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Comment by hnha | Hacker News Reader

For a little bit of fun: Try linking to https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en on Facebook and marvel at the non-descript error messages. They depend on where you try to post it (timeline, comment). For example "could not be posted because of technical error, try again in a few minutes"...

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Hi, my name's Alec, I work as a software engineer for Facebook. Apologies for what you observed, it was due to an automatic system miscategorising the Tor download site. We've fixed the issue, given our software a stern talking-to, and are working to ensure that it does not happen again.

I sent a message to FB noting the "mis-categorization" on May 26.

How long did it take to fix the issue? Assuming that it is a simple task to fix, then why was it not fixed when I reported it on May 26th nor when I reported it again on June 24th?

Hi there; I don't know the answer to that question yet, but I will be investigating the matter next week and will take action accordingly. Thank you for the details and for taking the time to do that, it's appreciated.

Sorry, Alec. I'm not buying into the whole customer service corporate doublespeak routine. Your words sound like those of an uninformed pawn, a tool implemented by nobility, a means to an end.

He can't be an uninformed pawn of his corporate masters and be engaged in doublespeak at the same time.

Hush. The existential contradiction is part of The Conspriacy!

Not true. An employee can adhere to a company policy without understanding the reason a given policy exists. It's certainly possible to carry out orders, and adhere to a script, with unquestioning obedience.

Fair enough I guess...

FWIW, a bug appears to exist, as the following (perfectly safe) link also triggered the warning:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://w...

Note the irony of http://google.com/safebrowsing triggering a Facebook "unsafe link" security warning. Looks like the code is using a substring match, which might be incorrect logic.

Are your posts are Turing test? ;)

I'm not a bot, but my English teachers always taught me not to put two verbs in one sentence.

Good thing you put 3 verbs in your sentence then ;)

FB is a huge company now. Going through the reporting process, assigning to a dev, they get around to it after other assignments, goes to QA queue, it's tested, it'll get pushed out in a release. That'll take a month, easy. I don't smell conspiracy, I just smell software development.

Can I ask you, what category was Tor put into?

Could you provide disclosure regarding how this categorization system works?

Holy cow, it really doesn't work. I tried it once immediately as you posted, and then continuously via different people's accounts and different computers even. It really doesn't work, and it ain't just my computer or account. It isn't even a US thing.

I don't think there's a problem with parsing the URL because it clearly is able to load up the preview. All I can say is, MAN! They really don't want you helping people with Tor.

My facebook habits have shifted to posting almost exclusively NSA related materials. I've run into errors like this three times before. I don't know what the issue is.

Instead of error messages, I got this: http://i.imgur.com/mDTPnrq.png

I just posted that exact link without issue.

Before (12:41 PDT) and after (12:56 PDT): https://i.imgur.com/GAHQIXZ.png

"Worksforme" is a bad habit that we in the software industry need to get out of. When a user complains about something, they're almost never trolling, so we need to take the reports seriously.

"worksforme" isn't an accusation of trolling, it's just the second stage of debugging:

http://bash.org/?950581

Any sane debugging process should proceed beyond this stage. :-)

It does contain a direct download to an executable file. Maybe it's just fear of viruses and not something exclusive to Tor?

I've occasionally seen similar errors posting links to sites like Wikileaks.

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