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Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

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Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#51

Post by tester34 »

yardstick wrote: post #47
tester34 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities e.g 1k - 1 000 (of gold) 1kk - 1 000 000 (of gold) 1kkk - 1 000 000 000 (of gold) >I can't say I would recommend the practice. Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk... damn, but with number in front of it it's just like yet another unit - I guess?

Not in any of the games I’ve played. Why not use use m for million and b for billion? That’s the standard that everyone understands.

hmm, it's the same as e.g "Y2K problem"

>The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, Millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch or Y2K error,

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/39370/what-does-k-me...

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#52

Post by throwawaylinux »

tester34 wrote: post #46
throwawaylinux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. I can't say I would recommend the practice.

>Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities e.g 1k - 1 000 (of gold) 1kk - 1 000 000 (of gold) 1kkk - 1 000 000 000 (of gold) >I can't say I would recommend the practice. Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk... damn, but with number in front of it it's just like yet another unit - I guess?

> afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities

Ah okay.

> Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk...

Well more just because (I thought) it is unusual it'd be hard to understand in a context where you hadn't made it obvious. Maybe I'm just out of touch!

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#54

Post by thaumasiotes »

sneak wrote: post #50
thaumasiotes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PRISM would seem to support that idea.

Front suggests secret ownership/control. More likely is that they are simply compelled by the state to spy, willingly or not.

How is "the state secretly compels them to do things" different from "they are secretly controlled by the state"?

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#55

Post by 9387367 »

sneak wrote: post #48
onionisafruit wrote: post #9

Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.

More importantly: stop giving your phone number and GPS position to services. Your phone number is the same as your home address, because it is linked to same in a million databases.

How much do you trust Strava or Garmin with your data?

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#56

Post by southerntofu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #2

The argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes per se negligence seems like a stretch. For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it jus…

> For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening.

Well it is! Tech companies should not act as surveillance/intelligence companies: stop gathering personal info on people, and suddenly you've raised the bar considerably for spies to harm your users.

Sure, an insider spy could probably still setup a special-cased JS payload to infect a specific user, but that's more convoluted and more easily detected during review, compared to simply accessing one of the many troves of data companies keep on their users.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#57

Post by southerntofu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #6
onionisafruit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you’re saying, but one way or another personal data twitter was entrusted with was leaked and people were murdered as a result. I don’t know if twitter was actually negligent here, but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit.

> but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit. If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe. Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. L…

> There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't.

Why do they ask for personal information in the first place? Why are DM messages not e2e-encrypted? That's plenty of wrong already.

If you're building a public/global microblogging platform, enable nicknames for all and never ask for any personal information. If you're building a private messenger, enable e2e encryption (or at least at-rest inbox encryption).

If you're building both, and ignoring all security best practices, and encouraging people to give away their phone numbers, i would hold you responsible to any harm that comes their way because of this.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#58

Post by southerntofu »

l33t2328 wrote: post #25
SMVS wrote: post #21

The tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.

Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?

Because all of Silicon Valley has a strong/long history with the military industrial complex and various intelligence services? It's not exactly a secret...

Now take a look at how many ex-intelligence run tech companies (may i remind you that former NSA head is on Amazon board?) and how many tech companies happily collaborate with intelligence services (Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir).

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#59

Post by 1cvmask »

onionisafruit wrote: post #9

Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.

Or assume that these censorship platforms are complicit and in-bed with national security apparatuses of their home countries and the close allies of their home countries.

“The suit also alleges that Al-Ahmed's Arabic-language Twitter account was suspended in 2018 and has not been reinstated despite multiple attempts at appeal, and accuses the company of keeping Al-Ahmed's account offline because of its interest in maintaining users in Saudi Arabia. "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint.“

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#60

Post by evgen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #27
l33t2328 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?

PRISM would seem to support that idea.

No it would not. It would only suggest that once the data existed there was an interest on the part of certain government agencies to gain access to the data. The idea that these companies are 'fronts' for these agencies is moronic to the point of being self-parody.
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