There is a story floating around where a limited number of AT&T users were directed into the Facebook accounts of someone else. Personally, I think the headline is more sensationalistic than anything – “scary web error” – come on now.

This appears to be a misconfiguration for a proxy forwarder on the part of AT&T where the session cookies from Facebook were sent to the wrong browsers. Since Facebook (and most social networking sites) use a non-encrypted session, then it is technically possible for this to happen.

Here is the thing that gets me. What sort of “sensitive private data” does anyone really have stored in Facebook?

• You have your name and address? You can get that from whitepages.com or google phonebook or any phonebook.
• You have a list of your friends and their names and addresses? see above.
• You have your mobile number? Big deal – really. We typically give out our mobile number like our home phones now.
• You birthdate and school information? That can be found easily too.
• Your inbox of comments from your post about your breakfast? Big deal.
• Your FarmTown account? Right.

My point is that how is there a sensitive data breach? I really hope most people are not foolish enough to conduct sensitive business through Facebook’s messaging system.

It would help if Facebook would switch to an SSL session like Gmail – but even then I still ask? What sensitive private data?

This information is not anything really new – but most of my customers are not aware of what these limits mean. For instance, I have a business client (training company) who purchased about 20 of the AT&T Connect cards. Several of the student laptops were later infected with malware and ended up downloading 10x the limits on the cards. Her bill – nearly $6000 from AT&T.

Many of you use either AT&T or Verizon’s “air cards” as they are commonly known. These are typically USB devices that connect to your PC or Mac and give you broadband access through the cell networks. Generally they work really well – as a matter of fact I’m a big fan of Verizon’s EVDO network – and especially their “MiFi” card.

However, some of you may not be aware that a couple of years ago, Verizon and AT&T placed limits on their “unlimited” service. If you go over 5GB in one month, you will be billed on a “per kilobyte” basis.

1000KB (kilobytes) = 1MB (megabyte) and 1000MB = 1GB (gigabyte)

While 5GB may seem like a lot of data, let me put it in perspective:

I just purchased and downloaded 69 songs (3 albums) from Amazon’s MP3 service – 250MB or 1/4 of a GB. This was on a computer that was just wiped and Windows reinstalled due to a virus.  The Windows updates alone were over 600MB (.6GB). Additional software downloads (Firefox, iTunes, antivirus, picasa, etc) plus the drivers for that machine were about 1GB. That totals about 2GB’s of data for that one machine. See the point?

If you use an online backup service such as JungleDisk or Carbonite, it can be worse. Most people have several GB’s of pictures and data to backup (I have over 50GB’s of pictures alone). If you have to upload that data when you first subscribe to these services, or if you have to use them to recover then be careful.You are going to hit your limit quickly.

Do they warn you? Nope. Not until you get your bill.

Oh yeah, I’ve had my Verizon EVDO card since it started – so I’m grandfathered in with no limits. The best part – I have Verizon recorded via telephone stating that fact.

Verizon Limits Its “Unlimited” Wireless Broadband Service
By Joseph S. Enoch
ConsumerAffairs.com
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/07/verizon_unlimited.html