Facebook said today it has paid more than $40,000 to people who have uncovered bugs on its Web site in the first three weeks of its Bug Bounty program.
The company launched its bug bounty program at the end of last month as a way to compensate people who find and report bugs that might otherwise go unfixed or be exploited by malicious hackers. Bug hunters can make upwards of $500 per bug reported.
via Facebook paid $40,000 to bug hunters in three weeks | InSecurity Complex – CNET News.
Voluntary payments are picking up pace on the web. Linus Olsson, the co-founder of social micropayments system Flattr, draws on the lessons the team has learned from their users and explains how you can be funded by your fans, too
via Crowdfunding: get paid for free stuff | Feature | .net magazine.
Earlier this month, Business Insider published an article that further exposed the dirty little secret of online advertising: Brands are paying for ads that show up in very inappropriate locations. Maybe inappropriate is the wrong word. I mean really, really bad content — the kind that, if viewed at work, could get you fired.
via 5 horrible ad placements that could have been avoided – iMediaConnection.com.
Social media is not ubiquitous. In fact, says a Pew Internet survey released on Friday, just half of U.S. adults are logged on to sites like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.In Pew’s phone survey of 2,277 adults, 65% of Internet users said they use social media. For the first time, 50% of respondents — regardless of whether they use the Internet — said that they did the same.
According to jQuery support, training and consulting company appendTo, the popular open source library has now ‘overtaken’ Flash, in terms of how many websites have deployed each technology, at least when it comes to the world’s ‘top’ websites.
The mythical speeds of Google Fiber have been just that until now – mythical. Like the leprechaun’s fabled pot of gold, the service’s high speed riches have existed only in lore, but as of late last week it now has a basis in reality. Even though the Goog’s still busy laying the fiber groundwork in Kansas Cities, a limited Beta apparently launched in a Stanford residential neighborhood recently.
via Maximum PC | Google Fiber Delivering Face-Melting Speeds Near Stanford.
Researchers at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University just released a study that’s sure to ruffle a few feathers, and may freak out parents of Facebooking teens. What the study found is that teens who regularly hop onto Facebook, MySpace, or other social networking sites are much more likely to do things they shouldn’t be doing, like drinking alcohol and smoking pot.
Compared to teens that don’t spend any time on social networking sites, regular users are five times more likely to smoke or chew tobacco, three times as likely to drink alcohol, and twice as likely to use marijuana, according to the “National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XVI: Teens and Parents.”
via Maximum PC | Study: Social Networking Teens More Likely to Smoke, Drink, Use Pot.
Facebook unveiled a massive wave of privacy changes on Tuesday. It’s one of the biggest privacy overhauls in the company’s history, one that includes more than a dozen changes to profiles, status updates, locations and tags.
The new annotations appear when a user hovers over the +1 button. Hovering over it will display a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page. Google has also unveiled new code for the +1 button that will display the faces and names of friends that have used the +1 button. This feature works much like how the Facebook Like button appears for Mashable stories, displaying how many people have +1′d the page and which friends have +1′d it.
Although banner ads may be experiencing big growth this year, they’re not getting any more effective. The average click-though rate for banners fell in 2010, according to a survey by Google.