

Journalist questioned by police after reporting Facebook security flaw - brandall10
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/05/17/journalist-quizzed-and-ipad-seized-by-police-after-reporting-facebook-privacy-bug/

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va_coder
When I see security vulnerabilities I rarely get involved because the party
with the vulnerability will become suspicious of you. It's not worth the
hassle.

~~~
delinka
It's this kind of reaction that makes our technological toys less secure. It's
this kind of reaction that the Ominous Large Corporation _wants_ us to have.

The standard belief is as follows: being proactive about privacy and security
costs money, and if we don't _have_ to spend money we won't. Most people, the
ones we're crowdsourcing or selling to advertisers, don't understand and won't
care who actually screwed up - we'll blame the hackers and that will limit
negative perceptions.

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nbpoole
Why do people assume that this is some kind of giant Facebook conspiracy? From
the article:

" _According to Grubb, security expert Christian Heinrich demonstrated in
front of the delegates how he had managed to acquire privacy-protected photos
of the wife of fellow conference speaker Chris Gatford, who is Director at
HackLabs._ "

Isn't it more likely that the police are investigating charges against
Heinrich in relation to the presentation?

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dkarl
Perhaps it's a misunderstanding of Australian police investigations, but I
wouldn't expect them to arrest a witness. If Grubb was really arrested, that
suggests (to this American who doesn't know anything about Aussie police) that
someone accused him of a crime. Facebook has a motive; they want journalists
to think twice before reporting on Facebook privacy flaws. Nobody else seems
to have a motive. Not that there's any point in jumping to conclusions at this
point -- surely there will be more information available soon.

~~~
hugh3
The police say he wasn't arrested.

He claimed in a tweet that he was, but I kinda doubt it -- for starters he
wasn't arrested _for_ anything, and secondly if you _are_ under arrest are you
allowed to keep your phone and tweet all about it?

So, was he being over-dramatic, or did he genuinely believe he's under arrest?
(Oh, and a handy hint: if the police ever ask you to go with them then make
sure you ask 'em whether you're under arrest or not.)

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paulnelligan
I'd really like to know what they mean here by 'external servers' ... I really
thought that FB has acres of it's own servers, no ?

~~~
corin_
Presumably CDN servers whose job is just to serve up the content, not to deal
with who is logged in or who has access to view which content?

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jsavimbi
Either Facebook has big pull in Oz or the Queensland police are quite
proactive. Either way, they rank 22nd on freedom of the press, not exactly a
Scandinavian country.

