4 ms·

I don't see how the fact that he's a Mozilla blogger is relevant. The file contains "just" full name, e-mail and URL. Thieves got the information thanks to the

I don't see how the fact that he's a Mozilla blogger is relevant. The file contains "just" full name, e-mail and URL. Thieves got the information thanks to their Facebook apps (no idea of its name), it could happen with any third-party app.

jcromartie 14y ago
I'd imagine you could scrape a million people's publicly available info, too.
- gailees 14y ago
  Exactly what I'm saying....most of these people probably could care less whether their info is public or not. Many people talk about caring about their security in an almost idealistic view; few actually care in application.
- sneak 14y ago
  Have you ever tried scraping Facebook?
  - Achshar 14y ago
    What should I expect?
    - Permit 14y ago
      They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed as text, but as images. A person would be unlikely to notice as the pages looked identical, but dynamic changes like that make it harder to scrape some things. Introducing even rudimentary OCR requirements is enough to turn away a lot of programmers. I'm not saying it's not possible to pull off. But Facebook has set it up so any money you might make this way will likely not be worth the development time required.
      - fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
        Soon we'll have very clever, slow going, open source Facebook scrapers, created for free just because we love a challenge.
        Evbn 14y ago
        You could friend people, get to know them, get their email, go to a party to meet their friends, friend them.... and eventually scrape the whole network, if you had a team working in parallel.
      - mkjones 14y ago
        Glad you found our anti-scraping stuff to be neat! I work on the team that builds a lot of that technology at Facebook. Any interest in interning here sometime and helping us improve our systems even more?
        Permit 14y ago
        You guys do a really great job. To be perfectly honest, I've kind of fallen out of love with web development in the last year and have taken more of an interest in algorithmic trading. I appreciate the interest, though. :)
hk_kh 14y ago
Maybe it is a PR strategy to boost Persona, hence Mozilla was put on the title.
shardling 14y ago
It gives context?
- bashzor 14y ago
  It associates Mozilla too, unfairly imho.

jcromartie 14y ago

I'd imagine you could scrape a million people's publicly available info, too.

gailees 14y ago
Exactly what I'm saying....most of these people probably could care less whether their info is public or not. Many people talk about caring about their security in an almost idealistic view; few actually care in application.
sneak 14y ago
Have you ever tried scraping Facebook?
- Achshar 14y ago
  What should I expect?
  - Permit 14y ago
    They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed as text, but as images. A person would be unlikely to notice as the pages looked identical, but dynamic changes like that make it harder to scrape some things. Introducing even rudimentary OCR requirements is enough to turn away a lot of programmers. I'm not saying it's not possible to pull off. But Facebook has set it up so any money you might make this way will likely not be worth the development time required.
    - fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
      Soon we'll have very clever, slow going, open source Facebook scrapers, created for free just because we love a challenge.
      - Evbn 14y ago
        You could friend people, get to know them, get their email, go to a party to meet their friends, friend them.... and eventually scrape the whole network, if you had a team working in parallel.
    - mkjones 14y ago
      Glad you found our anti-scraping stuff to be neat! I work on the team that builds a lot of that technology at Facebook. Any interest in interning here sometime and helping us improve our systems even more?
      - Permit 14y ago
        You guys do a really great job. To be perfectly honest, I've kind of fallen out of love with web development in the last year and have taken more of an interest in algorithmic trading. I appreciate the interest, though. :)

hk_kh 14y ago

Maybe it is a PR strategy to boost Persona, hence Mozilla was put on the title.

shardling 14y ago

It gives context?

bashzor 14y ago
It associates Mozilla too, unfairly imho.