Earlier this week, security researcher Khalil Shreateh discovered a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend.
While he was able to prove to Facebook that his bug was legit (despite an initial response that it wasn’t a bug at all), Facebook wasn’t too happy with the way he did it: by using the bug to post on Zuckerberg’s otherwise friends-only wall.
So here are 20 photos of our hike this weekend. Here am I, standing halfway up a hill. And here am I standing halfway down a hill.
I am sure that your Facebook news feed -- should you still bother having one -- is filled with people who believe that every visual evidence of their everyday lives is fascinating visual evidence. Whereas, in fact, it's more turgid than a slime martini.
Facebook turned on a key security feature by default on Wednesday that scrambles data sent by users to the company's servers, following similar moves in recent years by Web services such as Google and Twitter.
Two years ago, the social networking site gave users the option of using TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption, indicated by "https" in the URL bar. TLS is the successor to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), a system that uses public key cryptography to ensure greater privacy between two parties.
Facebook is reaching out to emerging markets where it hasn't made much of an imprint -- and it's working.
The world's largest social network announced on Sunday that it has more than 100 million monthly users for its Facebook For Every Phone, a streamlined app for non-smartphones. The app was designed to work on more than 3,000 feature phones, which are low-end cell phones that don't have the compute power of smartphones.
Facebook is acquiring the assets of Monoidics, a U.K.-based software startup, including its bug-hunting technical team.
The two companies announced the acquisition, which should boost Facebook's mobile efforts, in separate blog posts on Thursday.
In an interview with the Guardian, Losse said that when she joined Facebook in 2005, customer support staff were each handed a “master password,” which allowed them to log in as any Facebook user and access all their messages and data.
She said that staff needed to have access to accounts in order to manage and repair user issues, claiming that it was common practice at the time for early-stage startups to give their staff access to customers’ personal information.
How safe is your online social network? Not very, as it turns out. Your friends may not even be human, but rather bots siphoning off your data and influencing your decisions with convincing yet programmed points of view.
A team of computer researchers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia has found that hordes of social bots could not only spell disaster for large online destinations like Facebook and Twitter but also threaten the very fabric of the Web and even have implications for our broader economy and society.
Norton has pinged Facebook for slurping Android users' phone numbers without their consent. The findings, posted here, were announced along with a new version of the company's Android security app.
Norton, which once famously blocked Facebook as a phishing site, says the updated Mobile Insight flagged Facebook for Android as leaking the device phone numbers, affecting a “significant portion” of the hundreds of millions of people who have downloaded the app from Google Play.
A bug on Facebook leaked email addresses and phone numbers provided by some 6 million people on the site to certain other users, the company revealed Friday.
What sparked the problem is a bit complicated. The bug caused some of the information that the social network stores to make friend recommendations to be inadvertently stored in association with people's contact information as part of their Facebook account, the company said Friday on its website.
With more than a billion monthly active users, it's easy to imagine that most of the data travelling over Facebook's networks is delivering photos, status updates and "likes" to its end users, but that's far from the case.
The social network moves about 1,000 times as much data between the servers inside its data centers as it does from its servers out to end users, company executives said Wednesday. They talked about the challenges that this creates for Facebook and the network technologies it's developing to overcome them.
