Trends Hut

With many adults in the UK using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, a large number are updating on their actions and whereabouts without considering the associated risks.

According to research by The Co-operative Insurance, 70% of adults in the UK using social networking websites.


Over a third of these though use such as Facebook and Twitter to make people aware of a whole range of personal information – such as where they are, what they are doing, when they are off on holiday etc.
They also divulge information about their date of birth, marital status and family details. In isolation this may seem harmless but collectively in the wrong hands may result in a number of problems.

Divulging personal information puts people at risk of identity theft but detailing when you are away from your home puts you at greater risk from burglary of your home and theft of your personal possessions, such as your car.

Giving this level information is done even though almost two thirds of UK adults believe that they would not be able to make a claim on their home insurance, due to a burglary, if they had clearly documented their movements on social networking websites.

David Neave, Director of General Insurance at The Co-operative Insurance, said: “A common sense approach when using social networking websites is key.

You have to ask yourself ‘would I be happy to divulge this information normally?’ If not, you shouldn’t make people aware of it online.”

He added “Unfortunately, whilst the majority of people use these websites as they are intended, there is a minority group which will be using them for their own illegal gains and therefore it is very important to be vigilant and err on the side of caution when updating statuses.”

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Lindsay Lohan is returning to familiar territory — a criminal court to face a judge who could send her back to jail or rehab for a failed drug test.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elden S. Fox will formally determine whether the "Mean Girls" star violated her probation with the drug test in September. If the actress admits the results are accurate — as she has already done publicly — then Fox could return her to jail or order her to remain in an inpatient rehab program.

Fox had been expecting Lohan to arrive at court directly from jail, where he ordered her to be held on Sept. 24 after a brief hearing. Within hours another judge had overturned his ruling and the starlet was released on bail.

The following week, a person close to the actress told The Associated Press, Lohan entered rehab for the fifth time. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Her recent court troubles have put Lohan's career on hold. She missed opportunities to promote her role in the summer film "Machete" because she was in jail and rehab. Her next starring role is supposed to be in a biopic on porn actress Linda Lovelace.

Friday's hearing will be Lohan's fifth court appearance since May, when she ran into trouble with her probation on a three-year-old drug and drunken driving case.

In July and August, she spent 14 days in jail and 23 days in rehab as punishment for missing several court-ordered weekly counseling sessions.

Fox allowed her to be released from rehab early based on the recommendations of her doctors and laid out a path for her to be taken off probation by the end of the year. His regimen included frequent counseling sessions, meetings with probation officials and random drug screenings. It also included several incentives, including an assurance that if the actress complied with the terms for 67 days, her probation oversight would end and she would be free to move from Los Angeles. He also dismissed two drug charges that were filed after a pair of arrests in 2007.

Within weeks of her release from rehab, Lohan, 24, failed a drug test. She acknowledged the result in postings on Twitter and said she was struggling with addiction.

Fox had threatened to send her to 30 days in jail for each failed or missed test. He did not indicate at last month's hearing whether he was mulling other sentences.

Lohan's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, did not return e-mail and phone messages seeking comment.
If Lohan is sentenced to jail, she will be subject to early release due to jail overcrowding. When a judge sentenced her to three months in jail in July, she served 14 days. She spent 84 minutes at the jail in 2007 before being released due to overcrowding.

Lohan pleaded no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08 percent and one count of reckless driving. She was sentenced to three years of probation, but that was later extended after the actress didn't complete the terms of her sentence in time.

A potentially serious security breach affecting tens of millions of Facebook users is the latest privacy snafu dogging the world's largest online social network.

Apple has shipped 7.5 million iPads since it launched in April, turning it into the largest player in the tablet computer market. The company grabbed that position in just six months thanks to its focus on a single device and surprising contributions from enterprise sales, Apple executives said on its quarterly conference call to discuss earnings.


Apple sold 4.19 million iPads  in its most recent quarter, and 3.27 million iPads in the quarter before that. About two-thirds of the 100 largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have begun deploying iPads for enterprise use, leading to a lot of growth in the corporate sector that has helped drive iPad sales, said Tim Cook, chief operating officer of Apple. Nearly 85 percent of those companies have also deployed the iPhone for enterprise use, he said.
“I’ve never seen an adoption rate on the enterprise side like this in my life. Enterprise is historically much slower moving on adoption,” he said. “We have built and are building additional capacity to call on businesses, and we’re putting a lot of energy into that — we aren’t treating this lightly or as a hobby.”

It's been widely remarked that The Social Network  isn't about social networking: it's about the genesis of any kind of empire. Maybe so, but whatever his creators' intentions, the Mark Zuckerberg confected by Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg can't help taking on an emblematic quality. He seems to manifest in extreme form a reshaping of the human personality that his own invention is helping to bring about.

The question that Facebook chooses to put to us is "What's on your mind?" In the film's first scene, Eisenberg's version of Zuckerberg pours out the contents of his own mind to his girlfriend Erica with zero interest in either her preconceptions or response. She tells him he speaks as if "every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared". As it happens, Zuckerberg's thoughts are indeed clever. In the world of digital discourse, however, stupid and nasty thoughts are tumbling out of the rest of us with the same lack of concern for those expected to share them.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, headlined the Wednesday press conference at which Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook to integrate Microsoft's Bing search engine into the world's most popular social network.

Lu's presentation might lead you to believe this was mostly about Bing continuing to nibble away at Google's seemingly unshakeable 60%-plus share of the U.S. search market.

Lu, whom Microsoft lured from a senior post at Yahoo, vowed that Bing integrated into Facebook would " harness and unlock the tremendous potentials of social."

However, this partnership isn't really about Bing vs. Google. It's much more about Facebook hunkering down to repel the ambitious search giant.

Gartner tech industry analyst Ray Valdes points out that Facebook's engineering team was in lockdown mode from mid-August until last week, when the team emerged to unveil an updated Facebook Groups and several other improvements.

This skunkworks output and the Bing partnership stem directly from Facebook CEO's Mark Zuckerberg's concern about Google's relentless and continuing attempts to muscle its way into the social Web, says Valdes, who has recently spoken with Zuckerberg about this.

Lucky for Zuck, Google thus far has stumbled. It's acquisitions of microblogging site Jaiku and mobile social network Dodgeball have gone nowhere. Its ambitious, would-be Facebook-killer initiatives Google Wave and Google Buzz both fizzled -- Buzz spectacularly so. Last month, Google quietly agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit stemming from the February launch of Buzz, the massive social network Google created overnight by automatically including Gmail users' private contacts on public Buzz profiles.

But Google is nothing if not relentless. Its resolve to get a toe hold on Facebook's turf became evident three months ago when Paul Adams, a senior user-experience designer, posted this extensive presentation, which got 300,000 page views on slideshare.net. Adams outlined what he characterized as a glaring weakness in Facebook's architecture: the inability for members to easily create multiple independent groups of friends. The implication: Google is developing a secret project that will exploit this weakness, says Valdes.

Shortly after Adams posted his slides, Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to work seven days a week in the skunkworks, says Valdes. The improvements Facebook announced last week -- and the new Bing partnership -- directly result from the gauntlet thrown down by Adams. Facebook's recent moves should be viewed as pre-emptive strikes to impede the Google juggernaut, he says.

"Facebook's no. 1 threat right now is Google," says Valdes. "So Facebook is trying to align its forces with others, in this case Microsoft, who are also trying to compete against Google."

Google has not been deterred. The search giant has recently "hired a bunch of people, repositioned management and continues to view the social Web as strategically important," says Valdes. "Rumor has it Google will roll out a major new social Web initiative over the next few weeks or months."