One unruly teen gets 15 years for trying to blackmail somebody via Facebook.

A Facebook teen, who used the social network service to blackmail students, gets a 15 year prison sentence. The charges stem from a scheme where Anthony Stancl, pretending to be a female online user, lured male classmates from his school into sending him photos.

A case involving a teen who used the Facebook social networking site for blackmail will serve 15 years in prison. Anthony Stancl accepted a plea agreement that involves the prison time. He was originally charged with five counts of child enticement, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and making a bomb threat.

The charges stem from a scheme where Stancl, pretending to be a female online user, lured male classmates from his school into sending him photos. He then used the photos to blackmail some of the students into performing acts with him. When they refused, he was threatening to release the photos they sent by posting them online.

When police searched his home, they recovered 300 images of juvenile males from his computer. The youngest male in one of the photos was 13. The incidents started in 2007 and ended in 2008.

Stancl was caught when he was linked to a bomb threat during the investigation of the incident. He faced as much as 30 years in prison. Judge J. Mac Davis sentenced Stancl to 15 years in prison and extended supervision.

Facebook has been granted a patent that covers large chunks of the entire social networking news feed concept. The patent application dates back to 2006. The news feed is a tool that provides online users with a steady stream of information about their friends’ activities.

“A user (the viewing user) of a social network may choose to view a news feed about another user (the subject user) in the social network,” the patent reads. “A list of the subject user’s activities within the social network may be drawn from various databases within the social network. The news feed is automatically generated based on the list of activities.”

Twenty students from a Brisbane high school have been suspended for bullying a staff member on Facebook. The school said it doesn’t tolerate bullying, harassment and threatening behavior. It

Facebook been the target of much criticism lately. The site is plagued with several glitches and privacy breach incidents. Another technical issue caused confusion among its members when e-mails were being sent to the wrong recipients.

“During our regular code push early Wednesday evening, a bug caused some mis-routing to a small number of users for a short period of time”, Facebook spokeswoman said in an official statement.

Several users were upset when private conversations became public. This is a situation in which was embarrassing for users and the online social website. Facebook is taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.