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A Facebook Sixth Sense

kirszenberg.com

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Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#21

Post by nindalf »

lossolo wrote: post #12
blowski wrote: post #7

Fascinating article, and thanks for taking the time to research it and write up the results. This kind of thing makes me think that Facebook et al will eventually push for a way of having closed source client-side scripting.

Good for us that there is no such thing as closed source client side logic in web applications (without installing extensions/plugins). You can only obfuscate.

That's true to an extent, except a compiled binary is much harder to decompile compared to what the author has done in the article with obfuscated JS. In future, I imagine more websites will use WebAssembly for this reason.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#22

Post by marak830 »

Huh this was a really interesting write up on semi-obscured code. I had never seriously thought about crawling through popular sites code like that, I'm definitely going to have to give it a go!

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#23

Post by kawsper »

vishbar wrote: post #18
chinathrow wrote: post #10

The same thing has been possible with Pidgin for ages - it opened the chat window automatically when a contact started typing.

It was definitely an option for AIM, and I believe it was an optional plugin rather than a default feature. I remember freaking out friends in high school :-)

> I remember freaking out friends in high school :-)

That was the primary feature :) It worked for the MSN/Microsoft Messenger protocol as well.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#25

Post by Freak_NL »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Facebook users are apparently broadcasting the fact that they are typing to their conversation partners, why should you ignore that information? If you don't like that, disable that feature, or complain to Facebook if it is not something you can disable yourself (or don't use Facebook).

It can't hurt to raise some awareness of what you are invisibly broadcasting in terms of data on-line.

(I always liked how this feature could be disabled in Gaim and Pidgin.)

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#27

Post by thomasahle »

Freak_NL wrote: post #25
dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Facebook users are apparently broadcasting the fact that they are typing to their conversation partners, why should you ignore that information? If you don't like that, disable that feature, or complain to Facebook if it is not something you can disable yourself (or don't use Facebook). It can't hurt to raise some awareness of what you are invisibly broadcasting in terms of data on-line. (I always liked how this feat…

I suppose it would be even easier to make a script that blocks facebook from sending this information? Does it already exist?

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#28

Post by thomasahle »

Contrary to popular belief, Ajax is actually one of the best things to have happened for hooking up to Web Apps and scraping. You used to have to walk through the obscure rendered html, now you mostly get to access the raw data in json format.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#29

Post by ifdefdebug »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #5

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Not a fb user, but I partially agree with you here, in that you should already send this information to all your fb friends, so they can learn that their "social expectations" are not backed by what facebook gives away about them to tech-savvy users.
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