fanso99

This is news to me. Was the customer list also stolen? Specifically, customer records linked to individual vaults?

My concern with anyone identifying themselves as being affected by this breach is that a 3rd party would be able to collect a lot of information about the user for a very targeted social engineering attack. Conversations here often disclose personal information such as approximate age, location, past experiences, hobbies, etc. It's a gold mine for social engineering.

They are owned by LogMeIn, which is a pretty shady company in my book (not malicious necessarily, but not transparent).

Please stop commenting whether you are a LastPass user or not. Some of your profiles on HN have an email address and in general all your comments are public so can be mined, plus "rich techies" could be prime targets for more direct and elaborate phishing campaigns.

> That consent was granted the day they accepted/sent the friend request. [...] They can do with that information as they please, which includes giving it to a 3rd party.

Hm - no. If I accept a friend request I allow that user to read my profile but I do not authorize any 3rd parties to access it. If you show me any mention of 3rd party access in a friend request - I might change my view.

> What if a friend gives me their password or remote desktop access to their computer and I look at your profile?

You don't seem to make any distinction between a first/second party (me and my friend) and a 3rd party (CA accessing data through an API). In fact there is a difference that's very clearly defined in contract law, user agreements, etc.

> While I don't know what the prompt exactly said, I bet it was specific enough.

An informed consent from users who's information is going to be collected. In this case it was the friends of the person signing up. Again, that's the only reason Cambridge Analytica was successful. They didn't have that many users, they collected a ton of data on the users' friends.

> I agree. And that company is not Meta.

Meta had an obligation to protect its users' data. It failed at that.

The main perpetrator in this case - Alexandr Kogan (now Spectre) - is now a tech entrepreneur leading a company with an investment from a US-based accelerator 43 North. That's how we punish them.

I am not buying this. It's borderline victim-blaming. An informed consent must be required. Giving access to an app is not the same as sharing your password with them and explicitly allowing them to do anything they want. Saying that, even if you do share your password, the app should not be able to collect data on your friends without their consent.

There is a huge difference between you stalking someone else's friends and a company collecting billions of data points to use for political manipulation. The purpose, the scale, the incentives are different. We need to stop assuming that the rules should be the same for an individual and a business just because they use the same loophole.

Semantic Web 3.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I might be remembering the details wrong, but wasn't the main issue that users half-knowingly allowed spying on their friends without any consent required from those friends? Open API isn't the reason this abuse happened IMO - Facebook failed to prevent massive data collection on users who did not give any consent.

I might be wrong, but I always lean towards this being the result of prioritization. Most engineers know the difference but prioritize other aspects than ethical. I am not even judging that, just describing. After all, implementing a dark UX pattern that will inconvenience some unknown to you users is not as high priority as providing to your own family.

Because looking back at the decades of your work while being retired is just a sweet ethical exercise with very few direct personal and financial consequences.

If you are an engineer employing dark UX patterns _today_ you must look at yourself and evaluate the ethics of your work _today_. This will likely have direct personal and financial consequences.

So the stakes are completely different.

No, probably just special treatment: https://twitter.com/whalechart/status/1606293657518080001

Intentional in the sense that you understand that you are exaggerating and still repeatedly do it. No one is calling for him to be flogged or beheaded in front of the White House. Jailing a fugitive, a flight risk financial scammer is not unreasonable. He was extremely wealthy at one point and so there is a chance he has enough money stashed somewhere to make fleeing a possibility. In addition, defrauding thousands if not millions of people is a heinous crime, for which the perpetrator should not be given any easy treatment. When we ("the society") catch a serial killer, we agree that letting them go free on a negligible bail and an IOU note is not wise.

Honestly, that's not a great example. Re-evaluating your ethical impact on the world is not the same as understanding the direct consequences of your daily work. Both are important, but really different. After all we are not discussing some more abstract issues of modern software propagating capitalistic values (we are all "the system", etc, etc).

So then who is the abuser? The users and the developers are the victims. PMs are likely also the victims of their higher-ups, their higher-ups are the victims of the CEO, the CEO is the victim of the shareholders, the shareholders are... the users. So that's a full circle: the users are abusing themselves.

There is an argument to be made that these… micro services were a part of a bigger offering from Google. Maybe by itself Reader wasn’t a billion dollar business, but together with other niche features Reader attracted an influential and wealthy audience.

The comment you are replying to did not say that he should be denied bail. Only that the rules should apply to him too. 10% is the most common requirement, he didn't meet it.

I would guess that there are so many Stanford-affiliated people and so few properties on the market that this fact is not a limiting one.

People are upset that he is getting special treatment. Again. He doesn't deserve it.

You are intentionally exaggerating this situation. People are calling for him to be jailed — a perfectly reasonable call.

Obviously in terms of the overall contents they are not the same - even eventually. Alcohol contents can be the same but the rest of the drink can not be discarded from the equation. For example, my body react poorly to high amounts of sugar, so drinking a sugary cocktail is vastly different from a shot of tequila. Beer instantly makes me feel bloated, so if I drink 2 pints of beer to match a glass of scotch, I will feel slow and foggy, not upbeat and sociable.

You have most likely done that already… but have you tried many different kinds of alcoholic drinks? Beer affects me exactly as you describe it so I almost never drink it.

Single malt scotch, on the other hand, has a very different effect - gives me energy, makes me more sociable, lifts my spirit. Red wine affects me differently from white wine, cocktails also have a different effect (can’t have sugar with alcohol!). Basically, at least for some people different kinds of alcohol have a very different effect.

I can't tell if you are trolling or are serious. Neither Opera nor Vivaldi have succeeded as social media platforms. They experiment a lot with different features but remain a minuscule niche browser. If that's the inspiration for Mozilla - then sure, they should go all in into social media.

> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse

What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?

You are misunderstanding federalization. People can migrate their account and social graph to a different instance _only_ if the current instance allows them to do that. If you are banned from Mozilla.social - you can't migrate. The instance owns you.

I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really pushes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.

Yes. I don't think they should invest into social media experiments. In my opinion they did a horrible job at that so far (Pocket was promising but is unusable because of its "social sharing" confusion). Social media introduces wrong incentives.

[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.

They literally say in the first sentence that they will run a public instance on Mozilla.Social. This means they will own that instance.

You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).

Yes, with one caveat: without algorithmic feeds users tend to form natural circles just like in real life. This dramatically reduces toxicity. Just let people post whatever they want and follow whoever they want. If a social media company will not attempt to mix and promote random high engagement content, users will far less likely discover it by themselves and engage in toxic behavior.

I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc.

I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.

Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)

Why does a browser company need to own a social media space? I am an avid Firefox user but don't see any pragmatic point in this "exploration".

Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.