I'm still having trouble believing this:
1) Type "facebook login" into the browser bar.
2) Get Google results page, with a news story called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" at the top.
3) Click that link
4) Observe a red page that says "Read Write Web" at the top, taking up nearly half the screen.
5) See a facebook logo and a facebook connect login prompt.
6) Log in to comment, and whine about how "I am going to delete my account if I ever figure out how to log in"
7) ???
I am having such trouble comprehending this that I think it's fake. But I'm probably wrong :(
Why is the Internet any different?
From Marco's post: "You can see the same effect on anything ranked highly by a Google search for “facebook login”, including this: http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac....
This is, I guess, representative of the problems the iPad is aimed at, but I'd really rather there was a better solution.
Also, once you get a few dozen of those messages, the trolls come out and pretty soon you can't tell who is confused and who's just piling on for fun:
What is rong heer. I wnted to get my bebo. But my bebo wos stolen. I just wnt my bebo back. I dunt want your crappy site wheres my bebo you will get sud for million dollas $$$$ for bebonets stealing
Well said, MrFerret. Well said.
Given how uniquely unobservant you'd have to be to have this problem, I'm willing to bet that would successfully phish a few hundred credentials. Alternately, this all an elaborate hoax that we've fallen for. (Please?)
I must confess that I often use something like this myself, though, despite being a tech person. I can never remember the stupid URL for my university's obscurely-located courseware system, for example, so I usually just Google for universityname coursewarename and click on the first result. I guess I could bookmark it, but this method works fine.
Unfortunately, if you want to stay safe online you need to understand an incredibly dense stack of technologies - you need to know what a browser is, how URLs and domains are formatted (so you know the difference between facebook.com and facebookcom.com), what an actual website is, how easy it is for someone to create a fake looking login page, how to judge if something is safe to enter your credit card in to...
I make my living on the web and I want to continue to do so. I need people to use it for e-commerce and to trust their private information to it. But I'm horribly aware that for anyone who isn't knowledgeable about how it all works, I'm basically encouraging them to join an unsafe environment which is almost certain to rip them off.
Stuff like the iPad is a step forward, but it doesn't help address the core problem - it will be exactly as easy to fall for basic internet cons on the iPad as a regular desktop machine.
I'm pretty much stumped.