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Is Algeria Deleting Facebook Accounts?
belmolis writes "Algeria is reported to be shutting down ISPs and deleting Facebook accounts in an effort to prevent anti-government protests from escalating as they did in Egypt. Is it likely that they are deleting FB accounts? Unless Facebook is cooperating, this would either require hacking FB to obtain administrator privileges or cracking the password of each account they wish to delete."
That cookie is renegotiated after each https login, and it is specific to one session. You can't clone it from another station.
Even if you do manage to intercept it, Man in The Middle attacks are notoriously hard to execute, (you have to actually BE in the middle) especially for a bunch of thugs in jack boots.
Still, you can just look at press photos to see that the Algerian uprising will fail.
In a Muslim country, you can simply count the number of women in the photos. If its not at least 10 percent, the police will use all force necessary, and will ultimately crush the protest.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The problem is that you may send your username and password over HTTPS, each page after that you send your auth cookie over plain ol' unencrypted HTTP
No.
This is *NOT* the problem at all.
The problem is that ridiculously entrenched tin-pot dictators continue to believe that they can control to populous like they did in the pre-Internet days when all you had to do was shut down a few newspapers and "disappear" their enemies.
Sure, there's obviously a technical process going on, but the root of the problem has nothing at all to do with computers or networks, it has to do with a fundamental change in the dynamics of how populations are controlled by despots.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Some of FB's servers went down. Some paranoid Algerian guy, who may or may not have good reason to be paranoid, noticed this, and assumed that it was targeted at him personally. And a rumor got started.
Somehow I suspect that controlling the ISPs makes a man in the middle exploit a tiny bit easier.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
When they shut the Internet off here in Egypt it only made people more pissed. Nothing to do inside then you go outside and join everyone else. If you work from home then you're even more pissed off.