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American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

nrc.nl

231–240 of 301 posts

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

#231
One time I found a booking.com lanyard on the ground and wore it and people thought I worked for them so I got free drinks at bars and shit in tropical tourist areas when I said 'yeah!'

Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too

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

#232

One time I found a booking.com lanyard on the ground and wore it and people thought I worked for them so I got free drinks at bars and shit in tropical tourist areas when I said 'yeah!' Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too

> Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too

How does that make anything better?

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> black hat hackers How are foreign intelligence services not black hats? They are stealing data in order to use it for any number of non-nice things. Not selling the data on the dark web doesn't bleach their hats.

Right, they should pay for it from a data broker like everyone else.

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

#234

One time I found a booking.com lanyard on the ground and wore it and people thought I worked for them so I got free drinks at bars and shit in tropical tourist areas when I said 'yeah!' Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too

> Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too How does that make anything better?

Yeah, now I hate two people instead of one!

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

#235

One time I found a booking.com lanyard on the ground and wore it and people thought I worked for them so I got free drinks at bars and shit in tropical tourist areas when I said 'yeah!' Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too

> Before anyone harshes me for this I met a chick with a smirnoff lanyard who was getting free shots without being from them too How does that make anything better?

what are you, a bartender?

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet the attitude would have been very different had spying been done by China, Russia, Israel, or even the Netherlands itself.

Lol you'd be suprised. Recently one large dutch newspaper published a scathing report published by CapGemini (large consultancy in NL) that researched the security setup at the largest telco in NL (KPN). They found that Huawei was able to listen, read and do pretty much anything they'd like with the data. But this was quickly swept beneath the rug. So no, I am pretty confident that the attitude wouldn't be different…

Archived version: https://archive.md/z3t8O

Note that it uncritically accepts report from 2009 which according to company was meant to be risk modeling exercise. Authors outright dismiss everything either KPL or CapGemini has to say themselves and does not even try presenting mitigations that presumably have been put in place, changes in infrastructure since 2009 and other more contemporary reports.

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

#237
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> black hat hackers How are foreign intelligence services not black hats? They are stealing data in order to use it for any number of non-nice things. Not selling the data on the dark web doesn't bleach their hats.

They are definitely black hats. Intelligence services operating in foreign countries (physically or digitally) are by definition criminals, in that they are breaking the local laws where they are operating / accessing. That they are doing it for a 'good cause' (often debatable) is somewhat irrelevant, that is a risk/reward calculation that the country/agency/spy needs to make themselves. If a a friendly country of th…

Illegal activities done with good intention (and usually outcome) is what the term greyhat is for. It would be fair to argue that's the correct term here for government agency hackers but personally I don't have strong enough stance on the subject to say either way.

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

#238

To understand the ramifications without geopolitical biases and pink glasses think of the headline: "X spy hacked Y, company stayed silent" where X is any (quasi)state actor that feels agrieved or entitled, and Y is any giant data collector The net as it has come to be used is a fractal of bad design in practically all conceivable ways: economic, social, geo(political)

Counter example where companies didn't stay silent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

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

#240
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I actually meant to indicate that there is a densely populated multidimensional spectrum of young to old, local to remote, well education to self taught, highly experienced to self motivated. While generally speaking, most remaining Perl 5 programmers are old, remote, self taught, highly experienced, very busy, hard to find, and extremely expensive. There aren't many schools and universities and bootcamps and onl…

the job of a university is to teach CS, not a specific programming language. javascript is just a language like any other, there is nothing particularly good about it. it became popular because a scripting language was needed in browsers and because every idiot out there wants to become a web developer because they think they will be zuckerburg in 6 months. indeed, there are endless programming bootcamps parasiting o…

Anti-intellectualism and refusal to learn any other language isn't going to get you a good job or much interesting experience.

You can get better in one language by learning and using several other different languages (the more languages and the more different, the better), which expands the scope of what you know how to do in ANY language.

And if you refuse to learn more than one language, that limits yourself to tasks that don't involve multiple languages, which is a large proportion of the typical tasks a professional programmer encounters. Many common tasks are impossible to do in only one language, since all libraries and apps aren't written in the same language.

Again, my point that you haven't countered is:

Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is.

Any decent professional programmer (ESPECIALLY web developers) should have no trouble picking up and applying new languages, and regularly using multiple languages together at the same time every day. The world is not partitions into mono-linguistic silos, and no one language is good for everything.

If those monolinguistic Perl 5 developers b20000 speaks of who refuse to use any other languages are the only ones left for BooKing.com to hire, then it's no wonder they have enormous security holes and terrible buggy hard-to-maintain code.

Have you ever actually met any of those hypothetical monolinguistic Perl 5 developers in person who you're "pretty sure" exist, and actually discussed with them why they refuse to learn or use any other language, and asked them who they work for, and what they work on, and how they enjoy it?

Or will you actually admit to being a monolinguistic Perl 5 programmer yourself, and answer those questions about yourself, please? Or are the people you speak of entirely theoretical and unknown to you?

If you are saying that Perl 5 makes people give up learning other languages, that sounds like a horrible thing about Perl 5, because it's so discouraging, but unfortunately it's probably partly correct for some people.

But not all programming languages are as hard to learn, and program in, and read, and debug, and maintain, and find good jobs for, and hire good programmers for, as Perl 5!

Please don't give up just because you picked the wrong first language to learn.

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