Facebook and Google Were Victims of $100M Payment Scam | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Google Were Victims of $100M Payment Scam

fortune.com

What is the state-of-the art way to block those annoying autoplay videos?

I have previously enabled click-to-play for flash, but now that videos have moved to html5, that no longer works. So then I installed the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" chrome extension, which worked for a while, but seems to be less and less effective these days. Then I resorted to picking site elements with Ublock. Amazingly, this didn't work today for this Fortune article. I finally had to just block their CDN (brightcove) via Privacy Badger.

Surely there must be a better way. This is just getting insane.

I use Firefox and have disabled autoplaying across the board by going to about:config and setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.

Unfortunately it doesn't offer exceptions at all (eg. by domain), so you'll need to click-to-start media on every site. IMO it's worth that minor effort.

Have you tried to disable JavaScript? That might work. There are even add-ons that let you do with one click.

Then you get an empty page...

Disabling JS and CSS kinda works, if you don't mind useless images that take the whole screen.

Here's an archived copy, which also works with JS disabled:

https://archive.fo/JwNn6

The interesting aspect is how a $100m theft is not considered a "material event" with regards to SEC reporting at these firms.

agree 100%. A company doesn't have sufficient controls (or auditing!?) around its financials and doesn't catch rogue payments up to 10s of millions over a TWO YEAR period, and thats only maybe a material event? Could be isloated event, could be the scammer told some friends how to pull it off with other suppliers, etc...

Sounded like the SEC is getting caught with their pants down on this too, though. Maybe not sure how to deal with these situations?

You would be shocked by how much large companies can loose as a result of fraud and inventory loss without reporting. Typically companies establish a percentage of revenue which when surpassed triggers disclosure. It's usually in the 1% neighborhood. Alphabet reported $89.5 billion in revenue in just 2016 & this fraud reportedly took place over two years. In other words, not even close to what most companies would consider reportable from a percentage perspective.

If you look at FB's and Google's annual revenue, the time period of the fraud, and the fact that it appears they got most of the money back, I'm surprised why anyone would consider this a "material event". Google had around 90 billion dollars in revenue in 2016. No, I don't see why a, say, $10 million dollar loss over a couple years to Google would be considered material.

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