Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website • Hacker News Board

Re: Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website

#121

Post by mandelbulb » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 8:46 PM UTC

dkuntz2 wrote: post #95

pavel_lishin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't combining the two tactics be the actually responsible thing to do? Inform the operators anonymously, and tell them that in four weeks a copy of this e-mail will be publicized.

Because that might seem like blackmail to some people...

You definitely have to phrase it kindly and explicit and be open for other options of how to proceed. Otherwise, the point of staying anonymous is to protect oneself from unnecessarily enraged admins or other responsible people.

Re: Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website

#122

Post by brianbarker » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:07 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #117

brianbarker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, you've never opened a gmail account using fake data and sent from there? Yahoo? Hotmail? The FBI will help your sys admin investigate a bomb threat, obviously. Reporting a security hole will unlikely draw their interest. Yes, just using a fake gmail account is tracable without more protections (like correctly accessing Tor). Again, I doubt the FBI is going to investigate. But hey, I'm all for paranoia and extra…

If what you're reporting is significant enough to threaten the livelihood or reputation of people important enough, they can and will find a way to trace you via your fingerprints/IPs … or do you think Google won't simply roll over on you when they get a subpoena/warrant?

I already gave you the answer. Send an anonymous letter. Done.

Re: Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website

#123

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jan 11, 2014, 12:38 AM UTC

dkuntz2 wrote: post #118

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average vocabulary isn't going to require using that massive a set of 3-grams though. If we started with homophones ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone#English ) that would seem to make a large difference; add in ability to easily get a definition (or list of synonyms) for words/phrases (like in Google Translate). Google suggest already does a lot of what is required.

Google also has a ton of computing power and disk space... That said, homophones and homonyms only would make the 3-gram sets smaller, but it would only detect homophones and homonyms being used incorrectly. I could still use a word incorrectly, and if I'm banking on that software to detect my mistakes it wouldn't.

Indeed. My false positive rate [flagged errors that are really omissions from the dict.] on spell-check in-browser appears to have been about 95% over the past couple of months. I wouldn't be expecting perfection; surely some mistakes corrected is better than none.

How I envision it is also a learning tool - "can here you" would pop up a "can {here} you [here refers to location, hear to hearing sound; 'can hear you']" allowing the author to click the 'corrected' phrase. At the same time you're learning the distinctions.

Thanks for the input.