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Tanya Cousins and Rick Mason were scammed out of $36000 and are now having to live in a house bus.A Facebook Marketplace scammer who swindled his victims out of $284,000 using 15 different pseudonyms won't have to pay a cent of the money he stole back. Hazel Osborne reports.Rick Mason and Tanya Cousins thought their prayers had been answered when they saw a self-contained unit for sale on Facebook.The Whakatāne couple had recently sold their home to become mortgage free as both moved into early retirement due to illnesses.When the sale of the house went through faster than anticipated, they bought a house bus to tide them over until something more permanent stood out.A few months later a self-contained unit with an asking price of $36,000 popped up on Facebook Marketplace. It was listed by a woman called Deborah McKinley and was just what they were after.What the couple didn't know at the time was that McKinley was just one of 15 different aliases for John Sinclair - a man now on home detention after scamming 28 victims out of $284,000 to fuel his gambling addiction.  » Read More

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is charged with deciding whether Donald Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram in 2023, Clegg said on Thursday.Speaking at an event held in Washington by news organization Semafor, Clegg said the company was seriously debating whether Trump’s accounts should be reinstated and said it was a decision that “I oversee and I drive”.Clegg added that while he will be making the final call, he will consult the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook board of directors and outside experts.“It’s not a capricious decision,” he said. “We will look at the signals related to real-world harm to make a decision whether at the two-year point – which is early January next year – whether Trump gets reinstated to the platform.”The former president was suspended from a number of online platforms, including those owned by Meta, following the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot during which Trump used his social media accounts to praise and perpetuate the violence.  » Read More

Apple’s major privacy update to iOS last year made it much more difficult for apps to track user behavior beyond their own borders, but a new lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta kept snooping through a workaround. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and embedded below, alleges that Meta evaded Apple’s new restrictions by monitoring users through Facebook’s in-app browser, which opens links within the app. The proposed class-action lawsuit, first reported by Bloomberg, could allow anyone affected to sign on, which in Facebook’s case might mean hundreds of millions of U.S. users. In the lawsuit, a pair of Facebook users allege that Meta is not only violating Apple’s policies, but breaking privacy laws at the state and federal level, including the Wiretap Act, which made it illegal to intercept electronic communications without consent. Another similar complaint (Mitchell v. Meta Platforms Inc.) was filed last week. The plaintiffs allege that Meta follows users’ online activity by funneling them into the web browser built into Facebook and injecting JavaScript into the sites they visit.  » Read More

Social-media giant Facebook is going through a tough time marked by stagnant growth.Facebook is starting to look like a shadow of its former self. The giant social-media company, now known as Meta Platforms  (META) - Get Meta Platforms Inc. Report, has been on a slide this year, with the shares down 58%.  Some top athletes and coaches enjoy 'farewell tours' after announcing their retirements. These 15 stepped away in style based on Stathead and Vivid Seats research. Click for more. The market capitalization of the owner of Instagram and WhatsApp is now only $383 billion, the lowest level Mark Zuckerberg's empire has reached since 2019. At that time Facebook was mired in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The social network had allowed the consulting firm, which partnered with the Donald Trump campaign team ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to harvest private data from tens of millions of its users. The data in turn enabled it to profile voters.  » Read More

He's lost a staggering amount of money so far this year.Billionaire WipeoutIt's no secret that Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse pivot isn't exactly paying off yet.The billionaire's fortune has dropped by a whopping $71 billion —  leaving him with a piddling $55.9 billion left over — this year, Bloomberg reports, rendering him only the 20th richest person in the world.Sure, that's still plenty of pocket money. But it's the lowest spot he's occupied in eight years, in a sign of how far he's fallen. Just two years ago, he was the third person in the world, with almost twice the net worth, according to the report.It's worth noting that 2022 has proven disastrous for global markets and other tech titans as well, but even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have lost far less than that. The takeaway? In the self-inflicted era of the metaverse, Zuckerberg is in big, big trouble.Meta PivotFacebook's highest valuation in recent memory,  » Read More

An epic food journey in the Arctic Circle(Image credit: Adrienne Murray Nielsen)Chef Poul Andrias Ziska of Koks restaurant honed his craft in the harsh North Atlantic but has now reimagined his signature locavore cooking for a Greenlandic terroir.FFabled for its off-the-beaten track location, gourmet restaurant Koks is now even harder to reach. It has uprooted from the Faroe Islands, and until 2023, moved to a small village in western Greenland that's located more than 200km inside the Arctic Circle. Here, rugged nature serves up a wild harvest of seafood and game, from prawns and halibut to reindeer and muskox (a horned and shaggy-haired bovine that resembles a bison). Faroese chef Poul Andrias Ziska honed his craft in the harsh North Atlantic but has now reimagined his signature locavore cooking for a Greenlandic terroir. Crispy shrimp heads with beady eyes and antennae; delicately smoked salmon sandwiched between bubbly fish-skin crackers; and tender morsels of scarlet-red ptarmigan (a bird found in mountainous northern climes) breast skewered with a white-feathered wing bone are among the dishes awaiting curious diners who seek out a table at the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the Arctic.  » Read More

Myanmar's ruling military said Tuesday that sharing social media posts by a pro-democracy shadow government, or even liking them on Facebook, can construe endorsement and be punished with a jail term of up to 10 years. Spokesman Zaw Min Tun told a news conference that the parallel government, called the National Unity Government, and its related organizations, including the People's Defense Force, are terrorist groups and therefore those who support them via social media are supporting terror acts "directly or indirectly." File photo shows Myanmar's military chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. (Anadolu Agency/Getty/Kyodo) The People's Defense Force is the NUG's umbrella organization waging guerilla warfare against the military following a February 2021 coup that ousted the democratically elected government of then-leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The NUG maintains that the military has lost over 20,000 soldiers in the fighting. The military, which has found itself on the defensive in some areas, appears to be stepping up its pressure on supporters of the pro-democracy forces. The military spokesman said simply clicking the "Like" button on Facebook or sharing posts made by such groups as the NUG and its armed umbrella group,  » Read More

Facebook is introducing new Pages features that are designed to help creators get discovered and connect with their followers, the company announced on Tuesday. Most notably, the social network is rolling out a new setting for creators that makes content exclusively available to top fans and subscribers. Creators can select the option by going into their Audience settings and selecting the “Top fans” option when sharing a new post. In the future, Facebook plans to roll out a new setting for creators that will allow them to give some fans early access to special content. The company is also launching “Creator Endorsements,” which gives creators the option to spotlight each other and invite their followers to follow another creator that they like. Once a creator that you follow endorses another creator, you will receive a notification that will ask you if you want to follow the recommended creator. In addition, Facebook is adding “Rising Creator Labels” to make it easier for users to discover up-and-coming creators on the platform.  » Read More

Meta-owned Facebook has banned the filmmakers of the Holocaust film ‘Beautiful Blue Eyes’ from promoting or advertising the film on its platforms as its title violates its policy against content that “includes direct or indirect assertions or implications about a person’s race,” among other personal attributes, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The film’s title refers to the eye colour of a child in the film who has a key scene. The film is directed by British filmmaker Joshua Newton. As per the report, in early September, the director got an email from Peter Ruppert, a digital media buyer for the film’s distributor, MovieFarm, that Facebook had decided to go for the ban. Beautiful Blue Eyes happens to be veteran actor Roy Scheider’s final film. He passed away in 2008. The IMDB description of the film reads: “A retired cop seeks revenge against an elderly man he's convinced is the Nazi who slaughtered his family during WW2.” Here is the trailer.  » Read More

Schiphol Airport, AmsterdamGrace Dean/InsiderAn airline passenger got a message from a stranger saying they'd found his bag in Amsterdam.Sunil Saith hadn't known where his bag was after it failed to arrive on his flight to Newark.He'd changed from a Turkish Airlines to a United Airlines flight in Schiphol.A passenger says he only found out his lost luggage was in Amsterdam when a stranger contacted him on social media and is still waiting for his bag despite informing the airline.Sunil Saith told Insider that he took business-class flights with Turkish Airlines from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Istanbul and then on to Amsterdam on August 27. He ended his journey with an economy-class United Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Newark Liberty Airport, New Jersey, which arrived on August 28.Saith told Insider that his bag did not make it to Newark and he filed a report with United Airlines. He said that when he checked in at Bishkek,  » Read More