> You can't make this kind of statement if you haven't been a pentester.

It's not that anyone broke in and stole things here, it's that Facebook dumped their stuff out of the window.

A variation of your point I totally agree with, FB has a lot of moving parts and a lot of employees. Who is this "Facebook" that should be ashamed of their incompetence, right? It's theoretically possible for a million genius engineers to be connected in a bureaucracy created the best of intentions, by the brightest of minds, that still turns their work into swiss cheese.

Maybe one problem is making these huge things, which are supposedly monolithic but where one hand doesn't quite know what the other is doing. That's at least a claim worth examining, right? And if you want to exclude the people who don't have that kind of experience because they consider it a dead end that never enticed them, that's both reasonable and circular. Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about, though I have enough imagination and whiffs of knowledge to at least know that -- but no, I don't have to be a ninja coder or a corporate high roller either, I learned to separate wheat from chaff, to appreciate skillful tight programs and to despite gimmicky bloat, sometimes around the Amiga, as a kid. Even as a user who pays a modicum of attention I can do this. I guess floppy drives helped, but the principle is still valid today, nothing changed.

So no, I don't need experience in maintaining giants that do a thousand things badly to wish for the return of a lot of little things that do a handful of things well. That's part of the reason I sleep soundly but angrily. It's 2017 and I still can't have a phone call with the quality I had in, say, 1990, because for every step of technological progress and insight, there seem to be five steps of greed and idiocy. It's 2017 and people are on Facebook. For me that's "the" problem, and making a "secure" Facebook is not the solution.

Freedom requires vigilance, that's not just words, that means if we have even just one lapse in your history, a period where we were not on your toes, where we left our drink unattended, we should be frightened stiff. A lot of people who should be aren't.

We laughed at AOL and whatever that thing was Microsoft cooked up before they realized the internet was going to be more than just a Microsoft product. And now, in the shape of Facebook and others, that won. It was cute to use "googling" as a verb meaning "to look something up on the internet", for a while, but it's not really, and I'm sick of it and I still say it. Yeah yeah, search engines are hard, operating systems are hard, but that stuff used to be even harder and it's silly that we seem to have less diversity now the more resources there are to go around. I don't hate on anyone's success, their success is hating on my imagined opportunities >:[

I'm not sorry for rambling, but as a more sober and delineated final point, something more actionable if you will.. from the article:

> Facebook confirmed the security breach in a statement and said it had made technical changes to “better detect and prevent these types of issues from occurring”.

What kind of "active" measures do they have in mind? What "type of issue" is this, even? Do they have something in mind they're "just" not sharing, or is that just a bluff? Without saying that, or hey, without actually showing the code and the understandable mistake that lead to this, that just sounds like "yeah, whatever it is you care most about, that's exactly what we'll fix". I know it's an article on The Guardian, I know they just can't show off code, but it's not really my fault that both incompetence and good faith speak in the same meaningless corporate verbiage.

Show me the goods, in some way or other. If you say something most people don't understand, but which YOU understand and which you're absolutely sincere and concentrated about, guess what, even babies, even dogs might trust you. And the people who do know what you're talking about can also rest well. But this way, the way this stuff gets handled lest the lawyers freak out, it's just completely empty. To actually learn something, a FB employee would have to violate their contract, and that that's normal doesn't make it less nuts. Yes, security is hard when you build super tall towers that move at hundreds of miles an hour. Then how about let's not?