News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace has announced a new initiative called Data Availability, a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web.

· Company e-mail, business documents and personal health information are now the new targets of choice for illegal hacks, as opposed to credit card numbers and bank account PIN numbers.

· Finjan, a San Jose-based maker of Web security software appliances, released a report saying researchers found a single server that had a pile of business and personal information stolen from 40 companies around the world.

· This type of information has become more valuable for criminal hackers.

· Finjan reported data breaches at both the FBI and Department of Health and Human Services.

· The server Finjan researchers found was in Malaysia.

Community driven portal for helping people nudge their favorite site about OpenID support… ‘We want you to add OpenID login to your website’ bookmarklet available.

Article about some of the new technologies that are helping OpenID to grow and achieve it’s true potential.

“At EIC2008 last month, Dale Olds of Novell’s Bandit Project gave me a few minutes and some insight into how Novell (and others) are mixing open source with proprietary software to architect a whole new Identity paradigm online.”

Mitchell Savage talks about authentication and Confident Technologies’ RecognitionAuth product.

SSO support is becoming a key success factor for social networking and social media web sites, as new users struggle to manage a growing number of passwords. This article goes over the arguments for and against OpenID and talks about some of the recent advancements made re: OpenID usability.

Chris Messina and Will Norris, two leading community figures working on distributed social networking, identity and data portability, are joining the staff of OpenID provider Vidoop

“If we really want to see OpenID adoption take off, we should look less at throwing up a multiplicity of buttons to ease the flow and look more at how we can build the links between authentication, brand and communications.”

“One of the most interesting projects to me as of late has been DiSo. DiSo is short for Distributed Social Networking and is the work of several developers working out in the open, developing real solutions for real users. The mantra of the DiSo team has been one that I can relate to coming from the open source world; lead with code. This touches me right where my Open Source roots come from and I love it.”

“Alex Polvi, friend of Miro and a community marketer for Mozilla, has won a Vidoop contest called ‘How do you identify?’ with a very cute video. Vidoop is a company that takes a cool approach to internet logins, with an OpenID service that gives you one universal login and an option for image grid based identification (take a look). Alex is donating his $1000 prize to Miro and Vidoop is matching that. Thanks so much guys!”

“Now, it’s really starting to get exciting here in Portland.”