A Wisconsin woman has been charged with theft over accusations she tried to profit from Facebook’s much-anticipated plans to go public by selling fake stock in the social media giant.

Facebook announced on Wednesday its plans for the biggest-ever Internet IPO.

In a criminal complaint on Thursday, prosecutors said Marianne Oleson told acquaintances she obtained $1 million in stock because her daughter was an acquaintance of Facebook’s founder and persuaded several people to buy fictitious Facebook stock over a four-month period.

The Oshkosh woman was charged with 31 counts of theft, forgery and making misleading statements.

One of Oleson’s victims was a contractor who did work at her house in September. Oleson paid the contractor for the work with $13,980 worth of fake Facebook stock, the complaint alleged.

The contractor, who also paid $10,000 in cash to the woman for additional stock, grew suspicious when he found she lied about her name and various oddities on documents referring to the transaction.

Oleson, 46, was also accused of defrauding a 66-year-old Oshkosh man who was suffering from a vision impairment. According to the district attorney, the man gave Oleson four checks totaling about $43,000 late last year to pay for Facebook stock.

The woman promised him she would send stock certificates in the mail. Oleson is also accused of selling fake Facebook stock to two other men for a total of $9,900.

What each of her four victims say they did receive was a document describing the private stock offering — a document Oleson had received when she contacted OM Investment Management LLC, a legitimate owner of 65,000 shares of private Facebook stock, about purchasing $1 million worth of stock from the company. She allegedly took the share subscription agreement they sent, changed a few words and offered it to her victims as proof of her good faith.

If convicted, she will not only miss the legitimate Facebook IPO, but will also face 218 years, 30 days in prison and $418,000 in fines. Her bond is set at $50,000, and she is due back in court next week.

Read story@ msnbc

Other Sources: newsfeed.time.com

Two teens apparently couldn’t find an open Internet Cafe or another available computer at 3:30 a.m. so they could check their Facebook Page. What could have been so pressing? So, the obvious solution came to mind – break into the CNN Headquarters. Surely they will have computers.

Aldayne Fearon, 18, and Francis Mutemwa, 17 were arrested last week after breaking into a CNN Atlanta’s newsroom to get a peek at their Facebook pages.

I am sure their parents won’t “like” this situation.

After driving to the Omni Hotel in Mutemwa’s mother’s red Mercedes, the teens scaled the wall and gained access to CNN’s fifth floor newsroom. They were discovered at approximately 3:30 a.m. by police who had been contacted by CNN security, according to Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones.

The two were found working on two computers which were not password protected. At the time of their arrest, they were checking their Facebook pages on those computers.

The teens initially declined to give law enforcement their names, but eventually capitulated.

Each man was charged with criminal trespassing.

I suspect Facebook will close their accounts and the two will have to live without getting their Facebook fixes.

Have you ever wondered if your significant other or spouse is cheating and been tempted to play sleuth? People have been catching their spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends cheating for centuries, but it took some real effort. Nowadays, it has become so easy due to technology.

Thirty-three percent of dating couples and 37 percent of spouses — slightly more women than men — say they have checked their partner’s email or call history on the sly, according to a survey last year by the gadget shopping site Retrevo.com, which queried more than 1,000 people online. Among those under 25, almost half reported snooping. Just 9 percent discovered evidence of cheating.

Retrevo.com spokeswoman Jennifer Jacobson said she doesn’t think young couples are less trusting. “It’s just that technology has made everyone’s communications highly accessible and people probably don’t see it as a violation of trust, because of how easy it is to do.”

When Patricia Masterson’s boyfriend broke into her email account in search of evidence that she had been cheating, she was deeply offended by the violation of her privacy. The fact that she had, indeed, been cheating hardly seemed like a good excuse.

She changed her tune 10 years later, when, married and pregnant, Masterson innocently spotted a text message on her husband’s cellphone from a woman regarding a baby. Her husband said it must have been sent to him by mistake, and Masterson, sensitive to privacy, left it alone — until a few months later, when the woman contacted Masterson through Facebook to reveal she’d recently given birth to her husband’s child.

Masterson said, “I became a snooper.” She poured through cellphone records and installed software to recover deleted emails, gathering all the details she could. “It was so not me; up until that point I had believed in absolute privacy.”

When, if ever, is it OK to invade a romantic partner’s privacy? Many say it’s often the only way to confirm suspicions of infidelity when all else fails. I am not sure what “all else” includes – asking and hoping for an honest answer? Hiding behind closed doors and eavesdropping on phone conversations? Following your partner? Hiring a private detective to perform surveillance on your partner? Place a GPS tracker on their car?

According to a study, it depends on from which generation you belong that determines your probability of using today’s technology to spy on your partner.

Larry Rosen, author of “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us” (Palgrave Macmillan), said millennials raised on a culture of Facebook stalking view privacy differently from baby boomers or Gen-Xers (roughly people over 35).

“For older people, the lines are clear: Private is private, public is public,” said Rosen, a research psychologist and professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills. “For younger people it’s much more murky.”

Flirting with Fire

Technology has made it easier to spy, but it has also made it easier to cheat, blurring the lines of what is considered appropriate relationships. Let’s take Facebook for example. I know of a few couples that broke up over Facebook “friendships.” Facebook invites flirting with exes, and some people never know whom their partner is texting. Is that OK? It depends on the couple, but it can get out of hand.

The ping of a saucy text message stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, as does cocaine, and people want more, Rosen said.

He recommends people abide by a five-minute “e-waiting period” before sending an electronic communication so that they can be more clear-headed about whether it’s a good idea. I think that’s always a good policy anyway – especially if you are about to send an angry email. You should avoid that impulse to hit the “send” button before giving yourself time to think clearly.

“It’s an issue of higher-level thinking versus lower-order responding,” Rosen said. “We have turned into salivating dogs, and we have to back off a bit.”

Generally, a relationship is harmful if you’re redirecting intimacies and energies from your partner to someone else, or if you’re hiding behavior because you know it would make your partner uncomfortable.

“People are trying to hang on to two worlds, and it’s been my experience that those things blow up,” said Randi Gunther, an LA-based clinical psychologist and marriage counselor, and author of “Relationship Saboteurs” (New Harbinger). “Do you want to spend your life looking over your shoulder?”

I am in complete agreement on this one. You can be cheating on your partner without having any physical contact with another person. There have been numerous studies that show women are more threatened if their partner is having an emotionally intimate relationship with another woman than if he were sleeping with her – not that the latter is very comforting. The exact opposite holds true of men. They are more upset about the physical contact than about their woman seeking emotional support from another man.

Setting Parameters

It’s up to each couple to determine what’s appropriate regarding privacy, but the problem is that most couples don’t talk about their values until someone gets hurt, said Linda Young, a counseling psychologist who sits on the board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Young said couples should get on the same page about their expectations (What is cheating? How transparent should you be? Do you have access to each other’s passwords?) just as they would about children or finances.

But first, she added, it’s important to understand why you desire a certain level of privacy or transparency.

It’s unfair to project insecurities or baggage from prior betrayals onto an innocent partner and go searching for faults, Young said. Innocuous material can easily be misinterpreted and hyper-vigilance can be controlling and push someone away.

Read article@ chicagotribune

In my college years, I purchased used books. I would go to the bookstore and try to find the cleanest ones I could – ones without too much scribbling, highlighting or even a piece of gum. In one student’s case the unexpected (and unwanted) gift-with-a-textbook-purchase was a bag of cocaine.

Sophia Stockton — a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas — recently ordered a textbook from an independent retailer through the Amazon online storefront. The book was intended for a spring course on terrorism and is called “Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues.”

Maybe the book should have been titled something like, “Understanding Drug Abuse.”

When Stockton flipped through the textbook, she “discovered a bag of white powder had fallen to the ground.” According to WPTV, Stockton feared that the bag contained anthrax and took it to the local police department the next day.

Stockton said, “I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it,” Stockton recalls. “ He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!”

Gardner law enforcement officials speculate that there may have been up to $400 worth of cocaine in the bag.

Wow! That’s enough money to buy two – three more books.

Officials reached out to Amazon for more information about how such an incident could have occurred. While Stockton’s textbook was purchased through the online retailer, it comes from Warehouse Deals. This Amazon storefront offers “deep discounts on open-box, like-new, refurbished, or used products that are in good condition but do not meet Amazon.com’s rigorous standards as ‘new.’”

According to the Warehouse Deals’ page on Amazon, all items are inspected prior to being offered for sale: Prior to offering an item for sale on Warehouse Deals, we verify its physical and functional condition.

Items purchased through independent sellers on the Amazon website are covered by the company’s “A-to-z Guarantee,” so Stockton could theoretically file a claim on the grounds that the item she purchased was “not the item depicted in the seller’s description.” (We sincerely doubt that cocaine was mentioned in the product description, after all.)

At this time, it remains a mystery how $400 worth of cocaine wound up in a used textbook.

Stockton waited a day to alert authorities. If the bag in Stockton’s textbook did contain anthrax — as she initially feared — immediate and appropriate medical evaluation and treatment would’ve been essential.

Read story@ msnbc