351–360 of 521 posts
When I was working at Uber, we had a case of a guy stalking his ex-girlfriend's every movement through the backend. They eventually found out, fired him, and stepped up auditing.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245447/uber-allegedly-t...
You might say the problem was in the founding DNA: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40352868
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I once had a classified ad software hustle, and I needed customer data to debug things. But one of my customers was Canada's largest gay newspaper, and ts classifieds were highly sensitive. So I wrote a routine that obfuscated the database, changing all phone numbers to 555-xxxx, changing all names to random names of fruit (So a customer might become Banana Grapes, 416-555-1234), and a few other changes to hide other…
Aren't newspaper classified ads written specifically to be publicly disseminated?
So yes of course the ads were public, you could pick up a free copy of the newspaper at any gay bar on Toronto's Church Street. But the details about the customers placing ads were extremely sensitive.
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Oh man, the stories I heard... Many extremely sad to me, when I think about why people felt the need to be closeted and so on.
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Wishing I still had my 89 Caprice with physical buttons and switches. Parts were insanely cheap too (except the transmission, which I part of why I got rid of it).
You wouldn’t be wishing that the first time you were in an accident.
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I work in the industry. It's not a "vehicle" any more - it's a "platform" to "engage" with customers, i.e. sell your data and lock features behind ridiculous monthly fees. That is now the mantra of the automotive industry. It really kills any enthusiasm I have for new cars.
> It really kills any enthusiasm I have for new cars. ... and televisions, and phone apps, and solar inverters (with wifi!) and air purifiers (with wifi!) and drones (with wifi to activate) and scooters (to activate), and on and on...
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good ethics, bad data handling practices. Also, the code should not be allowed to run on a prod instance, even if it is triggered there. But, I'm sure you've figured this all out by now.
Sorry, that code is strictly worse. Because while the website on the laptop looks fine, there is a database on the laptop which has all the sensitive information. Anyone with access to the laptop just makes a backup of that database and the damage is done.
Something I have seen done before that I thought was good was that every so often a production database was synced, but during the sync process, things that could identify a customer were redacted or obfuscated. Then almost anyone who had need to work with production data would use the munged version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
good ethics, bad data handling practices. Also, the code should not be allowed to run on a prod instance, even if it is triggered there. But, I'm sure you've figured this all out by now.
If you want to point out that I could have been even smarter thirty-plus years ago, the line forms to the left... Stretches down the block... Goes around the corner... &c. But while my memory is imperfect, I believe that I hardcoded that feature to only work when running on my personal Mac SE/30, and also changed the feature/name to have a tossed salad metaphor.
Fair enough...
Yikes. So turning private images into memes and posting them internally isn't a fireable offence but union talk is? Such impeccable standards for conduct.
This kind of culture was unacceptable back then, of course, but the founders and owners were little more than children themselves. It was at least understandable if not excusable.
What completely boggles my mind is that, some 20 years later, this kind of culture is still happening. And it's not happening at some small tech startup founded and run by young men barely out of school - it's happening at a wildly successful car company which has been around for over a decade run by the richest man in the world.
The culture at Tesla must be rotten to the very core for this to persist so long.
Reminds me of the time I bought lunch at work, and a colleague told me exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. I called him out and said it was a lucky guess, and then he proceeded to tell me my entire payment history for the past 2 days. Turns out when I was buying lunch, he was on the phone with a friend who worked at Paytm and that guy gave away my transaction history for shits and giggles. My trust in p…
I used to work at the largest telco in the country on a software project (as a consultant) that involved some integration with existing services. With some playing around it soon became clear that all services were wide open as long as you were on the internal network, you just had to know what they were and how to call them. No authentication required, no audit logs as far as I can determine.
I didn't poke at it too much, but I was able to at least read an arbitrary cell phone's text messages and call logs.
Wake me up when there's an EV that is just a car and not an always-connected surveillance device on wheels.
I work in the industry. It's not a "vehicle" any more - it's a "platform" to "engage" with customers, i.e. sell your data and lock features behind ridiculous monthly fees. That is now the mantra of the automotive industry. It really kills any enthusiasm I have for new cars.