If anyone is offended by supposed political leanings in this article, I'd suggest separating Torba's political views from his words. Blaming a data breach on "mentally ill tranny demon hackers" (his words, not mine) is not a sane or rational thought. The most realistic scenario is that he knows exactly what he's saying and is doing so simply to rile up fanatics, because otherwise he actually believes that and should be in an institution. I'm not sure which one is worse.
Gab Has Been Breached
61–70 of 194 posts
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#62Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, he's the worst. I knew him in YC, and actually liked him. But I watched him spiral as he wasn't able to raise money for his startup, including starting to go to Trump rallies "out of curiosity". His FB posts began to include worse and worse rhetoric. It was crazy to watch him get radicalized in realtime. It ended in him harassing some (minority) YC founders who said they were scared by saying we should "Build t…
HN thread from 2016 on Torba getting booted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388 Includes comments from Sam Altman and Torba, posting as rvcamo
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#64Wow, it is actually shocking how disgusting the CEO's comments are.
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#65If you just want to know how the breach[1] happened: it was SQL injection, where string interpolation was used to construct a query, rather than use parametrized queries. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/rookie-coding-mistak...
I thought bcrypt had built in salts, how was he able to reverse those hashes for simple passwords? Any better algorithm to use or recommendation on salting?
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#66It doesn't seem right that the big players like Facebook and Twitter enjoy much better security. Is there really no open source offering that just gets this stuff right? A Twitter-in-a-box, like WordPress is a blog-in-a-box, but secure this time? Apparently Gab used Mastodon. Is Mastodon intrinsically hard to secure?
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#67The CTO was never a software engineer. They were a developer advocate so had some interaction with code, but was more of a "talk to developers using things and make sure the requirements were passed along to the dev team" sort of guy, rather than someone that knew his technical details (beyond say, the thing he was actively working on) inside and out.
Fosco started out pretty reasonable. When Trump was first elected, he did a "talk to a conservative" series, and while there was the expected disagreement, it was a pretty, civil, positive, well-received olive branch overall. However, like a lot of right-leaning folks in the Trump era, he became more extreme as time went on.
I had some reasonably close interactions with Fosco (not going to go into details with how), but it was being kind of clear that he had started to buy into the "Fox News caricature of what someone on the left is like" — to the point of putting words into the very people's mouths he'd so civilly made a point of talking to prior — and surrounding himself with like-minded folks. For all the talk of "diversity" that he had (and indeed, initially fostered!) he became pretty much the sort of caricature, albeit one of the opposite side of the spectrum, that he was deriding.
In that sense, while there's a lot of holier-than-thou and disgust that the whole Gab situation prompts, I feel pity and sadness more than anything else. Fosco was a decent guy at one point, but even decent people can end up in their own echo chambers. It's unfortunate to see the state that he's in now.
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#68> There's also the risk of incorrectly assuming that a presence in the breach implies your views have some degree of alignment with those regularly expressed on the site, yet clearly based on the presence of my own email address, that assumption is incorrect. I've seen comments elsewhere saying something to the effect of "Gab is just a bunch of right-wing terrorists, who cares if their personal info gets hacked" Ther…
It is kind of interesting to think about because if you go on facebook, you can see lots of people using their real facial picture and real first name, last name and the people doing the doxing/harassments don't really put much thought into how that profile account was created.
Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#69Re: Gab Has Been Breached
#70Gab is a joke. I got banned for making a post asking how are all the domestic terrorists Trump supporters doing after the capitol riot. I guess that is ban-worthy on their free speech network while advocating for assassinating public officials is a-ok.
I’m not a gab user, a Republican, or even an American for that matter. But it strikes me that what the situation seems to call for is more compassion and constructive discourse, but you seemingly wanted to harass people online under the guise of free speech. I think I understand why that would lead to being banned just about anywhere. It doesn’t serve anyone in any useful way. I don’t believe they should allow advoca…