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Major Facebook security hole lets you view your friends’ live chats

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Re: Major Facebook security hole lets you view your friends’ live chats

#5
post #3

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."

Can we still be angry at incompetence?

Possibly even more so than at malice. If an organization acts out of malice, you can change its behaviour by educating it about its best interests or moving to disincent its malicious behaviour.

But incompetence, especially systemic incompetence, is extraordinarily difficult to change. Facebook appears to have ADD around user privacy and its interface. Designs come and go, defaults change capriciously, and security seems to be an afterthought.

We've seen this movie before, with MSFT in the role of the bumbling centi-billionaire. Hopefully Facebook will steer a different course.

Re: Major Facebook security hole lets you view your friends’ live chats

#7
post #6

Even though chat is blocked, you can still see pending friends request on anyone's profile. In fact, one can probably use this to add anyone as a friend. Send a friend request, view your profile with their id and accept the request you just sent.

It doesn't let you accept/reject those requests - just shows them (afaik)

Re: Major Facebook security hole lets you view your friends’ live chats

#9
Are we sure the security hole was limited to merely viewing your friends' live chats? Sure, the "review how your profile appears to another person" search box will only give you your friends --- but you can change the "viewas" id manually.

Edit: I see someone in the Techcrunch comments section posted what he claims to be Mark Zuckerberg's pending friends requests - Ctrl+F for "Random Jo - May 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm UTC" ...

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