Comments on: Is Making Friends Social Engineering?

By: Never underestimate the importance of politics in social networking « TechWag

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:54:39 +0000

[...] Is Making Friends Social Engineering? (simonsalt.wordpress.com) [...]

By: Russ

Russ — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:31:39 +0000

The only reason Social Engineering doesn’t work for me is because of how “we” used it back in the 80s and 90s during a lot of the hack/phrack/2600-ish times. It meant something a lot different then, but I see where you’re coming from.

It was great to have you in our Salon, you were a great participant and a great sport!

By: Daniel Verhoeven

Daniel Verhoeven — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:18:01 +0000

This is a interesting question you raise. I will try to answer it from 2 different angles that both add to your view. One there is an empirical social network analysis that shows that Twitter is not a social network at all. Two our ability to make friends is not learned behaviour by excellence. In the nurture/nature debate, at least 50% should be attributed to nature. Recent (last 10 years) neurological research points to 'mirror neurons' being essential in creating empathy for others. You can read e.g. the article about it in the scholarpedia. A fiew years ago I have reviewed the opposite phenomenon of friendship: rejection. Also rejection is a process whose mechanisms are printed in our neurological circuits. See my paper Does rejection hurt?

By: Tom Myer

Tom Myer — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:24:47 +0000

I think that at the end of the day, all human “friending” activity is based on things like affinity (this person shares my values, or is from my home country, or likes what I like), attraction (whether physical, emotional, etc), and some other mix of risk/reward/gain.

In high school, some made friends with the outcasts because that was a way to cope with being an outcast. Others made friends with the popular and cool kids in order to be seen as cool — tragically, a lot of those people just came off as posers.

I like your use of “social engineering” BTW, as it relates to using non-technical means to exploit (or gain access to) an information system. In some cases, that’s what is going on, and in others, there are genuine connections.

I have a feeling that the next generation of tools like Twitter and Facebook will allow us to create groups/circles of trust–family and close friends in one, colleagues in another, old friends from high school we haven’t seen in 15 years in another. TweetDeck already gives us some of this, but it’s crucial in our attempts to maintain all these connections.