Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details, despite promises they don’t share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Che Guevara, James Dean, nein: Arthur Rimbaud! In Paris feiert eine Ausstellung den Dichter als Ikone des Pop. Das geht nicht immer gut. ZEIT ONLINE

Che Guevara, James Dean, nein: Arthur Rimbaud! In Paris feiert eine Ausstellung den Dichter als Ikone des Pop. Das geht nicht immer gut. ZEIT ONLINE

A site called YourOpenBook.org searches the public status updates of users, which have grown since Facebook began recommending users make their status updates public late last year. Any person, even someone without a Facebook account, can easily conduct searches with the tool and bring up users’ public photos and names along with what they wrote—a little-known feature within Facebook. The tool is based on technology that Facebook released to developers so third-parties can incorporate content from Facebook for their websites. “People are sharing things they clearly don’t want to share with the entire planet,” said Will Moffat, a 32-year-old software engineer who helped build the site.

Von Wahnbildern, Irrtum, fixen Ideen ist im Weiteren die Rede, und das sind nur die sanftesten Beschreibungen der Newtonschen Optik, gegen die hier der Dilettant Goethe antritt, der die Farbenlehre zeitlebens als sein bedeutendstes Werk ansah. Beides, die Maßlosigkeit der Polemik und der gegen Newton gerichtete Vorwurf des bewussten Forschungsbetrugs sind indes so provozierend sturköpfige Dokumente des Goetheschen Denkens, dass man sie doch gern verstünde.

To ban naked short selling in the absence of an obvious crisis is PR suicide; merely inviting speculation as to what the authorities know that markets don’t. Sure enough, there’s plenty of that speculation around as European trade gets under way Wednesday.