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Until last weekend when a fix quietly went into its code, Facebook was unintentionally publishing information about its users, Yahoo developer and scifi novelist Kent Brewster illustrates on his blog. Code monkeys should go there now. For those of you in a higher pay grade, here's the executive summary.

Facebook uses a lot of JavaScript and "any third party can use it by including it with a <script> tag." These publicly available scripts amount to a doorway for hackers into Facebook's database. In this case, Brewster demonstrated how third parties could tell if visitors were logged onto Facebook or not. It's fixed now, so you can't check it out anymore. Well, that's helpful. Here's a clue: Yes, we're all logged onto Facebook all day long. Kent, dude, when you're done hacking Facebook, how about creating something at Yahoo worth breaking into?