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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.
Lawyers throughout the US just had orgasms....
just wow.
This is a serious allegation. With all of the information Facebook aggregates, they potentially could unlock many people's emails and various other accounts with the family and personal information. Lots of people use simple things like their pets or parents birthdays as those reminder question answers, and Facebook could easily hold all the correct information to gain access to those accounts. If this case is proven true, I can see some new laws on how companies with this kind of information have to structure and protect it. Hopefully people will wake up and stop putting their personal information where Facebook and others can see...
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
using the same password for their email account as they do with their social networking sites then people should expect to be compromised.
... as this limits the guess work.
I suggest you use 4 types of passwords, one for accounts that wouldnt effect u much, one for email, one for social sites and IM, and one for bank accounts; with none of the passwords having anything to do with each other, e.g redball, orangeball,greenball... or whiteball, soccer, redflag
this "hack" was probably just stupid curiosity which will probably get him arrested, and once that happens he will loose a lot of control of the company.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
And what if all those other sites have a admin that can't be trusted? It's really not about facebook this issue. It's about broken trust and you can't really protect yourself against it. At least not if you want to use their services.
When you look at Facebook's dismal history of privacy policies and changes, it's really not that surprising. A person with flawed ethical standards tends to do unethical things.
If at all possible, they'll use the word "boffin" in there somewhere, too.
Kinda puts his comments that "No one has any reasonable expectation of privacy anymore" into a whole new light, doesn't it?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Did he offer to buy the Caprica Bucs as well?
A friend once made the observation that no big-time, fast-track success story in the world of IT ever makes it without doing something that gets them into serious hot water at least once. Once they do that, they offer a bunch of mea culpas, make a few donations here and there, then make bank. (The slow-track success stories don't usually fit that theory.)
This is a bit different, seeing as he's already made bank, and it's a skeleton coming out of the closet, but I still think he'll get off easy.
Remember, it's not how much justice you can get, it's how much you can afford.
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He isn't exactly known to believe in privacy in the first place, after all:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy
The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".
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.
Was Chuck Norris
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
The issue is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security.
I want my apps and data to be accessible at all times. Even when I'm off-line, or they are, or somethings dies in-between.
I want my data to be safe, which means off-site, off-line backups.
I want my data to be secure, which means no hacking. For every high-visibility CEO that gets caught, how many 3rd-world subcontractors' trainees don't ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Expect a lot more of these stuff.
The people who start social networks are a different breed than those that cooked up tech startups of past decades.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
And this is why don't provide any site any more information that the bare minimum that it needs.
Nah. Facebook is a scam.
Now excuse me, I've got to update my status.
And I had a thing, "Anyone who asks for your password is lying. Don't give it to them. And if they say they really need it, don't do business with them."
Of course, it was 1989. But the neckbeard taught me right.
Web 2.0 has proven itself nothing more than a private takeover of the public infrastructure of the net. FB wants to displace everything from email to irc. If people want to commit their information to sharks who want to mnetize their personal information, they get what they deserve.
Anyone familiar with the mechanics of Facebook's rise to prominence should not be surprised at the alleged ethical and legal violations. Zuckerberg et al. hacked and social engineered their way into dozens of college freshman admit lists so they could be the first to get new students online. This is not speculation. The "virality" of early facebook was not viral at all, it was good old fashioned spam to ill-gotten mailing lists.
It took me about 10 minutes to skim through the backstory, but it's pretty sparse on the details and supporting evidence.
"Instead, he decided to access the email accounts of Crimson editors and review their emails. How did he do this? Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend:"
Oh, a friend said Mark said... right.
"Nevertheless, during 2004, Mark Zuckerberg still appeared to be obsessed with ConnectU. Specifically, he appears to have hacked into ConnectU's site and made changes to multiple user profiles, including Cameron Winklevoss's."
"At one point, Mark appears to have exploited a flaw in ConnectU's account verification process to create a fake Cameron Winklevoss account with a fake Harvard.edu email address."
It "appeared" that way? According to whom, and based on what?
Seriously, the whole article is a long string of "it looks like" and "he said she said Mark said" with nothing to back any of it up.
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....
I was basically thinking about services such as Amazon EC2 et al, and the possibility of outsourcing computing power from inside an organization into the cloud, and my observation that such an organization cannot really escape having to trust the administrators of the cloud facility, since there is no way of securing a cloud server's memory against the cloud organization's administrators.
Yes, Lastpass does not fall into this category at all, and seems potentially secure.
Good thing you are not a lawyer, it's from the date it was committed.
The point of such statutes is because after a long time has passed, the defense is less able to form a coherent defense since a lot of the evidence is gone.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Actually, it can also be the case that the statute of limitations applies when the crime was discovered, not necessarily when it was committed. I am told this is especially so if they're trying to convict someone of "habitual criminal". I only know of this because a friend had to file embezzlement charges against an employee who had been stealing from him for longer than the statute of limitations and he was able to get them convicted of the entire string of crimes stretching back several years.
In civil court one only need look at The Knack v. Run DMC where it's been since 1986 but The Knack are able to sue, so far, because they claim they knew nothing of the song "It's Tricky" until recently despite its massive popularity at the time.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
The heads of Google take their job seriously. Zuckerberg is just a douchebag who was at the right place at the right time.
So will he get a mug shot now?
If he does, do you suppose he'll use it for his Facebook profile?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
The staue of limitations kicks end after the crime is completed.
If it is ongoing, then it would kick in when over.
IANAL but I have watched Law and Order. The sound wasn't on but I think I got the gist of it.
Why would he? He's a CEO, he's supposed to act like a cartoon villain.
The world makes a lot more sense when you stop assuming that various businessmen, politicians etc. are trying to further their self-interest in a rational, if ruthless, manner, and instead treat them as villains in a farcical drama movie. That way you don't have to wonder why someone who already has three billions would risk everything to get a fourth, or something to that effect. The implications of that are somewhat... disturbing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Good thing you are not a lawyer, it's from the date it was committed.
The point of such statutes is because after a long time has passed, the defense is less able to form a coherent defense since a lot of the evidence is gone.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but I have a reasonable amount of experience doing legal research:
Actually both parent and grandparent are correct. Generally, in civil cases where the standard is preponderance of the evidence or which was more likely, the statute of limitation is from the discovery of the damage, most of the controlling case law in the US in civil matters was established in the dalkon shield cases against A. H. Robins Company. a three year statute of limitations was held to not protect A. H Robbins 16 years after the faulty product was sold, and 15 years after the initial discovery of injury, but less then three years after the discovery of severe internal damage.
The standards for criminal law are not preponderance of evidence, but beyond a reasonable doubt, and in criminal law, the statute of limitations are a way of saying that there is reasonable doubt by the passage of time, so we will not even try the case because the burden of proof cannot be met. Therefore criminal matters tend to have a statute of limitations that runs from the commission of the crime.
Work bio at MMWD
Of course, otherwise where's the Paris Hilton angle?
I am absolutely shocked that someone would impersonate another human being for personal gain. What has the world come to?