TechCrunch BCC Fail Reveal Emails of Everyone Who Applied to Disrupt Hackathon | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch BCC Fail Reveal Emails of Everyone Who Applied to Disrupt Hackathon

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33 pointsjgv27 comments

Hey email clients. More than 10 recipients? Make the user confirm with "Are you sure you want to send this to 11 people?"

And just add another message for every order of magnitude increase in the number of recipients.

Outlook does that. Also messages when you email large mailing lists (exchange) or people outside your org.

A hackathon with 500 TechCrunch readers? My guess is that there will be a total of 4 lines of code written. But hey, programming is really cool!

Did you know GroupMe was started at a TechCrunch hackathon?

I was there.

actually, those four lines are just UTF-8 BOM markers

Actually, their NY hackathon last year was pretty awesome and there were lots of good hacks (digging up some of the demo videos).

I've heard teams have won hackathons with 0 lines of code, which makes sense to me. Biz model+mockups+presentation (and if it seems technologically feasible) should beat the neatest app.

Just so I'm clear, you're saying a neat idea should beat a neat app?

Yes, but not just an idea. Assume each entry is scored with equal weight in terms of the business model, functionality, pitch and team. If functionality=0 (no working app) you may limit the maximum absolute score to 75, which may in fact be greater than any other entry. If it would advisable to purposely not make something that works would depend on the competition criteria.

They’re also “removing” anyone who has replied all

It's TC's event and they can do whatever they want. If TC sends a reply all, it's an honest mistake. If you do it, you get removed from the list. Because they can.

They warned that anyone replying all after the warning would be removed. Seems like a fair way to stop the spam.

That whole part was fake. It wasn't sent by TC.

it's fake. just didn't want to get 100+ stupid emails in my inbox ;)

that's brilliant!

I learned a valuable lesson today ... never give out my true email address to ANYONE! :p But seriously ... do people routinely create aliases for every form they submit on the net? In this case, I had an expectation of privacy. Feeling really screwed now :(

I do - my personal email (I have my own domain) is only given out to personal friends and with the explicit instruction that they better not use it to sign up to competitions or 'tell a friend / share the reward' forms. Some still do of course, but at least gmail's spam filter filters out most of the junk.

For any 'commercial' site or correspondence, I create a unique alias. Well 'create' is too formal, I simply have a catch-all address so I can create 'aliases' on the spur of the moment. I rely on gmail's spam filter to filter out the rubbish and if a particular alias becomes 'compromised', I can create a custom rule that deletes email received at that particular alias.

I do the same. zoneedit.com is a free and very easy way to do this. Register a domain and use zonedit for DNS and email forwarding/filtering.

Spam Gourmet is good for the second case. blah.myname@spamgourmet.com gets forwarded to my real email. I can configure a maximum number of emails that will work before the alias stops functioning.

The only drawback is the domain is not great for dictating over the phone or in person.

You are feeling screwed? Because it was disclosed you entered a competition? What were you going to do if you got in, wear a balaclava and talk through some sort of voice altering device to hide your true voice?

And if you don't get in are you afraid that people are going to ridicule you for the rest of your life because your name was in the to list with 500 people?

I appreciate that TC made a mistake, and you would think they might have gone a bit further in preventing this sort of mistake, but I think we have all suffered far worse invasions of privacy than this (half the people on the list probably tweeted that they'd entered anyway).

To clarify: I feel screwed because my previously spam-free mailbox had dozens of messages from recruiters and people wanting to "hustle" (get feedback on their projects, etc.). I generally believe in good karma and offer feedback on HN or Forrst. I am annoyed that people are taking advantage of the TC mistake.

I honestly don't understand how this is a scandal at all. Sure, it's a mild annoyance to receive 27 reply-all messages. Newsworthy? Not in the least.

This is how college flame wars get started! And it's right before finals, too!

Heh, the "removing" email was from "Techcruch Disupt"

We’d like to ask everyone at this time to stop replying all as not to negatively disrupt all 500 applicants on the list

Thank You, TechCrunch Disupt

HAHA THIS IS FUNNY (update: it's not TC disrupt writing it)

Another TC fail...

your comment missed the word "another" :)

Lol, fixed.

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