CNN anchor Rick Sanchez wasn't really high on crack this morning, and the reason his Twitter feed said so wasn't the phishing scam that's been going around--it was a lone hacker, the microblogging service said later on Monday.
"The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend," a post on the Twitter blog explained. "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."
The same hacker was responsible for compromising a number of Twitter's most popular accounts, including those belonging to pop singer Britney Spears, media outlet Fox News, and President-elect Barack Obama.
Twitter has said, meanwhile, that the phishing scam--which used messages from Twitter friends to trick users into entering their user names and passwords into a bogus log-in screen--is under control. "Our on-call team was able to attend to the matter quickly and prevent too many people from being affected," Twitter's blog post read. "Our support team is definitely going to have a busy week because we reset a bunch of passwords just to be on the safe side."
Move over, iPhone: The cool system to "jailbreak" these days is Facebook's new advertising initiative.
Two aspects of Facebook Ads--the "Beacon" and friend-recommendation-equipped "Social Ads"--have already garnered some skepticism around the Web for being potentially invasive, annoying, or both. Many Facebook users, myself included, haven't even seen these advertisements yet, but code-savvy developers like Nathan Weiner of The Idea Shower have already decided that we might want out.
Blocking the Beacon, Weiner wrote, is remarkably easy. All that's required, according to a set of instructions, is a site-blocking Firefox plugin, and then the Beacon application can't send Facebook any information about what you've been doing on partners' sites. Valleywag theorizes that the Social Ads program may be the next target.
Facebook has plenty of smart engineers on board, and they'll likely find a way to "un-jailbreak" the company's advertising platform; think about how Apple has repeatedly released software updates for the iPhone that (among other things) prevent clever users from unlocking them and installing third-party software.
But this should be a heads-up for Facebook: when people are hard at work on workarounds, it's a sign that they might not be too happy with the concept.
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