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Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#91

I don't see it mentioned in the article but is SBF still doing the "dumb blonde" act as though this were all an unintended accident or have his lawyers gotten him to tighten his lip?

“Dumb blonde” is not useful and such a silly stretch…I don’t think this was a good choice for a description of his actions and weakens the potential impact of your comment considerably.

I'm not using "dumb blonde" to describe what led up to the scandal, I'm using it to describe his responses to questions after the scandal.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#93

Impressive that it was a one line code change to allow a 65b credit line. This is some office space level stuff.

This reminds of the book Dark Forest in the series 3 body problem

Spoiler Alert : In this book, a character invents a way to impart any belief into your mind. So if you read "water is poisonous" while in the MRI-type machine, your brain will completely believe that water is poisonous. The intention was for people to believe that they can win against the technologically superior aliens.

But the character made a one character change (+ to -) to modify the machine to make a person believe the opposite. So "humans will 100% win against aliens" became "humans will 100% lose against aliens"

Very interesting idea.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#94
post #92

SBF may have made mistakes or even committed fraud, but it is concerning that bankruptcy attorney does not seem to focus on recovering the value of the assets. If FTX US was liquid, this action has brought down another company...

I assume they’re being honest about the value of the company. They’re not “lowering” it. The company is worth whatever a potential buyer is willing to pay for it. And whatever that number is, I can’t imagine it’s meaningfully different from “$0”.

I’m talking about the brand and the technology, not the assets that need to be distributed to creditors.

The alternative here is if the lawyers found the back door, and decided to keep it secret. That’s not ethical IMO.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#95
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$65B seems oddly specific - could it be that they just set the liquidation limit for Alameda's account to 65,535 (max 16bit unsigned int), in millions of dollars?

Pretty sure their whole stack was in Python

Their tech team almost exclusively came from Jane Street, wouldn’t it be OCaml?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#96
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the first conditional checks if the logged-in user is allowed to access the account by ensuring that the the user and account match. OR, if the user is sbf, they always have access regardless of which account it is. That said this wouldn't really set up a line of credit but it is a way to give one user access to everyone's stuff.

My point is that the first check would be true because the user is already sbf.

The first comparison is checking the ID so the rightful owner has access. The second comparison (unless it's been edited since you posted your comment) is checking the username against 'sbf'.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#97
post #21

Interestingly, while some are quoting a "single line of code", the article is actually using some even stranger information: > "Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code [emphasis mine] for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," [FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich] added. "And we know the size of that line of credit…

Maybe some specific accounts were hard-coded to have credit lines of certain amounts, and they just changed the one for Alameda from 0 (or whatever) to 65 billion. Not uncommon for a startup to hack features into code directly before there's a db column and frontend to support updating values through an admin interface.

we're also basing a lot off a reporter's interpretation. Inserting a value into the database by hand would probably have similar effects and still be "programming".

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#98
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they find the code? Brute force?

I usually try random codes with the following format: COMPANYNAME15, COMPANYNAME20, etc. Every once in a while (maybe 10% of the time?) I get lucky.

WELCOME10, WELCOME20, etc also work a good amount of the time. A lot of the sign up for our mailing list and get a discount promo codes match up to WELCOME plus the percentage off.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#99
post #92

SBF may have made mistakes or even committed fraud, but it is concerning that bankruptcy attorney does not seem to focus on recovering the value of the assets. If FTX US was liquid, this action has brought down another company...

I thought Matt Levine's take in Wednesday's Money Stuff was insightful:

> If you go around talking up the value of the FTX’s business and its tokens, you might be able to talk someone into paying a lot of money for them; maybe not now but perhaps in November. If you go around talking down the value of FTX — if you make statements about how poorly it was run and how much fraud it did — then that value will tend to zero, and you won’t be able to sell it.

> At some level Bankman-Fried is surely right that if he had remained CEO of FTX, instead of stepping down and being replaced by Ray, he would have had a better chance — though still quite slim — of selling FTX’s business and tokens for more money, and thus raising more money for FTX’s customers. If you want to sell that business, you have to say that it’s good.

> It’s just that, you know, if FTX was a fraud, he would have been getting that money for customers by doing more fraud? Like if Ray is right that FTX was a fraudulent mess, then he shouldn’t be trying to sell it to investors for a lot of money, since that would itself be fraud.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#100
post #9

Reminds me back at a certain large travel website I worked at, someone left the debug promo codes enabled in prod... Eventually someone found the "5000off" code, and posted it to Slickdeals. We had alarms for bookings that lost us money (especially with bundled flights), so it was found relatively quickly, but around 30 people had used it already... Except SBF was just massive fraud, not a whoopsie doopsie.

At a certain shoe online retailer I worked at, we had a hard limit on the maximum discount, and it was built into the code. Not configurable, and not overridable. There were a lot of problems with that codebase, and some of those problems probably led to that particular solution, but I liked it.
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