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TRENTON, N.J. - New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus.com, a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students.

Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive. One thread, for example, on the “most overrated Princeton student” quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

JuicyCampus may be violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn’t allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule — and no way for users to report or dispute the material, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said Tuesday.

Milgram said she believes New Jersey is the first state to investigate the site.

The investigation began last month when a student came forward who had been terrorized by posts on the Web site that included her address. Prosecutors have subpoenaed information from JuicyCampus on how it is run, citing concerns about “unconscionable commercial practices.”

“There’s an unbelievable amount of offensive material posted and absolutely no enforcement,” said Milgram, noting insults about students’ appearance, race and sexual history as “just the tip of the iceberg.”

JuicyCampus referred a request for comment to its public relations firm, which said a response was forthcoming.

The attorney general has also subpoenaed the Web site’s advertising agency, Adbrite, to determine how JuicyCampus represented its operation and what advertising keywords the site requested.

Milgram said Adbrite has offered full cooperation with the investigation and canceled its contract with JuicyCampus.

The site launched last fall on seven college campuses and recently expanded to 50 more, including Princeton University. Free to use and supported by advertising, JuicyCampus promises total anonymity to people who post on it. Many of the postings indicate they’ve been viewed thousands of times.

Students at many schools have responded with outrage and disgust at seeing peers smeared. The student government at Pepperdine University in California voted overwhelmingly to request a ban on the site, although the university has a policy against censoring Web sites.

JuicyCampus founder Matt Ivester has expressed little concern in the past about backlash from colleges.

“Like anything that is even remotely controversial, there are always people who demand censorship,” he told The Associated Press last month. “However, we believe that JuicyCampus can have a really positive impact on college campuses, as a place for both entertainment and free expression.”

The site seems designed to shield its users from the threat of libel claims.

“It is not possible for anyone to use this Web site to find out who you are or where you are located,” assures a JuicyCampus privacy page. “We do not track any information that can be used by us to identify you. “

Mainstream social networking sites, on the other hand, maintain detailed logs of users’ numeric Internet protocol addresses and their posting history.

Facebook plans to roll out new privacy features on Wednesday that will give users more control over who sees the data stored on their profile pages.

The new privacy controls will allow users to choose which of their friends can see information such as their photo albums, mobile phone number or e-mail address. Facebook users will also be able to share information about themselves with a wider group of people, thanks to a new “friends-of-friends” feature that is also expected to be available on Wednesday.

The company has also taken efforts to make these new privacy features easy to use, said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager. “We've introduced a standardized privacy interface that users will see when they're editing their privacy setting anywhere,” she said.

Privacy Issues

Privacy has become a hot-button issue for Facebook since its mismanaged launch of Beacon, an online advertising tool unveiled in November.

Privacy experts blasted the program for being confusing, and computer experts soon revealed that Beacon was tracking Web behavior and secretly sending data back to Facebook without notifying users. Facebook was forced to retool the product amid a firestorm of bad publicity.

The new privacy features do not have any relationship to Beacon, but at a press event held Tuesday, the company's vice president of product management gave a frank assessment of the Beacon roll-out.

“With Beacon we just screwed it up,” said Matt Cohler. “It was just poor execution on our part.”

From its humble beginnings as a Web site for Harvard students four years ago, Facebook has grown to a global phenomenon, and that has at times made it difficult for the company's developers to balance things like privacy with ease-of-use, Cohler said.

Just 18 months ago, 90 percent of Facebook's users were in the U.S. Today, about two-thirds of the 67 million active members are from outside the country.

“On the one hand, we think it's important that the tools we give people are really powerful,” Cohler said. “On the other hand, you have to make sure those things are really easy to use.”

“That was early on a pretty easy problem for us to solve, back in the dorm in Harvard.”

Facebook Chat Client

Cohler also confirmed rumors that Facebook plans to roll out its own Web-based chat software in the coming weeks.

The company demoed a very simple chat client that could be used to connect with other Facebook users, so long as they are logged into the Facebook Web site. Facebook chat appears as a small icon on the bottom of the Web browser that, when clicked, pops up a small chat window. Chat conversations will be archived for 90 days, although users will have the option of erasing them.

Cohler wouldn't say whether Facebook's chat software would be integrated with other chat clients, but hinted that this could be a possibility. “We want to be able to extend Facebook out into as much of your use of the Web as possible,” he said. “Our vision is not to make Facebook an island.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Facebook said Tuesday it is giving users more control over who gets to see personal information posted in profiles at the hot social-networking website.

Privacy updates to be available by Wednesday include letting Facebook users categorize friends into lists, with access to profile information determined by which list someone is on.

Prior to the change, any friend granted access to a Facebook profile could see anything posted there. People were left to choose between denying certain friends access to their profiles and censoring website postings.

Facebook's more than 68 million active users will also be able to give “friends of friends” automatic access to their profile pages.

The privacy enhancements come as Facebook rolls out French, German and Spanish language versions to win more users outside US borders and works to regain the trust of members irked by its “Beacon” advertising platform.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized online in December to members for “mistakes” made implementing the ad platform and gave them a way to switch it off.

Facebook changed its Beacon advertising platform to an opt-in system to soothe members outraged by what they saw as an assault on their privacy.

Beacon lets “partners” track Facebook members' visits to their websites and relay messages letting users' friends in the social networking community know what they bought in a tactic referred to as “trusted referral” advertising.

Originally members were fodder for the ad platform if they did not exert the effort to “opt-out.”

After considerable rumor and speculation, numerous false starts, and not a small amount of frustration on the part of consumers, Microsoft has released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 into the wild.

The bundle of updates, which includes all updates released for the OS since its debut in February 2007, is now available for download via Microsoft's Windows Update service.

The easiest way to get your hands on Vista SP1 is to sit back, relax, and let Microsoft Update grab it for you. However, if you can't wait, you can get the standalone update in a 32-bit version or a 64-bit version.

Mixed Results

PC World's in-house tests with the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of Vista SP1 have shown mixed results. In file copying tests, the service pack proved noticeably faster than the original Vista OS. Other tests, on the other hand, showed little improvement (or actually performed worse than Vista without the service pack). For instance, our preliminary file compression tests showed a decrease in performance with SP1 installed.

Overall, we found Microsoft's claims of dramatic performance enhancements to be somewhat overstated. PC World continues to evaluate the performance impact of Vista SP1, and more test results will be forthcoming.

Microsoft promises performance and power consumption improvements in many aspects of the Vista user experience, including better performance while browsing network file shares, improved power consumption, faster loading of large images, and faster searches.

In addition to intended performance improvements, Service Pack 1 comes with a number of low-level enhancements such as support for the Extensible Firmware Interface and Extended File Allocation Table. It also includes improved compatibility with some hardware and software. Many users will be pleased to find that SP1 also removes the reduced functionality mode that disables computers which have not been activated through Microsoft.

Who Needs Vista SP1?

Third-party software companies will have mixed reactions to SP1. While it will open up access to the built-in search functionality for third-party desktop search apps, it has already raised problems for some third-party security software vendors whose utilities have been disrupted by the update.

On the security front, the service pack enables single sign-on for authenticated wired networks, which should streamline the end user experience in enterprise environments, in addition to many other updates.

While most users are likely to find Vista SP1 benign (if not beneficial), some organizations–such as large corporate IT departments–may wish to wait a while before deploying this software update. To do so, administrators should download the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool, which will prevent the service pack from being installed. This tool creates a registry key entry that can be later removed by the administrator, and can be run remotely across a network.

PORTLAND, Maine - It was during the card approval process that more than 4 million customer accounts at grocery stores in the Northeast and Florida were exposed to fraud, even though the company meets the latest standards for data security, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Hannaford Bros. Co. doesn’t yet know how the breach — which began Dec. 7 and ended March 10 — occurred, said Carol Eleazer, vice president of marketing for Hannaford, based in Scarborough.

About 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers were exposed and at least 1,800 stolen during the seconds it takes for that information to travel to credit card companies for approval after customers swiped their cards in checkout-line machines, Eleazer said.

On Tuesday, many customers were not yet aware of the problem. Others who’d read or heard about it didn’t seem alarmed.

Shopper Mary Kellett said she’ll continue to shop at Hannaford — and use her credit card. She’ll also be more vigilant checking her card statements.

“Nobody’s really found a perfect a way to prevent this,” she said as she loaded bags of groceries into her car in a Hannaford parking lot in Portland. “But I’m still here shopping today.”

It’s virtually impossible to make credit card transactions 100 percent secure, even if companies use state-of-the-art technology and accepted security practices, said Avishai Wool, chief technical officer at AlgoSec, a computer network security company in Reston, Va.

“That’s like asking if you can have a 100-percent secure home that cannot be broken into,” Wool said. “I don’t think you can. If the bad guys spend enough money and have the appropriate equipment, they can go through anything.”

The breach affects all 165 Hannaford stores in New England and New York, 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida and a smaller number of independent stores in the Northeast that sell Hannaford products. Hannaford and Sweetbay are owned by the Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize America.

The Hannaford case is among the largest security breaches on record but is still much smaller than the tens of millions of credit cards that were exposed at TJX Cos. of Framingham, Mass., which has 2,500 stores and includes the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains.

Hannaford stores, Eleazer said, do not use wireless systems, which are believed to have been the entry points for other recent large-scale data thefts at retailers, including the TJX case.

The TJX breach is thought to have started when hackers intercepted wireless transfers of customer information at two Marshalls stores in Miami — an entry point that eventually gave hackers undetected access to TJX’s central databases for a year and a half.

For merchants to accept credit cards, they have to meet industry standards that credit card firms impose on merchants to protect data.

The standards are administered by the PCI Security Standards Council in Wakefield, Mass., and include making retailers maintain firewalls to protect data inside their computer systems, encrypt data when it travels across public networks, and generally restrict access to cardholder data.

The standards also require companies to track and monitor all access to cardholder data, restrict physical access to cardholder data and use and update antivirus software.

The standards are constantly being updated, said Bob Russo, general manager of PCI Security Standards Council.

“You have to think of this as an arms race,” he said. “We have to stay out in front as much as we can.”

Hannaford’s transaction system was found to be in compliance with the standards as recently as last month, Eleazer said.

“And yet we were the victim of this attack. Which further proves that, regrettably, in the wired world in which we live, vulnerabilities inevitably exist,” she said.

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating, and Hannaford continues to evaluate its technology infrastructure. None of the exposed data contained customers’ names, addresses or phone numbers — just account numbers, Eleazer said.

Still, the problem is “testament to the fact that breaches have turned into a global epidemic,” said Slavik Markovich, chief technology officer of Sentrigo Inc., a database security company based in Woburn, Mass.

“Overall, this type of attack, lasting several months and resulting in large-scale data theft and actual cases of fraud demonstrates once more that enterprises are being proactively targeted by organized crime,” Markovich said in an e-mail. “Weak links anywhere in the data chain that leave the data vulnerable to theft are exploited.”

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Software maker Adobe Systems Inc. beat Wall Street’s expectations in the first quarter with profits that rose 52 percent on continued demand for its design and Acrobat products.

For the three months ended Feb. 29, Adobe posted a profit of $219.4 million, or 38 cents per share, according to an earnings report after the close of trading Tuesday.

That was up from $143.9 million, or 24 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Excluding one-time items, Adobe earned 48 cents per share in the latest quarter. On the same basis, analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected, on average, earnings of 45 cents per share on sales of $875.8 million.

Revenue jumped 37 percent to $890.4 million from $649.4 million in the first quarter a year earlier as booming growth in digital content, from Web sites to online publishing, drove demand for Adobe’s products.

But the company did not raise its yearly guidance.

“We are not immune to any type of recession, were one to come, and we are keeping our eye on the U.S. business,” Adobe chief financial officer Mark Garrett told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday.

“We are fortunate that we have an extremely diversified model, both from a geographic perspective, a product perspective, a purchase perspective,” Garrett said. “Any way you look it, Adobe is one of the most diversified software companies in the world, and that has helped us a lot through these types of economic downturns.”

The quarter was the first for Adobe’s new chief executive Shantanu Narayen, who took over from former CEO Bruce Chizen in December.

Adobe shares closed Tuesday at $31.88, up $1.09 or 4 percent for the day. In after-hours trading after release of the earnings report, they rose another $1.59 or 5 percent to $33.47.

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Facebook Inc. is tweaking the privacy settings on its popular online hangout to let users exert greater control over which of their friends are allowed to see personal details they post.

The Palo Alto-based company said it would add features Tuesday night that will give its 67 million active users the option of selecting individual users who can or can’t access certain parts of their pages.

For example, someone who uploads a racy batch of photos or lists his cell phone number or personal e-mail address on his Facebook page can now bar some people on list of friends from seeing any of that information.

Previously, the only ways to block people from seeing specific content was to deny their friend requests outright or to create a limited profile. The second solution had the downside of blocking entire groups of people from a wide swath of content.

Facebook announced the new features Tuesday as it tries to combat criticism that it doesn’t give users enough control over what posted information their friends see.

The company also is stepping up efforts to portray itself as privacy-conscious after many users rebelled over a marketing tool called “Beacon” that tracked purchases Facebook members made on other Web sites and sent alerts to their Facebook friends about the transactions.

Facebook now allows users to turn off Beacon. The new privacy features announced Tuesday don’t extend to Beacon, however, so users who opt into that program still can’t specify which friends receive Beacon alerts.

Facebook also demonstrated a new instant messaging function Tuesday that lets Facebook friends chat with one another and is scheduled to launch in coming weeks.

BERKELEY, Calif. - A new partnership among two personal computing giants and two major research universities aims to bring advances in processing technology to consumers faster.

Under an agreement announced Tuesday, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are joining the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to push developments in parallel computing.

Parallel computing speeds computers enabling them to perform tasks at the same time on multiple chips.

The companies are expected to invest about $20 million in research centers at both universities over the next five years.

Technologies the centers may pursue include face recognition and voice recognition.

Dell has replenished its overhauled PowerEdge line of servers with the launch of new single-socket servers for small and medium-size businesses.

The PowerEdge T300, with a tower chassis, and PowerEdge R300, a rack server, are designed to consume less power and include system management tools to better manage IT tasks, Dell said. The servers have quad-core Xeon processors and provide memory expandability and redundancy features, the company said.

The servers are available worldwide today and in Latin America starting March 25, a Dell spokesman said. The R300 server is priced starting at $1,249, and the T300 starts at $999.

Server Specs

The servers run on processors including Intel's Celeron, Core 2 and Xeon chips. The PowerEdge R300 also supports a low-voltage Xeon processor, said Lionel Menchaca, a Dell blogger.

The servers come with hot-pluggable hard drives, which allow hard drives to be replaced without powering down the server, Dell said. They also come with redundant power supplies to boost system reliability. Both servers include Dell's OpenManage system management tools to help administer and manage IT system resources.

The servers hold up to 24G bytes of RAM and come with integrated graphics controllers. The T300 supports up to 4T bytes of storage, while the R300 supports up to 2T bytes of storage. The servers will support Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 5 and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A leading marketing forecaster on Tuesday cut its projection for U.S. spending on online advertising this year, signaling that economic troubles are likely biting into corporate marketing budgets.

The revised forecast by eMarketer calls for U.S. advertisers to spend $25.8 billion online this year, which compares to its projection of $27.5 billion made in October.

EMarketer added, however, that online spending should still grow by 23 percent from 2007 and weather the economic downturn better than spending on other types of advertising.

Spending growth will then likely slow in 2009 to about 16 percent, and will not return to growth of 20 percent or more until 2012, EMarketer said.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Brian Moss)