Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

cybernews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#401

Post by notyourwork »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #328
vsareto wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices. Fairly sure we could replace algorithm and data structure whiteboard interviews with security interviews and we'd all be better off

I'm all in favor of getting rid of the leetcode interviews, but it's not an either-or one, coding competency is still the primary concern, security a secondary one. And I don't think an individual developer would have prevented this; this is an issue with the general security and monitoring policies at Parler. I mean how could they create millions of admin accounts and extract 70 TB of data without any alarm bells, f…

When I interview candidates and their solution encounters an unexpected condition I typically park the original question to temporarily discuss how to handle this exception.

This and more generally their thoughts on how to handle other types of unexpected scenarios is an important part of delivering real world solutions. I'm shocked by the amount of engineers that don't have any thoughts on this topic.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#402

Post by 9387367 »

tootie wrote: post #283
valvar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because WikiLeaks is very diligent in scrubbing sensitive private information from leaks.

Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

> Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

No.

> WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange phoned the White House to warn lives would be put at risk by the publication of cables online, a court has heard.

> On 25 August, 2011, German news outlet Der Freitag revealed that it was possible to access the unredacted database of cables by using a mirror site and a 58-key password that had been published in a book by The Guardian earlier in the year.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/wikileaks-...

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#403

Post by sphuff »

whymauri wrote: post #26
sphuff wrote: post #2

Discussion of how it was done here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kuqvs3/all_par... Edit: this Reddit post appears to be inaccurate. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725268

This copypasta is incorrect. See more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725268

Ah, thanks for the info. I’ll edit my post.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#404

Post by BlueTemplar »

papaf wrote: post #354
BlueTemplar wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a big issue with the importance of Facebook in this specific story (even if something similar will almost certainly happen or already have happened elsewhere) : I have been to Myanmar. The kind of people that they are talking about overwhelmingly are too poor to afford Internet/Facebook !

About 30% of the population: https://napoleoncat.com/stats/facebook-users-in-myanmar/2018... Its enough to raise a mob. Facebook are also central to the investigation: https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in...

Those 30% overwhelmingly live in the biggest cities. Not in the poor villages where the ethnic tensions started.

(However, maybe Facebook indeed made things worse, once the Facebook-connected military got involved.)

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#405

Post by semicolon_storm »

nickysielicki wrote: post #255
maurys wrote: post #57

While I understand that Twilio is probably not at fault for the actual leak, I'm curious if they gave Parler some time to migrate/shift before cutting them off from their services. It's easy not to care since Parler is the "bad guy" here, but I do think that Internet infrastructure companies need to give a reasonable heads-up before pulling the rug under business customers.

This whole ordeal really sours Twilio in my mind. Whereas AWS can plausibly claim that they don't want to host illegal content, what can Twilio say for themselves here? From Twilios perspective, providing Twilio's core product to Parler isn't any different than serving them to other platforms. They have no responsibility or liability. The lack of moderation on Parler is irrelevant when Twilio isn't involved with movi…

If there's a drunk guy trying to start fights in your restaurant, you boot him out the door immediately for being a safety hazard and overall reflecting poorly on your business. I don't think any reasonable patrons will see that and think "Wow, they just kicked that guy out because they didn't like what he was saying, it could happen to me too, better get out of here".

It's a similar (digital) situation here. Parler is (was?) actively refusing to moderate their platform to prevent a literal insurrection.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#406

Post by notyourday »

rob74 wrote: post #202
gwbas1c wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of insecure code in the wild; and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices. I'd assume that Parler's engineers motivations had more to do with politics than providing a secure platform for protecting dissidents under duress. (Or, if we look at the history of a recent major war, the mediocre engineers working for the other side thought they were the good guys.)

To be fair, it's probably hard for a network like Parler to attract top talent. I mean, they explicitly advertised themselves as the "free speech social network" (i.e. "all hate speech welcome, we won't censor anyone except maybe Trump parody accounts") - would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

How much are they paying, again? If they pay on par with FAANG, I'm sure they would have no problem attracting top tier talent. If they are paying multiples of FAANG, they would attract top of the FAANG talent. Of course if they are paying a fraction of FAANG, they are going to get a very mediocre talent.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#407

Post by scythe »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #201
jedimastert wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand if an actual researcher leaks data they're still a researcher; they might be a bad person, but that's orthogonal. I would disagree. To me at least, the difference between researcher and hacker is what you do with the knowledge you have.

Those aren't exclusive, hacker doesn't necessarily have a bad connotation (see "white hat").

In my original post I didn't want to use the word "hacker" to mean "breaker-into of systems" while posting on a site called Hacker News.

But my point wasn't that people can't have their credentials revoked for doing bad things, my point was that if actual security researchers -- say, a team from some university or prominent firm -- had done this, we would be having a very different conversation right now. We might stop calling them researchers next week, but history matters.

As far as I can tell, the people who broke into Parler are not far beyond script kiddies, if at all.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#408

Post by pratik661 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #39

When you purposefully leak private data, you no longer get to hide behind the title "Security Researcher".

I find this euphemistic renaming amusing. It’s like calling a state backed hitman a ‘termination consultant’

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#409

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

mabbo wrote: post #94
user-the-name wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty clear where their priorities lay, huh. Breaking the security of their users is less important than getting new users.

Nah man, I won't criticize too hard. There but for the grace of god goes I, you know? I've had flakey dependencies. I've thought "maybe fail open is okay in this one case". You're growth hacking your company and you don't want to be held back because a dependency can't handle your scale. And hey, if a few fraudulent accounts get in, we'll just clean them up later. Cost benefit analysis here, right? But the road to he…

“The road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.”

A thousand engineers just got PTSD from reading that!

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#410

Post by rob74 »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #228
rob74 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's probably hard for a network like Parler to attract top talent. I mean, they explicitly advertised themselves as the "free speech social network" (i.e. "all hate speech welcome, we won't censor anyone except maybe Trump parody accounts") - would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

Yes? I wouldn't work for Parler, but I fail to see how the phrase "free speech social network" should elicit some negative emotion. Parler sucks because they are a haven to right wing extremists, not because of their marketing. Its like being angry at Signal because their encryption allows terrorists communicate securely.

Well, free speech is a good thing, if done responsibly. In practice though, "free speech" as used by Parler means no moderation at all, so the most blatant lies and the craziest conspiracy theories can run unchecked. And since mainstream platforms are cracking down on extremists, your platform will inevitably become a haven (and echo chamber) for them, even if you didn't intend to be one.
Post reply on HN