has been this past decade in morally questionable killing. And, as Begley himself points out, he’s only documenting the strikes we know about, and doesn’t include strikes in Afghanistan. The only strike Begley tweeted not from Pakistan is the one embedded above. And he’s still going. The latest came about fifteen minutes before this went to press, and he doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. Begley started about five hours ago.

Forget @SeinfeldToday — if this project doesn’t merit an A, we would love to see one that does.

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drone firingA

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| Quit Posting Facebook Copyright/Privacy Messages — It’s a Hoax!

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Quit Posting Facebook Copyright/Privacy Messages — It’s a Hoax ~
, Time.

 

Have you seen the one where you’re supposed to post a legal notice to your Facebook profile to ensure the social networking titan can’t use anything you’ve written without your permission?

No, doing so won’t accomplish anything legally speaking, and yes, it’s a hoax — an old one that already made the rounds earlier this year according to urban legend tracker Snopes.com.

I scraped a copy of the message off my own Facebook NewsFeed this afternoon (one of my friends had posted it), and other TIME editors confirmed seeing it in their feeds this morning. Here it is, in full:

In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, graphics, comics, paintings, photos, and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For any and all commercial use of the above my written consent is required in every instance.

(Those reading this may copy and paste this text on their Facebook walls. This will place them under protection of copyright laws. By the present communiqué, I hereby notify Facebook that it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, disseminate, or take any other action against me on the basis of this profile and/or its contents. The aforementioned prohibited actions also apply to employees, students, agents, and/or any staff under Facebook’s direction or control. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of my privacy is punishable by law (UCC 1 1-308-308 1-103 and the Rome Statute).

Facebook is now an open capital entity. All members are recommended to publish a notice like this, or if you prefer, then you may copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once, you will be allowing tacitly the use of elements such as your photos, as well as the information contained in your profile status updates

The idea seems to be that by posting this, you can somehow override the privacy strictures you agreed to when you signed up for Facebook. Let’s be clear: You can’t. It’s that simple. Posting such messages, whatever you’ve read about your rights and the power of self-declared legalese, will simply clutter up your timeline and annoy your friends. If you have a problem with Facebook’s privacy policies, you can either stick it out and lobby for Facebook to amend its terms, or you can quit Facebook.

Part of the appeal behind this particular version of the hoax lies in its citation of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), Section 1-308, which supposedly confers certain legal privileges if you drop it somewhere in the vicinity of your signature. In short, it doesn’t, and it certainly doesn’t protect you on Facebook. The only thing that’ll protect you on Facebook is you, in other words — taking care not to post anything you’d rather stay private.

Perhaps “hoax” is too strong a word. Sometimes these things are just viral mistakes — someone taking a well-intentioned misunderstanding and driving it viral (though that’s often also a definition for “conspiracy theories”). People pick it up thinking they’re immunizing themselves with, as Snopes puts it, a “legal talisman.” No such thing exists. The person who devised this particular message may have been going for viral clutter, or they may simply have been misinformed.

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| Facebook’s new user policy and the end of digital democracy?

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The end of digital democracy? Facebook wants to take away your right to vote! ~ John D. Sutter, CNN.

(CNN) – Unless Facebook users fight back, the days of the social network’s experiment with democracy may soon come to an end.

The company on Wednesday proposed to take away its users’ right to vote on major issues concerning the governance of its 1 billion-member online network.

The reaction online has been less than welcoming.

“Facebook now argues that it is too big for democracy, much like the Chinese government might,” writes Michael Phillips on the site BuzzFeed. “Call this new regime Facebook with Authoritarian Characteristics.”

Facebook’s quarter in review
Facebook feature suspended in E.U.
Facebook reaches 1 billion users

Since 2009, in what Facebook calls an experiment with digital voting rights, Facebook has allowed users to vote on major changes to the way it manages user data and privacy, if the online community expressed enough interest. If 7,000 people commented on a particular proposal, that triggered a vote. And if 30% of the site’s active users — which would be 300 million people at this point — voted against the change, Facebook would abandon it.

Now the company says it wants to ditch that system, replacing it with new ways for users to submit questions to Facebook’s privacy team. The company lists two primary reasons for the shift away from digital democracy: Facebook has become extremely large, with more than a billion users; and it’s a publicly traded company now, which means it is “accountable to regulators around the world.”

“Democracy can be difficult, especially for a multibillion dollar public company,” writes Somini Sengupta for the New York Times’ Bits Blog.

Some technology writers are calling for users to revolt.

“Because it hasn’t revoked that right yet, there is still time for you to mount a campaign to retain it, in theory,” writes Will Oremus for Slate. “But Facebook knows it’s highly unlikely that you will. It turns out that, for all of the shrill cries that fly around the Internet every time (CEO Mark) Zuckerberg and company make a tweak, most people just don’t care enough to take action. At least, not on the types of changes that Facebook allowed them to vote on.”

Phillips, the BuzzFeed writer, says this is a watershed moment for the Internet.

“By repealing Facebook Suffrage, Facebook abandons a fundamental norm — that its users are citizens in a community, and not simply datapoints on an advertising algorithm. The vote may be quixotic, but if Facebook remains the indispensable social network, you’ll want to be able to tell your grandchildren you fought for Facebook freedom. Who knows how Facebook will develop without your input.”

In clinical language released the day before the United States celebrates Thanksgiving, a time when people here are unlikely to take much notice, Facebook says it wants to “end the voting component of the process.”

“We deeply value the feedback we receive from you during our comment period,” the site says a press release. “In the past, your substantive feedback has led to changes to the proposals we made. However, we found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality. Therefore, we’re proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement.”

The company adds: “We will continue to post significant changes to our Data Use Policy and SRR (Statement of Rights and Responsibilities) and provide a seven-day period for review and comment. As always, we will carefully consider your feedback before adopting any changes.”

As TechCrunch notes, Facebook is creating other ways for users to submit feedback to the site.

“As a replacement for the vote, Facebook is proposing to continue offering the seven-day comment period on proposed changes to its governing documents. It will also offer two new ways for users to voice their governance concerns,” Josh Constine writes. “There’s ‘Ask the Chief Privacy Officer,’ a new feature on the official Facebook Privacy Pages that will let users submit questions to Erin Egan, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer. Additionally, Egan would hold regular live-streamed webcasts where users can ask questions. If the proposal is allowed, these new features will be substituted for the vote.”

So there you have it. Webcasts, yes. Voting, no.

Read more about the changes and let Facebook know what you think of its apparent move away from digital democracy by visiting the Facebook Site Governance page. Facebook says it will consider user feedback submitted until noon ET on November 28.

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