A pesky hacker has caught the attention of Facebook.
Mohamed Mansour is like a freedom fighter against the social network. He is trying to liberate his friends. He just wants his data and the ability to move it, but Facebook makes that very hard.
It’s a question over who owns all the data that members feed the social network daily, such as your friends list.
Mansour says his friends and contacts are his to do with as he pleases, but Facebook doesn’t want him just picking up and moving to another social network.
That has become an even bigger concern since Google+ launched this week.
In November, Mansour wrote a computer program to capture his Facebook friends’ e-mails and export them to Google.
The program wasn’t widely used until the tech community was invited to test drive Google+, at which time about 30,000 people used Mansour’s program to export contacts from Facebook, the hacker said.
Facebook caught on to the program and thwarted it by cloaking e-mail addresses when they suspected a user was running the program, which may or may not violate the company’s terms of service. This move by Facebook made Mansour’s app virtually useless.
Facebook did not return a request for comment. However, the social network did contact Mansour, we hear.
A Facebook engineer made a “friend request” call to Mansour just for a little chat, trying to reach a peace.
However, Mansour was not converted. We hear he is working on a more sophisticated program to help Facebook members escape the anti-social behavior. Garret Sloane
Can’t ignore
Bruce Berkowitz‘s Fairholme Fund is hemorrhaging cash through redemptions.
Shareholders have pulled out $3.5 billion from over the past four months, with $1 billion in redemptions last month alone, according to a report by Morningstar.
The $19.27 billion fund is down 9 percent this year, says Morningstar, while the S&P 500 is up more than 7.6 percent for the year.
Berkowitz, who rose to fame with stellar performance in the first 10 years of the 2000s, was named Fund Manager of the Decade by Morningstar.
Berkowitz’s motto of “ignore the crowd” has served him well in the past but his large investments in distressed financials such as AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America have hurt the fund’s performance this year. Post Wires
Volley
Some bankers play tennis. Others get to hang out with Venus Williams.
Williams, not dressed in her toga-inspired tennis whites from this year’s Wimbledon matches (as she is in this photo), doled out life advice on Thursday to 375 Morgan Stanley employees at their Times Square offices.
“Of course, I’m very strong, like a whip, but it’s very important to have strategy,” Williams said.
Perseverance is key, according to Williams. “Sometimes you feel you’re not supposed to win, and that’s the point where you don’t give up on yourself,” Williams said.
Williams spoke about her book “Come to Win,” which features tips from Jack Welch, Magic Johnson and others.
Williams, said she’d like to earn an MBA, and noted, however, that being an athlete has at least one advantage over being a businesswoman.
“One of the good things about playing a sport is that it requires a lot of rest so I al ways have excuses to go to bed early and take naps,” she said, laughing. Post wires
Poison Pen
Hedge fund wunderkind David Einhorn, who runs Greenlight Capital, is not one to mince his words.
He was very adamant on why he dumped his Yahoo! holdings for a “modest loss” after the search company dropped the ball on its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese search company.
So On The Money got a hold of Einhorn’s investors letter, and the 44-year-old fund manager had sobering thoughts on debt both here and abroad.
Einhorn writes on the US debt scenario, “Earth to S&P: if you can foresee a near- term default scenario that is plausible enough for you to warn about it, AAA cannot be the correct cur rent rating.”
His Mediterrean view is not all that rosy either. “Likely, the real worry [with Greece] is that the first default will expose the fic tion that sovereign debt is risk- free.”
If the authorities permit one default, their credibility to prevent additional de faults will be lost.
We scoured the letter for any word on his ongo ing talks with the New York Mets and majority owner Fred Wilpon on buying a piece of the team, but since it is a personal investment, there’s no insight into whether the Mets will re- sign Jose Reyes. Post staff