Bye, Bye Bebo – AOL Dumps the Popular Social Site

By Ian Bell June 17, 2010

AOL is paring back its ambitions in the world of online social networking, selling a website called Bebo that it bought a little more than two years ago for $850 million.

Bebo, which launched in 2005, has failed to match the huge popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

AOL Inc., which is based in New York, tried to use the site to drive traffic to its other ad-supported Web properties, but it hasn’t taken off. The site had about 5 million users in February, according to comScore Inc., compared with Facebook’s 210 million. AOL said in April it planned to shut the site or sell it.

The buyer is the private investment firm Criterion Capital Partners LLC.

The California company did not say how much it is paying, but analysts have speculated that the site would fetch just a fraction of what AOL paid for it.

Ian Bell

Publisher

I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?

Computing

A dangerous new jailbreak for AI chatbots was just discovered

Microsoft has released more details about a troubling new generative AI jailbreak technique it has discovered, called "Skeleton Key." Using this prompt injection method, malicious users can effectively bypass a chatbot's safety guardrails, the security features that keeps ChatGPT from going full Taye.

Skeleton Key is an example of a prompt injection or prompt engineering attack. It's a multi-turn strategy designed to essentially convince an AI model to ignore its ingrained safety guardrails, "[causing] the system to violate its operators’ policies, make decisions unduly influenced by a user, or execute malicious instructions," Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, wrote in the announcement.