A war between a loosely organized anti-spam group called Spamhaus and one of the Web hosts the group publicly identified as a spammer escalated last week, at times threatening some of the basic infrastructure of the Internet, according to a security firm’s account.
Find out how to use Google Tools to manage social media content and campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an interactive online event starting June 6. Monica Morse (left), head of social & SMB solutions at Google, will familiarize you with a wide range of Google tools such as trends, Google+ and Hangouts. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
Pinterest is ridding its social network of fake, spammy, or suspicious accounts. In recent months, the company has created a dedicated team to detect and rid the site of spam. Now users will be able to see the results of Pinterest’s efforts, which may affect follower counts for some users.
The FTC has settled its case against Circa Direct and its owner Andrew Davidson for advertising acai berry products with fake news headlines such as, “Acai Berry Diet Exposed: Miracle Diet or Scam?”
Click here to receive the Morning Social Media Newsfeed via email.
Facebook Allows Users to Download Expanded Archive of Their Information (Inside Facebook)
The “Download Your Information” feature now includes catalogues of friend requests a users make, IP addresses they’ve logged in from and any previous names they’ve used, among other Facebook actions. This is in addition to the copy of photos, posts, messages, chat conversations, friend lists and other information that Facebook first made available for download in 2010. The New York Times Facebook, which is preparing for an initial public stock offering, most likely in May, has been trying to accommodate government officials in Europe, where privacy laws are more stringent than in the United States. Mashable The archive still doesn’t include your friends’ photos and status updates, other users’ personal info and comments you’ve made on other people’s posts. Facebook This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future. Read more
Remember those affiliate links on Pinterest that had everyone so worried about copyrights? It turns out that they actually protected us from spammers like Steve, who use hundreds of fake Pinterest accounts to sell products on Amazon.
Visible Gains designed this infographic about effective ways to communicate over the Internet. From the looks of it, email is far from dead and here to stay.
Once you install the app, which is free, it will continue to scan your Twitter account and notify you by direct message of any threats. BitDefender includes scanning on demand, so you can scan accounts before deciding to follow them.
A couple of spam text messages hit my iPhone recently. So, I tweeted a question to AT&T Wireless’s Customer Care Twitter account to learn what advice they might offer. You can see the response in the screenshot above. AT&T’s advice to use the word STOP to block messages is, it turns out, specifically to deal with messages from Short Code numbers. However, AT&T provides ways to deal with other kind of text message spam on this web support page.
Read more
Truthly, Privachi scatters users’ information online like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, so that not one online service, not even Privachi, knows everything about the user.
“This year more than two hundred million people will find some form of virus or spam on their Facebook wall and inadvertently spread it to all their friends,” said Adams. “Using Protection blocks these viruses making it impossible for you to infect others.”
