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Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

cnn.com

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Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#411

Post by jonstewart »

shadowgovt wrote: post #215
purpleblue wrote: post #167

Millenials and GenZ may have no idea who Mudge is. I, however, almost lost my first job out of college at a bank because I ran l0phtcrack against our Windows NT 4 server to see if it could crack passwords. I showed my boss, and he pulled me aside into another room and tore my head off for irresponsibly running this tool against a production server. He said I could have been fired if this got out, but he covered my as…

I don't because I'm not seeing an organization that will hold them accountable. - This Congress is ill-equipped to understand tech, much less hold it accountable. As long as the people are happy, Congress is happy. - Lord knows the people are ill-equipped to get how bad this is. They already watched this company allow a rogue employee to shut off the account of the President of the United States (before they chose to…

Twitter signed a consent decree with the FTC years ago. This complaint could result in the FTC investigating deeply whether the consent decree is being upheld. If not, there's likely sufficient regulatory force to hold Twitter accountable.

I agree that, generally, it would be better for the US to have a better regulatory mechanism for large tech companies, but the consent decree is likely a strong tool in this particular case.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#412

Post by zeruch »

gonehome wrote: post #405
zeruch wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met Mudge once in my career early on (I was at VA Linux systems circa 1999ish) and I found him intense, an apex intellect, but absolutely affable and self-aware. He never struck me then, or in any interview or write up since, that he's impulsive, or prone to taking actions like what he's done to Twitter, in a cavalier way. He saw something bad and thinks something should be done to address it. He likely made that d…

Yeah - comparing mudge's history with the email the Twitter CEO sent to internal employees and the situation seems crazy? Always hard to know from the outside, but this paired with Jack leaving seemingly frustrated with the board looks really bad. I know people have thought Twitter was mismanaged for a while, but seems like it's a lot worse than I thought it was (and the CEO seems more vindictively bad than I would h…

Yeah, I think we're in lockstep here.

I'm no fan of Musk (he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech) but that doesn't mean that Twitter leadership is any better. Just not as well PR'd.

Dorsey himself was mostly an imbecile who drank too much of his own Kool Aid. Twitter has for years been the standard bearer for the most opaque, and incoherent content management; from user feedback to bots, just a village with only idiots. It was eventually going to catch up to them, the question now is to whom does the bulk of the suffering land on, not whether it lands or not.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#413

Post by jyrkesh »

minhazm wrote: post #278
bequanna wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a huge win for the defense in a case using DMs or Tweets as evidence. It would be quite easy to argue that a highly-politicized org like Twitter _might_ alter tweets or DMs to implicate someone in the opposing party. That’s reasonable doubt that at least some jurors would buy.

Usually these sorts of systems have very detailed logs and those logs are kept for a long time for things like lawsuits. In the hypothetical scenario you're describing the other party would subpoena Twitter and they would corroborate whether or not someone logged as that user or not.

But part of what this article calls out from the whistleblower's POV is that the logging and auditing systems that would be needed to do that don't exist at Twitter. That users can activate God Mode or get into production systems without any logging or accountability

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#414

Post by icelancer »

purpleblue wrote: post #167

Millenials and GenZ may have no idea who Mudge is. I, however, almost lost my first job out of college at a bank because I ran l0phtcrack against our Windows NT 4 server to see if it could crack passwords. I showed my boss, and he pulled me aside into another room and tore my head off for irresponsibly running this tool against a production server. He said I could have been fired if this got out, but he covered my as…

Yeah I kinda glossed over the headline and figured, whatever.

Then I clicked through and saw it was Mudge.

Ah jeez.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#415

Post by Jensson »

pb7 wrote: post #403
Banana699 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in simpler words, they are indeed a pseudo-monopolistic (pseudo means apparent, something very close to but not quite there) social media giant that can indeed censor millions (10% of USA's population is 30 millions) arbitarily and at will ? Ok :) And whether a bakery serves your gay wedding or not is perhaps the most petty and inconsequential thing to be upset about. There are thousands upon thousands of bakerie…

Monopoly on what? There are not thousands of bakeries in any city. Many towns might have none, or one. In that regard, the bakery will have an actual monopoly on baked goods to people living there.

The baker is a person with rights as well, you can't force him to make a special order cake for something he disagrees with. You can force him to sell standard cakes, and they offered to sell standard cakes in the case, but the customers wanted to force him to make a designed cake, that would be against the bakers individual rights.

Large corporations lacks those individual rights for obvious reasons, so large corporations should be forced to provide services to everyone even though individuals shouldn't always be.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#416

Post by Banana699 »

pb7 wrote: post #403
Banana699 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in simpler words, they are indeed a pseudo-monopolistic (pseudo means apparent, something very close to but not quite there) social media giant that can indeed censor millions (10% of USA's population is 30 millions) arbitarily and at will ? Ok :) And whether a bakery serves your gay wedding or not is perhaps the most petty and inconsequential thing to be upset about. There are thousands upon thousands of bakerie…

Monopoly on what? There are not thousands of bakeries in any city. Many towns might have none, or one. In that regard, the bakery will have an actual monopoly on baked goods to people living there.

>Monopoly on what?

On users. Any network is worth a function of the number of nodes in it (typically a quadratic). Social Media are networks that link humans, and there is a finite number of humans (or, more accurately, internet-connected humans with time to spare) that grows very slowly and inevitably will stagnate. That means a social network is in direct zero-sum competition with all the other networks, and a giant like twitter hurts everybody else by concentrating a signficant proportion of users into a single (aweful) place, destroying competition by the lock-in effects of network dynamics.

>There are not thousands of bakeries in any city

There are in my city, actually. Dialing the number down to the hundreds or the high tens doesn't signficantly change the validity and implications of the argument either.

> In that regard, the bakery will have an actual monopoly on baked goods to people living there.

If you can actually prove that in a court, and if you furthermore prove that the complaining party will incur significant costs to themselves if they try to seek another bakery elsewhere (by a resonable legal definition of 'significant'), then you have my full blessing to force people to bake your cake.

Until then, comparing an easily-replacable food product with tons of suppliers and publicly-available recipes to a proprietary service supplied by a corporation with thousands of servers, thousands of employees and tens of millions of users is ideologically motivated bullshit.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#417

Post by gonehome »

zeruch wrote: post #412
gonehome wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - comparing mudge's history with the email the Twitter CEO sent to internal employees and the situation seems crazy? Always hard to know from the outside, but this paired with Jack leaving seemingly frustrated with the board looks really bad. I know people have thought Twitter was mismanaged for a while, but seems like it's a lot worse than I thought it was (and the CEO seems more vindictively bad than I would h…

Yeah, I think we're in lockstep here. I'm no fan of Musk (he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech) but that doesn't mean that Twitter leadership is any better. Just not as well PR'd. Dorsey himself was mostly an imbecile who drank too much of his own Kool Aid. Twitter has for years been the standard bearer for the most opaque, and incoherent content management; from user fee…

I’m a huge musk fan, but I still think his trying to get out of the Twitter deal is lame buyer's remorse and his arguments are weak. I see it as mostly unrelated to this mudge issue.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#418

Post by chipgap98 »

kyrofa wrote: post #314

Is it just me, or does some of this feel less whistleblower-y and more petty? For example: > The company also lacks sufficient redundancies and procedures to restart or recover from data center crashes, Zatko's disclosure says, meaning that even minor outages of several data centers at the same time could knock the entire Twitter service offline, perhaps for good. That said, this is Mudge. I have a lot of respect for…

> The company also lacks sufficient redundancies and procedures to restart or recover from data center crashes, Zatko's disclosure says, meaning that even minor outages of several data centers at the same time could knock the entire Twitter service offline, perhaps for good.

I mean if it were true that seems pretty negligent. If that were the entire extent of the whistleblower complaint (not sure if complaint is the right term?), I would agree, but it seems as though there are some significant issue raised in the rest of the report.

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#419

Post by imchillyb »

Mudge = Competent advisor, Cybersecurity expert, Senate special witness.

Twitter board = Incompetent, Liars, Corporate cronies.

Which of these two sources do YOU believe is more reliable? Yeah. That's gonna be the general consensus.

Mudge-1 / Twitter-0

Re: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

#420

Post by datavirtue »

gopher_space wrote: post #402
datavirtue wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, Twitter needs regulated then. Hardly a private going concern if you are right.

This won't fix the fragility of our economy. It would start a weird exit model for social platforms, though. Get big enough that the US buys you out.

Our economy is not fragile.
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