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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#61

Post by cliveowen »

jamiequint wrote: post #58
cliveowen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever stop and think that maybe if people were less lazy and started learning English things would actually improve? Information (including "important contributions to furthering computer science") would spread more rapidly, people would have access to an endless stream of news outlets and have a more detailed view of the world. Also, there won't be any need to waste money on translators (do you know how much m…

Wow, what an ignorant comment. There are currently more Mandarin Chinese speaking engineers graduating than English speaking ones and more people worldwide that speak the language as well (both native speakers and overall), yet I don't see everyone in America clamoring to learn Chinese. Of course the world would be more efficient if translation was not necessary, but demanding everyone stop being so "lazy" and learn…

Read my response to xerophyte12932.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#62

Post by ceol »

jamesjguthrie wrote: post #54
yuliyp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarah Goodin is not a fake account, she is one of the first Facebook users (back when it was at Harvard only).

How do you know that the post to her wall wasn't his initial discovery of the bug? Any occurrence of the bug was a breach of the ToS.

Not between two test accounts or two accounts that belong to you (work and personal, which you are allowed to have.)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#63

Post by bloaf »

Its simple, Facebook can't set the precedent that people who exploit bugs in this way get paid. If they did, every Joe who felt that their particular bug wasn't being addressed quite right would think that public exploitation is the faster route to their reward.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#64

Post by cliveowen »

nraynaud wrote: post #52
cliveowen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever stop and think that maybe if people were less lazy and started learning English things would actually improve? Information (including "important contributions to furthering computer science") would spread more rapidly, people would have access to an endless stream of news outlets and have a more detailed view of the world. Also, there won't be any need to waste money on translators (do you know how much m…

you know that the biggest advances in Maths are made in japanese, russian and french, right? You know that english got a status of lingua franca only gradually, meaning that for a long time there was actually no reason whatsoever to learn it. And now the best one, you know that thanks to the US money sent to Israel, Palestine is voluntarily maintained a third world country by its neighbor who impairs any form of educ…

Now, in the present, we live in a world where English is the dominant language (again, having a huge number of speakers it's a whole different thing) so, as a citizen, you have to adapt.

Secondly, at a no point I said anything against this guy, he at least put in the effort and is commendable. My whole point was that thinking about resorting to translators instead of thinking about how to improve the number of English speakers is being narrow-minded. It's like saying: building a dam is hard, let's just keep the floods coming.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#65

Post by Oculus »

iyulaev wrote: post #49
Oculus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that if FB took every single bug report that they got 100% seriously, they'd never get to the real bug reports, but would just constantly be sifting through the spam. You have to make educated guesses on whether or not a report is just useless spam. This report, the way it read, shoots off a lot of spam flags. I understand why he got dismissed so easily and frankly it is his fault. Nobody has enou…

Replying "this is not a bug" is equivalent to saying "I have read and understood your report, and this is not a bug, it is a feature." First off, it's not a dismissal, it's an acknowledgement. Second, since it's not a bug but rather a feature, then how does using the feature violate the ToS? The correct reply might be something like "cannot understand or reproduce, can you explain more clearly?" along with some bug r…

I definitely agree with you on this. The response from the engineer could've been better. Some sort of canned response would have worked.

IMHO, the whole ToS business was a way to give him a slap on the wrist for embarrassing them.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#66

Post by jack-r-abbit »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #47
zobzu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that hes not english native and that communication seems hard for him does not mean that: - he did not do all this in good faith. it seems like he genuinely did. Sure there are TOS. But given his english, do you really think he understood them? Of course not. Good faith is a higher morale value (even thus Americans are pretty much used to "if it passed as law/text, morale values are irrelevant, cuz lawyers+m…

I think the important part too, is when he technically violated the TOS it was only to get their attention because he was otherwise being ignored. I don't see any reason they should not want to pay him.

FWIW, his initial bug report included a link to a post he made on a non-friend's wall. So his first TOS violation was prior to his first attempt to file a bug. The second TOS violation (posting on Zuck's wall) was what got him press time.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#67

Post by Aldo_MX »

cliveowen wrote: post #43
mcphilip wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you and am leaving this comment in hopes that those reading this thread don't get the impression that the entire HN community supports such a despicable outlook. I, for one, am grateful for all of the many important contributions to furthering computer science and its associated industries by non english speaking individuals.

Do you ever stop and think that maybe if people were less lazy and started learning English things would actually improve? Information (including "important contributions to furthering computer science") would spread more rapidly, people would have access to an endless stream of news outlets and have a more detailed view of the world. Also, there won't be any need to waste money on translators (do you know how much m…

I have to assume that you can communicate fluently in a non-Germanic language, and that you already know that you can't change the way you think about concepts in a way that doesn't resemble your native language.

Otherwise: Con esa forma tan cerrada de pensar, por favor absténgase de opinar.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#68

Post by dsl »

wereHamster wrote: post #53
short_circut wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissive and ignored? Did you read what he submitted to them? It made no sense. He vaguely stated that there was a bug and his education. His bug report was nonsensical. I am not even slightly surprised they ignored it. And he violated the TOS before he even ever tried to post to Zuckerberg's wall.

To all hackers: If you speak perfect english, please proceed to submit exploits to the FB security team and collect $5k on your way out. If not, post to blackhat forums and receive $10k. Or use the exploit to manipulate FB stock price (I'm sure posting as Mark would move the stock price significantly, if only for a few minutes. But that's enough to earn a lot more than $5k).

He posted on Mark's wall, not as him.

Also, relative to other places you could be spending your time, FB security issues yield relatively little in the blackhat market because of their highly responsive abuse and security teams.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#69

Post by Oculus »

santosha wrote: post #56
Oculus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that if FB took every single bug report that they got 100% seriously, they'd never get to the real bug reports, but would just constantly be sifting through the spam. You have to make educated guesses on whether or not a report is just useless spam. This report, the way it read, shoots off a lot of spam flags. I understand why he got dismissed so easily and frankly it is his fault. Nobody has enou…

At USENIX this year, Chris Evans gave a talk about how Google does their VRP. Specifically, he mentioned that there weren't many false positive reports at all, way fewer than he expected there would be. In general, most bugs have something to them. Google has a long history of following up on bug reports with little or nothing to go on, because they take their jobs seriously, and aren't antagonistic to community bug…

As I mentioned in the reply above, the engineer's response could've been many times better, but you have to agree the bug submitter gave them practically nothing to work with.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked by an unemployed web developer

#70

Post by [deleted] »

beat wrote: post #44
joshaidan wrote: post #36

I find it interesting the amount of attention Hacker News is getting from this in mainstream media. It makes me wonder, when people unfamiliar to Hacker News read about it in stories like this, do they get the wrong impression and think Hacker News is about the criminal kind of "hacking"?

The mainstream media spent twenty years trying to turn the word "hacker" into some sort of unholy cross between thief, terrorist, child pornographer, and teenager. They'd better be getting the sense that hacker == criminal by now!

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