Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again. Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to tak…
Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
261–270 of 635 posts
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#262Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again. Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to tak…
Can you go into your argument for that?
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very easy for me to believe. "View As" is an authorization and authentication sensitive, limited user impersonation feature. Video uploading interacts with, and complicates, authorization in an application with fine grained privacy and permission models. It's intuitively straightforward that modifying code for uploading videos could (read: not should) have authorization and authentication ramifications. One of t…
> It's intuitively straightforward that modifying code for uploading videos could (read: not should) have authorization and authentication ramifications. I get this part. But why would it affect only videos and not other entities (photos, status etc.)? I would think creating (or uploading) any of the entities have the same authorization and authentication ramifications. What could be different for videos? Unless the…
The problem is often that there are multiple sources of truth for who the user is. And if you have an impersonation feature, you by definition have two sources of truth: who the user actually is, and who the user is impersonating. It would just be a matter of a single mistake of using the wrong one.
Considering that "view as" requires your page view to render every control as the impersonated user but only when it comes to your profile, but renders all controls outside of your profile as the original user, I could see any engineering team dealing with some very carefully drawn and potentially confusing boundary cases.
Edit: just to elaborate, it's not just obvious impersonation contexts where this gets interesting. For example, linking your Humble Bundle account to your Steam account, or on Netflix which user you are vs. which email address is being billed. Many apps have a function to share some document using a one-time expiring token. If you're also logged in, then do you read permissions from the shared token or from your account? If you mix them, do you make sure anything that writes to this shared view can't touch your account itself on accident? We don't think about it much but I think you can see how these subtle distinctions are important when you are thinking about access control, and that makes it a breeding ground for subtle mistakes.
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#264Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again. Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to tak…
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok so React, GraphQL, and good pay. Definitely not short-sighted. You don't think those technologies could have been developed by people at ethical companies, or even by the same people at ethical companies?
So why haven't they been developed by the time Facebook came around?
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#266The security update was written by.. a VP of product management[1]. I would have thought they'd have a bigger bench for their security team. [1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/1/17640852/facebook-cso-alex...
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok so React, GraphQL, and good pay. Definitely not short-sighted. You don't think those technologies could have been developed by people at ethical companies, or even by the same people at ethical companies?
So why haven't they been developed by the time Facebook came around?
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure I follow this argument, one could say the Earth itself is only critical infrastructure because it "exists". So therefore if we destroy the Earth, it wasn't actually "critical" infrastructure, even though any associated infrastructure on the Earth went along with it. Maybe the distinction needs a little more fleshing out.
If you destroy the Earth, we're all dead. If you destroy Facebook, Google+ gets some more users.
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#269Recently talked to 2 friends working for fb. According to them, the culture there is very toxic. For a master's degree, once get in, you need to get promoted in 22 months (I might misremember the actual number.) or you will have to leave. Debugging is never counted as a real work, so for quick promotion, nobody wants to solve bugs unless a bug becomes too obvious. And they also complained about no work-life balance.…
Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
#270Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again. Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to tak…
I've got several infosec friends at Facebook right now, all new hires, trying to preserve our democracy from attacks. I don't consider them morally bankrupt at all.
Hahaha, thanks, that was a good one.