Archive for the 'Bebo' Category

Bebo and Myspace - Changing society as we know it!

Published
by
Adam
on April 16, 2006
in Bebo and Life
. 170 Comments

The purpose of Myspace and Bebo was to bring people from around the world closer together. But what are the costs of bringing over 71 million (and counting) strangers together?

A minor problem is thatSocial Networking sites have made it ridiculously simple to find people with similar interests and nowadays it’s common to encounter people with more online friends than real friends. This is worrying because it means that people are spending more time online on sites such as MySpace than they are out in the real world. This results in people having low self-esteem and generally not having a clue about what goes on outside their house! This is only a minor issue though and it can be argued that Television has been contributing to this happening for generations but the internet is aiding the acceleration of this process! The main problem is something far more sinister that has the ability to change society as we know it but this is undoubtably serving as a catalyst!

Unfortunately, because people have a lot of online friends it has almost become acceptable amongst todays youth to travel across the country to meet each other and often times not just for mere friendship. I’m talking about something more than that. Not only is this dangerous but it is also in most cases carried out without the knowledge of parents - the older and wiser generation. If I told my mother that I was going up to Dublin to meet a random stranger for sex then all hell would break loose in the house which should get across the point that this is unacceptable behaviour. However, if I lied to my mother and told her that I was going up to Dublin with a friend for a spot of shopping then my mother would be none the wiser and not in a position to warn of the dangers (let a lone stupidity) of doing such things.

The people who do this though obviously think it’s okay to do so. If I think it’s okay to do such a thing then I’d tell my child that it’s okay to do it. Teenagers are notorious for disobeying authority though. So if my mother says that I can stay out until midnight then I’m going to stumble in the door at 4am. Now if I tell my child that it’s okay to go out and have sex with random strangers then imagine what they’d do when they (inevitably) disobey you and try to push the envelope! This is where the problem lies. Because teenagers can be in relative secrecy on the net they are operating with no guiding light, no authority and no advice. It really is a disaster waiting to happen and I really do hope that in the future such things won’t be acceptable!

bebo, bebo dangers, society change, society, myspace, myspace dangers, casual sex, social networking, anarchy

Bebo as it stands

Published
by
Adam
on March 31, 2006
in Bebo
. 80 Comments

In recent weeks Bebo has continued to grow from strength to strength. The downside of this new found popularity is that colleges have started to take notice to the hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth being used by students browsing bebo everyday and as a result they have had to resort to blocking access to it much to the dismay of the thousands of students who depend on it to provide a break from the monotony of lectures!

Not wanting to risk the chance of experiencing a withdrawal symptom of some sort (maybe even experiencing a real life), some rather smart people decided to find out some workarounds in the local college. Unfortunately they failed to realise at the time that when it comes to technology, guys are just as bad as girls for gossiping and inevitabley the fat, balding men in Computer Services caught on to what was happening and blocked that. Spirits were once again shattered and those who wish to access Bebo must now put on their thinking cap. I decided to join in on the act and for the afternoon I had my invisible thinking cap on, racking my brain trying to think of ways of how to access Bebo and after some initial dissapointments I think I’ve finally struck gold. But enough of that! The fact that people are willing to go to such lengths to access one site just goes to show how popular and addictive Bebo can be!

Bebo has also made significant steps forward in terms of safety and they have implemented changes similar to those that I suggested a few weeks back which makes me feel rather good about myself that I helped bring about these changes to a site which is as influential and as popular as Bebo! In fact, Bebo’s co-creator left me a comment Here. If Bebo continues to add new and fresh features then Bebo looks set to keep the masses entertained for the foreseeable future!

bebo, college, wit, Michael Birch

The Bebo Exposè: The Conclusion & Tracys Last Stand

Published
by
Adam
on February 18, 2006
in Bebo
. 19 Comments

Only a week a go, I didn’t care much for Bebo. I wasn’t even that active a member. Yet on the rare occassion that I found myself looking through my ‘friends’ profiles, I caught sight of someone Home Address. That person was almost unknown to me and was only in my friends list because I had previously imported my contact list from MSN.

From that moment on I wanted to try and make a difference, so I set about trying to make it happen. At first I didn’t know how but soon I had a few ideas floating around in my head which began to materialise in the form of Tracy - a totally ficticious girl that I created coupled with a photo of a hot babe. I then set about adding “friends” by using a quick work around I found (joining one of the many colleges). Once I had some friends added I was able to view their profiles which included their contact details. Out of the initial 6 friends that I added, I managed to obtain 1 home address and 4 phone numbers.

At this stage I wanted my findings to get some well deserved publicity as initial comments from my friends were quite positive. I added the article to www.digg.com and www.scooop.net with the result being a massive influx of curious visitors from around the net. The article had also been linked to from various forums and was quickly indexed on google.com meaning that my article was ranked highly when anyone searched for “Bebo”. While all this publicity was welcomed, it still didn’t take of the minor detail that the people who are unknowingly making their personal information available to the public didn’t know the dangers about doing it. That was where my next challenge lied.

I figured that sending messages to the 10 people that I had fooled wouldn’t cause any shockwaves that would reverberate through the Bebo community so I decided to think on a more epic scale. If this was going to work then I was going to have to add more people in order to let Tracy go out with a BANG! After individually clicking 93 boxes belonging to my “mutual friends” I had finally reached a point where enough was enough! Within minutes people started to accept my invitations. Now because I added so many people that don’t know me, people were bound to ask questions and I did get a lot of comments asking who I was, but because they left comments it meant that they had already accepted the invitation rendering their suspicions useless because I had access to their personal details. I reckon if they truly were suspicious then they would have sent me a message beforehand. With Tracy being ever so popular by having close to 100 friends, I realised that the potential for adding literally thousands more “mutual friends” to the list was massive. I was dissapointed to see that I was now unable to access the “Friends Friends” panel because I had more than 30 friends and I was greeted to a message stating that after 30 friends, the list would just be stupidly long and almost never ending! Fair Enough. This meant that I was no longer was able to quickly add numerous amounts of people so at this point I decided that what friends I had would do.

So I added up my friends and discovered that 75 had accepted my invitation. I then added up the amount of invitations that were sent out and ended up with 147 which means that 51% of invitations were accepted. However that can’t be a conclusive figure because some people may still have to check their email and see the invitation so I’m going to place the figure at around 60% of sucessfully accepted invitations!

I then added up the sexes of each of my “friends” and found that 39 were female and 36 were male. So it can be said that 52% were female and 48% were male which is a figure I was quite surprised at because I was expecting guys to be more inclined to accept an invitation from a sexy girl like Tracy. However those figures could just be down to me sending more invites to females but unfortunately this can’t be accurately tracked OR maybe the figures are correct and therefore may potentially backup the idea that girls are more desperate than guys for popularity when it comes to these social networking sites.

Now to the part that I think everyone is keen to find out about; How many people were “conned” into sharing their personal details with me?” Lets start with phone numbers;

I counted up how many people were showing a phone number (either mobile or work) and ended up with 35 which can be expressed as 46.67% this can be further broken down into male and female sexes. So off I went counting how many guys had their phone number displayed and finally I got 13 (37%) which means that out of the 35 people displaying their phone numbers a whopping 22 (63%) are female!

Now I can understand why people might be desperate and add complete strangers as friends but choosing to display a phone number to them makes me think that they either don’t know their number is visible or are simply not aware of the dangers of having their personal info on the net!

My second last task was to suss out how many addresses. I suspected (and hoped) that not as many people would be stupid enough to put up their address on because when you think about it, if you know a person directly, chances are they know where you live so there shouldn’t be any reason to have your address online. So once again I did my duty and counted out how many addresses were displayed. 21 was the result (or 28%). Once again more girls than boys had their addresses displayed but this time it was a lot closer with 12 girls (57%) and 9 guys (43%) having visible addresses.

The last thing for me to do was inform everyone that Tracy wasn’t a real person. I did this using the mail system on bebo.com. Sending a message to 75 won’t have any remifications on the rest of the bebo.com community so I also created a message on my real account and forwarded it to all my friends in the hope that it will continue to be forwarded. Lastly I contacted the Bebo.com owners in the hope that they will take on board some suggestions that I made to them.

I think that pretty much brings this report to an end. I suppose I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who felt deceived but at the end of the days thats exactly what happened - you were deceived! I’ll leave you with a summary of I learned:

Total Amount of Friends: 75
Amount of Friend Inivitations Sent out: 147
Percentage of Invites accepted: 60%
Number of Female Friends: 39 Percentage: 52%
Number of Male Friends: 36 Percentage: 48%

People Displaying Phone Numbers: 35 Percentage: 46.67%
Males displaying phone numbers: 13 Percentage: 37%
Females displaying phone numbers: 22 Percentage: 63%

People Displaying Addresses: 21 Percentage: 28%
Males displaying addresses: 9 Percentage: 43%
Females displaying addresses: 12 Percentage: 57%

bebo, myspace, danger, bebo danger, myspace danger, identidy theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment

The Dangers Of Bebo - Part II

Published
by
Adam
on February 11, 2006
in Bebo
. 36 Comments

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART I

24 hours have passed since I underwent the transformation into a woman. To those who are unfamiliar with my aim, I decided to sign up to Bebo.com posing as a girl in order to coax total strangers into sharing their contact details with me. I am now in the rather smug position of being able to tell you I managed to acquire mobile numbers and HOME ADDRESSES of the majority of those who accepted my invitation for friendship. So how did I manage to find friends?So that’s where we pick up the story. After creating a false email address, finding a suitable pic of a babe and signing up to Bebo.com I set about searching for friends because after all I’m a lonely New Yorker who moved to Meath because my Dad got a job there so I’m desperate for friends. I was semi-pleased to discover that adding friends on Bebo isn’t all that easy because you actually have to know their email address to be able to add them. I should have been thrilled after finding this out but because I was desperate to find some friends, it made the job in hand slightly more difficult because now it meant I had to find a work around.

So I paused for a few moments before noticing the “School” and “College” tab which I clicked because it would only seem logical to be able to add yourself to a school and be able to see everyone else who signed up to the college. Upon clicking on “College” I was asked to select a Country and then a state (having selected the USA) and then finally I could browse through all the colleges registered on the site. My first attempt at enrolling myself as a student was foiled because I was asked to enter my student email which must be verified. I couldn’t have been bothered to verify another email address so I went back over the procedure only this time I said I was Alumni and didn’t have to verify an email address (presumably because few graduates would remember their college email).

I was in! I was now brought to a page listing everyone from the college, past and present. Now I was free to look at people’s public profiles and request to add them as a friend. For the next 10 minutes I added about 6 friends in between many sips of coffee, all male and between the ages of 17 and 21. Once I did that it was simply a matter of playing the waiting game.

A few hours later I received an email saying that “XXXX” had connected with me on Bebo. I then had to log out of my genuine account (that is my account) and log in as Tracy so I could view this persons profile. Now at this point I’d like to point out that I won’t at any stage reveal the names of those who were duped. Nevertheless “XXXX’s” profile tested positive for the following banned substances… Mobile phone number and home address. I could do nothing but smile as I realised that unbeknownst to XXXX, I was in a very powerful position. Granted they were based in New York and here I am in Ireland but there are tonnes of US-based sites that are crying out for numbers to send junk txt’s to and likewise I could have done the same with their home address!

As I was reading that profile, I received another email saying that another person had added me. This time around the person was only choosing to display their phone number. Smart choice - Dumbass! Over the next few hours everyone that I had sent a friend request out to had accepted it and it turned out that that first person was the only one who entered in their home address while everyone else was showing their phone number.

I could have gone further and at this stage it would actually be easier to find friends because I would only have to click on “Friends Friends” and be given the option to add all my mutual friends with only one click. It would have beat having to add each person individually but I feel that I have already proven my point and that is the simple fact that Bebo has the potential to wreak havok on people’s lives while that person is left wondering just why €5 is going missing from their phone credit each day and why they are all of a sudden receiving 17 catalogues daily. Of course the danger doesn’t end there and armed with a home address there is the potential for some serious physical harm being done to the victim.

Before I started this experiment, I was under the impression that Bebo was a free for all where anybody could simply search for someone and add them, instead the other way for someone to get in contact with strangers is to join a college or a school. Once you do add someone, that person is advised to only accept you if they actually know you. However because people added me, the beautiful stranger, it’s proof that people aren’t following the advise but even though the onus is on the people to make sure they are responsible in choosing who to add, I feel that Bebo should tighten up it’s security further to make it harder for people to do exactly as I did.

To conclude this report I’d like to emphasise that I did this because I believe services like Bebo.com, Myspace.com and other community sites aimed at progressively younger users are dangerous and hopefully by doing this I can help spread awareness of this very real danger.

Thanks for taking the time out to read this and please feel free to link to this article and/or leave a comment telling me what you think!

bebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace!

Published
by
Adam
on February 9, 2006
in Bebo
. 51 Comments

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART II
Over the past 6 or so months, online “friend” sites such as www.myspace.com and www.bebo.com have taken the world by storm with MySpace.com recently notching up it’s 47th million user which is one of the reasons why it grew by 609% within in the last year! The service that the majority of them offer is the ability to upload pictures to your very own profile page where you can also add your own biography and list the things that you are interested in. People access your profile by adding you as a friend. Friends can leave comments about each other in what has recently become an over-glorified popularity contest.

With many people desperate for all the friends they can get, they will accept invitations from complete strangers just so their friend count will increase by one. This is where alarm bells start going off in my mind! Yesterday I signed up to bebo.com and imported all my contacts from my Hotmail.com account, the vast majority of whom I’ve never met and many being people I haven’t spoken to in years. This morning, a mere 24 hours later, I checked the site and saw that many people had accepted my invitation for “friendship”. I was looking through everyone’s profiles and noticed that about 60% of people had entered in their Mobile phone number and their full address! Oh dear!

Now try and remember that I don’t know a lot of these people and they don’t know me either yet all of a sudden I had access to their mobile phone number, full address and their pictures! This really is a disaster waiting to happen! If I wanted, I could cause havok! I could innocently sign them up to receive spam by mail or register them on ringtone sites resulting in them wasting credit. They’re just innocent ideas, if I were a paedophile or a pervert then I could use their address for a lot more malicious purposes. I really hope that that won’t be the case but I can’t help but feel that in this day and age, my fears could become a reality!

I really don’t want that to happen so I’ve embarked on a mission to expose these dangers. I thought about it for a while and I decided that the best way to do this would be to actually pose as a 19 year old stunner from the USA who now lives in Ireland

First I created a new email address: tracy.xox@gmail.com. I’ve already cut a corner because gmail.com isn’t yet open to the public so some guys might be a bit suspicious over how i managed to get a gmail.com address. At the end of the day though, I was just too damn lazy to go through hotmail’s longwinded signup system! Once I created the email address I had to search for a picture so I typed in “prom” into google images and picked the photo of the most beautiful girl on the page. I chose to use a prom photo because the story goes that I was a prom queen last year in New York (my hometown naturally) and this way if someone asks me about New York I can make up some bullshit answer and they’ll be none the wiser. After signing up I made up a half believable story about my life thusfar and entered in a few things that I like and dislike.

This is the stage that I’m at at the moment. Just to let everyone know that my goal isn’t to deceive people, instead it’s to make people aware of the potential danger. It’s the prove that people throw all sense of judgement out the window when they are desperate for friends and I reckon that in the next few days I will be well on the way to proving it because “Tracy’s” story isn’t solid. It’s full of holes that will become blatantly obvious to everyone once they find out that Tracy isn’t real. However if someone wanted to, they could pay a lot of attention to detail and make sure their story is rock solid!

I’ll let everyone know how this experiment turns out and if you want to check out my progress, check out Tracy’s Bebo page @ http://Tracyxox.bebo.com

YOU CAN SEE PART II of this report Here

bebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment