Men most likely to friend dodgy Facebook strangers

Men are more likely to be suckers for Facebook scams than women, according to a new survey by Bitdefender, and it's usually because they're hitting confirm on friend requests accompanied by pictures of hotties in bikinis. Female Facebook users tend to avoid temptation when faced with attractive photos of strangers - either …

[esucmn]

How's a man to know?

"there could be one real 19-year-old cutie who happens to look great in a bikini and just wants to be your friend. How's a man to know?"

Cos she wouldn't add me!

[Anonymous Coward]

..either that or she's actually a he.

[John Hawkins]

Closing time

Stating the obvious I know, but anybody who's observed closing time at the local nightclub will have seen essentially the same kind of behaviour there. Though I guess the addition of quantities of alcohol to the mix means that 'female' and 'pulse' are the only entries on the requirement specification of some male individuals - 'attractive' being a somewhat flexible definition in that situation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Friends?!?

Isn't that the problem though, they just want to be friends...

[jonathanb]

How to know

If a 19-year-old cutie who happens to look great in a bikini has to approach random strangers on the internet to get a date, there must be something seriously wrong with her.

[Anonymous Coward]

"How's a man to know?"

This is teh intarwebs, where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.

[won]

... and they're men!

[Anonymous Coward]

@won

Actually I think they're women. The ones trying to get even with the men who have been endlessly ignoring them due to this "internet thing" :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

@ for every dozen data-thieving spambots

with fake photos out there, there could be one real 19-year-old cutie who happens to look great in a bikini and just wants to be your friend. How's a man to know?

Dear Anna

You have shown great insight into my personality.

I'm sure anyone with as much understanding as you have must indeed be beautiful.

I feel we could and should be friends.

In my next email I will send you my bank account details and passwords

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Age distribution?

It states in TFA that older people are more cautious, so what age group was the poll conducted over?

I have a simple policy, if I don't know your name, you ain't getting in. Even that's not a guaranteethat I'll accept

[jungle_jim]

and...

She really IS a Nigerian princess with $154,965,168,00 in an account but needs £500 from me to get to it!!

[BristolBachelor]

Correction

Trouble is, for every MILLION data-thieving spambots with fake photos out there, there could be one real 19-year-old cutie who happens to look great in a bikini and just wants to be your friend. How's a man to know?

[Disco-Legend-Zeke]

Sounds Like Pretty...

...good odds to me.

[atomic jam]

And I immediatly hit the like button!

Oh, a friend request from Paris Hilton, this has to be real!

[A. Lewis]

"from randoms"?! What are you, a 17-year-old girl?

From Merriam-Webster. Random (n): a haphazard course.

This is a word in modern misuse that annoys me particularly. Random as an adjective should by rights means statistically so, chosen by a random-number-generator. A person may be odd, eclectic, surprising or just plain weird. They cannot be 'random'. They cannot be 'a random'. The English language is full of wonderful and varied words (which El Reg are normally quite good at employing). Why not use one of these, rather than forcing a word to do their job just because it's popular?

Language rant over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you think English came from?

The language you hold so dear evolved over time and guess what - it carries on changing all the time. Language is a beautiful, flexible thing that can be sculpted and moulded in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways

Words change, meanings change. Get over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

However

As computing-type people we understand the importance of having a defined standard that ensures that communication can occur fairly reliably.

So whilst it is good for language to evolve, this reasoning cannot be used as an excuse for ignorance and downright misuse of English.

[A. Lewis]

gr8 dis iz a wicked sick language well av in d future innit lol

The English literary greats of the past would be proud, I'm sure.

I'm not, in fact, protesting the change of language. New words, new sentence constructs, new abbreviations can all be good things, and of course are required for us to express new ideas, or talk about things in new ways. I fail to see though how we are progressing the language when a word that has a specific, scientific, meaning, is given a new and vague meaning that fails to convey the subtleties of the myriad alternatives which already exist.

Or, to put that another way: why describe so many things as 'random'? This reduces various situations or descriptions to a single nondescript word; when you could instead use 'unexpected', 'unusual',, 'assorted', 'odd', 'eclectic', 'diverse', 'rare', 'weird', 'bizarre', 'eccentric', 'varied', or any of the catalogue of synonyms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not into this facebook nonsense myself, but maybe they need an 'acquaintance' category to go along with 'friends', but with scam resistant limitations ? Then everyone daft enough to ask could be shoved into the 'acquaintance' pool, but only known folk categorised as 'friend'.

[Chris Beattie]

Facebook has Lists, by which you may categorize your friends. It's actually had them for a while now, but it wasn't until Google+ did it better with Circles that Facebook improved the interface. However, Lists still give off a "Me, too!" vibe, even though they predate Circles.

[Tom 13]

So that's what those are supposed to be.

Looked like too much work and not flexible enough when I glanced over them the first time. They should have three universal categories: friends, acquaintances, and family. Lists could be built from them, but those three should be the base.

[Old Handle]

That would seemingly make alot of sense, although I can imagine how it might just make primacy settings that much more confusing.

[earl grey]

Aye, that was her

Before she got one in the over that she thinks is yours...

[BinaryFu]

Men tend to expose themselves more than women

At least that's what I got out of this article...

:D