The Social

Social-networking sites and other Web services can't be held liable in a sexual assault on a minor that stemmed from a meeting online, according to a ruling in a California appeals court that consolidated a number of complaints against MySpace on behalf of teenage girls and their parents.

Reuters reported late on Wednesday that the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles cited the Communications Decency Act in coming to the conclusion. Claiming negligence and product liability, the plaintiffs had alleged that MySpace had failed to put in place age verification software or to keep profiles on a "private" setting.

Other federal courts have come to similar rulings. Last year, a Texas court ruled that the family of a 14-year-old girl who was assaulted by a man she met on MySpace could not hold the social network responsible. The girl in question had lied about her age when she created a profile, claiming to be a legal adult, and the court ruled that it was her parents' job, not MySpace's, to keep her safe.

This week's ruling in Los Angeles received a thumbs-up from MySpace and parent company News Corp. It could also have repercussions across other social networks and community-based Web sites, which have been subject to scrutiny from authorities over both safety and decency standards. Craigslist, for example, has faced a crackdown on sex-related ads after both allegations of rampant prostitution and a high-profile case in which a Craigslist encounter allegedly ended in murder.

The situation can be different, if there is actual harassment conducted through the social network, rather than an offline assault. In that case, if it appears that a Web service isn't doing enough to keep members safe while using the site, it can, in some cases, be held responsible.

Facebook and MySpace are working with state attorneys general to keep registered sex offenders out of their user bases, following allegations from lawmakers that they weren't doing enough to maintain a safe environment for minors.

On Thursday, the sentencing is expected in another Los Angeles court for Lori Drew, who has been convicted of three misdemeanors after impersonating a teenage boy on MySpace and harassing a 13-year-old girl allegedly to the point of suicide.

Drew could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and forced to pay a fine of $300,000, a far lesser sentence than she originally faced.

Not so long ago, the faces of gaming on social networks were those of zombies, vampires, and cuddly virtual pets. Now it's more along the lines of Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano.

You've probably seen it in your news feed: From Facebook to MySpace and now Twitter, Mafia-themed games have more or less taken over. Mobsters, a game created by development company Playdom, is the most popular application on MySpace's platform. Mafia Wars, owned by Zynga, is a huge hit on Facebook. The Social Gaming Network has an iPhone app called Mafia: Respect and Retaliation. And earlier this month, a Twitter-based game called 140 Mafia launched. The craze appears to have started with a Facebook app called Mob Wars, which was built by a smaller company called Psycho Monkey.

The premises of most of these games are the same. You can found or join a "mob" with friends from the social network that the game has been built on. You can carry out missions, including "killing" other players in rival mobs, in order to earn points. Your activities are broadcast, via news feeds or Twitter posts, to your friends on the network in question.

With the mobster gaming craze, social-network developers may have found the secret to bringing multiplayer role-playing games--long the lucrative domain of ultrageeks--fully into the mainstream. They can build elaborate role-playing scenarios with points, levels, teams, and weapons, but without the nerdy stigma that's become attached to fantasy-themed games in the vein of World of Warcraft. (A 2006 episode of the Comedy Central cartoon "South Park" summed this up well.)

"A lot of the core architecture is very similar to role-playing games in the past, in the way that levels and achievements and so forth are often themed around the certain topic but are pretty generic, actually," said Justin Smith, who runs the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. "When you compare a dragon game to a mob-based game, they're actually pretty much the same thing with different content."

"People just really like the crime genre," said Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, which publishes Mafia Wars. The mobster game is currently the company's most popular app, with 15 million active users across social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Tagged. "GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and a lot of derivative games of GTA top the charts, and I think that it's more those games feel more culturally relevant to people than a lot of other games that go into other genres that are either historical or more fantasy. I think that people like fantasies that are closer to reality."

There's another side to it: Organized crime in the real world tends to be concerned with the illicit transfer of wealth in one form or another (drugs, laundered money, gambling, you name it). When you take the popular perception of the mobster lifestyle and transport it to a gaming environment, there are plenty of opportunities to bring money into the mix. Most of the Web's Mafia-themed role-playing games make money from display ads as well as the sale of virtual goods, and some make it possible to earn extra points and "level up" by completing offers and surveys. It's no secret that some social gaming companies are making a ton of money, but mobster games are a particularly lucrative enterprise.

"(It's about) climbing your way to the top, and the status, and the ego of being the biggest and the best and the toughest," said Jason Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Super Rewards, the company that has partnered with 140 Mafia to power its payment platform. In 140 Mafia, for example, players who want to speed up their "recovery" from a round of game play can petition to the "godfather" for a favor (and that'll cost them real money).

Plus, Bailey said, it gets personal: "It has that small violence factor as well, being able to feed on people and put them on the hit list. When somebody does that to you, when somebody kills your character...the rage that it conjures up in people is much much stronger and they're much more willing to retaliate than in a sports game or a racing-themed game."

As with any online sensation, though, the question remains: Is this just a fad? From film noir to "The Godfather" to "The Sopranos," mobster themes have a solid shelf life to them, but mobster games on social networks could easily fade from favor if something more exciting comes along. But the real lasting power, social gaming insiders said, is in the fact that Web development makes it possible to keep a game in a constant stage of evolution. Once these games hit critical mass--which Mafia games arguably have--it's easier to keep people around.

Short attention spans
They're also low-maintenance, said Dave Kahn, head product manager for Zynga's Mafia Wars.

"I would say the difference between what makes Mafia Wars more popular over time than your traditional console game or your traditional hardcore game is that you can have the same experience with five minutes of play and you can interact with your friends," Kahn said. "I would say a game like GTA or a game of that crime genre would be much more popular if you could interact with your friends on a daily basis, and it doesn't require much time investment for you and your friends to have that satisfactory interaction."

"You're able to come in and come out in short spurts. You can play for 30 seconds, you can play for five minutes," Jason Bailey said. "It's not like a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game where, if the phone rings, you're going to get shot. It's really easy to come in and out of these games."

On the flip side, though, casual players who haven't put a massive time investment into a game are quite likely to be more fickle about whether they stick around or not. Time will tell when it comes to just how "sticky" mobster games turn out to be for players who aren't completely hardcore.

But beyond attention span issues, perhaps the biggest challenge to the creators of mobster games is that there are simply too many of them already, and the companies that make them have fallen into courtroom infighting that bears an ironic resemblance to actual mob warfare. There's an outstanding lawsuit between Zynga and Playdom, for example, over the latter's allegedly illegal use of the Mafia Wars name in advertising its own Mobsters game. And Mob Wars creator Psycho Monkey sued Zynga over copyright infringement in February.

"There's a variety of litigation that's still pending, and I think it just generally reflects the current culture of game development on social networks right now," Inside Social Games' Justin Smith said. "There's a lot of rapid iteration based on adapting other games and twisting them in a very slight way, and there haven't been many good examples of cases in which the IP has been successfully protected in the courts. So I think it will really be interesting in seeing how some of these cases play out over the next few months."

As we learned in the Scrabulous-Wordscraper-Lexulous affair last year, in which the manufacturer of board game Scrabble used litigation to force a Facebook-based imitator to change its name, intellectual property laws for games are complicated, and extremely similar games may legally coexist as long as they don't share a few key features. But it's not clear whether the mob wars over Mob Wars and its ilk will be without carnage.

"There's literally 20 or 30 mob-themed games on the Facebook and MySpace platforms, and that's conservative," Jason Bailey said. "If people find something that works, they copy it and copy it and copy it, ad nauseam."

The playing field for mobster games, as well as any other games on social networks that make money through virtual goods and transactions, could also change dramatically when social networks start introducing payment systems of their own. Facebook will start to do this soon, and it's also been circulated as a possible business model for Twitter. It's unclear what the rules will be in either case.

But Super Rewards' Jason Bailey--whose company will be a competitor to Facebook's in-house virtual currency platform, it should be said--thinks the dominance of mobster games won't change much if Facebook brings new rules to the applications on its platform. It may be too late for the massive social network to be the real kingpin when it comes to monetizing the likes of the mobster game craze.

"Facebook's issue, I believe, is it's hard to tack something like this on later...companies go out and spend millions of dollars building games for your platform," he said. Were Facebook to start requiring a cut of the revenues, "there would be literally a riot of people with torches at (CEO Mark) Zuckerberg's house tonight complaining about it."

Well, that's a whole different kind of mob.

In running for attorney general of California, Facebook executive Chris Kelly is returning to his roots.

"Ever since I worked in public life when I was very young, I thought it was something that I might do at some point," said Kelly, a former Clinton campaign and White House staffer who serves as the massive social network's chief privacy officer and head of public policy.

"Over the past few years at Facebook, it's become clear to me that the role of the attorney general is incredibly able to help make change in the world, and that's what I got into technology to do, too," Kelly, who is a Democrat, continued in an interview with CNET News on Thursday. "So looking at how to do that in the political realm is something that's been under consideration for me for a long time, and it seems like it's the right time to give it a shot."

Kelly is staying with Facebook, which recently surpassed 200 million active members and continues to grow fast, while his campaign is still in the exploratory phase. He said that he will "continue to be active at Facebook for at least the next few months," and implied that he won't formally step down unless he is elected.

As for financing, Kelly said that "quite a number of people have pledged a fair amount of money," but added that he had not yet made a decision about self-financing. He didn't comment on whether this might include cashing out part of his stake in Facebook. California campaign finance sites do not yet list any donations to the Kelly campaign.

So how are his chances? Kelly will likely have strong rivals both in the Democratic primary, which takes place in June 2010, and the general election that November should he emerge victorious in the primary. With an executive post at one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and a campaign platform focused on bringing everything from personal safety to violent crime control into the 21st century, Kelly can likely craft himself as the high-tech candidate.

"We're going to put together what we think is a fantastic story for the voters that reflects what the future of California should be," Kelly said to CNET News. "The reaction to somebody with both public and private sector experience stepping into this race has been very good and very exciting, and I'm thrilled to be looking at it long and hard and to be hearing from people abut their ideas about how to improve the state."

Photos: From tech exec to politician

As attorney general, Kelly has expressed a desire to crack down on the white-collar crime that has been partially responsible for dragging California and the rest of the U.S. into a deep financial recession. He's also committed to bringing better technological strategies and equipment to law enforcement authorities, and pledges to not take his eye off online privacy.

"When I talk about technology, technology is never a panacea," Kelly admonished. "It has to be deployed in ways that are trying to build safer social systems. For instance, Facebook is not just about the deployment of technology in these areas, we made choices around being a real-world identity platform and enforcing the fact that you can't use a fake name and things like that. When you talk about technology, (it's) the place that it's been used most effectively. (In law enforcement) there's a technology component to it, but ultimately the goal is to find the people who are committing the crimes, and arrest them."

Kelly's tech cred is high. But on the flip side, popular though it may be, an affiliation with a social network like Facebook does come with some baggage. Controversial interface redesigns probably won't hurt his campaign a bit, but Facebook has suffered negative press over the past few years for its allegedly intrusive Beacon advertising program, phishing schemes and viruses that continue to pop up, and ironically a high-profile campaign on the behalf of several states' attorneys general to tackle the issue of sex offenders maintaining a presence on Facebook.

Kelly acknowledged that this sort of press could turn into fodder for negative campaigning. "I expect that the politics-as-usual crowd will try to make a bunch of stuff out of situations where Facebook has acted incredibly responsibly, and has been able to address the real problems of the Internet, and to build the systems that build a safer and more trusted online experience over time," Kelly said.

"I think that we're in a new era of politics and that that sort of approach just doesn't work the way that it used to," he continued, "but I fully expect that there will be some opponents in this race who will be interested in trying to exploit a misimpression that people have about the way Facebook has acted, and I'm ready for that."

Facebook, along with fellow social network MySpace (owned by News Corp.), eventually reached an agreement with New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo early in 2008 to collaborate on new safety legislation. Cuomo had subpoenaed Facebook several months prior, claiming that it misrepresented how safe it was for minors.

Kelly doesn't have an official endorsement from Facebook and probably won't get one down the line, either: he said the social network has never endorsed a political candidate or initiative and doesn't expect it to do any differently for him. Nor has he made the decision yet to endorse any one of the current Democratic gubernatorial candidates over another--even though San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made a high-profile visit to Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters right around the time that he announced his candidacy for the state house.

"I like Gavin. I like Jerry Brown. I like Antonio Villaraigosa," Kelly said, naming a few of the Democratic candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring. Incumbent Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, cannot run for re-election due to term limits. "There are quite a number of candidates who are or might be in that race, (Senator) Dianne Feinstein is another possibility, and boy, if that's the field, we've got a lot of great choices."

The cops on Comedy Central's 'Reno 911' are fake. So are the ones who ran the Twitter account @AustinPD, it appears.

(Credit: Comedy Central)

There's no more @AustinPD on Twitter. That's because it wasn't actually the official Twitter account of the Austin, Texas, police department, according to the Austin Statesman.

The link to the account now reads that it was "suspended for strange activity," and city authorities have asked Twitter to keep tabs on the impersonator's contact information after both the police department and Texas attorney general's office complained to Twitter. The Statesman added, however, that criminal charges are not being sought at this point.

"Although some may dismiss the site as a simple prank or minor irritant, the fact is that the information presented was false and misleading, and could lead to unwarranted concern by the public," Austin police chief Art Acevedo said in a statement.

"AustinPD" wasn't exactly a huge sensation on Twitter, with only about 450 followers. But it was enough to tick off the real cops, especially during the South by Southwest Festival, when all eyes were on Austin.

Updates from the fake Twitter account included "warming up my radar gun for SXSWi" and "we're looking to make more stops at SXSW this year than last," as well as references to police jargon codes that seemed to be stemming from a knowledge of gangsta rap lyrics rather than actual law enforcement.

The Austin Statesman reported that fake accounts are a very serious problem on Twitter: "Even taco trucks aren't safe: NPR reported Monday that the Los Angeles-based Mexican-Korean food joint Kogi has a Twitter doppelganger that posts fake locations, menu items, and a 'Taco Bikini Saturday' event."

Getting punked by fake tweets is nothing new at South by Southwest, though: journalist Mat Honan has an annual ritual of posting off-the-wall updates in which he pretends to be present at SXSWi but actually isn't ("At the hyper-packed Facebook panel waiting for some sort of 'big announcement.' I bet it's that the new redesign was done by Blingee").

The antics of Honan and other Twitter account holders led to the spread of fake rumors such as a free breakfast burrito giveaway at the local Whole Foods (not true) and reports that oddball actor Bill Murray was showing up at SXSWi parties (never confirmed, but let's face it: probably not true).

Last month, Twitter suspended an account claiming to come from the Dalai Lama but reinstated it when the owner of the account agreed to provide a disclaimer that it was unofficial.

In one of the more sordid accounts of online predation we've read recently, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that a Wisconsin teen used a fake Facebook profile to blackmail his classmates into giving sexual favors.

Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.

Stancl then told many of them that unless they engaged in some sort of sexual activity with him, he would put the photos or videos on the Internet. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl allegedly documented with a cell phone camera.

There were about 300 photos of underage males, some of which were as young as 15, on Stancl's computer, police in the teen's hometown of New Berlin, Wisc., told the AP. Stancl had originally come under police scrutiny in November, after he issued a bomb threat that temporarily closed New Berlin High School.

The emergence of the case comes at a time when social-networking safety is back in the spotlight. After a subpoena from the Connecticut attorney general, the News Corp.-owned networking site MySpace handed over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders that had profiles on the site, and pressure mounted for Facebook to do something similar.

What's important to keep in mind, lest this incident set off more hysteria about the dangers of teens and Facebook profiles, is that this sort of activity could have happened over an instant-message client, another social network, or an online message board.

It's true, however, that the Internet can cloak a criminal in anonymity or a fabricated identity--in one particularly tragic case, a woman posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and allegedly harassed a 13-year-old girl to the point of suicide.

A recent report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concluded that threats to minors online are more complicated than the stereotype of a lone adult seeking out vulnerable teens: in the case of Anthony Stancl, for example, the sexual predator was one of the victims' own high-school classmates.

Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who created a fake MySpace profile that she allegedly used to harass a teenage girl to the point of suicide, was convicted of three offenses far more minor than the ones she could have been, the Associated Press wrote Wednesday.

Drew, indicted in May by a federal court after Missouri prosecutors could not find evidence of a state crime, had been charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of "accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress."

On Wednesday, a federal jury in Los Angeles failed to reach a verdict on the conspiracy charge. In addition, Meier was not convicted of the three felony charges of accessing protected computers, but was instead found guilty of three related misdemeanors.

Drew had faced up to 20 years in prison, but now faces a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for each of the three misdemeanors.

According to the AP, U.S. District Court Judge George Wu declared a mistrial on the conspiracy charge, but it is not yet clear whether Drew will be retried on it.

The harassed teen, 13-year-old Megan Meier, committed suicide in 2006. She was a classmate of Drew's daughter Sarah.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke out in opposition to the charges against Drew in August, saying that millions of Americans could be considered criminals in accordance with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because of the charges' basis in a terms of service violation.

Police in Monroe, Wash., say they've arrested that guy who robbed an armored car outside a bank, hired unsuspecting dress-alike decoys on Craigslist to fool authorities, and escaped downriver in an inner tube, according to the Seattle Times.

Contrary to what news media had speculated, tracking him down doesn't seem to have involved Craigslist at all.

Three weeks prior to the September 30 robbery, a homeless man contacted city authorities after seeing someone recover an oddball array of items from behind the same bank branch--a black wig, a reflective safety vest, dark glasses, a two-way radio, a baseball cap, and a can of mace--and provided a license plate number. It's believed that the witness may have seen a test run of the heist-in-progress.

The actual robbery, as fans of wacky news may recall, involved a dozen people responding to a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers who were asked to show up near the same Bank of America branch wearing a very similar outfit.

Using the license plate data, cops tracked down 28-year-old Anthony J. Curcio, recovered a "significant" amount of money from him, and are holding him in the Snohomish County Jail. His family had apparently recently had some financial difficulties, and had a prior home foreclosed. Curcio also had an infant daughter born 10 days before the robbery, according to birth announcements that the Seattle Times surfaced. Quick--somebody give him a job devising plots for CSI.

But it's not over yet: "(Police) still want to know what role the inner tube played in the robbery," the Seattle Times reported. "They believe it may have been stolen. They are asking anyone with information regarding the yellow inner tube, or the robbery, to call the Monroe Police Department."

Please, think of the inner tubes.

In an elaborate robbery scheme that's one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. "A great amount of money" was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

But here's the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery--wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was not immediately available for comment.

A New York man known for stirring up controversy on YouTube was arrested Thursday by federal authorities after allegedly claiming he had instructed Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide.

Anton Dunn, a 42-year-old from Manhattan who goes by "Trashman" on YouTube, has a moderate following on the video site, but probably not for the right reasons. Earlier this year, some of the tabloid press picked up on a video he posted in which he claimed to have purposely infected more than 1,500 women with the AIDS virus. He has also claimed to have killed two people.

Some found his videos funny, but others were offended and plenty of "response" videos pepper the site.

Then, in a series of videos from April to July, he allegedly detailed the workings of a plan to poison Gerber products, which ultimately resulted in his arrest. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Dunn is charged with sending threats in interstate commerce and falsely claiming to have tampered with a consumer product. The charges could result in up to 10 years in prison or heavy fines.

Critics will likely say it's a case of authorities overreacting to a case of over-the-top, look-at-me comedy. But the Trashman videos, in which Dunn wears masks to disguise his identity and rants in a humorless tone, don't look like they were made to make people laugh.

Other YouTube members quickly posted videos of local news reports detailing his arrest.