GoogleMeetRoulette: Joining random meetings
martinvigo.com
martinvigo.com
(So goes the thinking; it obviously has its pros and cons...and HN readership eats these guys' psychology for breakfast anyway, with a generally systems-focused mindset)
I don't think we'd expect this level of security to be acceptable for email access. It's really just a matter of enforcing a pin number, along with a meeting code.
I know for our work Skype for Business meetings we interrogate unidentified guests and boot them if they fail to appropriately identify themselves.
I have thought that long running recurring meetings is a security risk because of the use of the same pin
Pinpointing the source isn't necessary, though, only knowing that the leak occurred and the approximate number of people "in on it". Even limiting this to leaks to the media for information shared at company meetings (so the number of people is equal to the number of employees) could provide interesting data, assuming a large enough sample size (and that leaks are numerous enough).
Mole-Hunter-As-A-Service™
"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin
The post mentions that Google made some fixes and reverted them due to customer complaints, do we know what those fixes were? Have they fixed the issue?
However it seems the recurring meeting number+pin doesn't change. I feel this is a better UI, and only a minor risk with an easy workaround - update the meeting - which you would probably do anyway to remove the attendee who is no longer included
(also a choice of on hold music would be nice but that is just dreaming)
Most of the times, random codes failed but once I managed to accidentally dial in into a Facebook meeting.
Fun times!
However in Google's case their top bounty is $3133.70
Of course, you couldn't do this nowadays because abusive people would show up and ruin it for everyone. I don't know why they didn't back then.
People who had early access to Internet (or any tech) were more likely to be nerds.
I think initially the Internet brought people closer together. It was like ham radio - you could connect with people in a relatively small but very distributed community of hobbyists and experts. Once everyone joined and it became ubiquitous, it's had the opposite effect - it's replaced most of our social interactions but there's an increased anonymity and social separation.
I was not trying to categorize people, but I was trying to abstractly point out how this might happen, but I used a "category" to explain it simply.
> I think initially the Internet brought people closer together. It was like ham radio - you could connect with people in a relatively small but very distributed community of hobbyists and experts. Once everyone joined and it became ubiquitous, it's had the opposite effect - it's replaced most of our social interactions but there's an increased anonymity and social separation.
Exactly!
"nerds" is just a type of social circle, who're also the initial adopters of a tech, you don't want to be an outcast by doing something that is not "nerdy" in the early stages, because it is easily noticeable by other nerds of that tech. When the social circle expands to potentially bring in other types of social circles (by going mainstream) and becomes (pseudo)anonymous, you'll obviously find a large variation of (acceptable) behaviors among the different social circles, which may or may not overlap with each other.
Another thing I remember about this is that I could make unlimited calls to land lines in the United States from my country. Pretty interesting for a 12 years old kid.
In my case not ICQ, but a local messaging app had this feature as well. When I have moved to a new city a girl who has also recently moved there has found me by age and location. We've been married for 13 years now :)
The concept is intriguing, at least if one could keep it on real meeting topics which could have a world of interest and discovery (vs 4chan-ish foolery, of which there is already plenty available)