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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

#271

Post by astrange »

capableweb wrote: post #200
hammock wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a reasonable expectation, that the government of the country whose company you use to book a hotel would know what you're doing. But that's not this. Booking.com is a Dutch company. The spy was American. And not even authorized by the US nor the Netherlands either.

Booking.com is kind of a Dutch company, at least the .com division, but it's actually owned by a American parent, "Booking Holdings", based in Norwalk, Connecticut.

They sold themselves to Priceline because Europe doesn't seem capable of funding startups.

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

#272

Post by Nasrudith »

sandworm101 wrote: post #153
qwertox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Google Translate: > Booking has never encountered espionage before. The company isn't really looking for it either. As long as it doesn't cause any hindrance, it won't cost you any money. The unspoken consensus among specialists within the company is: we suspect that intelligence services are watching, but as long as we don't see them, we don't worry. What should make me believe that they don't have the…

>> 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.

Domestic intelligence services are also black hats. It isn't a matter of them not being black hats but about what they can get away with.

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

#273

Post by Nasrudith »

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.”

Nah - it is assuming they should be seen as bad actors and we would all be better off if they were all shoved feet first through a wood chipper but alas there is a tragic lack of identified targets, chippers, and people to shove them in.

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

#274

Post by Nasrudith »

Xelbair wrote: post #137
jb1991 wrote: post #27

This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…

I wonder when will people stop being surprised that any corporation puts profit as it's end goal. Them being nice for a while, it just a coincidence of aligned interests. Court mandated fines are taken into the account - if profit increase is higher than the fine, what's stopping them from going forward with such idea?

How about we go after the actual fucking culprit for a change?

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

#275

Post by Nasrudith »

t8e56vd4ih wrote: post #74
hanwenn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking takes a 20% cut of the reservation, so I expect every hotel to gladly you offer a 10% off the booking.com price.

that's just your expectations. booking hotels directly is usually more expensive. why? because they can

Also because making it cheaper through something gets called a marketing/business expansion opportunity and they don't want to take the haircut when they don't have to.

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

#276

Post by sudosysgen »

ninjanomnom wrote: post #237
furyg3 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are definitely black hats. Intelligence services operating in foreign countries (physically or digitally) are by definition criminals, in that they are breaking the local laws where they are operating / accessing. That they are doing it for a 'good cause' (often debatable) is somewhat irrelevant, that is a risk/reward calculation that the country/agency/spy needs to make themselves. If a a friendly country of th…

Illegal activities done with good intention (and usually outcome) is what the term greyhat is for. It would be fair to argue that's the correct term here for government agency hackers but personally I don't have strong enough stance on the subject to say either way.

Would Russia hacking a US election for example count as greyhat?

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

#277

Post by jessaustin »

Santosh83 wrote: post #97
seanieb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they couldn’t estimate accurately how fast the Taliban was recapturing Afghanistan, a country they occupied for over a decade! Too many cooks in that kitchen!

Of course they could. Why are people this naive? Nevertheless the administration simply did not care. It was time to shift the theatre of war elsewhere and that's that.

Look who's naive. The war was marketed as an attempt to kill one person. A month after the war started, that person left Afghanistan and never came back. After ten years, someone who vaguely resembled the original target was allegedly killed in a different nation, although somehow the corpse was never photographed or examined. After another ten years, it was twenty years past time to end the war.

Our unsupervised services might have suspected that it would all go to shit, but they expected that to take several months rather than several days. It's stupid to argue about, however, because the war should have ended after a month, when ObL left Afghanistan!

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

#278

Post by jhugo »

dep_b wrote: post #243
jhugo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried this many times and the hotel usually says "I guess you should book it online then"

That's so weird huh? I really don't understand it.

My guess is that they have some separate incentive from Booking.com etc to drive bookings through those platforms. The same places usually have a proudly displayed bullshit "9.9 average on Booking.com" somewhere in the foyer.

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

#279

Post by DonHopkins »

b20000 wrote: post #255
DonHopkins wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-intellectualism and refusal to learn any other language isn't going to get you a good job or much interesting experience. You can get better in one language by learning and using several other different languages (the more languages and the more different, the better), which expands the scope of what you know how to do in ANY language. And if you refuse to learn more than one language, that limits yourself to ta…

Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is. You have not given any reasonable proof for this. If this were true, just to give you one example, linux kernel programmers would be bad programmers. I used to use Perl for web development, but quit web development years ag…

I think you are confusing a program that is written in one programming language with people who only program in one programming language.

So name some linux kernel programmers you actually know for a fact that they only know and program in one programming language?

I bet I can name a lot more Linux kernel programmers who know and use multiple programming languages.

Have you considered the possibility that most Linux kernel programmers might have also worked on other programs than the Linux kernel (and didn't just jump into the deep end of Linux kernel hacking as their first job) and actually know and use some other languages other than C? Like maybe Bash, or Assembly, or Python, or Lua, or TCL, or Lisp, or C++, or FORTH, or Pascal, or Fortran, or Java, or C#, or Lord forbid even Perl?

Because Linux kernel hackers tend to be experienced, professional programmers, who know and use multiple languages, not monolinguistic amateurs who gave up learning new languages after only learning C, then started hacking the Linux kernel as their first and only project.

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

#280

Post by rurban »

furyg3 wrote: post #169
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.

They are definitely black hats. Intelligence services operating in foreign countries (physically or digitally) are by definition criminals, in that they are breaking the local laws where they are operating / accessing. That they are doing it for a 'good cause' (often debatable) is somewhat irrelevant, that is a risk/reward calculation that the country/agency/spy needs to make themselves. If a a friendly country of th…

> That they are doing it for a 'good cause' (often debatable)

I would not count their fascist agenda a good cause. Inciting wars, performing illegal wars, putsching socialistic leaders neither, ...

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