xie_alan

I'd be interested in reading that discussion if you have it handy. I've been looking into SSL recently for some personal sites and the easiest method has been a combination of GitHub pages / Cloudflare. I might be mistaken, but aren't EV certs just a cash grab by the issuing authorities?

Fair points on the issues of standing — I would assume that a college-educated person with a decent understanding of the relevant case law (gleaned from some of the links below and other MSM articles about the data breach) could stand a decent chance of winning in court. Your mileage may vary, but if a 5 hour time investment could possibly yield a 4-figure settlement, I don't see a problem with filing a case and the worst-case scenario being a loss in court. That being said, since your chances of winning likely increase with how much effort you put into the claim, it's not Legalist that's doing the heavy lifting for you, which also begs the question of why you'd have them file for you in the first place.

My knowledge of identity theft is admittedly limited to TV documentaries...but if your identity is stolen five years from now and the fraudsters rack up thousands of dollars in loans and bills under your name, is there a way for you to link that crime to the Equifax hack? I could see a lawyer making the very shaky argument that John Doe could have had their personal information hacked elsewhere and that there's no evidence connecting the thieves to Equifax.

That's for sure why people participate in class-action lawsuits against big companies like Red Bull, but isn't the whole point that people have had their privacy violated? I can't see a plaintiff showing up to court and not saying something along the lines of "Equifax lost my data and I want to be compensated."

Maybe Plaintiff John Doe isn't going to be able to exhaustively demonstrate quantifiable material damages, but maybe the court hands out a default judgment.

The real opportunistic money-grabbers here are Equifax...they took their own data breach, which is basically historically unprecedented in its scale, and used it as a way to shill one of their own credit score monitoring products. That, IMO, is despicable. If it's easier to sue these guys for their negligence, so be it.

I've had friends enter information into that form and it said they weren't affected. AFAIK the Equifax backend is complete garbage and they've been very careful to disclaim a positive match by saying your information is "potentially impacted." Seems like they have no idea of knowing/proving whether someone actually has your specific information, but can check whether your information resided at one point on the specific server/database that was compromised?

IANAL, but isn't champerty permitted (or not prohibited) in almost every state? I don't think there's any remotely recent precedent for state-level champerty statutes (the few that still exist) being enforced in a commercial litigation context, and I think this situation is one in which the plaintiffs (Equifax data breach victims) are already planning to file suit, thus not rising to the level of "champerty and maintenance" being applied to frivolous litigation that such statutes aim to prevent.

Better call Saul!

From what I've read on some law blogs, this doesn't happen often at all, and were it to happen, it would also mean that there's no reason for Equifax not to also deal with these cases in a class action.

Also a victim. I personally would rather get a 4-figure settlement in small claims court instead of a $5 check in five years from a class action.

IANAL, but it doesn't look like Legalist is handling any information that you wouldn't be making publicly available in a court filing were you to do this yourself. As someone who doesn't have the time or diligence to do all this myself, I actually find this pretty useful.

Saw this earlier this morning: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41257576

These guys should be, at the very least, fined by the government for how blatantly careless they were with consumers' PII. I can't believe the credit bureau oligopoly in the United States is this technologically incompetent, but I suppose it's not surprising given the lack of economic incentive to innovate. Hefty fines / settlement payouts should do the trick...

I wouldn't necessarily say that! I think pre-interviews are simply an indication that a partner wanted more information about the startup. That might be because the information was omitted or because it wasn't within the scope of the application. I suppose the only certain conclusion you can draw is that prior to the pre-interview you hadn't yet been rejected. But seeing as each application is read by at least one other reviewer, and the 450 highest weighted applications are sent invitations, I don't believe that a single pre-interview has an extremely positive or negative bearing on your chances of being invited to final interviews.

We were sent an email and asked to pick a set of times. It was a ten minute conversation with a partner. I imagine each partner has the ability to set up a certain number of pre-interviews at their discretion if they want to gather more information on a particular startup - it's neither a positive nor negative signal, but simply an indication that they wanted to find out more information that's not in your application.

We were pre-interviewed on Thursday and so far have not heard anything. We submitted our app an hour or two before the deadline, if you give any credence to the rumor that invites are being sent according to the date of app submission.

Last year, we applied the week after final decisions for S16 were made. 10 days after, a partner messaged us via HN with some follow-up questions. A week later, we had a Skype call with another partner. We were ultimately rejected 3 days after that call via their standard email template.

We haven't found one particular feature to be the most predictive overall, across all different types of projects, but we have noticed that certain features are more predictive for certain projects. For instance, a horror film, on average, is more affected by the presence of other horror/thriller genre fare released within a 2 week range than an action/comedy/drama film.