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American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

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Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#101

Post by mojo74 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #92
mojo74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have the makings of a new Netflix series there. I propose it be called Check In (or Cheque In for those of us in the UK).

There's a lot of potential here. I'm thinking a slow burning Breaking Bad set up that sells itself as a light hearted Fawlty Towers-type show about a wide eyed Monopoly enthusiast fulfilling his dream, but with every season it gets darker and grittier and ends as a tangled web of international crime and corruption. Everything spirals out of control. The hotel is hosting a big conference and the minister of whatever i…

Consider my subscription renewed.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#102

Post by perk »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #92
mojo74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have the makings of a new Netflix series there. I propose it be called Check In (or Cheque In for those of us in the UK).

There's a lot of potential here. I'm thinking a slow burning Breaking Bad set up that sells itself as a light hearted Fawlty Towers-type show about a wide eyed Monopoly enthusiast fulfilling his dream, but with every season it gets darker and grittier and ends as a tangled web of international crime and corruption. Everything spirals out of control. The hotel is hosting a big conference and the minister of whatever i…

You had me at slow burning Breaking Bad. I would watch the hell out of this.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#103

Post by qwertox »

consp wrote: post #9

Interesting part from the Dutch version of the article: Booking is nooit eerder op spionage gestuit. Het bedrijf is er ook niet echt naar op zoek. Zolang die geen hinder oplevert, kost het geen geld. De onuitgesproken consensus onder specialisten binnen het bedrijf is: we vermoeden dat inlichtingendiensten meekijken, maar zolang we ze niet zien, maken we ons niet druk. Which roughly translates to We are not looking f…

According to Google Translate:

> Booking has never encountered espionage before. The company isn't really looking for it either. As long as it doesn't cause any hindrance, it won't cost you any money. The unspoken consensus among specialists within the company is: we suspect that intelligence services are watching, but as long as we don't see them, we don't worry.

What should make me believe that they don't have the same approach towards black hat hackers which are silently farming their data?

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#104

Post by hosteur »

tgv wrote: post #84
tchalla wrote: post #47

Every time I read such articles, I replace the nationalities American with Russian or Chinese just to gauge how the reactions would be.

For edginess’ sake? While I don’t approve of hacking, I expect American spying to have less damaging results than Chinese or Russian spying.

Why?

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#105

Post by secfirstmd »

gadyke wrote: post #82
sva_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who paid in cash really existed. Here in th EU, they usually have a look at your passport. I think it's enforced by law in some places. Government overreach

Is it? Surely this simply and proportionately deals with exactly the risks above?

Not only that. In places like Thailand it is a key part of anti human traffic and child sex abuse strategy. Because it is so common, staff in most hotels are trained to spot it.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#106

Post by ComodoHacker »

akudha wrote: post #87
joe-collins wrote: post #44

> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. I certainly couldn't have named them all, so I dug up a list: • Air Force Intelligence • Army Intelligence • Central Intelligence Agency • Coast Guard Intelligence • Defense Intelligence Agency • Department of Energy • Department of Homeland Security • Department of State • Department of the Treasury • Drug Enforcement Administrati…

What does Space Force Intelligence do?

Investigates incidents of using Force in space.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#107

Post by maze-le »

jb1991 wrote: post #27

This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…

The way I use booking.com: Search for a suitable hotel or apartment and find their name. Then search for them independently and make the reservation directly. I mean: they have a great search interface and all, but I refuse to funnel money to gatekeepers whenever I can... Stories like this just affirm my suspicions about companies like them...

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#108

Post by isoprophlex »

misja111 wrote: post #98
smooc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same goes for Banks, a.o. Dutch banks. They are a bit more picky though. Domestic and US is fine, Russian and Chinese is not.

This is nonsense. Source: I have been working in the cyber security department of a major Dutch bank.

Doesn't an admission that you work for the cybersecurity of a Dutch bank immediately discount any claims you make?

If you're responsible for their cyber security, I guess you have a stake in projecting the idea that everything is fine.

Either way you can't prove anything with a one line comment like this. The only winning move is not to play...

(Or ask for sources. Of course the assertion by smooc is equally devoid of proof; I'm commenting because this chain amuses me)

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#109

Post by mjburgess »

mojo74 wrote: post #99
mjburgess wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're joking -- but in the UK you "check in" to a hotel. A cheque is, specifically, a type of financial/banking note. cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/check_in

In the US I believe a Check is the same as a Cheque in the UK. Granted cheque is a homophone but both usages denote money (more so with the US title) with the added benefit of the connotation of arriving at a hotel. I am a big fan of puns.

The paper item "a cheque" is called "a check" in the US -- which presumably happened because "a cheque" has something to do with the verb "to check" (as in, "to check the health of"; to verify the status of something by asking/seeing it").

When you check-in to a hotel you aren't "handing over a cheque", you are checking-in with the reception. Ie., you are speaking to reception and checking your reservation/room.

To "check in with someone" is to have a chat or talk to a person to "check" how they are.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#110

Post by DonHopkins »

DocTomoe wrote: post #89
DonHopkins wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean that BooKing.com is morally flexible enough to hire anyone who claims they are willing to program in Perl, because it's so damned hard to find good Perl programmers who don't know any other languages they enjoy programming in more, and can't find better jobs than programming in Perl. If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well ed…

> If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl. Yes, but then they'd get results in Javascript, which has it's own security nightmares (like npm's recent third-part…

Sure, people make mistakes and create bugs and security holes in every language. And some languages like PHP attract newbies who know no other language. And other languages like Perl 5 are so syntactically complex that they repel newbies.

But how many schools and classes and youtube videos teach JavaScript? And how many teach Perl?

The fact that there are a lot of bad JavaScript programmers isn't a symptom of JavaScript programmers being bad. It's a symptom of there being a lot of JavaScript programmers. There are also a lot of really excellent JavaScript and TypeScript programmers, just not as many as bad ones.

(But I bet there are more good JavaScript/TypeScript programmers than all Perl 5 programmers plus all Raku programmers (counting everyone who knows both twice), by far.)

To make a gross understatement, TypeScript's evolution from JavaScript didn't take as long, went smoother, wasn't as incompatible, and was more interoperable, successful, and popular than Raku's evolution from Perl 5.

Not to mention it's much easier for a JavaScript programmer to learn TypeScript, and to upgrade JavaScript code to TypeScript code, than moving from Perl 5 to Raku.

(And I also bet BooKing.com isn't upgrading from Perl 5 to Raku any time soon.)

There are more great JavaScript and TypeScript programmers available to hire than mediocre Perl 5 programmers, because Perl 5 is effectively a dead language, while JavaScript and TypeScript are both ubiquitous, thriving, widely taught languages.

JavaScript shops (and also Python and C# and Java shops) actually have the option of not hiring the bad programmers and intelligence agency plants, and hiring lots of the good programmers.

PS: BooKing.com could easily be confused with the evil "King Boo", Luigi's antagonistic arch-nemesis, and scheming ally of Bowser! Why doesn't Nintendo send them a cease and desist for acting so villainous, and seise their rightful domain in the name of King Boo? ;)

https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo

>King Boo is the leader of the Boos and ghosts, ruler of the Paranormal Dimension, the main antagonist of the Luigi's Mansion series, and the arch-nemesis of Luigi. He is also an ally of Bowser, who has aided him in his various schemes. He is more than capable of devising and enacting villainous plans by himself, including his capture and imprisonment of Mario. Although not the biggest Boo, King Boo has abilities that far surpass that of the average ghost; he wields a number of impressive magical abilities, including the ability to materialize objects. King Boo's magical power is directly proportional to the number of Boos in his vicinity.

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