A 24-year-old Warminster man who shared drugs with, then sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl he met on MySpace, pleaded guilty Monday in Bucks County court. Christopher Leasher, of Aster Road, will be sentenced in about 60 days following a Megan’s Law evaluation and could face up to seven years behind bars. Leasher, who went by the MySpace moniker “Christopher Jive” and claimed to be a musician, was arrested in August following a two-month investigation. (more…)

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC and social network MySpace, have launched a partnership to bring new and archived short form BBC content to MySpaceTV. The announcement marks the first global agreement of this type between MySpaceTV and a major broadcaster. Under the partnership, BBC video content will be made available online globally via MySpaceTV, the social networking site’s popular new video platform. (more…)

Long time readers of this blog will remember the MySpace vs YouTube war of words (and actions) that dominated much of 2006. It began when MySpace, albeit temporarily, blocked access to YouTube videos on the social networking site, reached its peak following the Google-acquisition of YouTube, and concluded with the launch of MySpaceTV. So imagine my surprise when I read the following quote (published on TechCrunch) from MySpace’s newly appointed COO Amit Kapur, talking up the site’s third-party developer program. (more…)

MySpace has forced the owner of myspace.co.uk to hand over its domain name despite it having been registered six years before the popular social networking site was started up. Although the site had been used for other purposes, the owner of myspace.co.uk began to allow adverts for the more popular MySpace to be placed on the lesser known site. (more…)

Within the last week, researcher Elazar Broad has disclosed two ActiveX vulnerabilities in the tools that MySpace.com and Facebook users use to upload images to their sites. On Sunday, Broad disclosed a buffer overflow vulnerability within the Facebook image upload control. Last week, Broad disclosed a similar buffer overflow flaw within MySpaceAurigma’s ImageUploader ActiveX; the MySpace vulnerability also affects Facebook users. (more…)

Last year, Megan Lonsway found herself in a predicament. Too old to play with dolls, the 12-year-old was also too young, by her mother’s standards, to sign up for MySpace or Facebook, online networking sites her older brother had joined. Then Megan discovered Stardoll.com, a Web site targeting girls between 9 and 17 that morphs Internet gaming features with a social networking format. Each of the nearly 13 million members gets a “MeDoll” they can dress up, take on shopping trips at a virtual mall and accessorize. With written parental permission, Lonsway also started making “friends” online, messaging other members and joining clubs, all features common to MySpace, which discourages those younger than 14 from joining. (more…)

Exploit code affecting an unpatched flaw in an image uploader used by both Facebook and MySpace is circulating publicly, putting users of the social networking sites at risk, according to security researchers. On the Full Disclosure security mailing list, researcher Elazar Broad disclosed a vulnerability in the Aurigma Image Uploader, an application used by Facebook and MySpace. Exploitation of the bug could allow an attacker to execute malicious code on a user’s system. (more…)

Social networking site MySpace.com.au and employment website careerone.com.au have come together to create MySpacejobs.com.au to help Australians get in touch with potential employers. The website will link the three million Australians who visit MySpace each month with the 68,000 job advertisements on CareerOne.com.au. Speaking at the launch, CareerOne.com.au national sales director Dawn Tingwell said it was a myth that MySpace was just for teens and 28 per cent of users had a diploma or degree. (more…)

Bugs in the ActiveX controls on popular social networking sites Facebook and MySpace can be used by hackers to snatch control of Windows PCs, security experts said today. Initially made public by researcher Elazar Broad on the Full Disclosure security mailing list, the vulnerabilities are in a pair of ActiveX controls that Facebook and MySpace provide to users for uploading images to their pages via Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser. Both controls are based on a commercial ActiveX control dubbed Image Uploader from Aurigma Inc., a developer in Tacoma, Wash., according to follow-up analysis done by Symantec Corp. (more…)