bxr

>the attention paid to LulzSec — a litter of script kiddies with kindergarten knowledge of the basest forms of technological harassment since 90s AOL proggies — is disgusting. And pathetic. And dangerous.

Many of the things I've read in criticism of lulzsec is that the writer always considers themselves better, somehow above the techniques employed below themselves. They're writing lulzsec off like some snooty bankrobber who prefers elaborate oceans eleven style heists so much that they find the mere idea of breaking into an unlocked bank at night distasteful. They seem to gloss over the fact that lulzsec got results. Enough doors were unlocked at night that they caused a good shitstorm.

If you want to use them as a springboard for discussion on responsible disclosure, fine. Were they immature? Of course. Want to analyze what the coverage means for the current state of journalism be it tech-specific or not, blog or real news outlet? Good, go do that. But what I am sick of seeing, is the "Oh yeah, well, I could do that if I wanted to, I just don't want to." attitude. Fuck you buddy. What did you do to stop those widespread vulnerabilities from being exploited? Oh, nothing? So you're just miffed that the culture and collective ego you bought into was shaken? You deserve it.

>I worry that rapidly improving the web's ability to deploy applications will make it less suitable for reading and writing.

Will make it? It already has. The web as we know it is a fucking unfettered mess. We've just been jamming applications into a document format so hard for so long we're used to it. You are right though, its going to get a lot worse.

We need a new platform. We're probably not going to get one, the "web" is just going to expand to engulf every bit of functionality a new platform would have, but bring along over two decades worth of evolutionary cruft. I've resolved to just stay out of the way, not fight the inevitable.

>But, they're still a startup

So what?

Aww... the cute widdle startup gets the bar lowered for them because we love startups here on HN?

No, we have people like you to thank. Standing on the sidelines bitching about the bad things that will happen in reaction to lulzsec instead of even attempting to prevent the gov't from doing them.

Way to suck the fun out of it :) -- I know, I just think a bitcoin exchange is an interesting concept, the kind of thing I would enjoy knowing my code was running in and got a little caught up bikeshedding in my mind how I'd secure a target like that.

Who wants to start an exchange?

I'd be down for that, it sounds like a fun project in an interesting domain and I was actually thinking about what building one would entail as I've been reading though the comments here.

Yes, there is. I can't trust a service that makes these kinds of mistakes.

That doesn't help anything other than dropbox's efforts to obtain new customers because they would be ill informed about the track record of the service.

>There is no way dropbox would be able to explain to them what happened without scaring them silly.

Opposed to who? People who do know what it means and should be scared silly but aren't because they've been beaten into submission by breach after breach after breach.

Indeed security is never prefect, however "its hard at it and we all suck at it" does not mean that everyone sucks at it equally.

>How do you know?

Pubkey auth connecting to openssh on freebsd to hippa- pci- sox- and sas 70- compliant storage with a warrant canary and you can give them a call to talk to the engineers (I have). Looking back dropbox feels like a fly by night in comparison.

They do now.

Here is a forum post where they admit that mobile SSL was impossible.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=10669

I know. I didn't bring that up to accuse them of malice as far the DMCA part, I brought that up as an example that dropbox employees don't understand what their own internal tools do.

I didn't say it was a good visualization, just that its not hard to understand what they're trying to convey.

Last time the Dropbox security thing was in the news, regardless of your personal preference on what encryption keys dropbox should have been using, the issue and more importantly the way they handled it made me question their abilities. Then they sent a DMCA takedown notification notification to someone they were just trying to censor, and now they temporarily set their auth method to "allow any password".

They are showing us that they are technologically incompetent at managing their own systems. I don't know why anyone continues to do buisness with them for files they want any sort of privacy over.

I've moved to rsync.net. Its uglier, but at least they know what the fuck they're doing.

At a glance it was easy for me, without even seeing the labels, to understand X was hops, Y was RTT and Z was the attempt number.

While I like many of Facebook’s PR team on an individual basis, as a whole, they are probably the worst in the industry when it comes to manipulation, double-speak, and all around slimeballishness

Their PR team are a prefect example, in Zuckerburg's words, of a "lack of integrity".

jedberg - Its sad to see you go, I remember when you came on at reddit. Whats next for you?

You'd still have to pay for all the computing time to remain available during the attack. Its probably not worth it to try to stay up in that kind of storm.

>You probably didn't read what came before this sentence

I did. I guess what I'm saying is: why does it matter to you if google's search algorithms aren't perfect and could operate better with a bit of metadata from the site? After all, you're free to opt out from playing along. If, like you suspect, it means that their algorithm is optimized for web spam, they'll sort it out eventually.

It just sound like your bitching that the cost of doing buisness has gone up in the meantime, and if only google could be perfect you wouldn't have to worry about it. But this is what you get for relying on the behavior of someone that owes you nothing.

But, only one of them is the foundation of our society.

Why should I care?

You shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to try and appear better in google's results.

Unless this open letter gets a very significant amount of media coverage, facebook isn't going to do jack to help any of their users out when the user's government doesn't doesn't want facebook to. Facebook has become big enough that they're scared of what rocking the boat, even the tiniest bit, will do to their buisness opportunities.

Everyone I know who was able to turn their passion into a profession have found themselves with diminished drive to work on their pet projects in that field. If someone is satisfied with their work, it gives them time for other hobbies. It is an unbelievable good thing if people can find time for multiple passions in their life.

Aside from the fact I think this line of reasoning is useless there is another -- more important -- issue. I don't care what people do in their off time. That's theirs, not mine. It is the same reason that I don't drug test.

Its an interesting comparison, but I think at least part of the difference lies in the fact many of google's main services -- search, maps, shopping, news -- are about getting you what you want and away from google. The faster you're done using google, the less time you spend there, the better they're doing. Gmail and apps are more time consuming but I think a certain level of "well, I have no choice to do the this work or not, I might as well have a nice interface" comes into play when using those.

Google's tools seem more about facilitating accomplishing something else as fast as possible, while facebook is the ends in and of itself. How long you spend on facebook is the metric of how well facebook is doing.

At least thats my take on it.

A slowly increasing number of my friends are cutting down their use, and eventually leaving.

I know what they say about the plural of antidote, but I've personally noticed the same. I use it less, and when I do use it, I notice the people I care about on facebook are using it less too. Everything you say mirrors the response to facebook I've been seeing. Its no longer a toy, its just that thing you have and slowly working towards being a burden.

I think a post I saw about facebook email says it the best: "Facebook, you're giving me email? You're now one ugly paintjob away from being aol". Its initially funny, but the parallels you can draw between AOL and Facebook are huge and I wouldn't be surprised if facebook followed a similar trajectory.

You know what I see? A couple of college kids who want to start seriously kicking around the idea of building something outside of their domain.

I don't put words in their mouths or thoughts in these Engineering majors head's. And heres why:

When I was at school and wanted to build something outside my wheelhouse, I would talk to the EEs or MEs. At first they could always see that I didn't know what I was doing when talking about their area, but it wasn't malice on my part or thinking less of them.

Luckily I had some good friends in those majors, and my shitty ideas helped me make more. You know why? Because we just liked building things. I would have shitty idea X, sometimes it was salvageable and we built something, sometimes we all just had a good laugh about it after they explained how terrible it was.

Maybe these guys have an idea for social networking that would work incredibly well as a facebook application and they just need 15 minutes of talking with a programmer to understand the domain a bit more and figure out how to go forward.

Its a startup and you're not gonna get paid? Well, duh. They're college kids (broke) and want to build something that they believe in and is instantly distributable to everyone in the world.

I know this is HN and everyone has the "oh, hes one of those 'idea' guys" mentality, but lighten the fuck up. Either move on from the job posting because they don't know what they're doing and let them fail, or go steer them in the right direction. What you don't have to do is call them out on HN for making a rookie mistake.

>I suspect we're in a situation where cost of being competent > probability of lulz * cost of remediation.

Yup, unfortunately this is true, and half-assing it because of this is what gets us onerous new internet legislation.

>It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

I wonder if mussel memory ever catches up to make the time benefit break the other way. I want something closed, hitting f3 is the same as typing any other letter. I had to look down to see what F-button it actually is.

>If LulzSec looks at you, you get to spend millions beefing up security

...or, you know, be competent in the first place.