Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business • Hacker News Board

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#301

Post by kevingadd » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #260

0goel0 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless some high-level execs are convicted and put in jail, and the company is given a high-enough file[1], this is the cost of doing business. [1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.

Zaidi has been convicted. He's awaiting sentencing.

Arguably a single conviction won't achieve anything. If it's just one sucker who gets taken out (years later) as a result of an incredibly profitable scam, it's easy to convince your employees that they won't be the one to take the fall. If you have a significant portion of the executive team or other leadership getting punished it sets a clearer example.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#302

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #284

bserge wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, uh, where do you get your news on Europe?

This is a good evidence for what I refer to as the rise of redditism on HN (US-biased views pretty much detached from reality, but constituting the majority of up/down-votes). This is further supported by the dynamics of up/down votes. You will see GP comment up-voted when the US wakes up.

This is not a change, it has always happened here. Also, saying that HN is turning into reddit is so old that there's a rule about not doing it.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#303

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #265

Spivak wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as the liberal-libertarian crowd on HN likes to be vocal against most forms of government licensure, protection from ethical breaches like this is one of the best things about them. You can tell your employer to pound sand because neither you nor anyone they could replace you with will be willing to risk their license to do something unethical. And even if they could find someone sketch to try and push it thr…

I'm not leftist and I haven't observed any strong bias here. HN crowd is leftist only by US standards but then US is a country where most people think public health care is communism.

"Liberal-libertarian" isn't "leftist," and that's pretty clear from the context of the comment. It's minarchist, free-marketeer, etc.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#304

Post by boshjlock » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:38 PM UTC

throwawaysk wrote: post #115

I worked at Songkick. The business was not sustainable, there was no revenue stream in sight before the Crowdsurge merger. Crowdsurge effectively acquired us when they merged as Songkick had run out of funding, with no potential buyers or investors. Crowdsurge was not sustainable either, they lost money on every ticket sold, but mostly because TM would only allow 10% of any allocation at any TM venue. Crowdsurge were…

The COO was a psychopath who treated daily company life as a game of poker. From the Crowdsurge side, it never really came as a surprise that the exec team were always planning to fuck over the company in their favour.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#305

Post by africanboy » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #277

bitcharmer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not leftist and I haven't observed any strong bias here. HN crowd is leftist only by US standards but then US is a country where most people think public health care is communism.

~42%-45% of the US population is in Medicaid, Medicare or other government healthcare solutions. It's very clear that most people in the US do not think socialized / public healthcare is tantamount to Communism. The US is left leaning compared to the majority of all nations. Besides that, the US is far more progressive than eg Europe in many respects (and that's ignoring parts of Europe still ruled by actual fascism…

> ~42%-45% of the US population is in Medicaid, Medicare or other government healthcare solutions

Please, not this argument again!

Medicaid is an health insurance, not free health care!

They are completely different things (no, it's not the same thing as providing free healthcare)

And btw, only 23% benefit from it

"providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans)"

> Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade

The only progress US has made has been the number of homicides...

A nation where a thousand people every year are killed by the police and that has almost 700 people in jail every 100,000 of population (25% of the global jail population) looks more like a dictatorships than a progressive country.

As a comparison in Italy for the police to kill a thousand people it would take 333 years. USA has only 5.5 times the population of Italy.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#306

Post by africanboy » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #284

bserge wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, uh, where do you get your news on Europe?

This is a good evidence for what I refer to as the rise of redditism on HN (US-biased views pretty much detached from reality, but constituting the majority of up/down-votes). This is further supported by the dynamics of up/down votes. You will see GP comment up-voted when the US wakes up.

You mean Americans being average Americans?

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#307

Post by tt217aa742 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #270

Larrikin wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same argument that tech corporations say should apply to them. They should be allowed to grow uncontrollably to make as much money as possible but it's actually impossible for them to know the details (moderate content in this specific iteration of the argument) of what they have grown. The point of this thread is the same argument against that very idea. If the organization is so big that the CEO believe…

But you can't know all of that. Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), th…

In this case:

The worker should be incarcerated for doing the act, whilst knowing that it was harmful to the environment, instead of reporting the manager to the authorities and higher ups.

The manager should be incarcerated, for directly ordering the said act to be done and due to therefore also being responsible for it.

The CEO should be incarcerated for failing to set up proper procedures so things like these can't happen (unauthorized dumps where just one party is trusted with these substances), for failing to set up mechanisms of oversight and control (which would terminate said manager from the company) and as an example to prevent systemic inaction due to noone caring and having no motivation to do proper implementations.

The particulars of how long these incarcerations should be, however, could be up for debate.

Financial penalties, as a function of net-worth, should also be considered.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#308

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

beefield wrote: post #276

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't know all of that. Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), th…

> it's unrealistic to expect the CEO to even know that that local walmart exists Maybe, just maybe we then should not have so large entities that nobody can be responsible for? Limited liability is a massive handout from society to the owners of the Limited liability company and should be priced accordingly. (I do not propose banning limited liability. I propose being more selective how and which operations actually…

> just maybe we then should not have so large entities that nobody can be responsible for

But who says no one is responsible? There are clearly guilty parties, just not the CEO.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#309

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

canofbars wrote: post #273

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't know all of that. Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), th…

The problem is management can just abuse this by saying something like "Dispose of these chemicals safely, you have 5 minutes to be back". The manager clearly said to do it safely but 5 minutes only leaves time to dump them unsafely. How do you assign blame to the manager or even higher systems which tell people to do these things without literally saying it.

This just means there is nuance to correctly assigning blame.

Re: Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

#310

Post by meigwilym » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

nathanyz wrote: post #155

ipqk wrote: post #148

Compare this slap on the wrist to Aaron Swartz: Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

It is one of the great imbalances in the justice system where technically corporations are people, but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.

Punish the shareholders too. Companies would soon find themselves ethical.