These heroes, known as the Facebook Five, made offensive comments about the prison boss for the Austalian state of New South Wales in a closed Facebook group, according to the AP. It's not clear how prison authorities came across the postings, but Facebook groups, even closed ones, can easily have hundreds of members. The workers, three men and two women, face possible dismissal over the messages for "unauthorized public comment" and "comment to the media without permission."

The employees argue their conduct was outside the workplace — i.e., on Facebook — and "intended" to be private. That standard would allow you to complain about your boss virtually anywhere on Facebook, save for his personal profile page. That sort of raw commentary might be hard for a supervisor to read, but that's the kind of unfiltered stuff she signed up for when she "friended" you, right?

(Image via)

At a disciplinary hearing, Singh protested that he was only guilty of indiscriminate Facebook friending:

Sometimes when I logged on to my Facebook site there would be 20-odd friend requests and I just accepted them. Sometimes I didn't even check them. I realise now it might have been naïve in the job I do.

Nice try, officials said: They found photos on Facebook showing him hanging out with Tyrone Leadett, a drug-dealer Facebook friend (above, right). Their investigation also found that he'd phoned 7 of the 13 Facebook-friend criminals.

Poor Singh! If only this had happened after Facebook rolled out its latest redesign, which makes it totally impossible to find photos and friend updates and such.

Roubini, a doomsaying economist who's as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil. (He simply had to spring for a helicopter "as Sao Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.) Check out who he hung out with: New York Times loan shark Carlos Slim Helù, disaster-exploiting hedge fund manager John Paulson, and demise-of-empire chronicler Niall Ferguson. They know all about meltdowns, too!

Zuckerberg has had a private account under the username "zuck" for awhile. But Zuckerberg's confession to operating the public "finkd" accountcomes after VentureBeat reported its existence and wondered if it was a hoax.

It's not a hoax. An update "finkd" posted at 9:38 p.m. on March 4 ("A good day") matches exactly a status update Zuckerberg made to his Facebook status two minutes later.

Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker welcomed Zuckerberg to Twitter. And one of his friends is Christopher Cox, a close Zuckerberg confidante who's little-known outside the company.

So what does it mean that Zuckerberg has a public Twitter account on which he can overshare his thoughts with the entire Twitterverse, when he's made so much of Facebook's privacy features which let people share updates with just their friends? It suggests that Twitter's rapid (if utterly profitless) expansion is unnerving him — and he still desperately wants to bring the microblogging site under his wing.

The story broke on Sunday in Consumerist (a website recently sold by Gawker Media to the publisher of Consumer Reports): Facebook had changed its terms of service to say it would retain data even after users deleted their accounts! The scandalous implication: Facebook intended to keep all of its information on us, for ever and ever and ever — every last poke and Wall post and comment and photo and video.

From there, it spread to Tumblr and Twitter. By Monday, it was on Techmeme, a headline-aggregation site obsessively monitored by tech bloggers.

By that evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's response — that Facebook users "own and control" their information — was gaining traction. But it still didn't quiet the blogosphere storm. Late last night, Zuckerberg bowed to the bloggers and retracted Facebook's revision to its terms of service, promising a further revision.

What did the storm accomplish? Facebook's terms of service no longer claim rights to a user's data after account deletion — though Facebook in fact continues to retain that information (for example, in a copy of a Facebook message sent by the former user which remains in a current user's inbox).

All that has changed is words, not actions. But the bloggers who so strongly protested Facebook's new terms of service can't very well complain about the old ones, since they lived under those for months or years without complaint.

And in reality, how many people were actually upset? 91,000 people joined a protest group. That's 0.05 percent of Facebook's population.

Amid this PR storm, no one has pointed out the real issue here, which is that the guy masterminding these legal changes is Ted Ullyot, who previously worked in the Bush Administration under then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, surrounded by coworkers who unabashedly defended torture and shredded the Bill of Rights. Amazing, isn't it, that people are talking about a site's legal boilerplate, rather than the guy who Zuckerberg picked to enforce it?

(Photoillustration via Ideagrove)

An undated photo of Blagojevich signing the rack of a youthful female voter — hey, he was reaching out to important demographics! — is making the rounds on Facebook. The picture appeared in the collection of CJ Dugan, a Chicago-area animator. We're not sure if he took it, or just reposted it from elsewhere. But what we really want to know is what's in the censored part — all the more suspicious after Blagojevich deleted his own Facebook account. Destruction of evidence!

Update: We just heard from Dugan, who is the mystery photographer! "I was clearing out my iPhoto library and found it," he tells us. The photo, he says, is from September 20, 2008; he noticed a crowd gathering at the Cubs game and snapped it as he walked by. And the weird blocked-out portion? "That was just my flash on someone's shoulder." Darn! There goes that conspiracy theory. Dugan reports he's newly popular on Facebook, including a friend request from Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rich Miller.

(Photo by CJ Dugan)

Her Facebook page has disappeared, though a public listing is still cached in Google's Web search. She's an Obama supporter, a fan of Evol T-shirts, and a fierce opponent of junk mail. What else was in the profile? If anyone snapped a screenshot, send it in. Here's her listing:

While it won't identify individual users directly, indirectly it will allow advertisers to reach a class of individual users through more refined placement. Which is kind of the same difference — mention American Apparel, and more porny ads for you!

The information that can be collected includes addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, physical appearance, behavioral traits, fiscal and financial records, and details about people who have personal ties with the subject.

Funny, because that's exactly the kind of information most of what Americans willingly share about themselves on social network sites like Facebook.

You get a Facebook message from a friend, urging you to check out this video. You go there, and it's a YouTube phishing site (with your friend's facebook profile picture and name on it), which then urges you to update your Flash player. Don't do it — it fucks up your computer and then spams all your Facebook contacts (not sure exactly how it does that). But it's interesting that hackers are now using a supposedly "trusted" messaging platform such as Facebook to launch attacks

If the hackers' method sounds familiar — a third party attempts to get a user to click based on what looks to be the endorsement of a friend — that's because Facebook tried the same idea with Beacon last year. And it's trying it again with Engagement Ads, a new format coming this fall.