Facebox incident aftermath
Interesting. It seems that there's some kind of an "edit war" going on over at the English Wikipedia regarding the Netlog entry. Netlog, as some people might now, is the social site known as Facebox, after having experienced some heavy rebranding a few weeks ago.
At the moment of writing, the disputed section reads as follows:
In early 2007 when registering to Facebox one was asked to provide the GMail login and password. Then Facebox downloaded the address book of the newly registered user and used it without any warning to send out invitations to all GMail's contacts, including mailing lists, and resending the invitation once a week until the victim reacted to it[3].
As a result of that policy the google search for the keyword facebox resulted in more than numerous links warning users against registering in the service[4]. It has been suggested in the blogosphere[5] that this situation was the direct reason for the rebranding on the service: Facebox became Netlog.com on April 25th, 2007.
First, for some facts. It is true, that Facebox abused the email accounts of some people subscribed to it. In early April I have suddenly received a couple of invitations from a friend of mine. Each was sent to a different email address (all of which were mine). Scratching my head for a second, I've IRCed about it only to find out, that most of the people I know got varying amounts of those invitations (the president of the Polish Linux User Group bragged about receiving as much as six invitations from a single person). Additionally, from a series of blog posts and email messages, I've learned that more people got affected by this. (One post (in English) from this guy, another from this guy, yet another from this guy, and last one from this guy.)
So, concerning the wikipedia entry in it's current form -- it should be noted, that the only reports thus far were from Poles (a limited test gone awry?). Additionally, if you want to know my opinion, the "has been suggested in the blogosphere" implication is too far fetched and should be removed. I don't think one person's entry (as cited), written in a language unknown to most readers of that wikipedia article, and without even a hint of having any insiders knowledge about the decision to rebrand, should be enough to warrant such a mention.
Other then that, the mention of the incident itself is appropriate, simply because it did happen and can probably be considered a major screwup on Facebox/Netlog's part. And if somebody's motivated enough, it'd be quite easy to collect at least half a dozen very credible reports of this, both from people that got spammed, and those in whose names the spamming was being done.
(And I'll bet Netlog's just dying for a major tech blog or news site to pick this story up and investigate a bit. I'm sure they'd start getting tons of new subscribers afterwards. :)
