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TOPIC: Other Side of Facebook

Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 05:14 #169363

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umay ka nb sa facebook?

- ako malapit na hehe may hangganan rin pla kapag tumagal at yumaman kn

alam nyo ba na may Scamville sa Farmville?

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Php 240 pesos para lang sa 7,500 coins? - buti nlng konti lang pinoy gumagamit ng online payment kundi dami na scam

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Getting tired of Facebook games

My excursion into the world of Facebook games was a short one, I'm already quickly losing interest. While Teut let me know that social network farming games are all the rage in China, I still have problems understanding what the fun is supposed to be. I click once to plow my field, once to plant, and once again to harvest, and that is where the gameplay ends. Multiply that with 200 fields on a 14x14 farm, and you'll get a big click-fest, but still not much fun. And the only "strategy" consists in choosing what to plant, with me having a preference for slow crops, because then I need to do those 600 clicks only every 3 or 4 days.

If I continue that for a while, I'll be able to afford a tractor, which presumably will save me some clicking. But the fuel for the tractor can apparently only be bought with "Farm Cash", which you can only get with real money, or by signing up for "free" FarmCash from advertisers. Surprise, surprise, mbp warns me that many of these "free" offers are scams, with users involuntarily signing up for some subscription they didn't want, and ending up paying more for the "free" Farm Cash than if they had just bought it.

No wonder people are increasingly suspicious of the microtransaction business model. While there are lot of good examples of microtransactions being used in a transparent way to buy access to more content in a good game, the frequent use of microtransactions in opaque scams for "games" that don't really have much gameplay, and where you are basically just wasting time and money to advance in a meaningless social competition makes people wary. But then of course a lot of people think that monthly subscription MMORPGs are also just a waste of time and money to advance in a meaningless social competition. So maybe I'm biased when I say that interesting gameplay is the minimum I expect from a game. Apparently for some people it is sufficient if they just get virtual rewards, even if the game doesn't amount to anything much.

Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.

Left alone, the system really will slide into a full blown disaster. The platforms (Facebook and MySpace) are in a position to regulate this, and even have rules prohibiting some scams. But those rules are routinely ignored by developers, and are rarely enforced by Facebook and MySpace.

There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves.

Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule? It was a surge in this kind of advertising. The money looks clean – it’s from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and others. But a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another.

And recent moves by Facebook to shut down application spam only make the problem worse in some way – game developers have to spend more money on advertisers to get users now that the viral channels are shut down. That means the games have to monetize even better. Which means more scams.

It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in.

There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” A few examples are below.
Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

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Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself:

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An Industry In Denial

Yesterday I attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In the Q&A session of one panel I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla to explain the ethics of her business, and outlined my ecosystem of hell argument above. Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “shit, doubleshit, and bullshit” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points. A video of the exchange is below, care of Alexa Lee.

Offerpal now has a blog post up on the exchange, but they still don’t address the issues. They offer misdirection, denials and a shield of rules that are never actually enforced.

Sadly, most of the audience of game developers was on Offerpal’s side. Many of these developers see quick dollars with lead gen scams and they don’t really care about how users are affected.

In one session earlier in the day, IGG Cofounder Kevin Xu recommended that game developers “get users in the door to play free, then monetize the hell out of them once they’re hooked.” Sadly, it’s simply human nature to push the rules until they break. It’s time for Facebook and MySpace to protect their users from this stuff and make sure it stops.

p.s. – An interesting development. Offerpal defended their mobile survey scams on stage and in the blog post referenced above, saying there was no scam involved. But today those offers have quietly been pulled down from all the games I’ve checked. If there’s no scam, why remove them? At least some good is coming from my ongoing rants.

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sources:

www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-...g-ecosystem-of-hell/

tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/getting-tir...-facebook-games.html

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 07:35 #169379

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let me add this also nabasa ko lang

i might call this a "hidden scam" because many are unaware of these things... "the clickjackings"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking

sa palagay ko isa ito sa dahilan kaya bumabagal ang internet connections natin kapag naglalaro tayo ng facebook games kc may mga hiddden connections nangyayari thru this kahit na mababa lang ang dapat maging load nito sa memory ng pc dahil 2d lang ang graphics na nde naman nag rerequire ng mas malaking computer calculations.

same things happen kapag infected ang pc mo ng worm o virus at kumokontak ang virus outside your pc kaya nag 100% agad ang memory usage ng pc mo kaya ma lag internet.

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The Dangers of Clickjacking with Facebook

Clickjacking is an admittedly difficult problem to solve entirely, though I question why invisible iframes are necessary. Still, a few techniques to combat the attack exist, such as frame-busting scripts. Twitter implemented this approach after a proof-of-concept attack circulated earlier this year, at the time, several researchers speculated on the ramifications for other sites, such as Facebook.

I’ve noted previously that authorizing a Facebook application requires only a single click, even if you’ve exempted your profile from the Facebook Platform. After noticing another possible clickjacking attack vector, I began compiling a list of single-click actions that should give any Facebook user pause. All of the following actions can be mistakenly performed by a user simply clicking a link or button on an innocent-looking page via clickjacking:

* Authorize a malicious application. This can happen regardless of any privacy settings. On authorization, an application can immediately access your profile information, your photos, your posted links, your notes, your status updates, etc. It can also send notifications to your profile, send notifications to other people (anonymously or from you), and post feed stories to your wall, all with links included. Note that under default privacy settings, an application can access most of your data if a friend of yours falls prey to this type of attack.

* Authorize a legitimate application with a cross-site scripting exploit. Most applications vulnerable to such an attack allow for clickjacking installs, where a single click authorizes the application and then forwards a user to an infected application page. That landing page can then execute any of the actions listed above for a malicious application. Note that if a friend falls for this attack and you have authorized the application, all of your data is vulnerable as well.

* Post a link to your profile. This is possible by applying clickjacking to several Facebook pages used for sharing content. A custom title and description can be set for the link. Other content, such as a Flash video, can also be posted this way.

* Publish a feed story from a malicious application. Note that this can work regardless of whether you have authorized the application. Applications may publish feed stories prior without authorization by a single click, though this does not grant them access to a user’s data. The feed story may include images, descriptive text, and links. The application can also pre-populate the user’s comments on the story, which would then be submitted upon execution of the clickjacking attack.

* Send a message to another user. The recipient, subject, and message content, including links, can all be pre-populated. This no longer gives the recipient more access to data than usual, but could still be easily used to spread malware.

* Send a friend request to another user. This means that a victim could unknowingly send a friend request to a malicious attacker’s profile, and the attacker would simply need to approve the request to gain access to everything on a user’s profile that their friends can access by default.

* Harvest a user’s post_form_id. Those familiar with Facebook’s code will realize how serious this issue is. However, exploiting a post_form_id also requires knowing a user’s Facebook ID, and so far this attack does not provide the latter.

This list is not simply theoretical – I did some simple testing to make sure that each of these attacks worked. I also would not pretend that my list is exhaustive, and I would welcome any additions from other researchers.

Most of these are already known or fairly trivial to figure out. I am not aware of anyone reporting my method for the last attack, however, and I will be reporting the details of it to Facebook, as I believe it involves a code issue that can be patched apart from any clickjacking protection. Update: Facebook pushed a fix last night which I’ve confirmed. The hole came from a dialog page that one could load via a POST request. Outside its normal context, clicking the submit button on the page would forward a user back to the referring page but with the post_form_id appended.

I hope this list will help raise awareness of the potential dangers of clickjacking. Creating a Facebook version of Twitter’s “don’t click” worm would be fairly simple, and as this list indicates, one could do far more than simply post a link in the process.

source: theharmonyguy.com/2009/10/14/the-dangers...cking-with-facebook/


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solution to this just install the "no script addon" if youre using firefox

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Last edit: Post by taekwondo.

Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 15:02 #169392

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di kaya press release ng friendster yan? ^_^

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 20:54 #169431

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arcee19 wrote:

di kaya press release ng friendster yan? ^_^


hehe hinde naman po kasi kahit friendster meron din yan mas talamalak nga lang sa facebook. techcrunch kilalang cable tech news yan kung may cable ka mapapanood mo cla nag investigate jan. mga techies yan same with cable news bbc's click nuon napanood ko may pasabi din cla against facebook. even nzherald may conspiracy daw sa facebook kc branch ng CIA daw yun. kaya cguro sa facebook may "news feed" at "live feed" for monitoring purposes daw yun. by default, u can monitor anyone sa facebook if you know the facebook code and its workaround mga expert developer ng open source alam yan. kaya pala lahat ng ginagawa ng mga friends ko sa facebook ko nalalaman ko halos lahat from the group they joined in and the games they played even ung chat history is stored sa facebook server mismo unless you clear your history anyone who are well verse in facebook code can retrieve your chat history as long they know ur profile id.

eto luma na pero parang naniniwala na ako dito. marami nga lang ang nagsasawalang bahala kaya hinde pinaniniwalan ng karamihan.

Facebook - the CIA conspiracy

Facebook has 20 million users worldwide, is worth billions of dollars and, if internet sources are to be believed, was started by the CIA.

The social networking phenomenon started as a way of American college students to keep in touch. It is rapidly catching up with MySpace, and has left others like Bebo in its wake.

But there is a dark side to the success story that's been spreading across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother-type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defence.

The CIA is, though, using a Facebook group to recruit staff for its very sexy sounding National Clandestine Service.

Checking out the job ads does require a Facebook login, so if you haven't joined the site - or are worried that CIA spooks will start following you home from work -check them out on the agency's own site.

The story starts once Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had launched, after the dorm room drama that's led to the current court case.

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel's board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.

She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

It was when a journalist lifted the lid on the DARPA's Information Awareness Office that the public began to show concern at its information mining projects.

Wikipedia's IAO page says: "the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.".

Not surprisingly, the backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA's activity, the Information Awareness Office lost its funding.

Now the internet conspiracy theorists are citing Facebook as the IAO's new mask.

Parts of the IAO's technology round-up included 'human network analysis and behaviour model building engines', which Facebook's massive volume of neatly-targeted data gathering allows for.

Facebook's own Terms of use state: "by posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorpoate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.

And in its equally interesting privacy policy: "Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States."

Is the CIA really providing the impetus and the funding behind the monster growth of this year's biggest dot com success story? Maybe only the men with the nice suits and ear pieces can answer that.


source: www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/artic...ctid=10456534&pnum=0

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 21:50 #169442

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sa mga tamad magbasa ng article eto watch nyo na lang itong presentation click nyo na nlng po

albumoftheday.com/facebook/

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 21:57 #169445

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hmmm it seems that we are again back to the conspiracy theories again....i guess there is really nothing wrong if you enjoy the game and would be willing to pay for it then there is no scam. i am playing the games but i am not participating in their revenue activities.

it is a matter of choice actually you could not guard everything that people do in the internet

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 22:15 #169451

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mas maganda laro ng farmville pag pinaghirapan mo ng ilang araw yung magandang farm mo... hindi kailangan bumili ng cash para lang makabili ng mga exclusive item at maging madali ang paglevel mo..... trust me mas gaganahan ka maglaro pag pinag iipunan mo....

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 22:22 #169457

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gener62166 wrote:

hmmm it seems that we are again back to the conspiracy theories again....i guess there is really nothing wrong if you enjoy the game and would be willing to pay for it then there is no scam. i am playing the games but i am not participating in their revenue activities.

it is a matter of choice actually you could not guard everything that people do in the internet


sir its not the game that is being questioned here but facebook itself because they allowed the scammers to proliferate in their system. nde porket nde ka nakkpag transact sa kanila ay safe ka na. hihintayin mo pa ata ma scam ka bago ka maniwala. thats selfishness sir kasi nde mo iniisip ung iba kundi sarili mo lang. minsan ang hirap sa tao dahil hinde nya maarok ung understanding ng iba iniisip kaagad na conspiracy theory agad without examining first its substance, history and implications.

refute nyo muna sir bago nyo sabihin na conspiracy theory nga.

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 22:42 #169465

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some programmers, hackers nagdedevelop ng mga application sa facebook para kumita... naniniwala ako dun....

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Re:Other Side of Facebook 13 Nov 2009 22:59 #169475

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reiearth2007 wrote:

some programmers, hackers nagdedevelop ng mga application sa facebook para kumita... naniniwala ako dun....


yup ur ryt about that sir

pero kahit na gawa ng hackers o scammers ang application para kumita, facebook code at tools pa rin ang ginamit at hinahayaan lang nila magamit yun sa scam dahil na rin ina allow nila mga applications without proper security measures or notices sa mga subscribers nya so i therefore conclude responsible pa rin sila.

cno kaya sa ulop marunong gumawa dito ng application sa facebook? para lalu maintindihan natin

gawa kayo dito --- developers.facebook.com/

kayang-kaya daw kc gumawa ng exploit gamit mismo ang development tools at code ng facebook.

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