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Google's Orkut social network isn't just big in Brazil. It's also popular in India, especially among software developers, according to a new survey.

Despite Facebook's efforts to promote that social network as the platform of choice for third-party application developers, Orkut is used by twice as many software programmers in India than either Facebook or MySpace, according to an Evans Data survey of more than 300 developers in India. Software programmers in that country are heavy users of social networks in general.

Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they had used Orkut, compared with 35 percent for Facebook and 32 percent for MySpace.

"Capturing mindshare with developers in fast-growing emerging development markets like India and Brazil gives them (Google) a strategic advantage going forward in further cultivating this very important community," Evans Data Chief Executive John Andrews said in a statement.

Google has released new domains specific to India and Brazil as a result of the popularity in those countries.

The independent survey was conducted in late May and early June.

Someone posts a fake profile of you on MySpace casting aspersion on your character. You may be justifiably angry, but unless you are willing to specify the defamations and provide proof they are untrue, don't expect to be able to unmask the profile author.

On Friday, Cicero, Ill., Town President Larry Dominick dropped his request for a court to force MySpace to identify the creator of several spoof profiles in his name that he claimed were defamatory. His petition filed last month (PDF) did not provided details about the profiles and exactly what was defamatory. The pages were removed after Dominick complained.

The profiles had photos and "questionable comments about his sexuality and ethics," according to the Chicago Tribune.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend of the court brief last week arguing that fulfilling the request would violate the author's First Amendment right to remain anonymous unless Dominick could demonstrate a viable legal claim. The EFF also argued that the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits government entities--including Dominick acting in his official capacity as Cicero town president--from obtaining identifying customer information through the ordinary civil discovery process.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman says the organization doesn't oppose all claims of Internet defamation, only those that fail to provide details about the alleged defamation and proof that the statements aren't true, as well as those that don't provide notification to the person whose identity is being sought.

"It's far too easy for someone to go into court and simply ask a third party like MySpace or Facebook to turn this information over if there is no attempt to notify the person whose rights would be affected," he told CNET News.com.

The concern is that without First Amendment safeguards for anonymity people will use the courts merely to find the identity of people whose opinion or actions they disagree with and use that information to chill criticism.

Most of the time, the cases arise from postings made on blogs. But social network pages are increasingly being used for anonymous self expression.

For instance, a judge in Indiana ordered Facebook to name the person who created a fake profile for a high school dean last month.

Facebook understands what makes its service tick: lots of users and developers.

On July 23, the social-networking powerhouse will hold its second annual F8 platform conference in San Francisco. The company claims 400,000 developers in more than 160 countries and 24,000 Facebook applications in its directory.

Facebook also recently reached a milestone, according to ComScore, catching up with MySpace on the unique-user metric.

Both social networks attract about 115 million members on a monthly basis. However, most of Facebook's growth has come from outside the United States, which could be more difficult to monetize than U.S. users. MySpace has 72 million unique monthly users in the States, twice the number of Facebook.

See also: "The battle for Facebook" (Rolling Stone)

Microsoft on Thursday will reveal TownSquare, a social network for its business customers, according to Computerworld.

The service is reportedly similar to Facebook, in which Microsoft has a $240 million stake. Users can see others' feeds of what they are doing, upload and view photos, and connect with each other in teams. The site has been in use at Microsoft since Janurary, the story said.

TownSquare also reads in news feeds from the Web and workflow information from the SharePoint groupware platform, Computerworld said.

Another Microsoft social network experiement, Wallop, spun out of the company in 2006 and more recently rebuilt itself as a creator of social applications for other, larger social platforms. See more social experiments at Microsoft Research.

UPDATE:To include CBS statement.

Warner Music Group has pulled its entire catalog from Last.fm, a company spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

Warner Music would not comment on the reason for leaving Last.fm, but the label's departure is certainly a setback for the social-networking site. Warner was the first of the major labels to do a deal with Last.fm.

Last.fm offers an on-demand streaming service that's free to members but has been seriously hamstrung by limits placed on song playback. The site allows users to listen three times to a song. At rival Imeem, users can listen to free streaming music as many times as they want.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Warner Music licensed its music to Last.fm on a month-to-month basis and hasn't renewed it.

"We are currently negotiating a new agreement with Warner Music Group," CBS, which acquired Last.fm a year ago, said in a statement. The network added that it was "working hard to build the most comprehensive music service on the Web."

Note:CBS has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, parent company of News.com.

Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan's private MySpace photos are all over the Internet now, thanks to a glitch in the bad APIs.

While the not-so-publicity-shy stars probably won't mind, and none of the photos are all that racy (except for the one of a fully dressed, provocatively posed Hilton in a tanning booth), there's a lesson for us all in this social network privacy flap du jour.

"Anything you upload to a public Web site is not private; it's public. Even if you think it is password protected," says Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at White Hat Security, a Web application security company. "That's the bottom line."

The photos began making the rounds on Tuesday after computer technician Byron Ngo released them publicly, and gave Valleywag detailed instructions for his hack. Valleywag also has the photos here.

The problem has been fixed so don't bother trying to replicate it. But the breach resurrects the debate over whether the notion of privacy is outdated in a world where you party too much at an event and the next morning an embarrassing photo is up on your friend's Facebook page.

Valleywag blamed data portability, the concept underlying the sharing of data between social networks and other sites.

However, according to MySpace, it had nothing to do with data portability and everything to do with "deprecated APIs."

Grossman attributed it to "insufficient authorization," which he said are common on all types of Web sites, not just social-networking sites.

"MySpace and Yahoo are firmly committed to keeping all users as safe and secure as possible. Recently, MySpace and Yahoo were alerted to a vulnerability within the MySpace widget on the Yahoo mobile platform," MySpace and Yahoo said in a statement. "The functionality of the widget has currently been disabled as we work to roll out an immediate fix."

The man behind the expose' is none other than Byron Ng, a Vancouver-based computer technician who found a hole in Facebook and got to photos on founder Mark Zuckerberg's private page in March.

Ng also is credited with uncovering a digital version of most of the unreleased Harry Potter book last summer.

Ng, if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you.

One MySpace page gave the rock band Boston more than a feeling about an amateur singer. They ended up hiring the man as their new lead singer.

For Tommy DeCarlo, a credit manager at a Home Depot in North Carolina, it was literally a dream come true. DeCarlo, 43, had been a fan of the band since his childhood, often singing along with CDs or the radio when songs came on the air.

When Boston lead singer Brad Delp committed suicide last year, DeCarlo recorded his own karaoke versions of Boston songs and uploaded the MP3s to his MySpace page as a tribute. A friend who heard the recordings later encouraged him to contact the band.

DeCarlo, who had never been in a band and whose recent singing experience consisted of performing for a couple of dozen bowlers in a bowling alley, wasn't too confident.

"I sent my MySpace page link to the Boston camp, and I also offered to sing my song at the tribute show, never thinking I'd get a reply," DeCarlo says on Boston's official Web site. "I did end up getting one about two weeks later thanking me for the offer, but at this point there were not going to be any additions to lineup."

And that was the end of DeCarlo's rock 'n' roll fantasy--for a few weeks, anyway. Boston founder Tom Scholz's wife was fiddling around on her PC when something caught her husband's ear.

"My wife was at her computer playing our tunes, and I asked whether it was us playing live," Scholz told USA Today. "She said, 'It's some guy in North Carolina singing your songs.' I said, 'I know Brad's voice, and that's Brad.'"

That was enough for Scholz. He dropped DeCarlo an e-mail and invited him to the tribute, where DeCarlo impressed the band with his covers (see a YouTube video clip of his performance below). He starts his new job on Friday when the band kicks off its summer tour in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

While it's a rather unorthodox way to replace a band member after a tragedy, the practice of a Web audition could become more common. The band Journey recently hired a new lead singer based on a video clip posted to YouTube.

On Facebook, you can poke your friends and test your movie compatibility. On the House of Hackers social network, members share information about securing computer systems, exploiting vulnerabilities, and all sorts of things related to hacker culture.

Some people think of hackers as the bad guys who break into computer networks and steal data. In actuality, the term can be applied not just to people who circumvent computer security, but to home computer builders like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, open-source programmers, and people who in general like to tinker with technology, test the limits of information systems, and think outside the box.

It's with this broad definition in mind that Petko D. Petkov launched House of Hackers, the first social network devoted to the often-maligned group. London-based Petkov is the founder of information security think tank GNUCitizen (no relation to the GNU open-source operating system).

Petkov writes in his blog introducing the site, "We do not promote criminal activities." Still, the site is likely to attract hackers of all stripes--white hat, gray hat, and black hat hackers--as they are referred to depending on their motivation.

Unlike Facebook, there aren't a lot of personal photos and information on profiles here. This group prefers to talk about ideas rather than post photos of themselves and announce what they did last night.

Unveiled a month ago, the site now has about 4,000 members who share their ideas in blogs, announce events, and discuss diverse topics in groups with names like Life Hacker; Urban Explorers (an examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of human civilization); Black PR (public relations with a negative twist); Female Hackers; IT Professionals, and Reversing (for people who like to take things apart and see how they work).

There are also groups devoted to topics like hacker movies, open-source security, wireless and mobile device security issues, electronic music, cryptology, cross-site scripting attacks, iPhone cracking, and hackers from countries around the globe.

"I wanted to aggregate in a single place people interested in hacker culture, security, people trying to find solutions to interesting problems," he said in an interview Monday.

The goal is to bring people to together to share ideas, collaborate on projects, and eventually create a recruitment market for independent security consultants, he said. Toward that end, Petkov will be working on a system to verify job experience, training, and performance.

Whether companies will come a-hiring remains to be seen. But for those who want to see what today's digital rebels are up to, this site offers a glimpse.

Everyone is talking about the "consumerization" of information technology being the next big trend. Well, OK, but just what does IT consumerization mean. It turns out that many people are talking about different things. Through some research, I think I can summarize this trend as having three components:

1. Consumer application use. Recent grads all the way up to thirtysomethings are used to sites where they can share information, download videos, blog, and customize applications. This next generation of employees expects different applications and presents different risks. Chief information officers need to understand these distinctions.

2. Consumer devices hit the enterprise. Whether it's the CEO looking to get e-mail on her new iPhone, technical writers working while listening to a Zune music player, or a marketing manager plugging a wireless access point into an Ethernet jack, users are bringing Best Buy bargains to work with them and creating havoc. Someone has to create and enforce acceptable-use policies and support users who run into problems.

3. New application development. Closely related to No. 1, CIOs and business application developers are trying to figure out how to integrate Web 2.0 functionality with internal applications to bolster productivity. Should companies create internal social networks like IBM? Will employee blogs help increase communications? Do wikis help group collaboration?

IT consumerization is a raging river--even the most conservative, risk-averse CIO can't swim against this tide. Additionally, there are no IT consumerization experts; we are all learning on the fly. Anyone claiming to have a road map is lying.

So what should CIOs do? The same thing they always do: Assess needs, understand risks, and build a pragmatic plan to serve the business. In other words, let IT consumerization work for you where it can help enhance productivity and global recruitment. Experiment with low-risk, easy functionality to get started and enlist user feedback to make sure you are hitting the mark.

Some companies will use IT consumerization to their benefit, while others will build internal applications that look like Facebook just because it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. The former seems like a prudent course to me.