Was Fashionista suicide victim, Ashley Anne Riggitano, killed by Facebook "Friends"?

No rapist dare to attack you, be confident with this device

RapeX 

Here's is a psychological reason to explain why a man may never rape a woman again as well as why father's like T.I. may not have to worry on the weekend. 

A woman wearing device like the one pictured here will provide a woman with the small satisfaction of knowing that a rapist will soon be in major pain. When he tries to penetrate her, his penis will slide into a sheath lined with barbs. To remove them, he’ll need to a see a doctor, who will call the police.

The name of this product is RapeX. The six-year-old device — invented by a white South African woman — is inserted like a tampon and fits like one. It got a good deal of press when it was released, but is back in the news again thanks to a viral Facebook image shared by TonyaTKOShow.

But it also raises a lot of questions says, The Dominion of New York. 

Does it subvert rape culture or reinforce the message that it’s women’s fault and responsibility? How will women who are raped by acquaintances — the vast majority of rape cases — protect themselves ? Will they need to wear this all the time? Will a rapist who encounters this turn into a murderer?

As a tool of revenge, RapeX is brilliant. Who doesn’t fantasize about harming these guys? And it could be a pretty powerful deterrent to stranger rape or a young male suitor trying to "holler at" T.I.'s daughter.

As reported by MediaTakeout, "T.I. allegedly cussed out a teenager [this week] because he disrespected his family."

Book Giveaway: "To Woman, From Man"

To Woman, From Man by A. Jarrell Hayes

The Black Urban Times is proud to announce a new book giveaway. A. Jarrell Hayes is giving away 2 copies of his upcoming book of love poems To Woman, From Man. Here's how you can win your free copy:

1) "Like" A. Jarrell Hayes' Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/jarrellhayes.
2) Post this comment on the page's wall: "I love the Black Urban Times!" (You can just copy and paste it.)

3) Send an email to contact(at)ajhayes(dot)com with the subject title "I love the Black Urban Times!" Be sure to send the email using the email account you use for Facebook.
4) The first 2 people to "like" the Facebook page and send the email win an autographed copy of the book!

Poems from the book have appeared on Poet's Corner, including Moon Stones.

Good luck.

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FACEBOOK.COM'S USERS ARE MOSTLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND ASIAN..WHY IS THIS BEING IGNORED?!

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New Facebook Application 'Fan Check' is Just Another Novelty, Not Stalker Detective

by Alicia Cruz
The Black Urban Times

Editorial Commentary

Have you ever been curious about those Facebook friend requests you received from people you don't know? Well, Facebook administrators decided to implement a new tool to help you protect yourself against cyber stalkers or just nosey people. They came out with Fan Check to help you out. Or did they?

I was curious and installed it to my own facebook page and while it told me which of my friends were doing what, it didn't do much else except slow my applications down, which ticked me off. Once I realized it was the Fan Check application, I uninstalled it.

I didn't get any real surprises either. All it really does it show you the activity of, obviously, those you interact with or those who post to your wall the most.

You don't get to see if someone you aren't friends with is scanning your page like an FBI agent on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Which is what I thought it would do, but it didn't.
And be advised that it doesn't reveal the number of times that individual visits your page and what portion of your page they have viewed.

It simply gives the person a "ranking" and that doesn't tell you anything because if they're heavy posters anyway, they're going to have a high ranking. It does not track your page views, which is what many initially though. It simply tracks the number of clicks your profile receives by friends already on your list.

When I delved a little deeper, I realized that Facebook, in fact, won't reveal such information anyway per their own policy which states: "For privacy reasons, this application only lists users who have interacted with your profile at least once during your friendship. "

In other words, real pervs or actual stalkers are, in essence, protected by privacy policies on Facebook so their visits to your profile and pics will not ever be revealed.

Now, if you want to check out your friends and see who their most frequent posters are...avail yourself of that "My Friends" button at the top left side of your screen, select a friend to view and voila.
Is that right? Heck no, especially since you don't want them hawking your every move, your visitors moves, etc.

So my advice?

Uninstall it or just don't install it, period.

Now if you're married/otherwise involved and want to check the activity or how often that person your spouse/significant other swears is "just a friend" visits or posts to your beloved's page, then I guess facebook's Fan Check is your savior.

Otherwise, it's just another novelty application like Birthday calendar, Yoville, Mafia wars and the baking application thingee.

To add to the hoopla, there's an alleged virus going around in correlation with the installation of Fan Check - Click Here -

Daily News article on Fan Check

Discussion of Facebook about Fan Check

Others who don't think Fan Check is a great idea either

Media Outlets must credit The Black Urban Times
www.theblackurbantimes.com
twitter.com/blkutimes76
facebook.com/theblackurbantimes

'Earthquake Haiti' Facebook Page is Heaven Sent for Many

Photos taken from the "Earthquake Haiti" Facebook page.

By Nicholas Dynan
(Tufts University)
Student Correspondent Corps

In much the same way loved ones wandered lower New York City with photos of the missing after 9/11, friends and family of Haitian earthquake victims are scouring Facebook and Twitter to make connections.

“Please help me find my brother, his name is Sidney Augustin. He is in Petit Guave or Port Au Prince. He is 26 years old and has a 1 1/2 month old premature son," wrote Julianna Augustin from Miami, Fla.

Most of the more than 5,000 images capture the faces of the missing and unaccounted for. Many are posing for family photos at happy celebrations. Some are marking another year at school. They are young, old, well-dressed, scruffy, male, female: a portrait of Haiti before Tuesday's devastating quake.

"His girlfriend's name is Sheena. He is the young man in my profile picture. Please contact me if you find him please.”

“We still have not heard from her," wrote Suzy Ocean Randolph in Boston, Mass., looking for information about her aunt, Marie Francoise Joseph. "She is a Diabetic and has High Blood Pressure. Please if anyone has any information, please email Suzy.”

Haitian diaspora families have glued themselves to televisions and desperately attempted to call loved ones in earthquake-striken Haiti. But downed phone lines and minimal reporting have frustrated many.

On social networking sites that are sometimes criticized for announcing the most mundane of life events, many users have posted heart-wrenching appeals as an avenue to find the missing.

Unable to contact her family living in Port-au-Prince, Alexandra Alexandre is one of more than 180,000 users who joined the Facebook's Earthquake Haiti page within days and began posting photographs. She said she hopes to enlist the help of other members by publishing this information. In a telephone interview, she expressed her worry for her 14 loved-ones she has been unable to reach.

In the past two days, the site has been inundated with support and concern. The growing photographic album on the site represents a glimmer of hope.

“I hope somebody there (in Haiti) with internet will be able to see the pictures and the message and help us,” said Augustin.

One drawback is the lack on internet in Haiti. While social network users outside Haiti can see the exchange of photos and messages, many inside Haiti cannot. Without internet access, word of the identified cannot leave the country.

Still, Facebook has offered a virtual space for families of the missing to form a community.

“Social networking is a support system, no question. Messages of hope from all over the world have meaning for people who are going through such a horrible experience,” said Dominick Flarey, executive director of the American Associations of Grief Counselors.

Other online social networks including Twitter have been effective in coordinating relief and fundraising efforts. By Thursday morning, the Red Cross raised more than $8 million from a texting campaign advertised on Twitter. The Red Cross also established an online database to aid in the location of relatives.

"Thank God for Facebook," the Port-au-Prince Salvation Army director told ABC News.

View the Facebook Earthquake Haiti page.

Facebook, Myspace Give Thousands More Pervs the Cyber Boot

Photo credit / Getty Images

BY Kenneth Lovett
DAILY NEWS ALBANY BUREAU CHIEF

ALBANY - In a major crackdown on Internet predators, more than 3,500 convicted New York sex fiends have been booted from two online social networking sites, sources told the Daily News.

The pervs were kicked off Facebook and MySpace in the first sweep of registered sex offenders under the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP), a 2008 law Attorney General Andrew Cuomo aggressively pushed.

"This should really be a wakeup call for everybody, whether it's parents watching what their kids do online, and all the law enforcement groups and authorities, and the sites themselves," one source familiar of the mass Facebook and MySpace purges said.

Laura Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law and the Crime Victims Center, said the fact thousands of offenders were dumped proves the law is working.

"Before e-STOP sexual predators freely lurked in social networking sites trolling for innocent victims," she said.

"With e-STOP, Attorney General Cuomo has sent a clear message that there is a new sheriff in the cyberworld protecting our most vulnerable."

Among the major findings of the first sweep:

- Those kicked off Facebook and MySpace in recent weeks include a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy, another who raped a 2-year-old girl, and a third convicted of sexual misconduct against a 10-year-old girl, sources said.

- Of the 3,533 offenders booted from the sites, 659 were from New York City and 328 from Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties.

- MySpace disabled a total of 1,975 accounts linked to 1,796 New York sex offenders over the past few weeks, the sources said.

- Facebook disabled 3,410 accounts linked to 2,782 offenders. There's overlap because some 1,045 registered sex offenders signed up with both sites.

- Of the 8,106 registered sex offenders who reported their online information to the state, 43.5% were either on the Facebook or MySpace networking sites, sources familiar with the situation said.

Under e-STOP, convicted sex offenders forced to register with the state must provide home addresses, e-mail addresses, site usernames, and online profiles as well.

State officials made the information available in the past two months to the social networking sites that want them.

Cuomo wants other networking sites to follow the lead of My-Space and Facebook.

The names of those booted have been sent to the state Division of Parole, which will determine if any of the offenders violated their early release provisions by being on the social networking sites, the sources said.

Out of the nearly 30,000 registered sex offenders in the state, 8,106 have supplied their e-mail addresses and other online information, the state Division of Criminal Justice Services said.

The rest either are back in prison, homeless, don't have computer access, or didn't respond, a DCJS spokesman said.

Sex offenders have 10 days to notify the state after creating new online profiles or face prosecution for a new felony.

Cuomo's office wouldn't comment yesterday, but last year, after the legislation was signed into law, Cuomo noted that "the playground of today is not just on the streetcorner . . . the playground of today is cyberspace."

Photo credit/ Smith for News

Facebook status update provides alibi for NY Teen

A simple Facebook status update turned into much more for Rodney Bradford: an alibi after he was accused of a crime.

New York (CNN) -- For 19-year-old Rodney Bradford, a simple Facebook status update turned into much more: a rock-solid alibi after he was accused of a crime.

Confirmation of the time stamp on the update and the location from which it was entered showed he could not have been at the scene of a robbery in another part of New York City. After he had spent almost two weeks in jail, the case against him was dismissed.

The story began at 11:49 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, when Bradford was updating his Facebook status at his father's home in Harlem. A minute later, 12 miles away in Brooklyn, two men were mugged at gunpoint.

The next day, Bradford, who is facing a separate 2008 robbery indictment, found out police were looking for him in connection with the Brooklyn robbery.

Bradford turned himself in, confident he would be cleared. But after one of the victims picked him out of a lineup, he was charged with robbery in the first degree and sent to Rikers Island, home of the New York City jail.

It wasn't until Rodney Bradford Sr. discovered his son's Facebook update that the young man's defense attorney realized he had an unbeatable alibi.

"Throughout that week," said the attorney, Robert Reuland, "I worked with the district attorney's office and made them aware of who our alibis were, presented the Facebook evidence and generally tried to convince them that it would be wrong to proceed to an indictment in light of this evidence."

The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook for documentation that would prove Bradford had updated his account from his father's home in Harlem. It worked.

"It all corroborated our alibis," explained Reuland. "The Facebook thing was really the icing on the cake. I think, ultimately, it's what prompted the DA to dismiss."

The district attorney's office would not comment on the story because the case is sealed.

Facebook officials said they are "pleased" they were "able to serve as a constructive part of the judicial process."

The online social network is ready to join telephone records and video cameras as a means of establishing an alibi -- but the implications are both good and bad, says an intellectual property attorney versed in the medium.

"We're in a much more trackable world, and for better and for worse," said attorney Jonathan Handel. "The extent to which it means that the right people get prosecuted and the innocent get their cases dropped, that's all of the good."

But, he said, the issue of privacy is also at stake.

And he pointed out that it could be argued the Facebook update was a set-up.

"On the Internet, nobody really knows it's you," he said. "A kid could set up an alibi by setting up a Facebook update."

Reuland finds that unlikely.

"This is a 19-year-old kid. He's not a criminal genius setting up an elaborate alibi for himself," he said. "This is not the kind of thing someone would fake." And if someone were going to fake it, he said, "They'd do it in a lot clearer way" than the inside joke that Bradford posted: "On the phone with this fat chick... where my IHOP."

The message was met with some incomprehension by reporters first writing about the story, who didn't quite understand the reference to the International House of Pancakes.

Reuland explained it this way: The "fat chick" was a playful reference to Bradford's pregnant girlfriend who was irked that he, his father and his stepmother had gone to an IHOP without her the night before. The update teased that she wondered where her pancakes were.

"He was just kind of taunting her playfully about having been to IHOP," Reuland said. "I know it sounds not very nice but it's sort of a reference to her because she's pregnant. But they actually have a very good relationship. She's cute as a button."

Now that his innocence has been demonstrated, Bradford has hired civil attorney Herbert L. Schmell, who said they are "99.9 percent sure" that they will be filing a civil suit against the city.

"Based upon what I see, there was no probable cause to arrest him at the time," Schmell said. "And to put him in Rikers for 12 or 13 days. ... We're seeking money damages. He's shook up."

--

Users Beware. The "Man" is on Facebook, MySpace, Etc

By Alicia Cruz

Senior writer

Theblackurbantimes

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times, people: Be careful about what you say and post on the internet because it could come back to bite you. The Wall Stree Journal is offering lessons on this very subject this week.

Let's say you owe back child support, taxes or owe a debt to the Department of Treasury. Well, their agents (collectors) are able to use the info you post on your facebook, myspace or any other social network site to track you down and collect their debt. The article stated that "In Nebraska, 'agents are not allowed to 'friend' someone using false information,' for example. But anything posted publicly -- which is the default for anything posted on MySpace -- can be used against you in the quest to collect on your tax bill."
So users beware. The "man" is now socuring social networking sites in order to catch you. A prime example of the lengths they will go to: "One deejay posted on his MySpace page that he'd be working at an upcoming party. Agents decided to crash it to collect their cash. Another man announced he was moving back to his home town and published the name of his new boss. Finding him to collect on an old tax bill was a matter of ease."

And in case you've never Googled your own name, try it. You will be quite surprised at what comes up and how much of your personal info is out there for anyone to view. Sites like Yahoo ask you if you'd like to make your personal information searchable by users. I would highly recommend that you check "No."

Facebook makes it easy to find users by their first names and I won't even go into Google or other search engines.

Just be careful what you choose to make available to the public and be even more careful at what you choose to post from blurbs to photos. Uncle Same, The "man" and a lot of other people are watching.