I find it interesting that I was just sent a news feed item on Facebook from the President:

Barack Obama is speaking at the White House forum on Health Reform. Watch live: http://www.healthreform.gov/video/room1.html.

The text below the news showed 3,875 users had clicked on the “like” option. I thought that was a strange number so I clicked on it as well and received a popup message: “unable to write to the database”.

It seems that 3,875 represents the maximum buffer on Facebook for likability. Not surprisingly a few minutes later the like option and like count were removed from the news item.

F-Secure has documented some illegal ads on YouTube. The payment card criminals have not only found YouTube to advertise their services, but they also seem to have exposed a problem with YouTube reporting:

No big surprises there.

A bit more surprisingly, when you want to report such videos to YouTube admins, they actually don’t have an option for reporting criminal use like this.

It’s not sexual, violent, repulsive, hateful, abusive, harmful, spam, or infringing, which are the options available. Perhaps “criminal” or “illegal” were just too obvious for users to flag and report, or maybe YouTube is trying to take a deeply philosophical social networking stand on acceptable use?

The BBC explains the role of the altimeter in the recent crash at Schiphol airport:

At a news conference in The Hague, [Dutch Safety Board chairman] Mr Van Vollenhoven said the plane had been at an altitude of 595m (1950ft) when making its landing approach to Schiphol airport.

But the altimeter recorded an altitude of around ground level.

The plane was on autopilot and its systems believed the plane was already touching down, he said.

The automatic throttle controlling the two engines was closed and they powered down. This led to the plane losing speed, and stalling.

As many times as people ask me if I can generate security products that “automate” controls, I find news like this reminding me that there will always (at least for the foreseeable future) be a place for human oversight by trained professionals. Unfortunately in this case the pilots ignored the alarms and continued to let the autopilot control the engines until it was too late to restart them.