Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access

MENLO PARK, Calif. — About one of every seven people in the world uses Facebook. Now, Mark Zuckerberg, its co-founder and chief executive, wants to make a play for the rest — including the four billion or so who lack Internet access.

On Wednesday, Facebook plans to announce an effort aimed at drastically cutting the cost of delivering basic Internet services on mobile phones, particularly in developing countries, where Facebook and other tech companies need to find new users. Half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, have agreed to work with the company as partners on the initiative, which they call Internet.org.

Investigation finds fake Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers

Investigation finds fake Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers could be misleading consumers

How much do you like courgettes? According to one Facebook page devoted to them, hundreds of people find them delightful enough to click the “like” button — even with dozens of other pages about courgettes to choose from.

There’s just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand “likes” at his “click farm”. Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year.

The ease with which a humble vegetable could win approval calls into question the basis on which many modern companies measure success online — through Facebook likes, YouTube video views and Twitter followers.

Chrome exposes user passwords in plain-text without additional verification

If you’ve enabled Google Chrome’s ‘Offer to save passwords I enter on the web’ feature and have saved some or all of your passwords through it, you should remember to sign-out of your Google account in Chrome, especially if you use the browser on a shared computer.

Google’s popular Web browser allows you to save your passwords and manage them through a menu in the browser’s Settings page. When you click on ‘Manage saved passwords’ you get a list of your Saved passwords as well as a list of websites where you have instructed the browser to ‘never save’. Interestingly, when you click on one of your saved passwords, Google gives you the option to see the password in plain text by clicking on the ‘Show’ button which is placed along with the listing. It doesn’t ask for a confirmation or any additional verification by, say, prompting for your Google account’s password.

Facebook Adjusts Its News Feed to Bump Up Older Posts

The Facebook news feed is getting slightly less mysterious — and perhaps more relevant, too.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company explained some of the mysteries of the news feed, which is the flow of status updates and other posts on a user’s home page or screen.

On any given visit to Facebook, the average user could potentially see about 1,500 items, the company said, from wedding photos posted by a close friend to a mundane notice that an acquaintance is now friends with someone else.

Apps that know what you want, before you do

In Hollywood, there are umbrella holders. Outside corner offices, there are people who know exactly how much cream to pour in the boss’s coffee. And then there is Silicon Valley, where mind-reading personal assistants come in the form of a cellphone app.

A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search — new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was.