My Facebook Login Lockout Ordeal and How I Prevailed | Hacker News Reader

My Facebook Login Lockout Ordeal and How I Prevailed

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18 pointsbasugasubaku16 comments

I think one of Facebook's biggest problems right now is that for most people it's still a place where all your friends are lumped together, whether it's your mother or your college roommate.

I think they have lists for segmenting friends but unless they can make Facebook grouping friends the core of their product, they're going to get the friend overload and intermixing of friends problem for the majority of its users.

Facebook succeeded because it was all about your college friends at first, and only people you actually knew. Linkedin's success is proof that we don't want to mix all our acquaintances into one identity site. If they can't make it dead simple to segment our Facebook usage based on our friend circles, then there's going to be some big problems ahead.

I agree with you, except I would think I would be the biggest problem with facebook. Most people act differently when they are with their families, places of work, etc than they do with their friends.

Why on earth facebook hasn't separated itself into groups jet I don't know, but here is hoping the fridge will get there.

Even more problematic is the fact that everyone of your "friends" can see all your other "friends". This leads to silly things like your mother befriending one of your work contacts because "SoAndSo became friends with SomeoneElse" pops up on your status feed.

There was a recent quote from Zuckerberg to the effect of: "We know this but people don't want to create lists."

True. But I think there's too much emphasis on that last "s" in "lists".

I really just want two lists. One list of acquaintances, work colleagues, people I randomly met, and friends of old.

The other list is my "in" list. Those are people (who overlap with some of the above) that I trust and that I'm OK sharing personal information with.

But- just looking at a "friend"'s FB profile shouldn't allow me to know that's what I'm looking at. This eases the social tension that could result from someone not being on your "in" list.

The "in" list, if integrated, would be easy to maintain and create(FB could probably get it 75% right without me doing a thing).

Even with 1000+ friends and having had Facebook for 6 years now, I don't need/want twenty lists with five adjustable settings, etc. Just those that can see those drunken tutu pictures and those that can't.

I actually think I'd be ok in this situation (and I have real difficulty recognizing faces) largely because my "friends" list is pretty damn short. I take the "friend" part pretty seriously - if they renamed it acquaintances, or had built in separate lists for friends/acquaintances, I'd probably have a longer list. Regardless, having Facebook lock me out on my holiday would be a good thing.

It does sound like this whole thing was poorly thought through. You can't encourage people to befriend everybody they every meet - and then ask them to know what they all look like.

I generally friend only people I'm, you know, friends with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think the site is useful for actual personal communication -- which is more or less the only thing I find Facebook to be useful for.

I find those friend recommendations to be just that: recommendations. I likely know them through someone or they're in my local network: have I met them? Do I want to be friends with them? Or am I just shamelessly network-marketing myself here?

I'd love to see this on every login, even just for a day. The fallout would be hilarious.

You're not using FB for professional networking, are you?

If you're a professional you need to be visible. At the same time, you may not want random folks unknown to you to be seeing all your personal details, so you may lock those down so that only professional contacts -- "friends" -- can see them.

That's how you end up with (checks) 893 friends (like me). It's a business tool, not a reflection of your personal life.

(And that's before we get onto the jokers who select some random cartoon character as a userpic, but that's just another failure mode for FB's broken attempt to reinvent shared secret authentication.)

  You're not using FB for professional networking, are you?

No, there is Linkedin for that.

That's exactly where I make that distinction.

Then again, I came through college just as Facebook started picking up steam (my freshman year was in '05 when the number of college networks expanded from a couple dozen to practically everywhere). It's been, by original use (and force of habit), solely a personal networking site in my eyes.

Things may have been different for me if I didn't join until after the "universities only" days, but then again, LinkedIn and Twitter had already gained plenty of traction in the "professional networking" arena by then -- and that's where I do most of my professional outreach (in terms of social networking sites).

Linkedin doesn't actually work (or do anything useful) for folks in my profession. Caveat: if you don't have a fan page on Facebook, you're probably not in my profession.

I concede that Facebook fan pages are a whole other animal altogether. In that case (in terms of having an account to manage a fan page as a professional face, so to speak), then performing user authentication based on knowledge of "friends" (account connections) makes no sense whatsoever.

All joking and discourse regarding "friends" aside, I think it's fair to have multi-factor authentication when it appears that an account has been breached. But yes, they could have implemented this differently. (See Gmail's "last account activity" alerts, which notify you regarding a breach once you log in from a recognized IP address but do not prevent access to your account: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&... )

I suppose I'm one of those odd, longtime users that wishes Facebook wouldn't try to be everything, hence the jabs at "I have too many friends" issue.

I hate their new lockout system. I'm a frequent traveler and run my business from my laptop. FB is a great way to keep connected to other travelers you meet and your friends back home while being on the road. But because I'm often in a new country every few days, let alone a new city, I get my FB account locked a few times a week. It's a huge pain in the ass.

Here's a thought for a new FB revenue stream: I'd pay them a monthly fee not to ever lock my account again. How sad is that?

You may already know this, but just in case here's a solution for you, get a VPS from Linode and proxy off it. You don't need to set anything up, just use the -D flag to ssh to open up a SOCKS proxy. It's like this form OSX or Linux:

ssh -D 8080 your.vps.ip

You now have a SOCKS proxy running on 127.0.0.1:8080. You can do the same thing using Putty on windows (it's in one of the settings tabs). Side benefit is that you can't be snooped on by whoever owns the WiFi.

I didn't know that and that's actually incredibly useful. Thanks!

I had the same experience and I was locked out my account until I came back home on my machine and logged in!

And, it is not only due to remote IP. It's remote IP + diff machine I guess.

Won't somebody just say that such an identity verification system is stupid! I had the "verify" problem a few months ago and wasn't asked to ID faces. This must be new. Scrap and try again! It's ok to mess up facebook.

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