Now, Meta is expanding Broadcast Channels’ availability by bringing the service to Facebook and Messenger. Influencers, creators, and celebs with Facebook pages will now be able to send messages, photos, videos, and voice notes to their followers, which will appear under a tab labeled “Channels”.

Also Read: Threads: Everything You Should Know About The Twitter Alternative

Participants will get a notification every time a page owner sends an update, but the feature can be muted at any time. Meta says admins of any page where the Broadcast Channels are accessible can start using the tool, though it isn’t available everywhere yet, so some users may need to join the waiting list.

The post Instagram’s Broadcast Channels Are Coming To Facebook appeared first on Tech Magazine.

Between February and March 2023, Group-IB researchers based in Dubai identified over 3,200 Facebook profiles falsely claiming to be written by Meta support staff in over 20 languages. Upon discovering the scammers’ accounts, Group-IB’s Computer Emergency Response Team shared information with Facebook, which it must be noted had already deleted some of the offending profiles.

The cybercriminals’ goal was to hack the Facebook accounts of public figures and celebrities, businesses, sports teams, and individual accounts. As part of the elaborate scam, cookie data, and session hijacking were employed, though the criminals mostly used traditional phishing techniques to trick people into voluntarily entering email and password information.

Group-IB researchers began tracking this widespread scam in February 2023. As well as 3,200 fake Facebook profiles containing scam posts, the cybersecurity experts also discovered 220 websites intended to trick users into parting with their data.

The Details Of The Scam

This Facebook scammers used social engineering techniques to trick users into thinking their accounts were marked for suspension due to copyright violations. If victims attempted to verify their profile to prevent it from being blocked, they would be taken to a phishing website, where they were presented with a page that contained official-looking Meta or Facebook branding.

Also Read: Filmmaker Uses AI To Visualize Thousands Of Leaked Passwords

“Cybercriminals can use compromised accounts to launch further phishing attacks. Individuals can suffer legal and reputational damage [and] threat actors could also gain access to the victim’s financial services [and] hold compromised accounts for ransom, demanding payment from the victim for retrieval of the account,” says Sharef Hlal, Head of Group-IB’s Digital Risk Protection Analytics Team.

Group-IB recommends social network users ensure that their passwords are “strong and unique, and that they enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide an extra layer of security”. In addition, if you’re ever directed away from official social media platform pages, it’s a good idea to closely check the URL to ensure it’s legitimate.

The post Facebook Scammers Pose As Support Staff On 3,200 Fake Profiles appeared first on Tech Magazine.

To enjoy the benefits of Meta Verification, users must be at least 18 years of age, meet minimum activity requirements, and submit an official government ID matching the name and photo listed on Facebook and/or Instagram. Meta confirms that it won’t make changes to accounts that have been verified using the company’s previous system, including notability and authenticity.

Also Read: Hub71 To Invest $2 Billion In New Web3 Startup Ecosystem

As well as verification, users who subscribe to the service will unlock exclusive stickers for Stories and Reels and receive 100 free stars per month — the digital currency used to tip creators on Facebook. Meta cautions that businesses can’t apply for a Meta Verified badge just yet, and profile names, usernames, birthdays, and profile photos won’t be able to be altered without going through the verification process from scratch.

It’s hard to ignore the similarity between Meta’s new checkmark service and Twitter Blue, launched by Elon Musk recently. However, Meta seems to be taking account authenticity far more seriously, which hopefully won’t cause the deluge of fake verified accounts we saw on Twitter towards the end of 2022.

The post Facebook & Instagram Are Testing Twitter-Style Blue Checks appeared first on Tech Magazine.

The gloves use arrays of microfluidic actuators driven by the world’s first high-speed microfluidic processor to achieve millisecond response times while keeping power consumption minimal — something that’s extremely important for any wearable hardware device.

Once ready for release, the gloves could be used to support many virtual reality use cases. “The value of hands to solving the interaction problem in AR and VR is immense” explained RL Research Director Sean Keller. “We use our hands to communicate with others, to learn about the world, and to take action within it. We can take advantage of a lifetime of motor learning if we can bring full hand presence into AR and VR”.

Unfortunately, a lot of work still needs to be done for the technology to leave the research lab where it’s being developed. According to Keller, the team has made groundbreaking progress across multiple scientific and engineering disciplines, but the light at the end of the tunnel is only starting to become visible.

Also Read: A Beginner’s Guide To Getting Started With NFTs

Meta isn’t the only company working on haptic gloves for virtual reality. There’s also HaptX, whose founder and CEO Jake Rubin has accused Meta of copying its patented designs. In an official statement, the company claims that Meta’s gloves appear to be substantially identical to HaptX’s patented technology.

“We welcome interest and competition in the field of microfluidic haptics; however, competition must be fair for the industry to thrive” said Rubin. Meta has yet to respond to the accusation, so stay tuned for updates.

The post Meta Unveils Its Prototype Haptic Gloves For Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Magazine.

The concept of the metaverse can be traced to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. In the novel, the metaverse is a virtual shared space that appears to its users as an urban environment. This space is accessed through personal terminals connected to virtual reality goggles.

Sound familiar? That’s because the metaverse is quickly becoming a reality thanks to companies like Oculus, a subsidiary of Facebook, and the combined effort of developers and content creators from around the world.

By creating thousands of new high-skilled jobs within the EU over the next five years, Facebook wants to accelerate the development of the metaverse to usher in a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences, enabled by technologies like virtual and augmented reality.

“At its heart is the idea that by creating a greater sense of ‘virtual presence,’ interacting online can become much closer to the experience of interacting in person,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities”.

According to the official announcement, Facebook decided to invest in the EU because the company believes that European talent is world-leading, supported by first-class universities. Facebook also mentioned the role European policymakers are playing in shaping the internet, so it’s likely that the investment has a political dimension to it.

Also Read: How To Lock Your Facebook Profile (From Mobile & Desktop)

Aware of its tarnished reputation, the social media giant stressed that no single company would own and operate the metaverse — just like no single company owns the internet today. Of course, that doesn’t change anything about the fact that Facebook wants to play a huge role in it.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that Facebook is becoming a metaverse company with the goal of building a set of connected social apps and supporting hardware. The recently released Horizon Workrooms remote collaboration app for the Oculus Quest 2 headset can be seen as an early piece of the much larger puzzle the metaverse will become in the future.

The post Facebook Will Create 10,000 Jobs In The EU To Build Its Metaverse appeared first on Tech Magazine.

The massive dataset is currently being shared on various underground hacking forums for free, and it affects users from 106 countries including every country in the MENA region. At 32 million records, US Facebook users represent the greatest chunk of the dataset, followed by 11 million users from the UK, and 6 million users from India.

Besides user’s full names, the leak includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, locations, birthdates, bios, and sometimes even email addresses.

“So what’s the impact? For a targeted attack where you know someone’s name and country, it’s great for mobile phone lookup,” explains Troy Hunt, the creator of the Have I Been Pwned database. “But for spam based on using phone number alone, it’s gold. Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days, and now there’s hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorized by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender.”

Twitter: @UnderTheBreach

The stolen information actually comes from 2019, and cybercriminals had access to it for quite some time now through a Telegram bot, which makes it possible to look up a phone number and receive the corresponding user’s Facebook ID, and the other way around — all for a small fee.

Also Read: Exploits In Microsoft Exchange Used To Breach Over 30,000 Organizations

“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” said Liz Bourgeois, Facebook’s director of strategic response communications, in a Saturday tweet.

Old or not, the fact that the personal information of half a billion Facebook users is circulating around on the internet for free is the least the social media giant and its users need right now considering the number of new cybersecurity threats created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hopefully, Facebook will take the steps necessary to minimize the impact of the breach and protect its users.

To find out whether or not your Facebook account data was among the leak, go to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter the email address you use to login to Facebook with. If your email address is detected within the millions of accounts, HaveIBeenPwned will let you know.

The post Personal Information Of 533 Million Facebook Users Leaked Online appeared first on Tech Magazine.

The survey was conducted between May 23 and June 13, 2020, and it included 17,758 participants. “Approximately 1,500 interviews were completed in 11 countries, with samples that were representative of the adult online population across age, gender and region in each market,” write Facebook IQ and YouGov in their marketing guide. “For the global average data cuts in this guide, we focused our analysis on the eight markets where Ramadan is celebrated by the majority of the population.”

Facebook

The most important insight is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed how people shop. Among those surveyed, 42 percent are planning to spend less time shopping in stores during Ramadan, choosing to shop online using their mobile devices instead. This is a major opportunity for marketers, who need to offer a seamless experience throughout the purchase journey to increase their conversion rates and sales.

During Ramadan, nearly half of all survey participants agreed that they spend more time on their mobile devices, and 8 in 10 said that they don’t put their smartphones and tablets down even while watching TV, including members of Gen X and Baby Boomers. One of their favorite activities around Ramadan is discovering shopping ideas, researching things to buy, and, of course, purchasing items.

Also Read: Microsoft Wants To Purchase Discord And We Know Why

The first shopping peak happens just before Ramadan, in mid-April, and the second shopping peak coincides with the start of Eid. Even though 39 percent of shoppers start planning their purchases about a month before celebrations start, only 20 percent have completed shopping when Ramadan begins.

For more insights like these, read the full marketing guide, which Facebook kindly published on its website.

The post Facebook Has Surveyed People About Their Ramadan Shopping & Media Habits appeared first on Tech Magazine.

The smartwatch will reportedly run on the Android operating system, but it’s unclear whether if Facebook decides to use the established Wear OS platform or release the smartwatch with its own flavor of Android.

In any case, Facebook’s smartwatch will focus heavily on messaging and health-tracking, presumably featuring lightweight versions of the social network’s family of services, including not only Facebook but also Instagram and WhatsApp.

Because the smartwatch will have a built-in eSIM card, it won’t have to be tethered to a smartphone to access the internet, a feature that’s guaranteed to appeal to all fitness users, especially if it delivers integrations with products from companies like Peloton.

The release of the Facebook smartwatch won’t be the company’s first push into other market segments. For example, Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets are among the most popular products of their kind, boasting a thriving ecosystem that’s home to some of the most innovative virtual reality experiences currently available.

As such, the biggest obstacle standing in Facebook’s way to success likely won’t be its ability to create an attractive product but its poor reputation among consumers and regulators, neither of which might not be thrilled by the idea of the company having access to users’ health data 24×7.

Also Read: Apple Likely To Release 8K VR Headset In 2022

Of course, Portal, a standalone video chat device released by Facebook that sparked similar privacy concerns, is still selling well, so it seems that many consumers are still willing to sacrifice their privacy if it means getting their hands on an attractive product.

While the first generation of the Facebook smartwatch will probably play it safe, future generations could benefit from Facebook’s acquisition of the neural interface startup CTRL-Labs in 2019, which specializes in building wireless input mechanisms.

The post Facebook Is Working On A Smartwatch With Messaging & Health-Tracking Capabilities appeared first on Tech Magazine.

Note: This feature is not yet available across all regions. If you’re unable to lock your Facebook profile after following our step-by-step instructions, then you most likely aren’t doing anything wrong.

How To Lock Your Facebook Profile Via Mobile App

Here’s what you need to do to lock your Facebook profile using the mobile version of the Facebook app:

1. Launch the Facebook app on your mobile device.
2. Tap your Facebook profile icon (located left to the “What’s on your mind?” input bar).
3. Tap the three horizontal dots (located right to the “Add to Story” button).
4. Tap the Lock Profile option.
5. Read the information about how the profile lock feature works and confirm your decision to lock your profile.

At the moment, only Android users can lock their Facebook profiles via the Facebook app. If you’re an iOS user and don’t have access to an Android smartphone, you can follow the instructions below to learn how to lock your profile from any web browser.

How To Lock Your Facebook Profile Via Desktop

While there’s no way to currently lock a Facebook profile from the regular desktop version of the social media site, there’s nothing stopping you from accessing the mobile version of Facebook using any major web browser and locking your profile that way:

1. Go to https://m.facebook.com/ (the “m” at the beginning of the URL will take you to the mobile version of the site).
2. Click your Facebook profile icon (located left to the “What’s on your mind?” input bar).
3. Click the three horizontal dots (located right to the “Edit Profile” button).
4. Select the Lock Profile option.
5. Read the information about how the profile lock feature works and confirm your decision to lock your profile.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Facebook Friend Requests

To unlock your Facebook profile, simply go through the steps again but select the unlock option after you click the three horizontal dots.

The post How To Lock Your Facebook Profile (From Mobile & Desktop) appeared first on Tech Magazine.

What Are Facebook Friend Requests?

Facebook is all about connecting with friends and family members. This is done using friend requests. You can send a friend request to any Facebook user with a simple click. If the user decides to accept your request, you will be able to see the user’s activity in News Feed, Stories, and Photos, and the user will see yours.

However, the user may also choose to decline or simply ignore your friend request. If they choose the last option mentioned, your friend request will remain pending indefinitely — or until you manually cancel it. The good news is that you can send an unlimited number of friend requests, so keeping them pending isn’t a huge deal.

How To Find Pending Facebook Friend Requests

Finding pending Facebook friend requests is just as simple on a computer as it is as on a smartphone:

Computer

Step 1: Open a web browser and log in to your Facebook profile.

Step 2: Click the “Friends” button in the left side panel.

Step 3: Click “View Sent Requests” below Friend Requests.

Smartphone

Step 1: Open the Facebook app on your Android or iOS smartphone.

Step 2: Tap the “Friends” icon located in the top menu.

Step 3: Tap “See All” next to “Friend Requests”.

Step 4: Tap the three dots in the top-right corner.

Step 5: Select “View Sent Requests”.

How To Cancel Pending Facebook Friend Requests

Facebook makes it possible to cancel pending friend requests without notifying their recipients. Here’s what you need to do:

Computer

Step 1: Open a web browser and log in to your Facebook profile.

Step 2: Click the “Friends” button in the navigation bar or in the left side panel.

Step 3: Click “View Sent Requests” below “Friend Requests”.

Step 4: Click “Cancel Request” next to the friend request you want to cancel.

Smartphone

Step 1: Open the Facebook app on your Android or iOS smartphone.

Step 2: Tap the “Friends” icon located in the top menu.

Step 3: Tap “See All” next to “Friend Requests”.

Step 4: Tap the three dots in the top-right corner.

Step 5: Select “View Sent Requests”.

Step 6: Click “Cancel Request” next to the friend request you want to cancel.

Read Now: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Alternatively, you can visit the profile of any person who received a friend request from you but hasn’t accepted it yet, and you should see the “Cancel Request” button under their profile picture.

Did this guide help you find and cancel all your pending Facebook friend requests?

The post How To Find & Cancel Pending Facebook Friend Requests appeared first on Tech Magazine.