Yahoo collaborated with Iran, providing info of 200,000 users with blogs | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo collaborated with Iran, providing info of 200,000 users with blogs

government.zdnet.com

33 pointsrms17 comments

I don't see this as any more troubling than the fact that Google turns over my email if the US government demands it for a lawsuit.

not much chance of you being tortured or killed for the content of your email though.

While I get the sentiment - if you operate in a country you need to follow the laws of the land no matter how you might personally view them - the reality is that this action might have actually killed people. Even if it didn't do - do you think that in that position yourself you could have said with a clear conscience: "nothing bad will happen to these people" if I give out their details?

I didn't think US companies were supposed to operate in Iran in any case.

For almost a year, Yahoo stopped accepting new e-mail registrations from Iran [1], but I'm told they didn't touch existing accounts. Last August they started accepting new registrations again [2]. I think sanctions wouldn't be any issue because no money changes hands? That was apparently Google's position.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/yahoo_google_microsf...

[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/yahoo_microsoft_iran...

The laws of a religious dictatorship doesn't count for anything - you can and should break them.

I'm sure you have a point to make, but I downvoted you because it is very poorly made and just seems like some kind of bad sarcasm. Please expand on your statement...

The point was basically this: The US, while far from perfect, gives people a fair trial, in front of a jury of their peers to laws made by elected representatives that answer at least partly to their constitutions but a constitution and bill of rights prevent this from turning completely into a tyranny of the majority. This gives the laws and system of justice some moral weight.

In Iran you would be hanged simply because you don't believe in Islam, or think women should have equal rights.

This means that there should be no more respect for laws made by Iran than for the average street bully.

"In Iran you would be hanged simply because you don't believe in Islam, or think women should have equal rights."

I challenge you to provide a single reference for any of the above alleged "hanging" offenses. (You will be held to your statements of fact regarding "believe" and "think".)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...

I invite you to do a web search for "Bahá'í Iran".

My understanding is that Google will only turn over email with a court order, not just because the secret police want to go on a fishing expedition through ALL the email accounts to line up candidates for torture and extra-judicial killings.

Hmm.. Maybe because the US government isn't likely to imprison or torture you if you claim the elections were rigged?

While US companies have no obligation to act in the interest of human rights, it would be nice if they, nonetheless, felt compelled to do so.

Google claims "don't be evil" - this should extend to using information to help, not hurt, the oppressed people of the world.

Yahoo makes no such claim, but the beneficiaries of a free nation have a moral obligation not to choose short-term profits over the lives of those unlucky enough to be born into nations that have no such freedom.

Indeed.

The thing about "don't be evil" is that once you do something evil, saying you follow that rule is extremely cynical.

At first glance this appears to be a shameful betrayal. But included in yahoo's terms are agreements that users will not use their services to violate local laws. Dissident Iranians are much better off following advice from Reporters without Borders:

http://www.rsf.org/spip.php?page=article&id_article=3384...

This thing fails the smell test, IMO (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870920).

The idea that Yahoo, in a matter of a few short hours, was able to search and index all the user accounts that touched a blog system over the course of five years is a bit odd to me.

It's not impossible, and given the China issues in Y's past, it's not implausible, just not that likely to me.

I can't make any reasonable statement about the likelihood of Yahoo having done this, but it seems easily possible to do in a few minutes. Forget hours, unless there is some fundamental aspect of the data structure used that I'm missing.

For example, I have a nightly process (plain jane RBDMS) that searches over 85 million records to match up with 100K records where the matches may be exact or provide potential matches from the larger table back to the smaller. This process typically takes less than 20 minutes and the system runs on what I would define as relatively average hardware.

I am assuming that the user accounts are logged in some way that keeps them from having to do some awful full text scan of blog comments for each of the 20 million users checked.

[EDIT: Rechecked log files, runtime is 15-20 mins instead of 5]

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