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The government of India may have asked internet majors Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and Instagram to remove all links of the lethal online game Blue Whale challenge but it does not make Indian youths, especially teenagers, completely secure from the reach of the games administrators/curators.

However, parents can try to keep track of whether their children are trying to get in touch with the administrators of the game or have already got addicted to it.

HT spoke to hackers and dug the cyber world to access the advisories issued by government agencies in Russia and Kazakhstan where the game earned maximum curiosity and witnessed maximum casualties to find out what parents can do.

Here are the 10 commandments they can follow:

1. Link your social media profile with your childrens and watch out if she/he is using the hashtags #Iamawhale, #IAmWhale, #curatorfindme, #f57, #f58, #SeaOfWhales, #wakemeat420am, #silenthouse, #quiethouse, #iaminthegame.

2. The game is also known by the name Quiet House, Sea Whale, Wake me up at 4:20, Silent House, f33, f40, F57, F58, Whales float up, Nyapoka, 50 days before my . Watch out if the teenager is member of such groups on social networking sites.

3. Also keep track if these Russian words are being used with hashtag #Tihiydom, #Siniykit, #50dneyDoMoego, #mlechnyyput, #yavigre, #Razbudimenyav420

4. The game requires the player to wake up at 4.20 am. So, if the teenager is unusually waking up around that time, parents need to be cautious.

5. The game requires continuous self-harming. So, watch out for cut marks on arms and legs, especially veins, and if she/he has inscribed f40, f57, f58 with cut marks with razors on arms, or have drawn a whale on an arm with cut marks.

6. Watch out if the teenager is drawing blue whale, unicorn and butterflies on papers, notebooks.

7. This game requires the player to maintain utmost secrecy. So, keep watch if she/he looks completely removed from the world.

8. If the teen, despite having an existing social networking profile, has opened new ones, especially if on the English version of Vkontake, which comes as https://vk.com/club200. HT found out several teens have opened account on this site in August, possibly with fake identity and profile photo, only to draw the attraction of the games curators.

9. If the teen suddenly closes public or friends access to his page on the social networking sites.

10. If the teenager is seen walking or sitting on the edge of roof, especially of multi-storeyed buildings.

So far three Indian teenagers one each in Maharashtra, Bengal and Kerala are suspected to have killed themselves under the influence of the curators of the game. Two deaths have been prevented in the country.

Hackers pointed out that since it is an underground game, it is not accessible through search engines. The game exists in closed groups. Administrators of the game, who are also called curators, choose players and contact them through direct messages on various social networking sites. The link to download the game is generally shared through direct messages.

People who intend to play the game can also draw the attention of the games administrators by using certain hashtags from their social networking profiles. It then depends on the administrators whether to choose the intended person as a potential player or not.

Moreover, those who in India have the game already downloaded can share the link through such sharing apps as SHAREit and Xender, said Jins K Sebastian, a Kerala-based ethical hacker who is associated with hacking groups i-hos, Mallu Cyber Soldiers and Lulzsec India.

Incidentally, apart from various government agencies in Europe, hacktivist group Anonymous has also launched a drive against the game in March and vowed to end the menace. It seems, none of them have fully succeeded yet.

Searches through social networking sites revealed that an increasing number of Indian youths are trying to draw the attention of the games curators since early August 2017. Many have opened new accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even VKontakte, where the game originated from and is mostly played.

The Indian government is yet to announce any advisory so far.

Archismita Chaudhury, a youth from north Bengal, claimed to have tracked down several teenagers by searching #iamwhale hastag on Facebook and sent messages to some of them.

I did this today and got many posts and texted 4 fellows....one child was of 15 years....And more three.... All were teens. I got reply from one of them.....He said he stopped playing the game yesterday as he understood how harmful it is....He was in 11th task, Chaudhury posted on Facebook on August 15.

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Parents can track whether their children are fishing for Blue Whale: Here's how - Hindustan Times

Facebook is usually more than happy to have news posts go viral. But this week, the social networking giant is actively removing links to a viral article that appears on the white supremacist site Daily Stormer.

The article in question, which The Verge reports had been shared more than 65,000 times as of Monday night, features numerous personal attacks against Heather Heyer , the woman who was killed on Saturday when a car smashed into a crowd protesting the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Several others were injured in the incident and the alleged driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., has been charged with second-degree murder.

Facebook has said that the article violates its community standards , which do not permit hate speech on the social network. Facebook will only permit posts sharing the Daily Stormer article to remain on the site if they include a caption clearly condemning the article's content and/or the domain itself, and the company said it is removing all posts that share the Daily Stormer article without a caption.

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Multiple tech companies have taken steps against the Daily Stormer website, which is known as a hub for white supremacist propaganda and an online gathering place for Neo-Nazis and the "alt-right ," in the wake of the site's response to the weekend's events in Charlottesville. On Monday, GoDaddy revoked the site's domain registration, forcing the Daily Stormer to temporarily move its domain to Alphabet's Google, before that host also revoked the Daily Stormer's domain registration. Google also banned the Daily Stormer's YouTube channel. Both GoDaddy and Google said the website, which is offline as of Tuesday , violated their terms of service.

Facebook was criticized last year when it was reported that the human curators of the social networking giant's Trending news section were biased against conservative news outlets. The company has since increased the automation of its Trending section to avoid claims that Facebook is hand-picking the editorial content that is shared most widely.

However, in removing posts sharing the Daily Stormer article, Facebook seems to be merely continuing its recently stepped-up efforts to combat the spread of offensive and hateful content on social media. Other services such as Twitter and Google's YouTube have taken similar steps over the past year amid concerns that hate groups and terrorist groups are using the Internet for calls to violence.

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Facebook Is Removing Viral Posts Linking to a Neo-Nazi Site - Fortune

If content is king these days, then everyone really wants to wear the crown.

The latest business to throw itself into the media melee is Grindr, the popular gay social networking app which has just launched a new media site called INTO.

Pitching itself as the millennial response to Out Magazine,INTO features a similar mix of culture, lifestyle, entertainment, news and features and the company even hired Outs former editor at large, Zach Stafford to run the site.

Grindr actually began experimenting with publishing on its own homepage before moving the news and features to the INTO site earlier this year, according to a spokesman.

Its the latest attempt by the social network to diversify and capitalize on its incredibly strong brand within the gay community. Other attempts to spin out new ways to make money on the brand include Gaymoji, an emoji keyboard, and is running a growing event business under the Slumbr brand.

Courtesy Grindr LLC

Having a media play seems to be just part of running a company these days, I guess (although not as much of a stretch as Van Winkles, the publishing arm of mattress startup Casper I see you Van Winkles and still do not understand why you exist).

Stafford is an award-winning journalist and has assembled a team of writers to help push out stories including Nico Lang and Mathew Rodriguez, photo editor Oly Innes. Also helping beef up content will be a paid contributor network that already numbers in the hundreds, according to a spokesperson.

Increasingly, as lifestyle-focused corporate social networks assert themselves as hubs for identity in the modern world, theres no doubt that more of these types of media plays will crop up.

With the internet displacing both network and cable television, theres no limit to the profusion of properties that can claim a sliver of an audiences attention. And with a built in base of users to turn to, theres a pretty good chance that many of these new Vicestyle brands will be successful.

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Grindr launches INTO, a new media property - TechCrunch

Investopedia

Microsoft: LinkedIn Dealt a Blow in Data Case Investopedia According to The Wall Street Journal, since 2012 the startup has been collecting public data from the social network service without any objections. But more recently, LinkedIn wanted it to stop, arguing it has the right to control access to its ... LinkedIn loses court fight over user data privacyToronto Star Microsoft ordered to let third parties scrape LinkedIn dataThe Verge all 54 news articles »

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Microsoft: LinkedIn Dealt a Blow in Data Case - Investopedia

It's no secret that the Chinese government heavily controls the internet within its borders. As a result, many of the world's top websites are blocked in China. Internet giants like Facebook and Google have been trying alternative ways to infiltrate the market. The latest is a stealth release of an app called Colorful Balloons.

Colorful Balloons is very similar to Facebook's Moments: an app that lets you share photos with friends and family. Even the name of the new app resembles the logo of the original. According to The New York Times, Facebook approved the release of the app back in May. The app is published by a Chinese company called Youge Internet Technology and bears no apparent affiliation with the social networking company.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has visited the country many times in recent years. During the visits, he evidently had talks with government officials about the company's future in the country. Last year, it was reported that the company had tried to create a censorship tool to reconcile with the government.

When contacted by The Verge, Facebook replied that it's "spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways. Our focus right now is on helping Chinese businesses and developers expand to new markets outside China by using our ad platform."

The way the app was released in China is certainly unprecedented for a company of Facebook's stature. It remains to be seen whether the government will take any actions regarding the app's future.

Source: The New York Times | Image via The New York Times

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Facebook secretly introduces a new social networking app in China - Neowin