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Facebook Founder Accused of Hacking Into Rivals' Email
An anonymous reader notes a long piece up at BusinessInsider.com accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists. The CEO of the world's most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy. In a two-year investigation detailing the founding of Facebook, Nicholas Carlson, a senior editor at Silicon Alley Insider, uncovered what he claimed was evidence of the hackings in 2004. "New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints [in a court case ongong since 2007] against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails — at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful. ... Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company." The single-page view doesn't have its own URL; click on "View as one page" near the bottom.
Facebook also had a thing "give us your gmail or hotmail password and we'll log in and retrieve your contact email addresses and offer you to add them as friends if they have a Facebook account already" - presumably they stored those passwords as well.
The hilarity would be if his tracks could be traced down through their own system's perverse logging, maybe then would he regret his company's policy of practically 100% data retention. Pwned Mark Fuckerberg. Pwned.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
In fairness, in the corporate world there are so many pitfalls that it's essentially impossible to navigate through them all without a strong team of lawyers and accountants.
Laws in America are so complex and vague that the average american commits three felonies a day. The same difficulties apply to companies. Even something as straightforward as paying a CEO takes legal specialists dedicated to that specific area of law. Even think of the difficulties of complying with Sarbanes Oxley from an IT perspective. It takes time to set up all the infrastructure, and if you were a startup, you may not even have had a dedicated sys admin. Then suddenly you have all these regulations you have to comply with.
Not that I'm trying to excuse Zuckerberg. If he was stealing other people's emails, he should go to jail, a much better candidate for jailtime than Terry Childs.
Qxe4
This doesn't surprise me, only confirms what I've thought about Zuckerberg.
1) I believe he stole Facebook from the ConnectU founders. I believe the assertions that he was hired as a developer and dragged his feet while forming his own company which eventually became Facebook.
2) I believe he has no scruples when it comes to Facebook users' data. He has publicly stated that he knows what's best for "his" users and this arrogance shines through every time the UI is abruptly changed.
3) I believe he will do whatever he pleases with users' information. I don't think that privacy laws provide guidance to him but instead are constraints that he will bypass given any opportunity.
I'm pleased to see that he is being publicly exposed - I doubt anything will come of it - but am glad for him to be seen as he truly is, an arrogant and unscrupulous bad person. This latest revelation may finally send him where he belongs . . .
banking.
Yeah, Linkedin.com also asks for passwords to your multiple email accounts to scan them for contacts. Wow. What a gold mine that could be. If there's an email addy that they don't know or a name they don't recognize, they could start spamming them for registrations and, potentially, saying a friend or colleague provided your email address to us thinking you might be interested in joining our social club....
Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them.
This is why I always have an "OH &*#$#^!" moment whenever I accidentally enter the wrong password into the wrong form. It's a mad rush to change the password to whatever service/server the password really belongs to. Thankfully, it's usually different usernames...
Just be prepared for the day they won't be in charge anymore.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.