Yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had his fan page hacked. The virtual intruders posted the message you see at right, which reads,

Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup201

The message was removed fairly quickly (by taking down the page), but not before it received some 1800 “likes” from Zuckerberg fans. Facebook still hasn’t commented on the incident.

I do want to remind people not to panic. As much as it looks like Facebook is insecure, this was a targeted attack against a high-profile page. It’s pretty unlikely someone would be hacking your personal Facebook page just to find out where you went to highschool.

Via: TechCrunch

This isn’t quite as bad as it seems, but it does give you a sense of what’s possible with all of the data on Facebook. A hacker named Ron Bowes from Skull Security wrote a crawler to compile data from all the publicly available pages on Facebook. Publicly available – that’s important.

It’s also important, though, that such a crawler could be written to grab that kind of data. Though you could just as easily search for these people and get their info, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that a bot could be written to compile the same. Facebook security remains a shifting target – for most people, there’s not a lot on Facebook they don’t want people to see. As Facebook continues to grow and expand its profitable operations, there could potentially be more and more truly personal data involved. In fact, that’s how Zuckerberg would prefer things. That’s why this is important.

I’ve been thinking about kicking Facebook for a while, and every time I get a story like this, even as unalarming and completely benign as this story is, it points to the ongoing lack of attention and concern it seems Facebook gives to user data.

I saw this post at TechCrunch and just had to pass it along. I often wonder where people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg get their start. Were they just born to be badass coders or was their some kind of natural progression toward their newfound demigod status. It turns out the second is true, for Zuckerberg at least.

A TechCrunch reader who was also one of Zuckerberg’s classmates at Exeter offered up a site that Mark had written back in 2001 when he was just 16 years old. It’s…terrible. Awful. Even in 2001 it would have been way behind its time.

Check out the full post over on TechCrunch.

Facebook rolled out a new feature yesterday that just might restore my faith in the service. I’ve long hated Facebook, and that hatred only grew as the site became more “feature-rich,” that is to say a much bigger pain in my ass. Luckily, I finally have some respite from all the requests for Mafia and Texas Hold ‘Em: Facebook Lite.

Originally intended for use in countries where broadband is sporadic or even nonexistent, Facebook Lite offers a slimmed down version of the social service, removing all the extra applications and goodies in favor of a much more utilitarian user interface. You get the bare bones, nothing more. I love it.

Facebook had this to say:

We decided to roll out Facebook Lite in the U.S. to give users a simple, expedient alternative to facebook.com, and hope that it will fill this need. While the majority of our user base is outside the United States, we’re always working to enhance the new user experience even in markets where facebook.com is easily accessible. We have also found that people who are new to Facebook tend to be most interested in a simpler experience, focus on establishing their network of friends and communicating with them by writing on their walls, sending messages, and looking at pictures. We have introduced the Lite site with these new users in mind.

I might actually log in more than my typical twice a month. You can check out the new service at lite.facebook.com.

Source: TechCrunch