Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Launches Social Login and HTTPS
dkd903 writes "Facebook has introduced two new features. First is a really innovative way to verify real users rather than using CAPTCHAS. Using the Social Login feature (or Social Authentication as Facebook calls it), users will be shown a few pictures of their friends and then they will be asked to name the person in those photos. They've also launched HTTPS. The company says: 'Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools.'"
News at 11.
I'm able to change the protocol to https for any page, successfully. But all the links on that page point back to http. So... That's pretty limited https support.
Problem: A lot of what people tag as me is to get my attention, not because it IS me. I got locked out of my account for about a week because of this mis-feature, and when I did get back in, I had to spend about three hours removing tags of things like trees, the sun, burgers, and lots of other stuff.... now it works. But the solution fails because it makes an assumption that isn't always true.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
All web sites that allow logins should REQUIRE or at least STRONGLY ENCOURGE HTTPS from unencrypted WiFi hotspots such as those "found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools."
I may trust McStarCoffeeInn not to snoop my traffic but I do NOT trust the guy in the next booth or room much less the guy in the parking lot.
The traveling public needs to pressure these companies - especially those that charge for it like some hotels - to switch to encrypted WiFi.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The "social login" is going to cause issues for people who have no idea what their "friends" look like. Or with friends with other subjects in their pictures.
The photo thing has been around for a long time and it sucks. I travel and have wanted to connect to facebook when in a different country, and it decides I need to prove who I am. So I have to match a certain number of pictures with the right person. The summary makes it sound clever and good, it is anything but.
It's been a few months since last time I did it, so I don't remember exact numbers but I had to get something like 4 out of 5 right. Then they start showing photos, and there is a list of 4 or 5 friend names below. It is up to you to pick the right friend to go with the photo.
What's the biggest problem? Well, you don't get pictures of the persons face as the summary says. What you get are pictures tagged with that persons name. The first one I did was their face, and I thought, "o.k. - no problem.".
The next one was some kid. A relative of one of my friends? A neigbor of one of my friends? Shoot could have even be one of my friends as a kid, I have no idea. All I know is I've got a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who this belongs to and if I'm wrong I've just used up my one wrong answer.
Next photo is an inanimate object. I don't know remember what it was any more. A pie or some food of some kind I think. Which friend is this?! I don't know. Best guess it is something one of my friends ate once. Who does it belong to? Once again, I haven't the slightest, but as you can guess, I wasn't allowed to log in.
A smaller problem is that I am not super close friends with every one of my friends on facebook. My barrier to entry on the friendship front is pretty low. I'm friends with people I knew in jr. high, highschool, worked with once, went to church with them years ago, etc. I know them but am not intimately close with them. Facebook is a good way to keep in touch while maintaining a comfortable distance. But will I be able to identify them in every pic of themselves they've uploaded to facebook? I doubt it. Not to mention the fad a bit back to change your profile pic to a cartoon character. I'll bet dollars to donuts those go into the rotation. Which of your friends was underdog and which was optimus prime? I don't remember.
It's a horrid system. A co-worker of mine on the same trip ran into it too. He mocked me for not knowing my friends well enough and then almost put his laptop through a window when he couldn't log into facebook. He had almost an identical experience, a picture of some 6 or 7 year old kid he didn't know and a bike or something.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This social login is supposed to increase security? What about privacy. It seems like this feature can be leveraged to harvest pics from facebook, not that they weren't already available to the highest bidder anyway. Hopefully they have something in place to prevent harvesting...
As a coincidental bonus of this new CAPTCHA, Facebook has nearly every photo stored in their library face-tagged for them, using the most powerful and accurate computers in existence - us.
I'm curious about how the "Social Authentication" feature will play out, especially for the facebook users eighter view the friendslist as a sort of competition or who play games that reward users who have many friends playing the game and therefore add friends by the truckload without having any real idea of who they are. There's probably a lot of people playing the latest Zynga game or whatever is popular these days, with an extremely large list of "friend" who they don't know and don't want to know, other that they share the same game interest and it's a win-win in relation to that game. If facebook starts asking questions about these 'friends' then I fear many users will fail the social authentication and then what?
More than half my friend list consists of people that I don't really know. Some are gamers who help me with social games that offer benefits to players that have a lot of friends who play the same game. Also, it seems to have become a fad to use weird aliases instead of real names.
The evidence that accounts were being hacked remained anecdotal. Facebook's security team couldn't prove something was wrong in the data. It wasn't until after the new year that the shocking truth emerged: Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords. [...] Sullivan's team rapidly coded a two-step response to the problem. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. [...] The second technical solution they implemented was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the malicious code was running. Like Facebook's version of a "mother's maiden name" question to get access to your old password, it asks you to identify your friends in photos to complete an account login.
insight through the mind
I thought it was just a clever way for us to do work training their facial recognition algorithm ... Maybe a huge conspiracy to create a government identification database!
Mathematician, n.:
Someone who believes imaginary things appear right before your i's.
i cant share my wife's account anymore. i gotta make my own now.
well, i needed to make one for myself just to untag my name from my ugly mug anyways. either way the machine is going to eat me. *splat* i give up. there's no way to avoid them. people i see can take photos of me and label me. i cant undo it without logging in. if i log in, it is still stored.
it's a new world i guess.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
They can hardly sell your personal information if a guy at starbucks can sniff it from you can they?
Stop information piracy! Buy facebook!
Someone had the 'brilliant' idea of everyone replacing their face with cartoon images from their childhood?
They pull that sort of thing now, and most people won't be able to log in...
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130&ref=mf
My congratulations to the Facebook developers. They've made a website that faceblind people like me cannot use -- I didn't think that was possible.
I wonder if I can sue them under the Americans with Disabilities act...
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
While I am skeptical that anyone needs Facebook chat, given that it provides an XMPP interface, couldn't she use Facebook over HTTPS and chat over XMPP?
I've been using HTTPS for Facebook for quite a while (when accessing over wireless, or from work,) and they've slowly been making it less obnoxious. The certificate errors disappeared a few weeks ago, but there is still no IM via HTTPS. And if you are logged out and visit their site via HTTPS, if punts you back to the regular HTTP when you log in, so you have to go manually re-S the connection.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
No. The photos they use are, by definition, tagged already. They already have the information. They are just asking you to confirm it.
They already have "information".
They may not have "good information".
Images with a statistically high "miss rate" can be rated "poor representations" of so-and-so. Images with a statistically low "miss rate" can be rated "good representations" of so-and-so.
As usual with facebook you are feeding them more information than you think.
Just because there's a situation where it doesn't work doesn't make it useless. And I don't know about you, but none of my friends know all of my friends.