250000 Facebook photos 'land on' dating site

SAN FRANCISCO: Hacking and art mixed in a freshly-launched dating website that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.

Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug, and "climber."

The creators of the online "dating agency" were identified at the website as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.

'Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook's constraints and boring social rules," the website authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.

The artists explained that a million "stolen" Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.

"Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions," the artists said.

"So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data."

Facebook frowned on lovely-faces, saying that "scraping" or mining information violates the terms of service at the world's leading online social network. Facebook was investigating and vowed to take "appropriate" action.

Ironically, the story of Facebook's genesis tells of its founder Mark Zuckerberg getting in trouble for hacking Harvard University computers while a student to get pictures of coeds for comparison with each other at a website! called "Face Mash" that he created.

Hackers target Nasdaq Stock Market trading platform: Report

NEW YORK: The computer network of the Nasdaq Stock Market was targeted by the online hackers several times last year, setting off an alarm by the US authorities, a Wall Street Journal report said.

The report, citing the people familiar with the matter, however, asserted that the exchange's trading platform was not "compromised".

According to the US newspaper report, the federal investigators are trying to identify the perpetrators and are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange.

The report said it couldn't be determined which other parts of Nasdaq's computer network other than the trading platform were accessed by the hackers.

The Nasdaq situation has alerted the authorities because of the exchange's critical role, which officials put right up with power companies and air-traffic-control operations, all part of the nation's basic infrastructure, it added.

People familiar with the matter called the incident equivalent of someone sneaking into a house and walking around but--apparently, so far--not taking or tampering with anything.

The report said that Nasdaq declined to comment on the issue.

A probe into the matter was started by the Secret Service and now includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation .

The report said that although the authorities haven't yet been able to follow the trail to any specific individual or country, those familiar with the case said some evidence points towards Russia.

It, however, also mentioned that the person or people responsible c! ould be almost anywhere, perhaps using computers in Russia merely as a conduit.

Preserving the stability and reliability of computerised trading, and ensuring that investors have full faith in that system are the two major concerns for the authorities, it noted.

In the past, Nasdaq's publicly accessible website was vandalised in 1999, when a group of hackers had claimed responsibility for defacing the site, as well as major media websites.

Nasdaq officials at that time said the company's internal network wasn't affected.