Mafia Wares and Farmvillians

For those of you who are addicted to popular Facebook apps Mafia Wars and Farmville, here's a wake-up call: the creator of the games is a sleazebag who doesn't give a rats @$$ about you, your security, or your personal information.

'From the beginning, the profitability and viability of popular Facebook social networking games Mafia Wars and Farmville were predicated on the backs of scams, boasts Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in this video. "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues," he crows in the clip to a gathered bunch of fellow scumbag app developers.' from http://consumerist.com/2009/11/mafia-wars-ceo-brags-about-scamming-users-from-day-one.html

Remember that these are applications, with access to your Facebook profiles (and your friends list, etc.), running in your web browser on your computer, and that they are produced by people with the intent of making money.  In this case, any way they can, even if it means compromising the security of your profile and/or your computer.  Just because something is popular (think crack cocaine!), doesn't mean that it's safe or sensible to expose yourself to it.

Firefox Add-on: Form History Control

Firefox, like most modern browsers, has a handy feature which remembers what you type into form fields on web pages.  Unfortunately, sometimes it remembers things it shouldn't (oh, like your credit-card number, SSN, etc.), because the fields aren't labelled correctly on the web page.  In order to protect yourself against someone obtaining this information from your browser profile, I recommend the Form History Control add-on (available here).  It allows you to view saved form information, and set criteria for deleting fields you don't want saved.  You should review what the browser is storing, looking for sensitive data (pretty easy to glance through the list).

If you use another web browser, find out how to do something similar, or, for the really paranoid (or lazy, lol), disable the automatic form-filling feature to be on the safer side.

Browse Safer with Firefox & Add-Ons

If you're concerned about keeping your computer and personal information safe, I recommend using any browser that isn't made by Microsoft. Seriously. If you use Firefox, I recommend the following add-ons:

Flashblock: keeps Flash animations from loading until you click on them, reducing page load times and bandwidth used, as well as preventing Flash-based attacks.

AdBlock Plus (with the EasyList (USA) subscription): keeps your browser from loading advertising images on web pages; this improves loading times, decreases bandwidth used, and prevents attacks embedded in ad images/animations.

NoScript: prevents scripts from running on web pages unless you allow them. Keeps your browsing activities from being reported to tracking services and prevents script-based attacks. It's easy to unblock trusted sites (like Facebook! Uh...).

Ghostery: shows/blocks web trackers on a page, which are used to gather behavioral data about users (i.e., track your behavior within and among web sites). Not so valuable if you're using NoScript (many trackers rely on scripting).

LinkExtend: has a lot of neat stuff in it's toolbar (and I usually _hate_ toolbars!), including "site safety" ratings, "child friendly" ratings, and a nice integrated multi-search feature. If you've ever wondered "Should I really be on this site?", this add-on will help.

RequestPolicy: For the really paranoid, this allows you to control what page elements are loaded from other web servers (ex., youarehere.com loads an image from server allyourcomputerarebelongtous.ru).  Requires a little micromanagement, but gives fine-grain control over what page content is loaded and displayed by your browser.

You can dowload Firefox for free here: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/