Nothing is ever 100% completely secure, let’s get this settled from the off.  Whatever security anybody or any company ever puts in place there’s either some way to crack it, or some flaw in the system that will allow people to circumvent it.  Thus it’s not really a shouting a Facebook moment to discover that such a flaw has been found that allows people to see the private photos of others.

The flaw was first reported on the forums of href="http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=140261733" target="_blank">BodyBuilding.com, presumably because the users of that website like taking photos of themselves and putting them online.  The bug exploits the way the offensive photograph reporting tool works.  I’m not going to detail it in too much detail here because I don’t want to encourage anybody to try and view photographs that other people have made private as they obviously want them to be kept private.  However the post does detail how the flaw works.

class="alignleft" src="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/117082-logo_facebook_icon-600x600.png" alt="" width="150" height="150" /> href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/facebook-flaw-allows-access-to-private-photos/64761?tag=mncol;editorPicks" target="_blank">ZDNet used the flaw to show a picture from Mark Zuckerberg’s private album, taken from a dinner party where everybody seems to be having lots of fun making the food, it’s quite sweet actually as Zuckerberg clearly looks like the shy one.

Facebook have said they are looking into the issue which revolves around being able to report more than just the single photo you can see.  It’s not a bug with the system but it is quite a substantial design flaw and, oddly, surprising that nobody has noticed it before.

Facebook has been heavily criticised in the last few years for matters of privacy and so there are people who will leap on this story as yet another example of how the company simply doesn’t take its users privacy seriously.  Such problems have included a change to the terms and conditions that made all your photographs and statuses Facebook’s property and a settings change that made everything on everybody’s profile accessible to search engines by default.  Both times the change was quickly withdrawn.

ZDNet said…

Details of this flaw were examined in detail. While some browsers restrict this flaw, private photos that are hidden or inaccessible to people who are friends, can not only be accessed but enlarged to their full scale.  This flaw is open for anyone to use — and abuse. While Facebook anonymises the reports that it gets through, the user whose profile pictures can be viewed will also not know that their privacy has been invaded.

There are real problems with privacy and the Internet, much of which seems to stem from people not understanding what the Internet really is and how it works.  I have published a free href="http://www.windows7news.com/download-center/?did=311" target="_blank">Facebook Privacy Guide, though some settings have changed and the book needs a second edition when I get time.  There’s lots of advice in here though about how to keep yourself and your personal information safe and private when online, at least as safe and private as Humanly possible.

As is always the case with these things the best advice is not to put embarrassing pictures or messages online in the first place, or to remove them after they’ve been seen by close friends.  Some companies are working on solutions including one ingenious one I’m looking forward to where a picture can be programmed to expire after a specified time.  These types of technology will no doubt help all of us in the future.

Comparing file hashes of files that you have downloaded to your computer with those provided by the provider of said downloads can be a great way of verifying that a file is genuine and that it has not been tampered with by third parties. Security only works if the sources you get the files and hashes from is trustworthy. One example would be if you uploaded a file on a server to download it later to another computer. You’d generate the hash, upload the file and verify that the hash is identical to the one that you have generated before.

MD5 Reborned Hasher is a Firefox add-on that integrates hash generating options directly in the browser’s download window. Having said that, it needs to be noted that users need to keep a history of their downloads in the browser for the add-on to work properly.

href="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/firefox-download-hash.jpg"> src="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/firefox-download-hash.jpg" alt="firefox download hash" title="firefox download hash" width="489" height="440" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-53964" />

The add-on places a small Check Digest link next to each download in the Downloads window of the browser. A click on the link opens a Check File window where hash files can be generated. The add-on supports the generation of MD2, MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384 or SHA512 hashes. Just select the desired hash from the pulldown menu and click the Generate Digest button afterwards.

The generated checksum is then displayed in the same window. All that is left then is to copy the original hash value into the second field. The add-on compares both hashes and will notify you if they are identical or not.

Depending on the result you may either decided to quarantine or delete the file or use it on your system.

MD5 Reborned Hasher is a handy extension for Firefox users who need to verify file downloads regularly. An option to automatically generate hashes for all downloaded files would be handy but is not present in the reviewed version of the add-on.

Firefox users can download and install the extension href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/md5-reborned-hasher/">from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Some folders in Windows Explorer show a single preview picture embedded in the folder icon. It seems as if the selected image is picked randomly from the available images in the folder. This guide will show you how to change the default folder picture in Windows Explorer.

When you use Windows Explorer in thumbnail view mode, and it does not really matter if you display folders and files in small, medium or larged size thumbnails, you will notice that some folders display one of the stored images in their icon. Folders without images display as blanks instead.

href="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/windows-explorer-folder-image.jpg"> src="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/windows-explorer-folder-image.jpg" alt="windows explorer folder image" title="windows explorer folder image" width="485" height="333" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-53958" />

You sometimes may want to change the image that is displayed by default, for instance if another image is more appropriately characterizing the folder or if you do not want that particular image to be displayed prominently in Windows Explorer.

It is possible to customize the folder picture thubmnail so that another image is shown instead. Please note that the following guide demonstrates how this is done under Windows 7. Other operating systems may or may not offer this feature at all.

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder that you want to change the thumbnail image for. Right-click on the folder and select Properties from the options. Please note that you need to select the real folder path for that operation and not a virtual folder (like a library folder). The My Pictures folder for instance would require you to open C:\Users\username\Pictures in Windows Explorer.

Switch to the Customize tab in the Properties window and locate Choose File under Folder Pictures.

href="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/folder-pictures.jpg"> src="http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/folder-pictures.jpg" alt="folder pictures" title="folder pictures" width="381" height="465" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-53959" />

A click on choose file opens a folder browser where another image can be selected to be that folder’s preview picture. Just select the image and click on open to assign it to the folder. Click on ok again in the properties window to close it. The changes should be visible right away. You can repeat the process for as many folders as you like.