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American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

nrc.nl

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

#131

Post by tyingq »

mrich wrote: post #19
andygrd wrote: post #12

I'd feel sorry for anyone who hacked booking.com, they'd end up trying to decipher several petabytes of email data saying basically, "stop sending me hotel offers in Outer Mongolia!"

Worse still, they would have to read Perl code :)

I love Perl. But, if I were hired to squirrel away code that helped me spy on people, Perl would be one of my top choices. Lots of opportunity to hide the true purpose of the code with weird, little known side-effects, syntax, and so on. Perl doesn't have to be cryptic, but it can be.

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

#132

Post by elliekelly »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #36
eganist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although a company the size of booking.com should have its own qualified legal department, so that may not shield them from being liable... How does retaining outside counsel as opposed to employing internal counsel have any bearing on liability? Asking genuinely. I'm not an attorney.

More to the point, I don't understand how is this even an excuse? This sounds like invoking ignorance of the law as defense. "But your honor, Joe McLawyer told me it's perfectly legal for me to shoot my neighbor. I can't be held responsible!"

It’s not about ignorance of the law but about demonstrating you made a “good faith” effort to comply and oops, it turns out you landed on the wrong decision. You got some bad advice, but now you know! Won’t happen again, sorry about that!

Depending on how much of a grey area you’re operating in the law firm may or may not issue an opinion letter. So if you’re really pushing the boundary of what is reasonable to the point outside counsel won’t put it in writing you know you’re taking a pretty aggressive legal position. Some of the big law firms/practice groups have a reputation for being willing to be more aggressive in their written opinions than others. Large multinational companies often have several big law firms on retainer and their in house legal team will know who to go to for more conservative legal advice and who to go to for cover on a risky legal position. So I’ve heard, at least, I definitely would never participate in such ethically dubious behavior.

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

#133

Post by vadfa »

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?

It deals with those risks, and it's still a disproportionate overreach.

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

#134

Post by dtjb »

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.

I'm not saying America is innocent, but those are materially different things with different motivations and risks. The reactions would rightly be different.

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

#135

Post by zinekeller »

b20000 wrote: post #127
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…

javascript implies well educated? so much LOL here. maybe perl programmers are happy with perl and have no interest in learning yet another programming language.

While there are many Javascript "developers" that don't deserve that title, there are much much more actually-good JS developers than actually-good Perl developers, not to mention the willingness to program Javascript than Perl.

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

#136

Post by dtjb »

seanieb wrote: post #28
dmix wrote: post #13

> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. This is a great factoid. Eighteen different IC agencies and countless contractors.

And they couldn’t estimate accurately how fast the Taliban was recapturing Afghanistan, a country they occupied for over a decade! Too many cooks in that kitchen!

Wendover did an interesting video on the logistics of Afghanistan, including the collapse of the ring road which hampered intelligence efforts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4tuhWvKduU

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

#137

Post by Xelbair »

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…

I wonder when will people stop being surprised that any corporation puts profit as it's end goal.

Them being nice for a while, it just a coincidence of aligned interests.

Court mandated fines are taken into the account - if profit increase is higher than the fine, what's stopping them from going forward with such idea?

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

#138

Post by b20000 »

zinekeller wrote: post #135
b20000 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

javascript implies well educated? so much LOL here. maybe perl programmers are happy with perl and have no interest in learning yet another programming language.

While there are many Javascript "developers" that don't deserve that title, there are much much more actually-good JS developers than actually-good Perl developers, not to mention the willingness to program Javascript than Perl.

i might be able to accept that there are more javascript developers than perl developers. this then implies there are more good javascript developers, but only if javascript does not attract more wannabe developers. and i think that might be the issue.

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

#140

Post by Grazester »

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.

As someone who speaks the queen's English, I would like to recommend you look up what a cheque is.
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