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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Great letter. Wanna bet it was completely ignored? Glad to see it here. Maybe it won't be ignored.

Librarians rock. There's even a show about them[0], Starring Number One.

I can't access the gMail account I set up, because I made a mistake, when setting the password, and did not save the one I used.

It will not allow me to access the account I set up.

After a while, I just gave up. I am satisfied that someone can't use my gMail address to impersonate me (because even I can't get it). I have plenty of other eMail accounts.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3663490/

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Currently the doc says:

""" STOP EMAILING ME AND CALLING THE LIBRARY ABOUT THIS

This was shared without my permission. This was not supposed to be public. It was meant to be shared internally to Google. It was not an open letter. It went directly to the security team and we had a conversation about it and it’s over. This is from well over a year ago and we no longer are having this issue as often as before due to various improvements.

Please delete this from HN. You are essentially DDOS’ing my work email and the library branch phone number making it very difficult for us to perform our duties as civil servants today.

I do not know how this made it onto HN. Someone must have leaked it. If they need to work that out internally then I’m leaving this here for their reference. But I do not want news reporters or random HN readers contacting me or the Free Library over this. """

Seems like it was not ignored and was already resolved.

> we no longer are having this issue as often as before due to various improvements.

Doesn't sound like it was completely resolved. In fact, it sounds like Google may have treated it as a "squeaky wheel," and only that library is getting better help.

In any case, I think that HN (@dang) should honor her request; regardless of its resolution.

I would suggest that the letter is great, and should be made more available, sans the identifying information.

I'd suggest someone try and get her permission to host an anonymized version of the page, on a different server that could handle the lurve.

> Wanna bet it was completely ignored?

Well, looking at the date...

> "Today, July 19th 2021"

Edited Sept 10,2021 per Activity and Details. The year is not a misprint.

The author updated the document to say that they worked with google security and the problems have been resolved. So it wasn’t ignored.

So what's the resolution for the billions of people who weren't contacted?

>I made a mistake, when setting the password

That's a feature, not a bug.

Yes, but not being able to recover the account, is a bug.

The issue was that I used a randomly-generated password from 1Password, and accidentally re-generated, before copying, so the original was lost.

That's a fairly common mistake. I'm usually careful to avoid that (now).

At least in bitwarden app they provide history of passwords for every url.

So does 1Password. However, the generator can be run standalone (not connected with an entry). In that case, the password is not saved, because there's no entry to save it to.

It does not offer to automatically create an entry, until after the login, so it's still quite possible to "fall through the cracks," which is what happened here.

Yeah, my bad. :P

Some people generate random passwords and never use them, always using recovery to regain access. That has to work.

This comment is sort of funny, because the author says that Google is being responsive but is upset at the army of HN commenters (plus the guy who posted this originally.)

> Starring Number One.

OG Mystique as well. Rebecca Romijn has done some great roles.

> Wanna bet it was completely ignored?

I just tweeted it to @Google. Maybe if enough people ping Google about it?

It's important to understand that Google is, as an organizational body, psychopathic in nature. (Many corporations are, but Google especially, through well-indoctrinated concepts like being solely data-driven and putting scale first, combined with a belief that Google hires the best people and hence is already doing the best possible thing.)

Google does not care. You cannot make Google care. Employees who care get fired, or burn out trying to make the company care, and inevitably quit. Google is Google, and the only thing that's going to make it change is regulation.

This is an extremely bleak perspective. Individuals care, but most are powerless to make a difference if they don't work in the area of concern. It's often a knowledge sharing game of making sure the right people hear about it which can be hard. They are intentionally shielded from direct feedback to keep them focused, but that is a double edged sword. I honestly believe the reason viral stories get resolved is because the information gets to the right people, not because of a desire to avoid bad PR. Google is a collection of largely independent tiny organizations.

Information/signal propagation (along with costs incurred by remedial activity) are the most important damn topic in our society today.

Almost every problem out there at some level is an info prop problem, and in cases where it isn't the signal getting lost, it's the remediatory activity being judged as too expensive, and thereby getting the process routed to /dev/null

It’s indicative of structural limitation and is not necessarily any reflection on the innate humanity or lack thereof of participants in Google.

Google has designed itself to be psychopathic from a human frame of reference because it is more streamlined (profitable) to be psychopathic. It is a product of its environment.

The letter was subsequently updated to say that the situation has improved and in fact the author is currently looking to get less attention (apparently it was posted to HN without their knowledge and now their work email is getting a ton of non-helpful noise from hackernews commenters). So it would probably be better to not tweet about this.

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