Sunday, August 17, 2008

Digital Embarassment

You know what's frustrating? Computers. Especially when you mess up something on a computer, because it might very well be public and digital, easy to preserve. Especially when you're someone who is supposed to be good with computers.

Take Facebook, for example. Facebook has a feature wherein you can give them access to your e-mail account, and they'll look up people that have exchanged e-mail with you and see if they have a Facebook account and allow you to add them as friends. Handy, right?

Well, suppose you are subscribed to a mailing list (for example, the Python programming list). There are hundreds (thousands?) of people e-mailing each other on this list. You probably aren't friends with all of them. But there they are.

By this point, you can probably see where this story is going, so I needn't continue. In my defense, I haven't slept in like two days, and the cancel/continue buttons are like right next to each other.

Hopefully most of the people will realize that I'm just some random guy, and not someone they know (although, I do have that very common name..). Of course, they might be like me, and just accept every friend request they get, because what if it IS someone they know but they just don't recognize the name?

We'll see.

2 comments:

  1. Wow...for some reason I am thinking about all the vulnerabilities and exploits there can exist if it is a custom made social network application...

    Am I weird?

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  2. I'm not sure what you mean. I don't use ANY social network applications. ^_^

    This isn't an application but a built-in feature of Facebook. And yes it does certainly have security problems. I blame my poor two-days-without-sleep judgment.

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