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Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

I am not a native English speaker. Although I study in England (University of Manchester), I believe half of my course mates are not native speakers either. At least the ones who turn up to lectures. People try to explain their algorithms, ideas in broken English with damn thick accents but they DO explain. They put effort.

From what he managed to write in the blog post, he CAN write English which is not THAT bad.

But this dude doesn't really bother. Hey Facebook, there's a bug. Wanna know it? How about you... beg me to tell you?

I am quoting him: whatever , i dont care for miss spelling , just the idea , i never correct an underline red word ;)

Did FB treat it properly? No. Did he act properly? Not either. But since it's FB... THEY ARE EVIL!!!!111!

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You do make a good point, but at the same time I was easily able to understand his original bug report. I agree that both sides should be making a little more effort, and engaging in a bit less drama.

He didn't make a bug report. He didn't specify how he could post to other peoples' walls. All he said was that he could, and that he already broke the ToS by using it on another person's account. This was his original report:

    -----Original Message to Facebook-----
    From: kha****@hotmail.com
    To:
    Subject: post to facebook users wall .

    Name: Ḱhalil
    E-Mail: khal****@hotmail.com
    Type: privacy
    Scope: www
    Description: dear facebook team .

    my name is khalil shreateh.
    i finished school with B.A degree in Infromation Systems .

    i would like to report a bug in your main site
    (www.facebook.com) which i discovered it .

    repro:
    the bug allow facebook users to share links to other 
    facebook users , i tested it on sarah.goodin wall and i 
    got success post
    link - > https://www.facebook.com/10151857333098885
    -----End Original Message to Facebook-----

From that, you surmised that he exploited the "make a new wall post" form by replacing the user ID with another of his choosing?

When you're working across cultural boundaries you realise that most problems stem from an incorrect assumption.

In this case Khalil probably held the incorrect assumption that an actual demonstration of the bug would be how Facebook would want this to be reported, hence the lack of details.

It's not unreasonable for him to think Facebook would take a look at their HTTP logs to find out what happened.

Enough to get a sense of his thinking there was a problem, and look up his and Goodin's accounts to see what he meant. Certainly it warranted clarification, and I sppreciate that the FB support team must get a lot of nonsense/stupid requests, but that's why they get paid the big bucks.

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