Beautiful writing, thank you. I have already incorporated this into my world view and am ready and willing to die for the creature that lives underneath San Francisco.
It's a third-party client making authentication and data collection requests, just like the hundreds of other credential stuffing toolkits (OpenBullet et al.) that are smashing the Venmo platform 24/7.
The most likely outcome for anyone using this is their account becoming restricted for unusual access patterns by the existing models already in place.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.
Taught me everything I needed to know about being a painter.
Perhaps not the 'best' book ever, but certainly one of the most impactful for me as a common-or-garden 18-year-old realising for the first time that our political and economic systems aren't some sort of almighty edict and could be critiqued.
Love love love this. I recently saw something about Rails 8 (probably Kamal?) and decided to build a toy app using the main git branch parsing and displaying Telegram logs. I haven’t used Rails or done any front-end work since the traumatic 2->3 upgrade over a decade ago.
My two main takeaways were:
1) This is fun
2) Why do we put up with all this garbage in modern development
2a) Okay I guess Tailwind is more useful that I assumed
And it’s legitimately made me think I could build and launch something on my own, which I’ve never had the confidence to try before.
I hadn't realised until reading this, that I use this exact method for Best Buy.
Not intentionally though - I have my password stored in 1Password, so I know it's correct, yet every time I try to purchase something through bestbuy.com I trip some sort of ATO protection that falsely claims my password is invalid.
I'm entirely willing to believe it's something on my side (ad blocker, local DNS blacklisting, etc.) but after a certain number of occurrances, you get bored trying to debug the problem and just follow the path of least resistance.
Great read! I love a pour over, but it's always "...but only if you have time" because I know how much of a pain they are for the staff.
I wonder if the Starbucks story was one of those situations where the CEO had a pet project but the rest of the company silently conspired to kill it? I feel like I'd be the exact target market for this, yet I've never heard of either Clover nor Starbucks Reserve before.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a single interview that left more than about 60 seconds for candidate questions. Maybe you can tease some of this stuff out with the “hiring manager chat” as that tends to be less formal, but in panels?
What level/grade are folks generally talking about here? Or is this a difference between applying for a role vs. being hunted for it?
> Every time this topic comes up, people delightedly mention the German Tank Problem, but I have never, not once, seen anyone post an actual example of when a modern business got rekt by a competitor using knowledge gained from monotonic IDs.
At $previous_job (payments provider), the sales engineers would often spot merchants using sequential order IDs and mention it to the account managers.
Rekt? I guess not, but knowing what percentage of their business we processed was extremely valuable information when it came to renegotiate the contract.
That does sound feasible. There are a number of airports (SFO probably being the largest) that have their security screening performed by non-TSA third-party companies, which I suppose is the ultimate political embarrasment lever to pull.