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What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

jacobinmag.com

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Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#71

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dcre wrote: post #39
blfr wrote: post #3

This is OT but I wanted to ask before: what does the "Jacobin" in Jacobin Mag refer to? Presumably not the more genocidal fraction of the French Revolution which was my first guess?

For more info, here is a great writeup by Alex Payne on why he made a large donation to Jacobin and joined their board: https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html > Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically…

And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Sure, blame us for the Holodomor and the "Great Leap Forward" (and other similar artificial famines, disease outbreaks, etc caused by bad state-socialist policy), but don't act like your hands are clean when you support a system that kills, last I remember, 49,000 people each year simply by artificially refusing to treat their diseases, and kills further millions in its endless-yet-pointless foreign wars.

I fully support having a genuine contest of ideologies to see who can kill fewer people and save more lives, with greater health and happiness! But that means we have to admit, in the first place, that capitalism kills, which is more honesty than we get out of most people in Western societies today.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#72

Post by specialist »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be i…

Comparing Germany vs USA, from the hip, the two biggest differences are voter enfranchisement and form of elections.

#1 The USA (mostly) requires voters be "registered" prior to voting. Whereas most modern democracies like Germany have universal registration.

#2 USA (mostly) uses first past the post (aka winner takes all) whereas a quick googling suggests Germany uses proportional representation. So in the USA, when 50% + 1 is a victory, every vote counts.

Consequently, voter registration and get out the vote (GOTV) have become central to campaigns in the USA. Also called ballot chasing.

These quirks (and others) in USA elections have created a campaigning arms race, leading to ever more costly elections.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#73

Post by gnaritas »

yaur wrote: post #50

The thing I don't understand here... How you can you write a multitenant app where protecting an EAV store is a critical feature and not have tests that validate that your security still works that run before every deploy.

Do you realize the vast majority of apps out in the real world have no tests at all?

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#74

Post by venomsnake »

skwirl wrote: post #65
venomsnake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. Pundits are greatly underestimating the anti establishment sentiments in the populace. And the Hilary supporters I know right now are smugger than crosfitting vegans. Hubris is the easiest path to a politician downfall and there is quite a lot of it in Hilary's warehouse. Edit: I also don't think that Bill really wants her to be pre…

>I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. What about Romney and McCain?

They had the deck stacked against them. For Hillary both 2008 and 2016 the attitude is of "elections are just some formality nuisance"

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#75

Post by mfisher87 »

skwirl wrote: post #65
venomsnake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. Pundits are greatly underestimating the anti establishment sentiments in the populace. And the Hilary supporters I know right now are smugger than crosfitting vegans. Hubris is the easiest path to a politician downfall and there is quite a lot of it in Hilary's warehouse. Edit: I also don't think that Bill really wants her to be pre…

>I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. What about Romney and McCain?

They were never seen as "having" the presidency. Hillary was seen as "inevitable" in two elections now, and lost the first.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#76

Post by gnaritas »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be i…

> (note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)

Well you know, except that one time...

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#77

Post by Bluestrike2 »

mfisher87 wrote: post #66
idbehold wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the same issue and it wasn't even an issue with the same vendor (NGP VAN).

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. I'm looking for a hard source, but haven't yet found it. http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-campaign-data-breach-co... "On Reddit, an r/technology thread about the controversy included comment from a self-identified 2008 Obama campaign staffer who claimed such breaches were both common but of limited strategic value: "As an '08 Obama staffer who used the VAN extensively, it went down l…

The entire story seems kind of ridiculous. Given the descriptions, we're talking about an access control bug. Calling it a "firewall failure" makes it sound ridiculous, and I agree that it shades everything under a nefarious tone. But since campaigns are chock full of lawyers, they might be using it in a legal sense, referring to a "Chinese wall" [1] that prevents certain communications to avoid conflict of interests. Unless access logs show that the Sanders campaign decided to suck up everything, it's hard to argue that the DNC didn't massively overreact here.

Whatever the case, what confuses me are the suggestions that these sorts of breaches are common and that they have been for some time. What the hell are these software vendors doing? Access control is nothing new. And while getting it right isn't always easy, there's no reason for you to continuously get it wrong, either. It's also really easy to test, comparatively speaking, because potential issues here are predictable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#79

Post by yourapostasy »

mschuster91 wrote: post #23
yourapostasy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US politicians are far less aware about data privacy issues than their EU counterparts. Assembling a detailed profile of an individual in the US is quite expensive, for very fine-grained values (think dossier, history-of-life levels) of "detailed", if you are putting together a mass marketing campaign. The actual publicly-available voter data however, is relatively straightforward and is necessary to prevent basic vo…

I believe there's a difference between cold calls at work and at home. When I'm working and you call me to tell me about a new tech stack, well fine for me. But when I'm at home and relaxing, and someone tries to sell me bullshit, I get really really mad. It's just disrespectful to intrude into others' personal lives - TV/radio/internet commercials already do that enough.

Agreed. However, I mentioned the aside because over the years I've been in the business, I've consistently seen techies look down their noses at sales and marketing staff, bringing their at-home policy over cold calls to work, and taking out their frustrations over their own sales and marketing staff against all vendor sales and marketing staff they meet, especially those who cold call. Your own organization's sales and marketing staff could genuinely suck rocks, but that doesn't mean all outside sales and marketing staff have no value on offer, but by and large technical staff don't recognize that.

That unfortunately perpetuates a vicious cycle, because with only minimal effort, technical staff can easily get a respected seat at the gatekeepers' table, and vastly mitigate the "management picking vendors' technical solution" issue. That very characterization of which illustrates the depth to which technical staff misunderstand what is really going on, because it really should be called "management picking the ROI and solutions to business' challenges, in the absence of proactive solutions put up by technical staff for consideration".

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#80

Post by sandworm101 »

Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #44

Really disappointed they went with the bloodless "Datagate" when "VANghazi" was available.

Watergate involved wrongdoing by republican staffers. Bengazi (allegedly) involved wrongdoing by democrats. So there is little debate as to which descriptor a democrat would adopt to attack a fellow democrat.

But the use of "gate" does show the age of the candidates. I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate.

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