(Photo: Facebook)

Each year on February 5th, lovers of the crack-laced hazelnut spread Nutella gather to create delicious recipes and spoon-feed each other scoops directly from the jar in celebration of World Nutella Day. But it appears that this year's festivities may have been the last.

News.com.au reports that Ferrero, the company that manufactures Nutella, has sent a cease and desist letter to Sarah Rosso, the creator of the event, telling her she must stop using their logo and name on her Facebook page, Twitter and website.

Ms. Rosso, who has basically been running a viral marketing campaign for Nutella for free and has this to show for it, will shut down nutelladay.com on May 25th, according to the site:

The cease-and-desist letter was a bit of a surprise and a disappointment, as over the years I’ve had contact and positive experiences with several employees of Ferrero, SpA., and with their public relations and brand strategy consultants, and I’ve always tried to collaborate and work together in the spirit and goodwill of a fan-run celebration of a spread I (to this day) still eat.

Meanwhile, Nutella fans on Facebook are none too enthused. "Nutella...more nuts in company management than in every jar," wrote one. "Idiots."

We'd call for a boycott of Nutella, but we all know it's not physically possible.

Mr. Collier. (Photo: watoday.au.com)

There’s really not a whole lot going down down under, so this is what’s making news: An Australian politician has apologized for accidentally liking a Facebook photo of a 16-year-old prankster exposing himself. It was part of a prank called "sneaky nuts," a time-honored tradition where teenaged boys sneakily expose their balls through their pants.

Peter Collier, a minister for education in Western Australia, apologized for his actions, claiming he didn’t see the boy’s nuts exposed in what he thought was a normal photo. The incident happened in 2011, when the boy was 16, but he bragged about Mr. Collier's like late last month on Twitter.

Mr. Collier released an apologetic statement:

"It was a silly mistake on my part. I only became aware of the actual content of the photo when shown by a journalist today. This obviously highlights the pitfalls of social media. I apologise if I caused any offense."

Apology nut accepted.

He's staring at a large pile of money, shimmering in the distance like an oasis.

Looks like there might be a suitor waiting in the wings for Tumblr, that scatterbrained belle of the ball. He's a real gray-hair, though. According to AllThingsD, the blogging site is talking to Yahoo about the possibilities for an alliance, an investment or even a lock-stock-and-barrel purchase. Ad Week says the highly hypothetical price tag could be as much as a billion dollars.

At this point, it might be easier to keep a list of the startups Yahoo hasn't considered acquiring.

AllThingsD pointed to recent remarks by Yahoo's CFO as a rationale. Basically, the company would do almost anything to shuck its nursing-home aura:

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

More than a couple of years, buddy. But if there's one thing Tumblr absolutely can promise, it's hordes of users 18 to 24.

GigaOm suggests, though, that there could be another would-be beau ready to make an offer: "We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer." David Karp did turn up at the Facebook Home launch, but the notion is even more speculative than the Yahoo deal, which is far, far from a sure thing.

God knows with these two, though.

Mr. Cook (Photo: News.au)

Apple CEO Tim Cook is preparing for his upcoming Congress appearance about corporate tax code by promising a “dramatic simplification” of the ancient laws. [Washington Post]

It’s been a year since Facebook's IPO. So let's celebrate it with a ~one year later~ reflection piece. [WSJ]

Remember when you’re complaining about your long work week, it’s way worse for Foxconn employees. [NYT]

It sounds like the Facebook designers behind News Feed's redesign were having the chillest of times on the project. They brought in lamps to create a "nice living room" and stared at posters on the wall to keep them motivated. [Taxi]

Ugh, we have some disturbing news: A website that bills itself as “Kickstarter for gigs” has launched in London. [BBC]

(Photo: Smedio)

Three men in New Jersey were arrested yesterday for allegedly swindling nearly $7 million from an investor by claiming that they had "special access" to shares of Facebook prior to it going public last May.

Federal prosecutors arrested Aaron Muschel, 63, of Brooklyn, and Alex Schleider, 47 and Eliyahu Weinstein, 37, of Lakewood, N.J. and charged them with wire fraud conspiracy. Bloomberg reports that they offered a New Zealand investor "blocks of Facebook shares" even though the men had no access to them. They preyed off the near deafening buzz, that seemed to promise Great Gatsby-like riches, to those who cash in on the site's IPO.

The investor wired $6.7 million dollars, with nearly half of that involved in the Facebook deal. However, Mr. Weinstein used the investor's money for personal things, like extending a loan to a Brooklyn rabbi's congregation in exchange for life insurance policies. He also used the money to make a gold deal in Africa, another undoubtedly legitimate transaction.

It gets better, or worse, depending on how you look at this bizarre case:

“Shamelessly, Eliyahu Weinstein allegedly committed these crimes while under federal indictment for another investment scheme, even using stolen money to pay his legal fees," said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman

The government is seeking the return of the millions of dollars in funds that were fraudulently obtained by the men.

SFW. (Photo: Hashgram)

Oh no, our world's children are succumbing to the perils of the World Wide Web. A new survey of 19,000 parents worldwide said their kids browse porn as early as age six and begin e-flirting at eight years old. The news comes from Bitdefender, a Bucharest-based antivirus company, that compiled the results from talking with parents and monitoring which sites parents block.

The Internet-addicted generation is also using instant messaging services and playing video games at younger ages than ever before, Bitdefender said. The survey found kids playing video games as young as five, and 17 percent of those surveyed registered for social media sites at 10 years old. Those sneaky kids also figured out that they could get around several sites' 13-year-old minimum age by--get this!--lying about their ages.

The study said that another "hot destination" for kids online for when they're not flirting are alleged "hate" websites where kids are allowed to--cover your ears--swear and be dicks to each other. So, 4Chan?

A Bitdefender spokesperson told USA Today that kids are getting increasingly sneakier:

"Kids nowadays are acting like young adults online — just give them an Internet-connected device, and they will find a way to things parents would like to ban forever," says Bitdefender Chief Security Strategist Catalin Cosoi.

Just wait until they get on OKCupid. Shiver.

(Photo: screencap)

Heedlessly disregarding the bad luck of looking anything like MySpace, Facebook recently added the option of emoticons for status updates. But, according to Popular Science, the social network couldn't simply use the same smiley faces that've done the Internet perfectly good for more than a decade. No, besides the old standbys you'll have the option of expressing your feelings with a custom-designed, "compassion-research-based set of emoticons."

Hey, we're willing to try anything that'll keep drama out of our News Feed.

It all started with Facebook grasping for ways to deal with interpersonal issues--think pissy complaints from users whose "friends" wouldn't remove unflattering Facebook photos. Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar asked psychology professor Dacher Keltner to help out with ways to encourage "more compassionate communication."

Yeah, Facebook got a professor to help Facebook understand emotions... so Facebook could create better emoticons.

And so:

"There’s all this communication that happens when you’re talking to someone face-to-face--you can see that they're nodding and you can see their smile--that is not present when you’re communicating electronically," Bejar explains. "One of the questions that we asked was, 'Wouldn’t it be great if we had a better emoticon that was informed by science?'"

So they took the 50 emotion states outlined in a 19th century work by Charles Darwin and hired a Pixar illustrator to create a smiley that conveyed every one.

Hello and welcome to the future!

(Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Public Domain Photographs, Via Wikimedia Commons)

The crooner Bing Crosby might've been a total dick, but it turns out he was a pretty smart angel investor. Guess the Biebs isn't so special, after all! [New Yorker]

"They became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down." Don't look now but someone lived out your wildest ATM-related dreams. [The Verge]

If you're going to I/O, keep your eyes peeled for all the sensors tracking air quality, noise levels and lord knows what else. [TechCrunch]

Square's TOS was recently updated to add that you can't sell "firearms, firearm parts or hardware, and ammunition; or... weapons and other devices designed to cause physical injury" using the service. Guess you're gonna have to start bringing duffle bags full of cash to the gun show again. [CNN Money]

Aereo launches in Atlanta June 17. [Aereo]

(Photo: Social Roulette)

Update: Facebook has revoked API access for Social Roulette, effectively killing the app. Bang.

If you've long considered acquiescing to the groans of privacy wonks and straight up deleting your Facebook account, but couldn't quite bring yourself to commit social media suicide, we may have found a solution for you.

Social Roulette is a game that gives you a one in six chance of deleting your Facebook account. If you lose, the game will delete all of your posts, friends, photos and other elements of your profile before completely deactivating it. If you're lucky enough to survive, the message "I just played Social Roulette and survived" will be published to your wall.

Created by Jonas Lund, Jonas Jongelan and NYU ITP adjunct professor Kyle McDonald, the game is the perfect solution for people who are just too afraid to pull the deactivate trigger themselves.

https://twitter.com/roulettenet/status/333269286929985536

We're admittedly too scared to play. What about all our pictures from senior prom??

(h/t Laughing Squid)

Brand manager, Vin Diesel. (Photo: Facebook)

Muscley toddler Vin Diesel is a big deal on Facebook. He has 41 million likes, where the incessant over-sharer documents much of his weird life. Scrolling through his timeline, there’s a picture of him posing shirtless with a leopard that has nearly 1 million likes, a picture of him smiling with some WordArt-created slogan reading “Sing and the world sings with you…” that somehow garnered 10,000 likes, and an open thread about his acting career that has collected 50,000 comments.

Now Mr. Popular thinks he’s entitled to a portion of the money that Facebook makes from his page. He told Entertainment Weekly that his page blew up because he connects with his fans in the "realest" of ways and doesn't let anyone else control or post on his page. He even went to Facebook headquarters to explain his social media ninja magic:

Facebook used to ask me to come up to their office to explain what the f— I was doing, and why I had so many fans. What was unique was: I never let anyone do a post, I never let anyone post for me in the last four years. My audience knows me so well on the page that if my producing partner’s in the room when I post, they’ll know somebody was around me. That’s kind of cool, that’s how sophisticated they are. Facebook really owes me billions of dollars. But whatever. [Laughs]

We eagerly await Fast and the Furious 7: How to Crush it on Facebook.