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The title seems very misleading, his friends list hasn't actually been discovered, but rather a method that could discover parts of it.

Question for the arm chair lawyers: If he published said friends list could the FB denial of a vulnerability be construed as evidence that he didn't hack them as the functionality is intended and authorized?




HN, 1492. Christopher Columbus discovers America. HN user comment : pretty misleading title, large parts of America are most probably not discovered yet. Joke aside, I've seen far worse titles than this one.


To be fair it would really be misleading as he wasn't the one who "discovered" America.

>>He was the first person to establish long and meaningful

>>connection with the New World that would eventually tie

>>Europe to the Americas, but it is a misconception that he

>>was the first to “discover” America.

http://sites.psu.edu/mmancini/2012/09/08/1-columbus-was-the-...

Additional source: http://web.dsbn.edu.on.ca/~William.Randall@dsbn.edu.on.ca/FO...


To be really fair, Columbus was searching for India when he first discovered America so I doubt he even knew what he had stumbled upon


IIRC, he continuously insisted that he had reached the ("East", as we now know them as a result of him being wrong) Indies, in fact.


Consider my post a alley oop assist ;)


The video shows how this "discover parts of it" can be used together with simple queries to acquire profiles that likely share common friends with the target. Then it accumulates common friends with each of these. For the case of Zuckerberg, with a single start query ("People who like Spotify and Facebook Security and live in United Statesand work at Facebook") it produced 486 friends from Zuckerberg's friends list, a list he had marked as only viewable by his friends.

It might not be an exhaustive list, but it certainly shows a way to circumvent a protection most people think is in place, when they chose "only friends can see my friends list".

In other words, the title is far from "very misleading". This is what that vulnerability allows.


Yes, gathering publicly available data is definitely authorized.

On the other hand, publishing it could get you in trouble if you do it without the person's consent.

Source: armchair lawyer


Scraping facebook is against the TOS.


Terms of Service aren't law.


They practically are in the UK under misuse of computer act.




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