If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I hate the like button on Facebook. It’s bland, its meaning is too spread out to have decent value, and now, thanks to the skilled hackers of the world, you can infect your computer with viruses from it.
It’s really a sad state of affairs, where Facebook has come to.
When Facebook first introduced apps, many of them were very cool and very useful. Sure, not every app was designed to make the place better or increase your productivity (SuperPoke, anyone), but apps had a purpose besides serving you a thousand advertisments.
Then we got shovelware. Thousands of crappy surveys to figure out which Golden Girl you are (Dorothy), what Opera you are (Don Giovanni), hell there are probably even surveys to figure out what your favorite color is because you can’t figure that out for yourself (Black like my soul). We also got all those apps that messed up you and your friends’ accounts.
A part of me could accept those crappy apps. It was pretty obvious they were malicious, and they were easy enough to avoid if you had any sensibility about you online.
With Likejacking you are screwed. Seemingly normal links lead to viruses that will continue to spread on Facebook. We’re lucky that the viruses don’t do anything but make more crap for people to like at the moment, otherwise a bunch of people would be screwed.
Now I can’t trust what my friends like on Facebook. Isn’t the whole point of the Open Graph to bring things my friends like to me? If I can’t trust what they like, what’s the point?
Facebook, get your act together. Start reigning in crappy apps. Make the Like button work safely. If security holes like this keep popping up, next time there’s a quit Facebook day more than 30,000 people will leave.
Anti-Social Media