[thelist] Facebook / blocked / security

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Tue Mar 29 22:39:14 CDT 2011


On 03/29/2011 04:11 AM, Barney Carroll wrote:
> Facebook take your privacy very seriously. You may have mistaken that
> glint in their eye for mischievous humour; it's actually contempt.
> Reliable access to your personal details is for 3rd party companies
> (not you on holiday) — I'm pretty sure it's in the continuously
> changing EULA.
>
> </cynicalMickyTake>
>
> I got stuck on this a while back while in Morocco. After giving me a
> variety of conflicting and vague messages as to why I was suspicious
> and how I might verify my authenticity, I finally managed to get
> notification of success after completing a simple process, but was
> then unable to use the API through anything other than a desktop PC —
> a weird half-way house that was success according to them but fail for
> my practical purposes.
>
> The authentication process eludes me, but I avoided the identify
> friends by profile pic option (most of my contacts have ironic
> Photoshopped images for these, making it impossible to reliably
> establish their identity). I'm pretty sure there are two other options
> (although I can't remember them off-hand) based on details
> confirmation.
>
> Failing that finding a 'desktop PC' or spoofing your UA to mimic one
> might give you said options or establish an extra degree of
> 'authenticity'?
>
>
> Regards,
> Barney Carroll
>
> barney.carroll at gmail.com
> 07594 506 381
>
>
>
> On 29 March 2011 11:01, Bob Meetin<bobm at dottedi.biz>  wrote:
>> Nasty security says it all.  I am traveling out of the country for a month,
>> need to do some work with Facebook developers, to set up an API key, secret
>> key.
>>
>> The problem - when accessing FB it detects that I am in a foreign land
>> making me suspicious and prompts me to go through a series of security
>> questions.
>>
>> q1 is a phone option which is useless
>> q2 ask me to verify pictures of friends, equally useless, why?  because many
>> of the pictures are of people i don't know but friended me, so of course I
>> have no idea what they look like.
>>
>> contact facebook - how?  the contact fb page takes you to a bunch of problem
>> types but for the life of me i can't find one that takes me to an email
>> address or form
>>
>> I am wondering if anyone has any ideas how to change proxy servers or
>> something else in Firefox to fool this beast and make em thing I am at home
>> in Colorado?
>>
>> -Bob
>> --
Barney, Simon, all,

Thanks.  Sanity is what it is and I'm not sure that the technical folks in charge of services like this have much of an understanding of Ordinary Joe.  You devise presumptuous methods and means that work great in the test tube but not when the walls are made of glass, brittle glass.

In this case, Facebook allows me to log in with my username/password, but the first screen is the deal killer, "Unusual Login Activity - Please Review".  You click to proceed and we encounter the 2 options to fix things up, phone and review photos.  Phone is not viable and the pictures, whether photo-shopped or not, it might as well be dart practice.  I don't know half the names other than the fact that we've crossed paths, perhaps, and of the names I do know, they don't look like what I remember from high school, most of 4 decades back.

I s'pose that I could sleuth and look up some of the names if FB doesn't time out and p'haps get lucky and find relevant pictures in Facebook.  Ah that now sounds like work.

Or cheat the system, doable in this case.  All I really needed to do was to obtain a Facebook key, api, secret key for a website.  Solution - to register under one of my email aliases which forwards email to me.  This worked, stupid yes, but it worked.

-Bob


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