Nitrogen » Mini-Projects

Updating Twitter from Facebook (and not the other way around)

nitrogen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:31:45 +0000

I use Facebook as my primary social networking tool, including status updates. I know it’s a concept they stole from Twitter, but I like the way Facebook has done it better. But I also have friends who use Twitter, and for a long time I had a Twitter account but it languished in inactivity. So I decided I wanted it to receive my Facebook status updates. That’s easier said than done, I found.

There are many Facebook apps that will grab your Twitter status and mirror them over to Facebook, but not the other direction. There are also apps or sites that will update both simultaneously–from your PC or your phone–but that’s just not what I wanted either. For many people, this solutions may be fine, but I wanted to keep the long character limit Facebook allows and still be able to update from the Facebook app on my phone.

So here’s what I did…

You need to get an RSS feed for your status updates. That’ll be along the lines of http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=????????&viewer=????????&key=??????????&format=rss20. (Note that I’ve blanked out my ID#, viewer#, and key; ID will be the same as viewer (mine’s 8-digit numeric) and key is a 10-character alphanumeric.)
You’ll need to find your own ID=, viewer=, and key= strings. Head to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php. Then find the “Subscribe to Notifications” section on the right, and click the link to go to the RSS. The address bar should now show you all three strings that you’ll need to fill into the URL in Step 1. Copy/paste (or simply replace ‘notifications.php’ with ‘status.php’).
Now we need to use a third party site to read the RSS feed and update Twitter with it. Maybe there are several ways to do this, but I’m using Twitterfeed. There you’ll set up an account and add that RSS feed to it. There are several options worth checking out, like the polling time (check for updates every x minutes) and whether or not to include a bit.ly link back to the Facebook post.
Once you’ve provided Twitterfeed the necessary info (feed, options, twitter account info), and activated the feed, any new updates you make on Facebook should also find their way to Twitter (after a small delay).

Note: The caveat to this method is that you can update Facebook with much longer posts than Twitter, so when they’re carried over, they may be truncated. I’ve enabled the option that includes bit.ly links back to the Facebook post, so people who are actually my friend can read it in its entirety there.

Mini-Project: Facebook Hacking (Part 2, Steganography)

nitrogen — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:00:35 +0000

At one point, while browsing facebook pictures, I noticed the telltale sign of bitmaps loading (they display from the bottom up). Sure enough, the pictures were about 400KB each. They may have been labeled as JPGs, but they were actually BMPs. I found this odd because to upload pictures to facebook, they all run through the Java uploader and are resized. Except, I realized, maybe the Java uploader simply checks the dimensions and only resizes and recompresses if necessary. If someone made a bitmap that was within the maximum allowable dimensions for facebook, with a misleading JPG extension, the uploader might simply pass it through. Therefore, it may be very easy to hide information within facebook photos without anyone being the wiser.

I was talking to Jeff about this possibility, and he whipped up a test file. As it turned out, I was mostly correct…we could upload large amounts of data hidden within a normal looking image. There is a limit, though: facebook only supported file sizes up to 3.25 MB in our practice. This is a good thing, as there could be some nefarious happenings if it weren’t capped. But it is a proof of concept: You can hide data in facebook images and have it covertly available. This is known as Steganography, defined by Wikipedia as “the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message.” And now you know…sometimes there’s more than meets the eye.

All content ?2007 Tony Magri

Mini-Project: Facebook Hacking (Part 1, The Creator)

nitrogen — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:00:50 +0000

Facebook, as you probably know, is a social networking web site similar in some ways to MySpace. I actually use facebook, though, because I feel it’s far superior to MySpace. Every now and then, I come across something something unusual that most people would never notice. I should clarify at this point that my use of the term ‘hacking’ is in reference to the classical definition. That is, hacking is studying a system to see if you can improve it or exploit it to perform a function it was not originally intended to (my definition). It is rarely illegal and is more of an exercise in understanding than a malicious act, as it is portrayed in the modern sense.

Tonight, I came across an article that mentioned a unique facebook group. It uses a special character known as a non-breaking space, and represented as ” ” to create a group that has no name. This also makes it somewhat difficult to search for. Thinking this was clever, I searched facebook for ” “. In addition to the aforementioned group, it listed what seemed to be hundreds of the same person: The Creator.

Intrigued, I delved into it a bit further. There was a ‘The Creator’ at CMU, and many other places. The profile didn’t indicate that it was any real person, but I was able to piece together some odd bits of information. Obviously, there’s the reference of creation, or being the first. The profile number of this person was 21700001–a surprisingly round number. If this person was the first person, then they would be number 1. But there’s the ’217′ part–but that’s simple: Each network is numbered sequentially on the left, and each profile sequentially on the right. CMU was simply the 217th network to be entered on facebook.

I was able to figure this out by comparing my profile number (21704861) to the Creator’s. The first three digits are the same, since they’re both in the CMU network. For the last 5, mine’s much higher, probably indicating I was the 4861st person at CMU to register for facebook.

This hypothesis was confirmed by a quick Google search, which led me to http://thebillygoatcurse.com/43/. That page said this:

The first Facebook member at every school is called The Creator. You can?t search for him, but it is the first member for each school added into the Facebook system.
Looking at your ID from your profile?s URL, you?ll learn that the first couple of numbers will represent your school. If you change the rest of the numbers to zeros, and the last number to 1 (making it the first ID for your school), you?ll view ?The Creator?s? profile. And? that?s it.

I had done one thing this person didn’t know was possible, though. I had stumbled on a way to search for The Creator (by searching for ” “). And that’s something apparently very few people know about.

All content ?2007 Tony Magri