Hackers placed code in the comments section, under targeted videos, that would run when people watched the clip.

In some cases, a pop-up screen appeared reporting that the Canadian singer, Justin Bieber, had died in a car crash.

Google, which owns YouTube, said that it had fixed the problem “about two hours” after it was discovered.

“We took swift action to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on youtube.com,” a spokesperson said.

“Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour, and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours.

Nasty attacks

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are relatively simple attacks that allow hackers to place code into web pages.

In the YouTube incident, hackers used JavaScript code and HTML, both commonly used on web pages.

Security experts said that although in most cases the code was relatively benign, it has been used for more malicious purposes.

“The thing with a cross-site scripting attack is that it will appear that it is a message being posted by that website, which gives it a certain legitimacy, Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos told BBC News.

“It could be used to show a message that tells you to update your password; it could link to a malicious website; or it could attempt to phish you.”

Phishing is a common tactic used by cybercriminals and involves using fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank accounts or login names.

“I’ve seen nasty XSS attacks that are used to fake whole login screens and we know how many people use same passwords for multiple accounts,” said Bojan Zdrnja of the Internet Storm Centre in a blog post.

Mr Cluley said that responsibility for these kinds of vulnerabilites was down down to how securely a website was written.

“Web programmers need to be much more careful with their code.”

Google said it was “continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future”.

When the vulnerability was first reported, rumours suggested that YouTube was infected with a virus.

The popularity of social media games has risen in recent years with up to 250 million global players logging on to various games each month.

Previous console Fifa games have retailed at around £30 but FIFA Superstars is free to play online.

The footballers making up each player’s team are purchased in packs at a cost of £1 – £2 per pack.

Players pit their teams against those belonging to their Facebook friends.

As the tournament progresses, each player earns points which can also be used to purchase team members.

Unlike console-based versions of Fifa games in which the player can decide to play as a manager, a player or both, on Facebook players can only be managers of virtual teams made up of real players from around the world.

They can also opt to participate in league games outside of their “friends” network.

“The Facebook version is a strategy game,” said Playfish chief executive Kristian Segerstrale.

“It extends the Fifa franchise by enabling you to play with friends.”

It will also reflect events as they unfold in the World Cup said Mr Segerstrale, although the details are yet to be announced.

There will be a new edition of the console version of Fifa at a later date.

Social media games developer Playfish was bought by Fifa makers Electronic Arts (EA) for $300m (£170m) in 2009.

Symbio Wildlife Park, south of Sydney, said thieves broke into the park on Sunday night and stole a breeding pair of Cotton top Tamarins, their two babies, and four Pygmy marmosets.

“These animals are part of international breeding programs and are crucial to the survival of the species, there are only 300 Cotton top Tamarins left in the wild, so time is running out,” said the zoo’s Facebook message.

“These animals need specialized housing and diet to survive, if they are not returned home safely, they may not survive, the whole team at Symbio are extremely worried,” it said.

“If you have any information, or know someone who can, please email or call the park, everything will be treated anonymously, all we want is the animals home safe.”

The zoo published photographs of the tiny monkeys.

Park director John Radnidge said the thieves cut power to the zoo and cut through three padlocks to gain access to the monkeys.

“On a cold, wet, windy, miserable, rainy night they cut the power to the exhibit, it was very clear these people knew exactly what they were doing. They had probably cased the joint before the attack,” Radnidge told local media on Tuesday.

Radnidge said there was no black market in Australia or Asia for the monkeys, unlike Australia’s native birds and lizards.

“Cotton-tops and pygmy marmosets are so rare and unusual, those who have them in their possession will be found, I’m sure of that,” he said.

“For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions. In our view, Facebook doesn’t do a good job in either department,” the organizers, who did not identify themselves, said on their website for Monday’s “Quit Facebook Day.”

“Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices.”

The group said at 2300 GMT that 32,749 had dropped out of the Facebook universe.

Facebook.com is visited monthly by 540 million people, or slightly more than 35 percent of the Internet population, according to Google data.

Facebook is overhauling privacy controls in the face of a barrage of criticism that it is betraying the trust which has made it the world’s biggest social network.

Facebook redesigned its privacy settings page to provide a single control for content and “significantly reduce” the amount of information that is always visible to everyone.

Facebook also said it is giving users more control over how outside applications or websites access information at the service.

Critics continue to call for Facebook to make all user information private by default and then let people designate what they want to share case-by-case in an “opt-in” model.

Dr Johannes Caspar, the Information Commissioner for Hamburg, Germany, told BBC News that there was “no sign” of the requested hard disk

The firm has until midnight to hand over data harvested by its Street View cars from private wi-fi networks.

A spokesperson for Google declined to comment further, but indicated that it would say more on the matter later.

The Hamburg commissioner also expects answers to a range of questions his office posed four weeks ago.

Dr Caspar added “We know that Google always thinks it’s better to hold back the answers for as long as they are able to.”

Earlier this month, the search firm admitted that it had collected information people had sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks for the last three years.

Last week, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that there was “no, harm, no foul”, in relation to the data breach.

Google said the wi-fi data collection was a “mistake” and that it had not been authorised.

The search giant’s admission came in response to an official German request to audit data gathered by Google’s Street View cars.

Different approaches

Google’s actions are under increasing scrutiny around the world, but countries are approaching the matter differently.

In the UK, the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered the firm to destroy the data which it collected in 2008.

The ICO said it took the matter “seriously” but that it would not take any further action against the company.

Its German counterpart has asked to see the data before it proceeds, and has sought answers from Google to a range of technical questions about how the data was gathered and stored.

One of them points out that a database of unencrypted wi-fi hotspots would be very useful to criminal gangs, and asks what steps Google had taken to prevent unauthorised access.

Some countries, including Germany, have said they are considering prosecuting Google, once the extent of the data breach becomes clearer.

But civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has questioned the wisdom of passing the data to authorities.

“Calls from some quarters for Google to simply turn over the data to the U.S. or other governments are wrong-headed,” said EFF Civil Liberties director Jennifer Granick in a post on the organisation’s website last week.

“To allow a government to investigate a privacy breach by further violating privacy is senseless.”

Google has said that it is in discussions with data protection authorities in all affected countries about what to do with the data.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives will discuss the changes at its Palo Alto headquarters at 6.30pm (BST).

Facebook faced a barrage of criticism from users over a series of tweaks that left its members unsure about how public their information had become.

Some profile owners have threatened to quit the site on 31 May in protest.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had “missed the mark”.

“I can confirm that our new, simpler privacy settings are starting to roll out tomorrow evening so stay tuned on our blog for more details,” said a spokesperson.

Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox described the last few weeks as “extremely humbling”.

Significant changes to the settings began in December, when the social network changed the default rule on profile information.

Users had the choice of whether to open information to just friends, friends of friends or everyone, with defaults suggesting different settings for different aspects of a person’s profile.

The changes were, in part, a response to changes demanded by the Canadian privacy commissioner.

But it created more controversy and criticism that the process was too confusing.

Ten US privacy groups filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission began its own investigation.

In April of this year, the firm moved a step further with a series of changes including the suggestion that users automatically re-categorise their interests into publicly available pages.

It also allowed more profile information to be shared wit hteh wider web, unless users specifically opted out.

Speaking a developers’ conference, Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to move towards a web with a “social default”.

The series of changes have meant that its current privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options and at 5,830 words is longer than the US Constitution.

The research by Spot On Public Relations, a Dubai-based agency, says there are more than 15 million subscribers to the social network.

The total number of newspaper copies in Arabic, English and French is just under 14 million.

The findings seem to confirm the increasing popularity of the social interaction platforms in the region.

Alternative

Spot On Public Relations, a marketing and communications agency, says the figures show that such platforms are beginning to define how Arabs discover and share information.

In Egypt alone, there are 3.5 million users, which is way beyond the circulation of any of the biggest dailies.

Even in conservative Saudi Arabia, people have been quick to embrace Facebook. It is the country with the second-largest membership after Egypt.

One-third of the population in the United Arab Emirates are said to be on Facebook.

The findings should come as no surprise. The majority of the region’s more than 300 million people is young, and internet use is on the rise.

In societies where political freedoms are severely limited, many have also resorted to Facebook as an alternative to the public sphere.

But the survey does not provide a detailed breakdown of how it is used in Arab countries – for example how much of it is for chatting and making friends and how much is for political and social campaigning.

But it contains valuable information for advertisers who want to reach the largest possible number of people.

In a column in the Washington Post newspaper, he said the social network would soon make changes to users’ privacy options.

The move may placate some of the growing band of members who had pledged to quit the social network on 31 May.

“Sometimes we move too fast – and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding,” wrote Mr Zuckerberg.

“The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information.

“Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark,” he wrote.

The technology blogger Robert Scoble also published, with permission, an e-mail exchange with Mr Zuckerberg from the weekend, in which the Facebook CEO admitted “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes”.

Privacy concerns

Facebook has faced increasing criticism from US civil liberties advocates, consumer groups and lawmakers. European Union data protection officials described recent privacy changes as “unacceptable”.

Mr Zuckerberg’s admission also comes after Facebook said on Friday 21 May that it had changed how it shared data with advertisers on the site.

The Wall Street Journal had highlighted how under certain circumstances Facebook had been sending the user name or ID of the person clicking on an advert to the relevant advertiser.

“We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Zuckerberg did not offer a date on which the new settings would be implemented, but said the social network was “working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible”.

However, it remains to be seen whether Facebook has done enough to change the minds of a growing band of users who had said they would quit the social network.

The quitfacebookday website records that more than 13,500 Facebook members have committed to deleting their profiles on 31 May 2010.

The first handset to use the Symbian operating system since it became open source has been announced by Nokia.

The N8 phone has a 12 megapixel camera and allows people to record and edit High Definition video clips, as well as watch web TV services.

Analysts said the phone was a “pivotal device” in efforts “to make Nokia’s high end phones credible again”.

It is also a chance for Symbian to prove itself alongside Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iPhone.

Despite being the world’s most popular smart phone software, Symbian has lost “mindshare” against more high-profile software, according to industry experts.

Analysts at CCS Insight described the Symbian 3 software as “evolutionary not revolutionary” but said it was a “key first step if it proves reliable”.

Cinema support

It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February.

The Foundation – which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung amongst others – gave away the code to developers for free in the hope that it would help speed up the pace of improvements. Any organisation or individual can now use and modify it.

The software in the N8 allows the phone to have multi-touch and multi-tasking, meaning more than one application can be open at any one time.

The device will be Nokia’s flagship smartphone. It can be plugged into home theatres and supports surround sound as well as high-quality video.

Social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be displayed on the home screen in a single application.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was “stoked” that Nokia had chosen to use the operating system on its phone.

The phone will ship in the third quarter of 2010, following delays.

Source: BBC News