<story><title>The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-inside-story-of-how-facebook-responded-to-tunisian-hacks/70044/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dansingerman</author><text>I have a bit of a problem with the description of the hack as &quot;The software was basically a country-level keystroke logger&quot;&lt;p&gt;I think this is unnecessary dumbing down.&lt;p&gt;For most readers who already knows what a keylogger is, it should be fairly obvious to them that this is not what they were doing.&lt;p&gt;For any reader who does not know what a keylogger is, describing the hack as being like a keylogger is not going to help them understand.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if you are in the demographic that know what a keylogger is, but can&apos;t see how that it is obvious that is not what was going on here, it just obscures what was really at play here: authenticating over (unencrypted) HTTP.&lt;p&gt;The writer probably did not want to make this a story about authenticating over HTTP, but misdescribing a central feature of the story is misleading.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-inside-story-of-how-facebook-responded-to-tunisian-hacks/70044/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>csomar</author><text>I didn&apos;t see a shift from http to https in the protests day. However, pages that report anti-government news, asked their audience to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://login&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://login&lt;/a&gt;. so they can open censored pages.&lt;p&gt;Back to Facebook, it had played a very important role and was key to the protests success. In the past, information is spread through word of mouth. There isn&apos;t trust, when it&apos;s spread that way and also no images or videos. The information that arrives isn&apos;t quite adequate.&lt;p&gt;Emails and forums are good, but due to Video websites censoring, they can&apos;t play an important role, since only a few fraction of the Web users in Tunisia can run a proxy.&lt;p&gt;Facebook changed everything, anti-gov. pages have from 200K to 600K fans. That&apos;s more than the half of the connected Tunisian population. In the last days, activity on Facebook was terrible, I would estimate that I post 50 to 100 videos, status and images; same for my friends.&lt;p&gt;Information spread essentially from these few pages with huge popularity. In a discussion, Admins seems to be using proxies and VPN to make secure connections and they have an anonymous Facebook account to communicate with the protesters (receive videos, photos, and information).&lt;p&gt;The urgent news would take only 30 minutes at most to spread through the network. Most of my friends, spend all the night (and dawn?) until late 4 and 5 A.M.</text></comment>