2,536 karma · joined May 16, 2014
The root cause was a captain who mistakenly reacted off of 12 hour old data and ignored another source of data that contradicted it. Pretty surprising given the lengths the article goes through to impress upon the reader how "safety conscious" he was.
"[...] with strong guarantees that the data of end user who has opted for paid service is kept private and not monetized anyhow."
As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement. The data is somehow segregated so that it's excluded from being sold to advertisers in any form. The user can have their data deleted permanently at any time.
It obviously wouldn't prevent someone from authorizing a 3rd party app to all of my Facebook data, but that is more about Facebook educating people about what they're consenting to rather than a philosophical debate about ownership of data.
The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.
That might've worked, except it doesn't delineate short and long-term gains, and even worse it counts every transfer to GDAX as a sale. That meant hours of pouring through GDAX's even more bare-bones reports to figure out which coins were sold, which were kept, which were transferred back to Coinbase or to other wallets, which coins were held for longer than a year...
That process, across several different cryptocurrencies and thousands of transactions, took 8 hours of work. At the end of it all you're left with the sinking worry that you overlooked something and are overpaying or underpaying.
That ship has already sailed I'm afraid. Nearly every common internet service now has a single provider that dwarfs the few competitors it has, both in actual usage and mindshare.
Oftentimes that mind-boggling success was fueled by easy treatment from regulators/the government as well as fate and circumstance, not from any groundbreaking ingenuity from the company that made it.
It may sound strange today to think of social media, internet search, etc as a public utility, but within a decade or two it will seem like common sense. Google, Facebook, YouTube and others are censoring their way towards nationalization.
People should be cautious about flouting the "they're private businesses and can do what they want" argument. It actually makes a compelling case for nationalizing these services and treating them as public utilities, a line of thinking that is rapidly picking up steam in various political groups.
Who meets your criteria for expertise on saying whether the car could have stopped or not? Uber?
In this sense, it is a possibly relevant detail of the story.
This should be the main takeaway from this article--that Facebook relies on the honor system for protecting user data.
Breaking a company's TOS isn't a crime in and of itself, and social media data has been used for political targeting for years now. Insinuating that Trump won because of a nefarious brain control operation fueled by data from a "data breach" is irresponsible.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I'd argue that this article pretty well encapsulates all of the various "scandals" the Trump administration is being bombarded with: breathlessly exaggerated so that people whose mind is already made up can scan over it and add another tickmark to their list of "scandals"
What happened to Martin is an injustice, and I'm saddened and disturbed by the people who celebrate it just because it was an injustice done against a "bad guy".
If a country doesn't like my site, they're free to block it themselves instead of compelling me to.
It's up to the German courts/government to deny access to sites that break their laws, not try to impose their law on people outside their jurisdiction.
> All of my cameras, for example, have some degree of motion detection and the ability to upload files to an FTP server or send an email.
Am I missing something?
Does the breach call for some punitive response? Definitely. Does it justify destroying a $14B company? No. That's an overly emotional, witch-hunting type of response.
HN of all places should be sympathetic to what happened to Equifax; they neglected to update a framework which had a vulnerability granting full remote code execution. That's game over from an info sec standpoint, and how many developers here can state, with 100% confidence, that every library and every framework and piece of application code in their own work is totally bulletproof and will never fall victim to something similar?
The breach should be used by everyone as a lesson, and as I stated earlier Equifax should receive some punitive action (arguably already delivered by the hit to their stock price and the public floggings from the congressional hearings). But saying that Equifax should be bankrupted by it, or that the executives or developers should be thrown in jail? Be careful what you wish for. Today Equifax, tomorrow you.
If and when they are solved, the incredible hashing power of the network plus the massive amount of Bitcoin software and support should restore its reputation as the premier cryptocurrency.
Claiming that "only a very small percentage of the population can ever achieve these shapes" smacks as totally false to me. Do you have any data or sources to back that up?
edit: Would the downvoters care to contribute? I asked for some data or, at the very least, some sound reasoning for the claim that it's literally impossible for the majority of people to have healthy physiques.
If someone is a senior engineer at one of those companies, I assume they have a reasonable amount of talent. It's not easy to fake it or avoid expectations as a senior engineer.
I'm sure it still requires a huge amount of talent and isn't lacking in meaty, difficult problems, but the core product just seems so unimportant.