I’m pretty pissed. A couple of months ago I configured Thunderbird to connect to Facebook’s XMPP-powered chat. I did get logged out sometimes, with mails from Facebook saying someone tried to access my account from an unknown location. Given the origin IP-address mentioned (in the private 10.x.x.x-range), this looked like a Facebook-internal problem (between their XMPP & Authentication servers).
Things have however taken a turn for the worse now; I’m not only getting logged out from Facebook on my 3 devices (work Win XP PC, home Ubuntu netbook & Android smartphone), I’m now even getting locked out of my account altogether, having to change my password on my smartphone (as that one has the OTP generator in the Facebook app). This happened 4 times in the last week and it is that frustrating that I disabled Facebook Chat in Thunderbird. And maybe that’s just what Facebook is aiming for; encouraging users to use Facebook Chat in a Facebook-owned/ -controlled context instead of in a neutral, ad-free 3rd party application? Wankers!
Maybe it’s a Thunderbird issue? I’ve been using Facebook chat from Adium for a while now, and haven’t noticed anything strange (yet) (my last datapoint dates from yesterday).
It’s not Thunderbird-specific, as Pidgin-users are reporting the same problem. As far as I know, Adium uses the same libpurple library from Pidgin, so it’s interesting that it does sometimes work and sometimes it does not?
Things just got a tad more bizarre; I again got logged & locked out, without any XMPP-client trying to connect.
Just info; this is the procedure I have to go through;
* try to log back in in the browser
* it asks for the Code Generator OTP
* open up Facebook Android App (FAA), where I very briefly see an OTP, before …
* I’m being logged out in FAA
* I’m being redirected to mobile browser to unlock account (new password)
* I have to log back into FAA with new password
* I get the OTP from FAA
* I enter the OTP in browser (without having to enter new password!)
So I’m not convinced this is related to Thunderbird/ Pidgin any more, to be honest. Those Facebook-guys still are wankers though … ;-)
Definitely a Facebook problem as I’m also getting the same error message whenever I log into Facebook from another device (other than my work laptop).
Facebook do not want you leaving Facebook they want to keep you so they can feed you with targeted adverts. Facebook are always changing their code to keep this so. But empires rise and they fall.