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."

Comments

Re:Unencrypted cookie auths

[Frosty Piss]

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.