Graham Cluley at Naked Security:

“Over the last few weeks we have been contacted by a number of members of the Sophos Facebook page, concerned by a message they saw on Facebook, warning them that their account protection was “very low”.

Your account protection status: Very low
Increase protection

With fake anti-virus (also known as scareware) attacks becoming an ever-growing problem (they attempt to trick you into believing your computer has a security problem when it doesn’t), some security-conscious Facebook users might worry that this is a similarly-styled assault, designed to scare you into taking perhaps unwise actions.

Certainly the warning message gives you the impression that there’s something seriously wrong with how you have defended your Facebook account. I must admit I was surprised to see the message appear on my own Facebook account as I have been quite fastidious in my security settings on the social network, following Sophos’s guidelines for better privacy on Facebook.

So, I was curious to find out just why Facebook believed that my account protection status was “very low”, and what they thought I should do to fix that.

If you do click on the link, the first thing you are asked to do is enter an additional email address. Facebook’s thinking is that if you lose control of the, say, Hotmail or Gmail account that you normally log into the site with, you’ll be able to regain access to your Facebook account by giving them an alternative email address. They could then use this, for instance, to communicate with you.

That’s reasonable enough, of course, if you feel comfortable giving Facebook another email address for yourself. And there is a genuine problem of users having the same password on their Facebook and email accounts – meaning that you could potentially lose control of both at the same time, making comandeering back control of your Facebook presence tricky.

But, there’s no indication of what else Facebook might do with this alternative email address of yours. Not only would you be right to be concerned about whether you are increasing the potential for data loss by sharing alternative email addresses with online companies, but is it possible that Facebook might also use this secondary email address to further interconnect you with possible contacts? There is, after all, no indication on the page that they are not going to use your secondary email address in any other way.”

AP reports that Israel believes the US is too distracted by Wikileaks to broker a deal on West Bank settlements with the Palestinians:

“Israel’s defense minister said Tuesday the U.S. has halted talks with Israel about curbing West Bank settlement construction and resuming peace talks with the Palestinians because Washington is distracted by the WikiLeaks release of secret documents.

Ehud Barak told a parliamentary committee that Washington was busy dealing with fallout from the release of diplomatic memos on the WikiLeaks website, as well as with tensions between North and South Korea.”

Intent Blog:

“In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”

Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), and on and on.

You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.”