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Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#501

Post by dannyw »

discordianfish wrote: post #500
0xmohit wrote: post #418

Facebook is blocking users from posting stories about its security breach Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable press outlets. ... The situation is another exam…

Believing this is the tech equivalent of believing in chemtrails.

I wouldn’t say so. It’s happened too many times for anti Facebook posts, even Google+ back in the day.

Remember, this is a company headed by someone who captured failed login passwords and used them to hack the email accounts of a journalist writing an anti-FB article. Yes, that was a decade ago, but that is a serious, criminal low.

http://www.theamericanmirror.com/flashback-zuckerberg-used-l...

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#502

Post by dang »

carapace wrote: post #374
emodendroket wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical consumption is a dead end. You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably.

You're being an apologist for slavery? Alright then, where do we draw the line? Can I go buy a person? If not, can I invade Sudan?[1] > Ethical consumption is a dead end. Should we give up even thinking about it and just do whatever is most convenient? Will that solve all our problems? You know Amazon treats its employees like disposable shit. If you buy from them anyway you are putting your self-love above the love…

Between accusing others of being apologists for slavery and moral cretins, you've dived into full-out flamewar of the kind that we ban people for on HN. It's unacceptable, regardless of how morally correct you are or feel you are. Flamewars burn what they burn regardless of how righteous the flames, so please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#503

Post by romed »

herpderperator wrote: post #415

Excerpts from the press call transcript [1] by Guy Rosen explaining what lead to this breach being possible: > The first bug was that, when using the View As function to look at your profile as another person would, the video uploader shouldn’t have actually shown up at all. But in a very specific case, on certain types of posts that are encouraging people to post happy birthday greetings, it did show up. > The secon…

That doesn't just seem like a few unlucky coincidences. That seems like a fundamentally unsound design. Why should it even be theoretically possible for a request under the authority of one user to create a token with the authority of another user?

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#504

Post by zepto »

ethbro wrote: post #306
zepto wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical people can take part in an unethical project until they realize what they are doing. The parent poster is calling on them to do just this with regard to Facebook. There is nothing wrong with that call, and it doesn’t impugn your friends unless they ultimately fail to re-evaluate the company.

I think treating Facebook as a singular project is the bigger fallacy. What about those who argued for React to move to a more reasonable license? What about those who pushed for open sourcing code and hardware in the first place? Companies at the 25k+ employee size are complex, often internally-disagreeing enterprises. Code may be pure, but resource allocation (programmer time) is political. Of the recent Facebook n…

By your reasoning it would be a fallacy to call any large project unethical.

I think that is clearly a fallacy.

Nobody is arguing that every individual within Facebook is an unethical person.

The argument is that the overall project is unethical and the ethical people within it should take that possibility seriously.

For more philosophical background on this idea:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#505

Post by dang »

compcoffee wrote: post #290
chronid wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is working at Google, Amazon and probably 90% of the big corps of the world in many sectors - from oil to finance to pharmaceutical to telecommunications and so on. And we can include the government. If you're a subcontrator or sold in body rental (modern IT slavery) you're also in the same position as an employee, so you're enabling their evils. Also, if one of those companies is a client of your company you're a…

> Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. I guess if your entire purpose in life is personal wealth, this makes sense. It also makes sense why you f…

Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please refrain from them in your posts to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#506

Post by eli »

dannyw wrote: post #501
discordianfish wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believing this is the tech equivalent of believing in chemtrails.

I wouldn’t say so. It’s happened too many times for anti Facebook posts, even Google+ back in the day. Remember, this is a company headed by someone who captured failed login passwords and used them to hack the email accounts of a journalist writing an anti-FB article. Yes, that was a decade ago, but that is a serious, criminal low. http://www.theamericanmirror.com/flashback-zuckerberg-used-l...

C'mon. I'm not a big fan of Zuckerberg but "did some unethical and possibly illegal things on the university network" describes a significant portion of the readers of this site.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#507

Post by flgr »

romed wrote: post #503
herpderperator wrote: post #415

Excerpts from the press call transcript [1] by Guy Rosen explaining what lead to this breach being possible: > The first bug was that, when using the View As function to look at your profile as another person would, the video uploader shouldn’t have actually shown up at all. But in a very specific case, on certain types of posts that are encouraging people to post happy birthday greetings, it did show up. > The secon…

That doesn't just seem like a few unlucky coincidences. That seems like a fundamentally unsound design. Why should it even be theoretically possible for a request under the authority of one user to create a token with the authority of another user?

Notably, they previously had issues were "View as" allowed you to view notifications and messages of the user you were viewing as.

If they'd done a proper post mortem and corrected the fundamental issue, and made sure it wouldn't have re-occured, this should not have happened.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#508

Post by underwater »

wfwefwef32 wrote: post #37

Recently 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.…

What you’re talking about isn’t related to having a masters. All engineers are expected to progress beyond junior levels (get to E5) in a reasonable amount of time.

It’s not a great practice in my opinion. But in practice only a small percentage of engineers fail to make the grade.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#509

Post by calc_exe »

romed wrote: post #503
herpderperator wrote: post #415

Excerpts from the press call transcript [1] by Guy Rosen explaining what lead to this breach being possible: > The first bug was that, when using the View As function to look at your profile as another person would, the video uploader shouldn’t have actually shown up at all. But in a very specific case, on certain types of posts that are encouraging people to post happy birthday greetings, it did show up. > The secon…

That doesn't just seem like a few unlucky coincidences. That seems like a fundamentally unsound design. Why should it even be theoretically possible for a request under the authority of one user to create a token with the authority of another user?

Yeah, sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem to me.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#510

Post by hobs »

jkchu wrote: post #443
hobs wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a vast networked trove of everyone's information is doing the opposite of "preserving our democracy from attacks" - its actively enabling it. Minimizing the damage of collecting that information is maybe not directly evil, but helping kick the can down the road to the point where facebook is so deeply networked in our society its unremoveable doesnt seem like a high horse to be riding on.

your line of reasoning makes it sound like it would be simple for everyone in the world to stop using Facebook or some similar social media platform. I see nothing wrong with trying to improve something that is already well ingrained into human society.

Hopefully I didn't make it out to be simple as much as stark. I feel like the option where you get a bunch of money and perks is probably the "simpler" option.
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