These are my links for December 28th:

• Former Morgan Stanley Coder Gets 2 Years in Prison for TJX Hack | Threat Level | Wired.com – The two great friends talked every day and shared information about all of their exploits — sexual, narcotic and hacking — according to prosecutors. Now another thing they’ll have to share information about is their experience in federal prison.
• Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says | Threat Level | Wired.com – The operator of a popular BitTorrent search site said Monday he will likely challenge last week’s landmark decision by a U.S. judge declaring such sites unlawful and no different from conventional peer-to-peer piracy services.
• Piracy Surcharge Set To Force 40,000 Households Offline | TorrentFreak – Earlier, ISP BT predicted that operating an anti-filesharing scheme in the UK would cost £365m a year. Now the government has admitted that not only will broadband customers have to foot a £500m bill, but that burden will prove too great for 40,000 households – who will have no choice but to give up their Internet connections.
• Top 7 Disruptions of the Year | Epicenter | Wired.com – Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it’s only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.
• Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Deciphered – NYTimes.com – A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, saying it was his attempt to expose weaknesses in the security of global wireless systems.
• Palm Pre Users Rejoice: webOS 1.3.5 is Coming Today – Here’s a nice Christmas present for Palm Pre users: According to Sprint’s website, a new version of Pre’s operating system, webOS 1.3.5, is due to go live today.
• Facebook more than doubled its number of users this year | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Even by Facebook's standards, the past 12 months have been remarkable. The site cemented its position as the world's favourite social network, reached the verge of profitability and even exerted its influence over the race for the Christmas No 1.
• Twitter’s List Of 370 Banned Passwords – Twitter appears to have learned from its security scare earlier this year and seems to be taking password security more seriously than most Internet services.
• 5 Reasons to Learn Social Media | Search Engine Journal – Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine.

One of the first things and most time consuming tasks you’re going to need to do if you want to allow different people is to setup up groups for all of your friends and classify them. Below is how I have people grouped:

Now this grouping of people, especially for those who have been on Facebook for a long time, will be a bit painful but it’s well worth it especially when your job or even life might depend on it.

You first need to go to the privacy page in Facebook:

Once on that page you’ll see the different areas where you can set privacy levels:

We’re going to first go into the Profile property area:

As you see above, I have it setup so that only certain people can see certain information. The key to limiting certain peoples access in a more pin-point way goes back to spending the time setting up groups. You’ll see that I’ve limited some areas to exclude specific groups. This will keep them from seeing that particular part of information. This is great to make sure potential or current employers don’t see the pictures of you riding a bull at a bar or of your 21st birthday party.

Now the next step is to go to the second tab and do the same for your contact information.

When you’re done that we can move on to the more interactive parts of your profile.

When you first get your Facebook account, it is a clean slate and is about a pourus as a fishing net. Everything you do is completly transparent and everyone can see what you’re doing, who your doing it with, and… well you get the idea. A lot of this is unknown to many users until they get really into Facebook and often this can be too late. A good way to prevent a crisis before it starts is to spend some time with the the tab called Newsfeeds and Wall. (I skipped over the Search, but we’ll go back to it after this.)

When you get to the News Feed and Wall area your screen will look like this:

Now this is more cut and dry than the profile privacy area. This is because you’ve already set your preferences for who can see what about you. This is more fine tuning. This area is rather self explanetory so dive right in. I’ll wait here and when you’re done we’ll continue.

Okay. Welcome back. Go back to the main privacy area. You’ll notice right above the News Feed and Wall link there is a button for Search. This area will allow you to specify how much a person can see prior to becoming your friend.

In my opinion, I would let everyone find you. That makes Facebook a great way to reconnect with old friends and what not. Keep in mind that very stripped down Facebook page will appear in search results in Google and the other major search engines. But as you can see from mine, it’s not much.

So, in my opinion let everyone find you. It’s up to you to determine who is your friend.

Now the last MAJOR issue with privacy is controling how much a Facebook application can say about you to your friends and others. To edit this you’ll need to go to the settings area in the top menu and select Application settings.

Now in order for most applications to run, they need to have access to your information. Facebook does regulate what information they can actively keep on their own servers and they treat violations of their development rules strictly.

To edit a what an application says about you click edit settings. You’ll be greated with a popup options menu:

This dialog is worth investigating and tweaking. Essentially what you are controlling is how much information is posted when you interact with a particular application. Even with some control, still pick your applications wisely. Some are just ploys to get information out of you about your computer usage, where as others are lots of fun and worth checking out.

I hope this quick primer to the Facebook privacy panel was informative and helpful. Please feel free to share this post with your friends, just please attribute it back to this blog with a link.

I’d also link to hear your thoughts, post your comments below! Thanks!