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American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

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

#171

Post by shmatt »

hammock wrote: post #159
consp wrote: post #9

Interesting part from the Dutch version of the article: Booking is nooit eerder op spionage gestuit. Het bedrijf is er ook niet echt naar op zoek. Zolang die geen hinder oplevert, kost het geen geld. De onuitgesproken consensus onder specialisten binnen het bedrijf is: we vermoeden dat inlichtingendiensten meekijken, maar zolang we ze niet zien, maken we ons niet druk. Which roughly translates to We are not looking f…

How could allowing random countries to spy on your customers not be considered a hindrance? Don't you think this would cost you future customers?

I don't think anyone assumes the booking for their next family vacation or business trip can't be tracked. They use their credit card and their telephone number at least

As for losing the customer base of drug kingpins and wanted terrorists, they're probably OK with losing them

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

#172

Post by ratww »

b20000 wrote: post #125
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking.com is the poster child of 'dark UX patterns' like that.

what about facebook?

Facebook is kinda tame compared to Booking.com.

Imagine Facebook if the like counts and comments were all false, and there were things flying across your screen saying "20 people are reading this comment, you should also do it". Then you got Booking.com.

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

#173

Post by JohnWhigham »

sofixa wrote: post #158
joe-collins wrote: post #44

> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. I certainly couldn't have named them all, so I dug up a list: • Air Force Intelligence • Army Intelligence • Central Intelligence Agency • Coast Guard Intelligence • Defense Intelligence Agency • Department of Energy • Department of Homeland Security • Department of State • Department of the Treasury • Drug Enforcement Administrati…

This reminds me of the book Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups by John Hughes-Wilson. It has a good overview on a few different failures, including multiple ones by the US, not least because of the huge number of different agencies, each wanting to protect its territory and reputation more than to actually do their job. The incompetence is frankly pretty staggering. And those are the people who can just dro…

It's reasons like this that weed (and other drugs) will not be legal at a federal level for a long, long time because there's an entire agency (the DEA) to prevent specifically that. They will fight tooth-and-nail to keep that shit illegal.

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

#174

Post by brimnes »

moooo99 wrote: post #58
nomercy400 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When searching for an accomodation, booking.com offers a map, which shows the price of each accomodation, with filters applied. This is so useful and I wish other travel sites also had this. A list of a 200 hotels of $50-100 is simply not enough information when searching in an unknown city. I need to narrow down that list, for example with features like a kitchenette (60 hotels left), but also a location near the ci…

The best hotel search engine I have used to date is kayak.de, a company from Berlin. The offer most if not all of the features you described and compare a variety of different booking portals. I'm not completely sure how biased they are in their ranking. But I've been using this site for the last few years and never had any problems. I recommended this site to a few of my friends who shared my positive experience.

Kayak is headquartered in the US and owned by Booking.com

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

#175

Post by morpheuskafka »

DeathArrow wrote: post #71
joe-collins wrote: post #44

> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. I certainly couldn't have named them all, so I dug up a list: • Air Force Intelligence • Army Intelligence • Central Intelligence Agency • Coast Guard Intelligence • Defense Intelligence Agency • Department of Energy • Department of Homeland Security • Department of State • Department of the Treasury • Drug Enforcement Administrati…

Departments of Agriculture and Education don't own intelligence agencies?

No, but Agriculture does have top secret-cleared foreign service personnel (Foreign Agricultural Service and APHIS). They probably have at least a soft intelligence role for foreign markets and trade deals.

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

#176

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

thrashh wrote: post #157
buran77 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have turned into one of the hundreds of articles about Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Ukrainian, North Korean, etc. hackers meant to solidify people's world view that we have a "good side" and a "bad side" of the world. The reality is that we have a "bad side" and a "worse side" but that's a hard pill to swallow for the regular person. Hence the deluge of articles meant to "straighten up" the view.

You’re mistakenly assuming that everyone sees intelligence services as bad, because as much as many people are concerned, “an enemy of an enemy is a friend.”

In as far as news editors and journalists believe this, they have lost their way.

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

#177

Post by stjohnswarts »

jdavis703 wrote: post #168
sandworm101 wrote: post #153

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.

If intelligence agencies are after you you’ve got way bigger problems than some fraudsters using your data for financial scams. It’s the same reason smart lock hacks don’t scare me… Anyone who is exploiting technology to gain physical access to my physical body is going to get me, regardless if I get hacked or not (e.g. thugs could just kick my door in, or wait outside and launch an ambush).

Wait you don't have perimeter sensors and 360-degree camera coverage at your studio apartment?

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

#178

Post by stjohnswarts »

angio wrote: post #145
nverno wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather live under the American, Russian, or Chinese government? Probably as simple as that- what's considered damaging in this case likely depends on your preferences.

I'd rather not live any under of them, and that's the reason I live in Europe. This is not the first time the US (an ally country) hacked European companies to gather data about European citizens (or in other cases technology).

If you think European countries aren't hacking American companies...

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

#179

Post by tablespoon »

joshgrib wrote: post #167
dtjb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying America is innocent, but those are materially different things with different motivations and risks. The reactions would rightly be different.

How are the motivations and risks different? The motivation seems like "country wants more information to use against people" and the risk is that they do it. At least in recent history (~50 yrs) the US has done way more damage globally through its intelligence agencies than probably any other country

> The motivation seems like "country wants more information to use against people" and the risk is that they do it.

IIRC, the intelligence utility of hotel booking data is for counterintelligence, so it's more like "use against other spies." They're looking for situations where spies/sources are traveling to the same place to meet.

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

#180

Post by b20000 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #170
b20000 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

javascript implies well educated? so much LOL here. maybe perl programmers are happy with perl and have no interest in learning yet another programming language.

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 off these people as you pointed out.

finally, it is perfectly valid to choose to become BETTER in a tool set instead of learning a new one every year. i’m pretty sure there are many developers out there who have no interest in learning other languages and are content in spending their valuable time learning other skills that are more valuable.

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