Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Facebook mystery

There's a curious post going around Facebook of late, which looks like this:

***********************

HACKER WARNING

[name deleted]

She is a hacker. Please pass this on to all your friends asap before she infiltrates your account.

DO NOT ADD HER!!!!!!!!!
The "warning" comes with a picture of an attractive, counterculture-like teenage girl. Now it's possible that the warning is legit, of course, but think about it- if you were clever enough to hack Facebook, you'd be clever enough to hack a lot of more interesting- and lucretive- things. On the other hand, from the point of view of a teenage jerk who wanted to harass the hell out of some other kid, making up shit like this about someone might seem like a tempting tactic- making it harder for her to make friends on Facebook. And it's the kind of story that makes a good "viral" meme, like all those "virus warning" emails (many if not most of these have turned out to be hoaxes, BTW).

I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about whether or not to include her name in this post or not. If she's innocent, would this help by drawing a few Google hits from folks who might think twice before swallowing the story, or would it simply be a further invasion of her privacy? I'm inclined to think the former, but I'm not going to act on that without soliciting the opinion of others first. After all, if I do release her name, and decide later that I was wrong to do so, it can't be easily recalled (if nothing else, it will be in Google and similar caches for quite a while).

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