Dumbfounded: Smart phones breach Facebook security
This is beyond cool. Who cares if you can watch Sunday football through an AT&T coverage map, when what little network they've got will let you seamlessly login to someone else's Facebook account via your smartphone?
"Fortunately, the vulnerability would be of limited use to a hacker interested in pulling off widespread mayhem because the hole would let him access only one account at a time."
I beg to differ. I think the amount of mayhem a creative miscreant could pull off would vary greatly depending on whose account they accessed, not how many. C'mon, people, let's start thinking about quality vs. quantity here. Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail hack pales into insignificance. Zuckerberg's entire personal photo album plastered on Gawker suddenly seems boring. To heck with being ->insert your dream/nightmare here<- for a day - how about an hour? Or even five minutes? Oh, the possibilities!
Four questions immediately spring to my mind:
Is this another Facebook (non)privacy feature giving users exactly what they want?
How soon will Google work this into the Nexus?
Is there an iPhone app for this?
Am I gonna burn for all eternity because my imagination is in overdrive and I've got a serious case of the giggles...?
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People need to be just as careful on FB as they do anywhere else on the web. Problem being? Most idiot AOLers are now on FB and being just as stupid there as they ever were on AOL.
ReplyDeleteYou know, it's been 15 years since the Unlimited Access on AOL thing went into being, which proved that even people who cannot read a simple direction or keep themselves from doing that they've been told time and again not to do can get online and be just as vulnerable in the ether as they are in the material.
But, at least we've successfully identified the people not worthy to pass on their genetics.
When you think about it, 15 years isn't that long in terms of a technological lifespan; the "consumer-grade" intarweb is in its infancy yet. On top of that, the world wide web as we know it is still a largely unexplored frontier for the casual user - but perhaps the bigger danger is that it is still largely *unexplained* for the casual user. There are many deceptively simple and friendly looking fronts out there. Who'd guess those cute dancing bunnies will download a heckuva lot more than the latest Smiley Collection to your computer when you click 'em??
ReplyDeleteThen again, true dat explanations (and warnings) often go unheeded. I mean, do people REALLY need to be warned not to use their hair dryer in the shower - and do some people go ahead and try it anyway...?
(yeah, yeah, I know, it was a rhetorical question)