Hacker News Reader

I tend to react similarly but this event is the first one that triggered some of my non-tech FB contacts to leave for more geeky alternatives, namely diaspora. The groups of his friends is discussing moving as well.

This is anecdotal but I hope several groups are considering the same now...

I’ll give back another anecdote. This did nothing for anyone I know.

Not only did this not do anything for anyone I know as well, many people I know used complacency language when talking about it; large data breaches seem normalized now, they don't faze the tech-illiterate anymore.

The HN bubble sort of gives us a false sense that this is a Big Fucking Deal, but I didn't get the sense that my friends and cared, or even really knew.

I’m tech literate and they don’t phase me either. Why would they? My business is already in the streets. What does it matter if one more company leaks my personal info?

I’m not sure they faze much of anyone besides some of Reddit and HN. The tech literate friends I know don’t care much either. There’s a handful of things that both those sites over-do like crazy compared to the norm and this is one of them.

> Equifax lost the personal data of all Americans and is doing fine.

Because Equifax lost the personal data of _Americans_.

Not all nations/regulators are so hands-off and Facebook is an international company with the vast majority of its users outside the US.

It’s like people who make those posts didn’t remember that the tobacco industry still exists. Literally killing people and lying about it for profit isn’t “company ending” if you have scads of money and lawyers, and a market eager for your poison.

> It’s like people who make those posts didn’t remember that the tobacco industry still exists

Ah, but at least everyone agrees you should quit smoking cigarettes for your health.

Oddly enough, Scientologists believe lung cancer is caused by not smoking enough[1].

1 - http://www.xenu.net/archive/multimedia.html#smoking

True, but took about much more than a century for that, and for quite a long time tobacco smoke was seen as medicinal!

>Like many other compromises, this one will be forgotten.

When people say, "It'll work this way in the future because it worked this way in the past" I tend to discredit them.

I mean I could provide statistical data and show trends etc, but that's a lot of effort. I am presuming that people here will have kept up on major breaches to realize that point. That might be a really bad assumption but I know there are some really smart infosec people on hacker news.

Yes, social events do not always follow the same pattern (see Trump election), but the odds in this case are very much on the side of Facebook's breach being the same as others before it.

This is what climate change news feels like too.

> "Blah happened at City/Nation and it is potentially a planet ending event."

It's hard to take Chicken Little serious. All of the sensationalism feels like a magician waving a cloth with one hand, to distract the audience from the other hand.

I don't know what to tell you. The sensationalism is there because it's a catastrophic problem that requires major action.

There's consensus that a very bad thing is happening, its effects are already being felt, and they will get much worse over time. Scientists have tried to communicate this in every way, but people have hemmed and hawed or outright denied it for so long that it's going to be bad no matter what at this point. There are still things that can be done to reduce the impact, but the picture isn't good.

Heh, just to clarify, are you referring to climate change, surveillance economy, data breaches or all of the above?

As it applies to all, and yet, they all end up blaming end users in one way or another while patently ignoring the forces that drive public policies... Profit, industry, Guv regs & profit.

I know, I know, profit deserves two mentions.

Everything is a catastrophic problem to someone. Sensationalism is about the worst way to communicate this, and is likely why so many refuse to believe. The reality of climate change is that we're trading inhospitable poles for an inhospitable equator.

Yes, this will be painful to those who have to adapt or relocate. But it is a form of NIMBYism.

There’s a lot more than weather to climate change. What if there were no more fish? What if the ocean didn’t absorb CO2. Read more.

Life is full of scary problems. What if your car catches fire? Life can be made scarier if you pretend that you have to solve all the problems yourself. We can do anything, but we cannot do everything by ourselves.

If fish die, surely some other life form will fill that niche, and we'll eat that. It's not as though humans are the most adaptive life form in existence.

Except one is backed by large amounts of data, and the other is just some guy pontificating.

I'm the OP. The data is qualitatively different, but as I repeatedly say in the thread, we know very little so far except that 50m accounts were entirely compromised.