Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post To Walls
angry tapir writes "A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages last week. Facebook confirmed the bug Friday, after notifying affected users of the issue. Most of the messages promised 'Free iPhones,' a common spam message on Facebook these days. Facebook says that the spammer hit thousands of profiles before the company removed the spammy photos and notified affected users. No accounts were compromised as a result of the bug."
Facebook is cancer on the internet that is eating away creativity and innovation.
Please visit my fake site for more information!
And we talked about Friendster (Remember Them?), MySpace (Remember Them), and Facebook. I say they should have sold that site last year. Now with many people being aware of location awarness etc..., my buddies have decided to delete their accounts. I admit I dabbled in it for a week, it was a complete waste of time. Call me old fashioned I still like using the phone and be in person when I talk to my friends.
And I keep saying it over and over again, If I made my thoughts public or let everyone know who my friends are I would be in a lot of trouble. Fuck that!
Free iPhones!!!
And to think that I thought that all of those wall postings were because of a sudden surge in my popularity...
Well, at least I'm going to get a free iPhone out of it, or so I've heard.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Facebook obviously don't want Apple's products advertised on their site! Ping threw down the gauntlet, Facebook accepted the challenge and fought back with a mighty PR blow. Take that, Jobs.
the idiots that spend hours each day on the site deserve everything they get.
I'd like to consider that the insecurity settings I've applied to my account actually mean something. If an unauthorised post ends up on my wall I would consider that my account was compromised, particularly if the post was visible to others.
.. 4chan didnt get this first - imagine the chaos they would cause (if you've seen any of the screen captures of the dox pulled on porn stars, middle aged masturbating men on chatroulette and so on - just imagine the evidence posted on a person's wall and then the amount of bans handed out to those with pornographic content)
With the non-stop assault on facebook by every hacker on the planet I have to ask one simple question.
Why do people put every single tidbit of info possible into the info section of their profile?
It's going to get grabbed at some point. No matter how careful you are. Either Facebook is going to change the privacy controls again, opening up another flood gate or a hack is going to allow total access to data.
I regrettably accept the fact that social networking is here to stay. No matter how satanic some of you think it is, it is now a fixture in our lives. But as in the real world I at least use some degree of caution while I use it. Do I have perfect protection. Of course not. No one does. You can get mugged in a police station these days. So no protection is perfect. But good lord some people are just begging to get electronically raped.
For example real time geo updates to your current location + putting in your address into the info tab and having no privacy settings.
This parent post is just a simple example of a breach.
The other day I accidentally went to facebok.com. It was pretty obviously a typo squat, but what was more alarming was that the fake survey they provided had some correct information filled out (age, sex, etc..) Try it with and without cookies and it seems that that info is stored either locally or via the advertiser information sharing.
How do spammers sleep at night? Do they realize how big of a douche they look like?
I have a computing habit about equal to that of some couch potatoes, and that's one thing I do point out: at least the computer is/can be active instead of passive, at least more often than the TV is active-thinking
For instance, I tend to like strategy games.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Back in the 90s we got my mother-in-law a computer and an AOL account. It was around the time she retired, she wasn't very active physically and didn't get out much except to get groceries. Once she figured out that the celebrity gossip news was coming from the outside world, not inside the box (guess we should have left the modem sound on :-), and that she could talk to other people, she started to be much more social, which she'd missed since she no longer ran into people in real life, and made some good friends that way.
I got on MySpace so I could see my nephews' heavy metal band. They were actually pretty good for teenagers in a garage, and one of them's a serious musician. MySpace was way too garish to actually spend any time on, of course...
I'd done the Orkut thing, which was fun for six months but that's about it, so I had no interest in getting onto Facebook, but my sister dragged me onto it as a way of keeping track of various relatives, so I can see what her kids are up to and where the various cousins are, as well as comments from various friends. It's not something I spend much time on, but it can be useful for staying connected.
And I really hate that Facebook is trying to stay relevant by making itself the login system for anything online that'll take it. I'm sorry, my ranting on political discussion websites doesn't need to be connected to my family or the LA Times or GMail/Yahoo/Flickr/YouTube. And it was kind of creepy that Facebook suggested "You may already know ____ - want to send her a Friend invitation?" - Yes, I know her, she's a cousin, and she died last week, so just because lots of other people I know were writing on her wall doesn't mean that's a good algorithm for building more connections...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Facebook is set to show your birthday by default, and show who your friends are. My mom's never going to be on Facebook, so nobody's going to get her maiden name that way, and my birthday's set to "January 1, Random Year", so it's not showing the quasi-passwords to half the information in the world, but arrgh.
What's worse is Ancestry.com, where if you're using it to share genealogy research, it typically *is* going to show your birthday and mother's maiden name... On the other hand, they're not trying to become the shared login system for everything in the world.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I got email from my friend that I had free iPad spam on my Facebook. Arrrgh. Went and deleted it, dropped notes to the couple of friends who had commented that my account had probably been hacked, changed my password (which had been too short, back when I wasn't expecting Facebook to have any real information in it.) I tried to play with the pictures, but if I understand FB's tools correctly (I don't use them much), I didn't have permissions to change the iPad picture they'd put on my Wall Album into a can of Spam, and it was harder to delete than it should have been.
Glad to hear they were doing something other than password hacking here, but it's still an example of why I don't want my Facebook login used as the login for everything else on the Internet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, the information's out there - but it's not in a conveniently accessible indexed format that anybody can get to without problems. (Of course, if you want official copies, it's become worse since the Patriot Act - try getting a driver's license reissued if you don't have an official copy of your birth certificate, and try getting an official copy of your birth certificate if you can't show your driver's license...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks