RoadieRoller

Barely a month back in the facebook data breach thread in HN, I was downvoted and my comment removed when I said that it has become a fashion for the top 500 web/e-com companies to come one day and announce data breach and walk away. I said there that it all looks to me as part of a conspiracy theory where they hide behind a breach to sell data/ buy data en masse for marketing purposes.

A wild thought - How much of this is caused by H1B visa restrictions and higher visa rejection rates? Dallas, and Texas in general, is home to the fourth largest Indian population in US. I reckon that these high paid tech people are abstaining from purchasing any real estate owing to the uncertainity in their existence here.

I don't have any evidence. But I just like to think it that way. Also it could be because I finished reading most of the books mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749283

BTW there are people who need data, not just people within US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/world/asia/trump-china-el... "Mr. Trump did not suggest that China’s behavior was on the scale of Russia’s sophisticated campaign of manipulating social media and the release of hacked emails during the 2016 presidential election."

https://www.rappler.com/technology/news/211276-facebook-twit... Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opened the hearing by citing the promise of social media before adding, "But we've also learned about how vulnerable social media is to corruption and misuse. The very worst examples of this are absolutely chilling and a threat to our democracy."

Already, Russia and Iran have sought to interfere by passing themselves off as American groups or people to shape the views of American voters, say lawmakers and technology executives. Facebook, Google and Twitter together took down hundreds of accounts tied to the two countries last month, a move that prompted Burr to open the hearing Wednesday by expressing fear that "more foreign countries are now trying to use your products to shape and manipulate American political sentiment as an instrument of statecraft."

Cambridge Analytica - Worked with some Indian Political Parties or the Government itself too.

Lawmakers aren't limited in the questions they can pose Facebook and Twitter. Sandberg's boss, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, faced questions in April hearings that extended far beyond the reason the hearing was called: Facebook's entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed 87 million users' personal information. Sandberg could also face questions on Cambridge Analytica.

My mind has fashioned me to think that these leaks, so called, are planned. To why I think so, is simple. When you, as Facebook, sell user data to other companies/third parties/countries, then it is crime, or is subject to investigation when it is known. But these so called leaks, are deemed "we are sorry, we will fix it, but we are so sorry about the data". And that is it. No one is responsible.

Now you have 50 million people's data for sale. Are you in that 50 million? You don't know or you will never know.

Connected incidents - British Airways Data Leak, Equifax, Uber Data Theft Cover Up, Air Canada, T-Mobile, Dixons Carphone......how many such. All of them soon will be available for sale, with no one to blame for.

My Team uses CosmosDB heavily (so far, and not too far anymore) and it is another half-baked service. The support people are Indians (Microsoft outsourced Azure support to an Indian company - MindTree) and are not very knowledgeable on the CosmosDB service. They always point us to the URI of a web article (of course from Microsoft) and says everything will work if you follow the article, and close the ticket. Over the time, we understood that we know more than them on CosmosDB, and used to ignore their replies, but nevertheless raise tickets to make sure that they are aware.

One of the masterpieces I've read on developer created UI. https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-...

True, no denying that. I wasn't thinking of snooping into their profile details. I was mostly thinking about - women quoting HN during technical discussions inside their company, present their startups to YC and stuffs like that.

Freshdesk/Freshworks (Series F, $149M Total) CEO, Girish Mathrubhutham, has penned down a memoir of how a comment on HN has enabled him start his startup journey.

https://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-...

Somewhere someone could be selling your data for money. I can imagine the below happening. After all, all corporates are hand-in-glove with each other when it comes to public's privacy.

This is probably what your ISP is doing. Take your MAC Addresses, try to find the phones in your house which is connected to the wifi, take those MAC addresses to all the telecoms, get the SIM card number and the phone number associated with those MAC numberss, send those phone numbers to the banks to find matching bank accounts and the associated credit card number, along with your registered email address, get the purchase history from the bank on the credit card number, compare it with your browsing history and sell all of this to another company and make money.

Innovative Bangaloreans and Madrasis (Madras is the old name of Chennai and Madrasis refers to people who live there). IBM has huge presence (8-10 Offices) in Chennai.