MySpace devotee Kary Rogers was expecting to see a gut-busting video when a friend from the popular online hangout messaged him a link.

First, though, he was directed to a page where he was supposed to re-enter his password. Rogers realized that someone was trying to steal his information, and he didn’t take the bait. At best, he would be spammed with junk e-mails; worse, the Web thief might steal his real-life identity.

“I immediately went back and changed my password,” said Rogers, 29, a network analyst for Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss.

One recent scam works this way: A spammer posts a number of phony profiles featuring pictures of cute women, often promising nude photos. A “friend request” with the woman’s photo is sent to hundreds of users.

Once the fake profile loads, a blue screen descends, saying the profile is protected by the “MySpace Adult Content Viewer.” Unsuspecting users who try to download the viewer instead get a worm that installs adware on their computers.

Flanked by his band, Justin King sits at a piano in the middle of a performance hall and lip syncs his song “Bright and Dirty Lights” as a crowd slowly starts to form around the musicians.

As smoke swirls around the floor and people surround the band with tentative, curious looks on their faces, King switches to an electric guitar and the music intensifies. The crowd members jump up and down, pump their arms, laugh and shake their hair around.

King and his band are shooting a video to promote their music, and part of how they got the volunteer extras into Agate Hall for the crowd scene was posting notice of the open video shoot on a MySpace.com bulletin.

Parents are not the only ones keeping a watchful eye on my space.

Five school districts we contacted in the Rio Grande Valley say they have blocked the website from school computers.

Administrators with the Brownsville, Harlingen, McAllen, La Joya, and Rio Grande City have all banned MySpace on campuses.

Most parents are happy the find out, the school district has stayed one step ahead of them.

Adam Cervantes just learned about MySpace from watching the Action 4 News investigation.

“Some of the pictures of these girls, they went too far. It can be dangerous,” says Cervantes.

He doesn’t agree with what he saw, but he hasn’t yet talked to his children about it.

“I don’t even think they know about it,” he tells us.

Cervantes quickly found out he was wrong. 18 year old Michael said he had heard of the website, but never been on it.

Other Harlingen students tell us it’s hard to miss the constant chatter.

When a scorned wife in Birmingham discovered her husband was having an affair with her best friend, she decided a 2,500-pound ad was the perfect way to embarrass him.

Addressed to her love-cheat husband “Mark” and her best friend “Shelley”, the message read: “You are the most despicable, deceitful people I have ever met.

“I know what you did and I’m disgusted.

“I’ve changed the locks Mark, burnt your clothes and emptied OUR joint account - to pay for this poster.

“You deserve each other.”

Within hours of the billboard appearing in Birmingham city centre on Friday, the 37-year-old woman, identified only as ‘Jane’ and mother-of-two, was inundated with messages of support, according to the Daily Mail newspaper.

The woman also posted messages in Myspace.com website. The message reads: “If you are reading this, I guess you are wondering what this is all about.”

“He tried to fight back. Every time he did that others would jump in and one of them took out a metal-ringed belt,” said Lieutenant Colleen Turay.

They beat an 18 year-old man who happens to be Jewish. He ended up bruises, scratched, and scarred. Davis police didn’t have much to go on. They pulled surveillance video from nearby shops, finding a partial license plate in one picture. “So we were already working that angle, but at the same time he ends up coming up with the name on his own,” said Turay.

The victim started working his own investigation. A friend told him about a guy in Vacaville who might be responsible, so the 18-year-old went to a laptop lineup on myspace.com, finding the guy who beat him.

Davis detectives caught up with 18-year-old Sean Kennedy near his home in Vacaville, and the victim didn’t stop with one face and one name.

“He started looking at the people this guy was communicating with and said, ‘yeah, that’s one, and that’s another,” said Turay.

The victim’s myspace sleuthing skills led cops to a 17-year-old suspect who’s also under arrest. And myspace is helping police pick up perpetrators in other cases. Criminals caught digitally red-handed, bragging about what crimes they’ve committed.

People looking to gain favor with potential employers have to “be aware of their identities. People do look at you,” says Kimmel, 24, a candidate for an MBA in business computer information systems at Hofstra University in Hempstead. In a nutshell, that’s the latest development in career management: managing your professional reputation, or identity, online. A key component, certainly, is avoiding or cleaning up any digital dirt remaining from one of your more impulsive moments. But increasingly, managing your online identity means being proactive: developing your own online brand, just as businesses do.

The practice of creating personal career-related Web site portfolios and blogs highlighting scholastic and work accomplishments is catching on fast as students and professionals aim to catch the attention of prospective employers — in a good way.

The online expansion of the traditional resume is taking a variety of forms, including the revamping of MySpace pages to make them more professional and the creation of short videos posted to sites like YouTube, with URL links included in an online job application.

Social networking website MySpace.com may have been too friendly with a worm.

The worm steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites, according to the IDG News Service via PC World’s website.

The worm attacks when a user visits a MySpace profile infected with an embedded QuickTime movie.

The video that loads carry with them a bogus menu.

The site, owned by News Corp, has more than 70 million registered users.

Social networking website MySpace says it will release tools to identify and ban US sex offenders from its service.

The company said the new service will be the first national database that brings together about 46 US state sex offender registers.

MySpace is a personal website tool for people who use it to post blogs, music, and videos.

More than 80 million people have registered a MySpace page. News Corp bought the site for $580m last year.

The new technology, called Sentinel Safe, will let MySpace search US state and federal databases to seek out and delete MySpace profiles of registered sex offenders.

BBC

In an interview with the virtual community Second Life, Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. took questions from Reuters as well as Second Life users about the changing music industry in the digital age, the MySpace and YouTube phenomenon and even the time he caught his own kids illegally downloading songs. Bronfman said that the community that has grown out of Web sites like MySpace and YouTube is a good thing, but when music is being streamed and used in videos on those sites, record companies have to find a balance between what constitutes stealing and what is user creativity and innovation.

“The business models will vary with the platform. What we’re trying to do as a music company is first to enable as many uses of the content as possible to allow others to innovate,” said Bronfman. “We’ll figure out what the business model is as certain things have traction and other things don’t. We’re trying to enable as much progress as quickly as possible rather than wait to see a business model develop.”

http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=316288

Last month, Universal Music Corp. filed a copyright lawsuit against MySpace, alleging that the social Web site has cost Universal as much as $150,000 in damages per copyrighted work. Some industry veterans in Nashville, however, say MySpace is getting a bad rap.

The “big” artists, who have much to lose to any album sales competitor, stand to be harmed the most by MySpace. But on the other end of the continuum, the business model followed by up-and-coming artists has been revolutionized by the social networking site.

“For the long term, I think more and more artists are going to be taking control. The money goes to the artists. It doesn’t go through any intermediary,” said Dean Shortland, who hosts a monthly showcase of popular MySpace artists at 3rd & Lindsley each month. “I think it’s bringing music back to what it was meant to be.”

MySpace.com, which was acquired this year by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million, currently consists of pages created by more than 90 million users. The pages are packed with music, videos and art – some of it copyrighted, and some of it not. Most pages have background music playing, but the music can’t always be downloaded.

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com