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Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#41

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

adaml_623 wrote: post #36
rayiner wrote: post #16

Nitpick: the title implies that Uber is suing Github, but that's not the case. Uber has a civil suit pending in N.D. Cal., and has issued Uber a third-party subpoena: http://regmedia.co.uk/2015/02/28/ubergithubexhibit.pdf . Such subpoenas are used when a third party might have information relevant to a pending lawsuit. They do not imply any allegations of wrongdoing against the third party.

As a general rule headlines from 'The Register' should probably not be copied directly regardless of the rules on this website. Actual headline: "FORK ME! Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers"

Why? What's your justification?

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#42

Post by JeremyNT »

adaml_623 wrote: post #36
rayiner wrote: post #16

Nitpick: the title implies that Uber is suing Github, but that's not the case. Uber has a civil suit pending in N.D. Cal., and has issued Uber a third-party subpoena: http://regmedia.co.uk/2015/02/28/ubergithubexhibit.pdf . Such subpoenas are used when a third party might have information relevant to a pending lawsuit. They do not imply any allegations of wrongdoing against the third party.

As a general rule headlines from 'The Register' should probably not be copied directly regardless of the rules on this website. Actual headline: "FORK ME! Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers"

There's actually an exception in the site rules[0] for the sorts of titles which are common on the Reg:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#43

Post by tessierashpool »

tedunangst wrote: post #39
tessierashpool wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

incompetence, desperation, and a great way to shift some blame onto GitHub, in the eyes of people who know absolutely nothing about how this stuff works. which could be the audience they're most concerned about.

Are any of the people who know absolutely nothing about how this stuff works following the story on the register? Would anybody even know if the register hadn't decided to make a story out of it? Doesn't seem like a particularly effective blame shifting strategy to me.

it's also on VentureBeat, Slashdot, and a bunch of other places. google "GitHub Uber subpoena." it'll probably show up on TechCrunch and Valleywag by the end of the day.

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#44

Post by TeMPOraL »

paulornothing wrote: post #40
TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, that's excellent as well! I think I'll just note both of them in my quotes file. BTW. After watching all episodes of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" I'm looking for interesting shows. Is that podcast worth listening to? Anything else you'd recommend?

Not the OP, but I pretty regularly listen to Wait Wait, it's always pretty humorous and sadly it keeps me up on current events. I also listen to Marc Maron's WTF podcast and Star Talk Radio with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Different strokes for different folks though.

Thanks for recommendations, I'll check them out! :).

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#45

Post by shawnhermans »

When these types of things happen, I notice a strong "blame the victim" mentality. When Sony was hacked, I saw similar comments about how it serves them right for having bad security. Some people even go as far as to praise the hacker and think they shouldn’t be held accountable for their crime. After all, if Uber didn’t want this, they wouldn’t have made themselves so vulnerable to penetration.

While I agree companies like Uber and Sony need to invest more time and energy into security, real people are hurt when these types of things happen. It isn’t the executive-level “fat cats” who are hurt the most. It is normal, everyday people. They did not ask for their personal information to be stolen. Their only crime was working for a company with poor information security.

Furthermore, the fact Uber issued a subpoena for information from Github does not make Uber the bad guy for requesting the information and Github the good guy for withholding the information. A crime was committed and this is part of the investigation. The information requested by Uber is not unreasonable. They are basically requesting log files for that specific Gist.

Channeling my inner Matthew McConaughey from A Time to Kill, imagine this happening to an organization that is more likeable than Uber or Sony (shouldn’t be that hard). What if this happened to an organization responsible for helping rape victims and this person leaked the private information of rape victims to the Internet? Would people be so willing to support the criminal? Would people be so eager to praise Github for not cooperating?

Just because Uber is a horrible, unethical company does not mean it isn’t protected under the law. We shouldn’t condone crime just because we don’t like the victims.

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#46

Post by matthuggins »

hurin wrote: post #32
matthuggins wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secret gists are not published publicly, and thus are not crawled. You would need to have a direct link to the gist to have accessed it. Having the link either means you had access to it as an internal employee, it was shared by an internal employee, or an internal employee's system or email was accessed by someone else.

Or it could have been linked somewhere public? It's far-fetched to think that you'd be able to prove that someone seeing this gist is malicious. Github clearly states Warning: Secret gists aren't private.

Yes, I'm definitely not disagreeing with that.

Re: Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

#47

Post by tessierashpool »

tessierashpool wrote: post #43
tedunangst wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of the people who know absolutely nothing about how this stuff works following the story on the register? Would anybody even know if the register hadn't decided to make a story out of it? Doesn't seem like a particularly effective blame shifting strategy to me.

it's also on VentureBeat, Slashdot, and a bunch of other places. google "GitHub Uber subpoena." it'll probably show up on TechCrunch and Valleywag by the end of the day.

also, and although I doubt you'll ever see this, I would bet almost anything that my statement was 100% accurate as long as you assume the audience this move was intended for is an internal audience at Uber.
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