Welcome to the modern world...

The problems and challenges we're going to face with all our new toys and hypercommunication capacity are only just begining to surface.  There are going to be many cultural, personal identity/privacy, and public safety/national security issues to come over the next few decades...

 

Georgians uncover Facebook flaw

 A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information.

 

The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little-known security flaw with far-reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn’t appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

“The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook,” said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page this month.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn’t look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page’s owner.

“He’s white — I’m not,” she said with a laugh.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols