

Note on How Many Facebook Users Go About Logging into their Accounts - mgorsuch
http://www.marco.org/383925895

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jrockway
Brilliant. What's nice is that you can actually log into Facebook "on their
site", because comments are accepted via Facebook Connect.

I'm still having trouble believing this:

    
    
       1) Type "facebook login" into the browser bar.
       2) Get Google results page, with a news story called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" at the top.
       3) Click that link
       4) Observe a red page that says "Read Write Web" at the top, taking up nearly half the screen.
       5) See a facebook logo and a facebook connect login prompt.
       6) Log in to comment, and whine about how "I am going to delete my account if I ever figure out how to log in"
       7) ???
    

I just don't get how so many people could make so many errors. If you know
English well enough to comment, you probably know how to read the article, and
the links, and the message on the Facebook Connect page.

I am having such trouble comprehending this that I think it's fake. But I'm
probably wrong :(

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simonw
Users don't read. They're not in "comprehending" mode - they're in "find the
damned blue button and log in so I can get on with what I really wanted to do"
mode.

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jrockway
I can sort of understand this; sometimes I press the wrong button on the
elevator at home (thinking I'm at work), and I get off on the wrong floor. I
am confused for a second, but I eventually realize that I am not at the right
place. I definitely don't start ranting about how I can't believe they
renumbered my apartment, repainted the hallway, and changed my lock. I just
get back into the elevator and go to the correct floor; perhaps slightly more
aware of what that task entails than I was when I first pressed the button.

Why is the Internet any different?

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mattdw
I really don't know how to feel about this. As much as I want to say "get a
brain" to these people… a problem this widespread really can't be considered
an individual problem.

This is, I guess, representative of the problems the iPad is aimed at, but I'd
really rather there was a better solution.

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dasil003
It's just a matter of the numbers involved. With hundreds of millions of users
on Facebook it's inevitable that some of them are going to be either complete
internet beginners or straight-up idiots.

Also, once you get a few dozen of those messages, the trolls come out and
pretty soon you can't tell who is confused and who's just piling on for fun:

 _What is rong heer. I wnted to get my bebo. But my bebo wos stolen. I just
wnt my bebo back. I dunt want your crappy site wheres my bebo you will get sud
for million dollas $$$$ for bebonets stealing_

Well said, MrFerret. Well said.

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pmjordan
I guess this explains why even the most obvious of phishing sites work.

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_delirium
This is one reason I like the behavior of Chrome's URL bar. It sometimes gets
it wrong, but I think it frequently guesses correctly when I start typing
something whether I want to: 1) visit a site I've recently/frequently visited;
or 2) search for that term. If you just start typing "facebook" in the URL bar
and hit enter you'll end up at facebook.com instead of performing a search for
it.

I must confess that I often use something like this myself, though, despite
being a tech person. I can never remember the stupid URL for my university's
obscurely-located courseware system, for example, so I usually just Google for
_universityname coursewarename_ and click on the first result. I guess I could
bookmark it, but this method works fine.

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simonw
What really depresses me about this kind of thing is how at-risk these people
are of online fraud. The internet means everyone is just one hop away from a
criminal, and mass phishing attacks are lucrative enough that there will
always be attempts at them.

Unfortunately, if you want to stay safe online you need to understand an
incredibly dense stack of technologies - you need to know what a browser is,
how URLs and domains are formatted (so you know the difference between
facebook.com and facebookcom.com), what an actual website is, how easy it is
for someone to create a fake looking login page, how to judge if something is
safe to enter your credit card in to...

I make my living on the web and I want to continue to do so. I need people to
use it for e-commerce and to trust their private information to it. But I'm
horribly aware that for anyone who isn't knowledgeable about how it all works,
I'm basically encouraging them to join an unsafe environment which is almost
certain to rip them off.

Stuff like the iPad is a step forward, but it doesn't help address the core
problem - it will be exactly as easy to fall for basic internet cons on the
iPad as a regular desktop machine.

I'm pretty much stumped.

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kaddar
Wow, this is dangerous, given how dumb these people are, a less nice blog
could be stealing passwords.

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imajes
why bother? the password is just 1Password or any of the other twenty common
passwords.

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mixmax
Because the password to their homebanking account is the same.

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imajes
Yeah, but you typically need other user data to validate their banking.
Obviously it's good that people aren't grabbing the data, but lets be honest
here: there is still a class of people who don't really know how to protect
themselves online etc. Therefore to capture this data is not that hard, you
just need to be persistent - stalking their rubbish, having key info etc.

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NathanKP
Incredible! I don't understand how so many people could be so clueless. Also,
I wonder why Facebook.com isn't the first result for "facebook login".

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jmaygarden
It's not first because Google places recent news stories before the general
web search results.

