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Facebook Apologizes For Bug That Unblocked 800,000 People (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook disclosed a new "bug" on Monday that temporarily let some users who'd been blocked on the service send messages to the people who had blocked them. The bug also let some previously-blocked users view posts that were shared "to a wider audience," such as publicly or with friends of friends, Facebook said. Facebook's privacy boss Erin Egan apologized for the error, writing in a blog that the company is reaching out to "over 800,000" users about the screw-up. The "blocking bug" was active between May 29 and June 5, for eight days, though the company now says Messenger should be acting normally. According to Egan's post: "[the bug] did not reinstate any friend connections that had been severed; 83% of people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked; and Someone who was unblocked might have been able to contact people on Messenger who had blocked them."
They are not sorry for doing this
They are sorry that they got caught.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Would using a modern programming language like Rust have prevented this bug from happening?
Possibly, but unlikely. Facebook uses a hodgepodge of mostly PHP and JavaScript, but other languages as well. But this was most likely a design or algorithm flaw rather than an error at the language level.
Their real problem is a lack of testing. A company of Facebook's scale should have a large suite of unit tests, regression tests, functionality tests, and usability tests, that are automatically run both pre- and post-deployment. They should have a rack of VPSes continuously testing and probing. There is no excuse for something like this going 8 days before detection.
In general I'd agree, but there are people out there who have nothing better to do with their lives and some tickle in their brain or bug up their ass that leads them to devote as much of their time as possible to wasting your time or making you miserable. Here's but one example of countless many.
If you're blocking someone just because they disagree with you or aren't validating your belief structure, I'd say that kind of makes you a bit of a dink. If someone's just endlessly spamming you, why devote your attention to any of it?
Clearly, you don't know what it's like to have someone spam/harass you online with insults and threats because you had the audacity to determine you didn't want to be in a relationship with them anymore. I witnessed it happen firsthand to a close friend of mine, They had to block their ex online, change their cell phone number and file a restraining order.