Facebook users in the U.K. are being treated to the same premium charges their counterparts in the U.S. have been hit with when sending messages to certain high-profile members on the social network, as well as people outside their circle of friends.

According to U.K. news site The Sunday Times, Facebook users in the U.K. late last week started being charged as much as 10 British pounds (about $15) to send messages to celebrity-status Facebook members. Olympic diver Tom Daley and former Children's laureate Michael Rosen are the most expensive celebrities to contact.

Facebook last year announced what it called a "small experiment" … Read more

When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different. At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics … Read more

A Huawei executive has acknowledged that the telecommunicatons equipment maker will not see growth this year in the United States.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Huawei executive Bob Cai, who is in charge of the firm's wireless marketing division, said there will be no growth margin in the U.S. market in 2013.

Although Huawei does expect to see growth from Asian and European markets as mobile device and network demands continue to rise, security concerns have led to government officials in Europe and the U.S. advising caution when using or purchasing Huawei's … Read more

"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 … Read more

The Russian government has turned to censorship on the Web.

According to the New York Times, the government is utilizing a new law, which the Russian parliament approved in July and which took effect in November, that allows the government to selectively censor Web pages within its borders because of content that it believes is illegal or harmful to children. The law's supporters have said that it protects against child pornography and other harmful content, but detractors say that it's giving the government too much power to block whatever it deems unfit for its citizens.

Although smaller sites … Read more

Apple has fixed the security issue involving its Apple ID password-reset page, a vulnerability that had made it possible for hackers with a user's e-mail address and birth date to reset the user's password.

Apple said yesterday that it was aware of the issue and was preparing a fix. Meanwhile, the company had taken the "iForgot" reset page offline for maintenance. Now the page is back up, and Apple has confirmed the fix with CNET.

The security exploit made use of a special URL that got around the need to answer a security question. Apple had … Read more

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced a new bill, known as the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, to force law enforcement to obtain a warrant to track suspects with GPS devices.

The bill, which was introduced to Congress yesterday, is sponsored by Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), as well as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House judiciary committee ranking member Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). If passed, it would provide a "legal framework" that provides clear guidelines on when and how GPS devices can be accessed and used.

"New technologies are making it increasingly … Read more

A new Mac OS X Trojan is making the rounds, installing an adware plug-in that renders ads on Web pages to generate revenue for its author.

Dubbed Trojan.Yontoo.1, it is the most prominent of an increasing number of adware Trojans making the rounds, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web, the same company that discovered the Flashback virus last year.

"Criminals profit from affiliate ad network programs, and their interest in users of Apple-compatible computers grows day by day," Dr. Web said yesterday in a statement. "Recently discovered, Trojan.Yontoo.1 can serve as a … Read more

The Obama Administration is headed to court today to argue that warrantless GPS tracking is just fine.

The administration will present its arguments before a federal appeals court today, despite the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruling that a warrant was needed to attach a GPS device to a suspected criminal's vehicle. According to Wired, which first reported on the story, the government believes that the high court's ruling does not account for all scenarios, and wants to see where its ruling should and shouldn't be held up.

The Supreme Court's ruling last year was … Read more