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edit: Whoops
Awesome analysis dude! I'm sure the judge will love that when discord sues these guys.
Would you agree abusive ToS's by massive corpos are unethical? What about the Disney+ ToS hiding a binding arbitration agreement preventing you from suing them? [0].
Or are you one of those "my personal ethics are whatever the law says" folk?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
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That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public. The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discor…
Eh, depends on how you look at it. "Public" is a pretty vague term. Something might be public in the sense that anyone can come and view, but it can also be public in the sense that anyone can join and participate, but you still must be a joined member to participate (and that participation can be revoked, etc). Twitter and Reddit are the former, publicly visible communications avenues. Discord is ultimately a privat…
Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC.
> Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one.
I definitely agree with this, although the fact that anyone joining can scroll back does sort of mean it's available to anyone who wants to look for it - it's just difficult to do so.
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> The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder. That being said, this feature a…
You think so? I believe that's properly a consequence of culture, Discord being originally a gaming platform, and of pseudoanonymity, the same thing you have on reddit. Anyone who cares even a tiny bit can join any of those public servers and see what you posted. The big difference is that you don't have as many lurkers who just got there by googling and are going to leave immediately. By the 1-9-90 rule of thumb, th…
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As usual, 404 nails it: ---- It should be noted, however, that almost no one reads end-user license agreements and many of Discord’s users are children and teenagers. Discord is, first and foremost, a platform for gamers to organize communities and it’s not plausible that a 15 year old looking for a Fortnite meme server ever thought their dumb jokes about Tomato Town would end up in a public database five years later…
On the contrary, I think that what these researchers did was the only ethical thing to do once they discovered that this was possible. There's no way that this hasn't been done dozens of times before by intelligence agencies, hacker groups, and whoever else you care to worry about. Most of us here were well aware that public Discord channels have always been public and durable. It's hardly a secret from the technical…
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I'm not sure what you mean by "prevent". A TOS is a legal document designed to put down rules and a legal basis for the service. I don't know what a "guild" is, if it's some Discord thing, and you don't say whether this is a good-faith human who joins, or a bot operator, intending to scrape. The hypothetical is irrelevant here; what is germane is that the expectation of privacy by the individual participants, and the…
>The hypothetical is irrelevant here; what is germane is that the expectation of privacy by the individual participants, and the terms which bind people who use that service. How can you have an expectation of privacy in a public forum? Where did this bizarre disorder originate, where people knowingly put their writing out there for literally anyone to read, then turn around and start talking about "expectations of p…
Well unfortunately it originated in the human condition, my friend.
I take it back about "expectation of privacy". Perhaps that is an outmoded concept.
Humans used to sort of have a default expectation of privacy. Being that gossip, slander and libel were sins and crimes, we could often safely gather in a room and isolate ourselves in a select group, and share our thoughts openly.
Most humans could go into a living room with their family, a pub or bar, a classroom, or a treehouse, and say/do things that were shared only by the local group of gathered humans. You could go into a public park and speak to a fire hydrant. It was not usual, or possible 100 years ago, for the news media to go around with recorders and cameras and record/preserve/transmit/broadcast everything everyone said in every place they were doing it.
Expectations of privacy were just sort of... humankind's default setting. And so betrayals were sins and crimes. And we sit alone at our keyboard looking at a screen. It feels private, all right. Where are we really? Where are our words being carried? We can't know anymore.
Unfortunately we've built online and virtual worlds around paradigms that imply privacy or confidentiality, but don't actually afford it. You can go into a "chat room" or a "forum" or change your "privacy settings" but they mean nothing. Nothing at all. Because everything we're sending across the net can be perfectly recorded, preserved, retransmitted, and it's no longer gossip, it's just business.
> Where did this bizarre disorder originate
I don't believe that any other living organism has had to deal with the complete and total collapse of "privacy" like humans in the 21st century. Surely, termites in Australia don't know, and couldn't care, about what's going on with honeybees in California.
And here we have people calling it a bizarre disorder. Yes, it's mistaken and misguided, but who can call it unreasonable?
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That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public. The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discor…
Eh, depends on how you look at it. "Public" is a pretty vague term. Something might be public in the sense that anyone can come and view, but it can also be public in the sense that anyone can join and participate, but you still must be a joined member to participate (and that participation can be revoked, etc). Twitter and Reddit are the former, publicly visible communications avenues. Discord is ultimately a privat…
I can't speak for AIM, but I've never assumed IRC was ephemeral. Most IRC servers had and have numerous people idling in the channel with their client just archiving everything that happened. Many of those archives ended up published on the internet and that usually surprised no one.
Discord is even worse because it does the archiving for you and grants new users immediate access to the entire archive.
As a rule, each and every recipient of every message that you send has the option to archive or forward that message. That's a simple fact of information flow that everyone in the modern world must wrap their heads around. In this case, when you send a message to Discord you're transitively sending it to everyone who is currently or ever will be on a given server. That has always been true, and that fact has been exploited ever since Discord came about.
All these researchers have done is expose the kind of archiving was always possible and always happening.
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There is a special place in hell for software (including game) developers who exclusively use Discord to release patch notes, documentation, technical support, etc.
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You could argue "well you can just scrape it and post it online, like OP", but:
1. That's still an extra step and requires an account that could get banned doing it
And
2. Others (like yourself, even!) in this thread take issue with that approach.
So which is it? Just close down the information forever, yet accept no criticism about the fact you chose to host it on discord, knowing this would be the case?
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On the contrary, I think that what these researchers did was the only ethical thing to do once they discovered that this was possible. There's no way that this hasn't been done dozens of times before by intelligence agencies, hacker groups, and whoever else you care to worry about. Most of us here were well aware that public Discord channels have always been public and durable. It's hardly a secret from the technical…
I think conflating a security paper which shows something is possible to using the "exploit" to create a database 100s of GBs large and analyze it is disingenuous at best.
These databases exist and always have because this has always been possible. The only difference is that they've typically been held close to the chest by intelligence agencies or hacker groups or whoever else made them for illicit purposes. The only change here is that this database is public and is drawing mainstream attention, which is a strictly good thing.
A lot of the people on here are using the same reasoning that would say that LockPickingLawyer should stop showing how to pick locks because he's making it too easy to learn how garbage most locks are.
The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which historically were publicly searchable and often had a lot of great information about various hobbies and things.
Now those of us who've been around the block know that Discord is merely the latest iteration on chat servers such as IRC. I'm interested to know, from anyone here who's an IRC operator or server/network admin, how the IRC community deals with scraping and bots, because in the early 90s, it was never an issue of corporate Terms of Service or legalese, but typically handled by community standards, and probably, people…