Justin Kistner

How someone hacked Facebook and the immaturity of the web

Part of this article is a link to a guy that hacked Facebook. His site is a single page of journal entries that explains in detail how he was able to customize his profile through exploits. The other part of this article is about what an arrogant jerk he is. Wow, calling a hacker an arrogant jerk—that’s new. But, it’s not just him. The web is dominated by young people and without the control rods of older generations the general behavior can get unruly.

First, I want to be clear that I think it’s great that this guy discovered a way to hack Facebook. I have great appreciation for his talent. However, I have a problem with a few of his statements. He calls the site a piece of shit because they opened it up to advertising. He doesn’t think Facebook’s design is that good and finds it too similar to Digg’s. Guess what, man—they didn’t put in thousands of hours of effort not to get paid (oh wait, is that Google ads I see on your own site?). Not everyone can live off of a trust fund their parents set up for them. And, if there is any similarity between Digg and Facebook’s design, it’s that they use the color blue and both utilize solid usability principles, which is the nature of the medium. Creativity for creativity’s sake leads to a site that users can’t figure out how to navigate.

So who cares if this guy said a few punk statements, right? I do. I do because he’s not alone in the way he dismisses the hard work that goes into developing one of the top traffic sites in the world. He and his buddies think it’s great to go around making fun of everyone else that doesn’t understand as much as them and try to publicly discredit creation because they figured out how to break it. Here’s the truth: it’s much harder to create something than it is to break it. You and your buddies might be able to drink a few beers and find an exploit in a site with millions of lines of code in a night, but let’s see you take that same group of people and create a site that becomes a sustained metoric growth website worth billions of dollars. Then write an article about how rad you are.

This guy also runs a site that hates on the hard work of others. I have to admit, I find this guy’s site funny, but it’s sad to me that it feels like a great deal of the MySpace generation is so hateful. It reminds me of a program I watched on Discovery channel where they found that packs of elephants that only had teenage males would turn into a fights and eventually break up the pack. So it is with the web. I’ve complained before about the haters on YouTube who cowardly through out racist, homophobic, sexist, and other hateful statements under work people are proud to share from the anonymous comfort of their homes. As the web generation grows up and a new crowd of young people log on, I hope they will get the kind of influence and peer pressure that allows them to take a raw talent and use it for something truly amazing, and not just to break up that pack.

BTW, none of his Facebook hacking techniques work any more as they were fixed within a week of trying them.

Do you think there is too much hatred on the web? Does it have anything to do with age? Do you wish you were a Facebook hax0r?

07/27/2007 facebook, hacked, hacking, immature