Facebook Inc. priced its shares in its initial public stock offering at $38 late Thursday, setting the stage for its historic market debut Friday.

The IPO values Facebook at $104 billion, the largest-ever for a newly public company. The $18.4 billion that Facebook is expected to raise in the IPO itself would be the second-largest in U.S. history, trailing only the $19.65 billion of Visa Inc. in 2008.

The Facebook pricing comes at a jittery moment for the stock market, which suffered a deep drop Thursday in a continuation of the weakness that has gripped share prices this month.

The Dow Jones industrial average sank 156.06 points, or 1.2%, to 12,442.49. It has fallen 6.3% from its recent peak on May 1. The technology-laden Nasdaq composite, on which Facebook will begin trading Friday, slumped 60.35 points, or 2.1%, to 2,813.69.

Facebook’s debut has dominated Silicon Valley and Wall Street in recent weeks, as the company and the financial markets geared up for the most anticipated IPO since Google Inc. in 2004. >more

IT Services – Houston, Texas

A Southern California mother was recently able to locate her long-ago kidnapped children via Facebook, according to numerous media reports.

An unnamed San Bernardino woman lost her son and daughter in 1995 when her then-husband made off with the 2- and 3-year-old toddlers. But the intervening years brought the advent of the World Wide Web, along with, eventually, social-networking sites.

In March, according to a report on KCCI.com, the mother searched for her now-teenaged daughter on Facebook and discovered her profile. The two began exchanging messages, but, MSNBC reported, things cooled.

“The teenager said, ‘Not interested in a relationship. We just have a happy life. Leave us alone,’” San Bernardino Deputy District Attorney Kurt Rowley told MSNBC. The profile disappeared, and the mother got in touch with Rowley and his investigators, who eventually located the children in Florida.

The father was arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping and two counts of violating child custody orders, MSNBC said, and the mother, according to the KCCI report, was eventually given custody of the kids, who were initially watched over by the Florida Department of Children and Families.

The ending, however, may not immediately be a happy one. Both the aforementioned reports cite Department of Children and Families spokeswoman Carrie Hoeppner on the reunion of mother and children.

“There is no relationship there. You don’t have that immediate joyful reunification,” Hoeppner said, adding that if a relationship is to form, it certainly won’t happen overnight.

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Facebook has fixed a flaw that let hackers delete Facebook friends without permission.

The flaw was reported Wednesday by Steven Abbagnaro, a student at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. It was patched Friday afternoon, Pacific time, after the IDG News Service notified Facebook of the issue.

The bug was a variation of an earlier vulnerability that Facebook learned about last week, which affected a range of features on the Web site. Hackers could have leveraged Abbagnaro’s bug to delete all of a victim’s contacts, one by one, but it does not appear that anyone ever exploited it in a malicious way.

For Abbagnaro’s attack to work, however, a user would have to have been tricked into clicking on a malicious Web link while still logged into Facebook.

Facebook has struggled this week to fix these bugs, which are called cross-site request forgery flaws. They exist because of relatively simple Web programming mistakes in the Web site’s code, and security researchers have criticized Facebook for not fixing them more quickly.

“We’re in the process of doing a full audit and are building additional protections for this type of potential attack across the code base,” said Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman, in a Friday e-mail interview. “We began working on this one as soon as we learned about it and pushed a fix early this afternoon.”

Facebook is employing aggressive legal means in combination with technical measures in order to stop hackers from abusing its social-networking site, according to its chief security officer, Max Kelly.

The company is constantly under fire from hackers trying to spam its 400 million registered users, harvest their data or run other scams.

Facebook’s security team started off with just a few people, said Kelly, who began working at Facebook in 2005 after a stint as a computer forensic analyst for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. He gave a keynote presentation at the Black Hat security conference on Tuesday.

Now, as many as 10 percent of Facebook’s 1,200 employees are involved in security-related functions for the site, Kelly said. Its core security team consists of 20 people, a site integrity team of around 15 people and 200 others that are part of a user operations team that monitors illegal activity.

With the right data, it is relatively easy to identity where the attacks are coming from, even if a specific individual can’t be identified. If an attack is under way, it’s important to understand the person’s motivation, Kelly said.

“We diligently go after attackers on this site,” Kelly said. “We want to know what people are attacking us and why.”

Facebook has integrated its security incident response team with its law enforcement team, which allows both groups to use some of the same tools in order to respond to a security incident, Kelly said.

On the technical side, Facebook has automated systems that detect when someone is using the site in a way that is different from the normal user. Those systems can then employ countermeasures, such as limiting the number of messages a user can send, employing CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and disabling accounts, Kelly said.

Facebook’s security teams tends to worry less about vulnerabilities, focusing instead on the actual attacks, Kelly said. It allows Facebook to focus on the individuals behind the attacks and trying to frustrate those attackers.

The site is also rewarding individuals who responsibly disclose security problems by giving them credit on its security page. “If it’s a really good hack, we’ll probably end up hiring you,” Kelly said.

Facebook has pursued a variety of criminal and civil penalties against those who abuse the site, using laws such as the U.S. CAN-SPAM act, which levies penalties of as much as $100 per spam message, Kelly said. Facebook has “dozens” of lawsuits in the works, he said.

The company has had some notable successes with this strategy.

In November 2008, it was awarded one of the largest judgments ever, winning statutory damages of US$1.3 billion (later reduced to $873 million). That suit charged Adam Guerbuez of Canada, Atlantis Blue Capital and 25 other unnamed people for falsely obtaining login information for Facebook users and then sending spam to those users’ friends. Although the individuals charged are in Canada, Facebook could still pursue the money. Even if it doesn’t, the judgement still has an impact, Kelly said.

“It means that any asset that goes through the United States, we have a claim,” Kelly said. “It makes the cost of doing business in the U.S. much more prohibitive.”

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