mishmash · HackerTrans

mishmash

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Submissions

Ask HN: Registrars for the Paranoid (July 2011)

13 pointsby mishmashhá 15 anos6 comments

WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious 'Insurance' File

10 pointsby mishmashhá 16 anos6 comments

You stay classy, Rails.

ruby-forum.com

40 pointsby mishmashhá 16 anos19 comments

Ask HN: How obsessive are you with your code?

37 pointsby mishmashhá 16 anos36 comments

ASk HN: Handy domain blacklists to preload a new site with?

7 pointsby mishmashhá 17 anos10 comments

Ask HN: Review our anonymous networking app

5 pointsby mishmashhá 17 anos2 comments

comments

há 14 anosdiscuss

> How do you intend to handle this situation with every other app you, and presumably your wife, have ever downloaded?

Not sure yet. Path is actually the first (and will certainly be the last) social network I've ever joined - and it was precisely because it was supposed to be private and they had a pretty reasonable privacy policy. I remember something of this nature after the App Store was first released but had honestly thought it was a fixed issue.

On our lap/desktops we use prompting firewalls and on occasion will even watch suspicious apps or behaviors, if you will, where on iOS this is much harder.

I have an idle FreeBSD box and may start mitm'ing like OP did, but seriously pouring through the kind of output a home network produces doesn't sound like fun at all and I already know that going back to a dumb phone would probably be just as easy.

há 14 anosdiscuss

> What are you talking about? Do you expect them to perform complex data analysis to figure out that certain contacts are young children, and then explicitly ask permission to share those? Or do you expect them to preemptively ask for any potential sensitive contact information? "Can we use your children's information?" "Can we use your in-laws' information?" "Can we use the address of the President's safehouse?" Etc.

Just a "Can we upload your entire address book?" would have worked. Or perhaps listing "Your entire address book" in the "What personal information do we collect?" section of their Privacy Policy.

há 14 anosdiscuss

Because asking for advice from those wiser than oneself clearly makes one a moron.

há 14 anosdiscuss

To get perspective, actually. Most lawyers are wicked smart and it sucks you aren't in a position to have such a valuable resource available in your own life. HTH.

há 14 anosdiscuss

One of my kids has special needs. This means he rides a certain bus and goes to a certain school. It would be trivial to uniquely identify him for the rest of his LIFE with only the information contained in my contacts list.

So now, without consent, this "private" "friends and family"-based app I installed on my phone, plus it's company, plus any other company they choose to do business with, or any entity that acquires them in perpetuity, or any data mining, social profiling, credit bureau, can start building far-reaching and long-lasting profiles of a four year old little boy that needs a extra help.

What part of that confuses you?

p.s. this could have been avoided with a dozen lines of code via a dialog box.

há 14 anosdiscuss

> I'm unclear on why them having the information you cited

First of all, my wife and I actually read and attempted to analyze Path's Terms and Privacy Policy before joining. They did not in ANY WAY have our permission, either implicitly or explicitly to collect private information about our children, who are, 3 and 4 years old.

> along with dozens or hundreds of other contacts from your address book

From path.com/about

  Path should be private by default. Forever. You should 
  always be in control of your information and experience.

I was never once asked, agreed to, or gave consent to allow anyone to collect sensitive information about where are children are schooled at, what buses they ride, where they receive medical treatment at, or OTHER PLACES I LEFT OUT OF THE ORIGINAL LIST BECAUSE THEY ARE PRIVATE TO MY FAMILY. :)

> for millions of users

"kill one, it's murder - kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic" - this isn't about your children - it's about mine. ;)

> constitutes some kind of terrible threat to your children

Where did I say this was a "terrible threat" to my children? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - bottom line is we did not consent to it. And perhaps we just want to protect our underage children from having behaviorial profiles or credit risk assessments built up on them before they reach kindergarten.

Interestingly enough, according to Path it is VERY reasonable that I should protect my children's information:

  We take reasonable measures to protect your personal information 
  in an effort to prevent loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, 
  alteration and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, 
  no security measures are perfect or impenetrable and no method of data 
  transmission can be guaranteed against any interception or other type of misuse.

Combined with:

  (You)...accept all risks of unauthorized access to the Registration Data and any other information you provide to us.

My risk, right?

> But maybe there's a specific threat in mind that I'm not thinking of?

Yes, there is. And I acknowledge that you might live in a world where you have no problem allowing anyone in the world to know any detail they can illicitly sneak out of your phone about you, your family, and your friends - but most of the rest of us don't.

For fuck's sake a UIKit dialog box and handler code is less than a dozen lines of code and then NONE OF THIS WOULD BE AN ISSUE.

> Anyway, just thought your response was a little over the top, and more informed by emotion than reason.

I'm curious, do you have a spouse or children?

há 14 anosdiscuss

Your comment seems trollishly silly, but... the internet and residential electricity are also both inventions of the 20th century - I guess we could destroy those too without bothering you?

há 14 anosdiscuss

I've just:

  1) saved their Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
  2) requested a complete deletion of our family's account
  3) requested deletion of any/all stored information
  4) considering contacting our lawyer

As I emailed to Path's support, our 3-4 year old children's schools, bus companies, physicians, pharmacies and our family lawyer were in that contact list - that's an insane, willful, and quite unexpected violation of our privacy.

Worse, it could have easily been solved by adding an entry to their Privacy Policy (under the "What Personal Information Do We Collect?" section) and/or a simple dialog prompt.

Unbelievable.

há 14 anosdiscuss

It would be nice to go a single week without seeing how utterly complete the notion of privacy has been destroyed.

há 14 anosdiscuss

Cool, I didn't know that (started late 90s here) but that wasn't what this person attempting to do. Apparently she had asked for the source from another dev's script and saw something like:

  action="process.php"

And just thought This Should Work™ too and put the mailto: into the form. When it happened, in front of 50 other people, I just stared at her for a moment and said it was complex and we could look at it later. Not really much else you can do in those situations.

há 14 anosdiscuss

>Am I insane for being completely satisfied with $80,000/yr to do really cool multithreaded programming work on some seriously beefy hardware? (Midwest area.)

In 10 years of midwest experience, $80k is probably a bit on the low side for systems-level work. Just a few years ago I would see DreamWeaver jockeys pick up full time for ~$50k/year. One hire did NOT know the difference between HTML and an HTTP server, someone else called me into a training session she was hosting and asked why her form wouldn't work. She had set the form's action param to email:

  <form action="mailto:[email protected]">

Sadly I'm not kidding. :(

On the high-side, I've seen C/C++ contractors charge $100-$250/hour, depending wildly on the individual consultants.

So I don't think you're crazy for being happy. And great working conditions can have an often immeasurable impact on life. Happiness, is, after all, the end game - and a guaranteed $80k/year might be worth more than an unknown $120k/year for some people.

há 14 anosdiscuss

> Anyone have any ideas on how to get the IP blocks of MPAA member companies?

It's been tried before. Maintaining the list is very difficult for the exact same reasons that would have made PIPA/SOPA technically inept.

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian

há 14 anosdiscuss

Great commercial and easily relatable.

Just yesterday I was looking for shirts at a top3 US retailer and encountered something I'd never seen before:

  - there were six rows (shelfs) and about 7-8 columns
  - there was a maybe 14x10" "70% OFF" sign at eye level
  - HOWEVER, there were two qualities/brands contained in the cells
  - one brand had the clearance 70% off marked on their tags
  - the other brand DID NOT and was marked full price
  - the clearance and full price cells were randomly placed

So the display resembled this simplified matrix:

  [FULL][sale][FULL]
  [sale][FULL][FULL]
  [FULL][sale][sale]

I had already carted four shirt designs before realizing three of them weren't on sale. Tricky bastards. ;)

edit: formatting

há 14 anosdiscuss

# or $ gives the reader an indication of what type of account should execute the command.

há 15 anosdiscuss

Thanks to everyone involved!

há 15 anosdiscuss

Instead of hockey stick growth, would this be like light pole growth? ;)

há 15 anosdiscuss

Both of your examples are of people who are and were extremely well known both before and outside of GitHub.

há 15 anosdiscuss

Same here. Our turn-around is usually two days. We routinely get the "we've received" emails but our next ones won't ship for 1-3 days after that. It's annoying considering the "unlimited" plan claim.

há 15 anosdiscuss

Nice to see, thanks.

há 15 anosdiscuss

> hover

Hover apparently stores your password in plaintext, as discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727123.