…Clueless

Yesterday, I voiced my concern regarding the website facebook.in which appeared a little suspicious to me. I contacted the folks over at Facebook and got a response from them today. Here’s what they had to say :

Hi Rahul,

We appreciate your concern. “http://www.facebook.in” is a secure Facebook login page. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns or see anything else that is suspicious on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Emma
User Operations
Facebook

So, Emma from Facebook basically confirmed that http://www.facebook.in/ is a legit Facebook website and a property of Facebook. Thus, we can safely conclude that facebook.in is Facebook’s entry into India and probably will be the website to which the Indian users will get redirected in the near future. Facebook India is still broken and doesn’t work properly so I guess it is still more of a placeholder than a proper Indian version for Facebook.

A similar step was taken by MySpace (http://in.myspace.com/), Orkut (http://www.orkut.co.in/) and YouTube (http://in.youtube.com/) recently. Facebook will compete with Orkut, which is the leader in the Social Networking segment in India.

There is a kind of rush to get into the Indian market which is still in its nascent stage but has a whole lot of potential keeping in view the fact that majority of the Indian population is young and broadband penetration is increasing as every day passes.

Well, I’m a relieved man, now that it has been confirmed by Facebook that it wasn’t any scam.

I use AirTel as my ISP. Sometimes, I forget to add the domain suffix and prefix and just simply enter the name of the website. The AirTel DNS is intelligent and redirects me to the required website.

But something unusual happened today. I keyed in “facebook” in the address bar of my Opera browser and hit enter. I was redirected to facebook.in. At first, I didn’t notice anything strange and didn’t even look at the URL in the address bar. I simply put in my username and password and proceeded to login. But the login took forever.

I refreshed the page and this time I noticed something different. The username and password fields did not have their usual yellow borders, which show that you have the credentials stored in the Opera Wand password manager. This time I decided to look at the address bar and saw that I was on http://www.facebook.in and not on facebook.com

I did a quick whois for the domain. The information seemed pretty fake to me but the server it points to seems to be a legit facebook server. It shows up results when you search for friends but everything else on the website is broken. The results also seem to have been fetched from Facebook as the original Facebook uses “s.php” for fetching results whereas facebook.in uses “srch.php“.

So, I am not sure if this is a fake website or a legit one which is yet to be launched. As a precaution, I logged into Facebook and changed my password. I’ve emailed Facebook, lets see what they have to say about this. This intelligent feature of my ISP turned out to be a big security risk for me!

A couple of days ago (May 22nd to be precise), I logged into my facebook account. As I was going through the News Feed on the home page, I noticed this :

Look carefully at the news in the red box. It tells me that a guy named Vishal Kharbanda has accepted my invitation to join Facebook. Now this set my alarm bells ringing. Why? Because I don’t know any Vishal Kharbanda and have never invited anybody by this name.

So, just to investigate further, I clicked on the guys name. A box popped up.

Had the dude been my friend, his profile would’ve opened up instead of this box. I saw that we had one friend in common. I clicked on “1 mutual friend” and it revealed the thumbnail of one of my friend. So, my friend had invited Mr. Vishal but Facebook incorrectly shows me that I have invited the guy.

The conclusion: Facebook is already messed up with thousands of useless apps and now they post incorrect information to your news feed. Way to go.