Fishing in a barrel...!

Well, the Orkut story thunders on like a large thundery thing in a big pile of goo.

From Indian newspapers to the Tickertape on the CNN TV station, everybody wants a slice of pie and we ain't running out of plates to serve them on yet. Prepare to be served, Mercury News! Notable quotable time? You bet:

"Social networking sites are always going to be rich pickings,'' said Chris Boyd, research manager for Face Time Security Labs, a Foster City company that recently discovered an attack on Orkut, Google's social networking site. "It's almost like fishing in a barrel.''

Hmm..."fishing in a barrel"? I could've sworn I used the word "shooting" but on the bright side, it gives the line a subtle (yet crazy) twist. In fact, it's almost as good as "The Ben Stiller Incident". Next!

"The biggest exposure people have is within their control, which is the amount of information people give away about who they are -- your e-mail address, your age, your gender, where you live,'' said Dave Cole, Symantec's director of security response. "There is entirely too much personal information on all of these sites.''

True, dat.

As my final notable quotable illustrates, people are indeed handing over their entire life stories to complete strangers on these sites. In fact, they're now doing it in real life, too. Not so long ago, one of my mates was in a club saying what sounded like complete jibberish to some girl. When I went over to drag him away, I was surprised to find he was trying to spell out his MSN address to her so she could hit him up on IM the following week. She, meanwhile was trying to remember her Myspace address.

Um...hello.....ever heard of a little thing called a phone number?

Doh.

For what it's worth, I checked out her profile and I discovered more about her from her site in five minutes than what she could've told my mate in 3 hours at that club. Lucky for her I don't have a knife and matching balaclava costume in the back of my kidnap van, or else she'd have been in trouble.

Maybe next time...