Hacker stealing public information



  • @Techcrunch said:

    A hacker has exploited Facebook’s Graph Search to collect a database of thousands of phone numbers and Facebook users. Both parties agree that all the information was left public by users (even if the users themselves may still not realize it). But Facebook issued him a cease and desist after the hacker continued to scrape data and argued with Facebook that the availability of the information invades users’ privacy.

    (full story)

    This dispute reminds me of that time when Apple sued Microsoft for stealing concepts they themselves stole from Xerox; only in this case the leaf-level thief is complaining about the availability of the information he's (allegedly) stealing.



  • Apple bought a license from Xerox.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Apple bought a license from Xerox.

    I'm sure that's how it ended up in court.



  • Didn't someone scrape and compile the profiles of about 100,000,000 users a few years back and release of torrent of that data?

    Edit:

    Yeah.



  • @Ronald said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Apple bought a license from Xerox.

    I'm sure that's how it ended up in court.

    Yeah, but Xerox lost their lawsuit against Apple (just as Apple lost their lawsuit against Microsoft) so it seems to matter fuck-all.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Yeah, but Xerox lost their lawsuit against Apple (just as Apple lost their lawsuit against Microsoft) so it seems to matter fuck-all.

    I look at it from this viewpoint: no matter how revolutionary or advanced or forward-looking Xerox's technologies were... they weren't willing to actually put them in products and sell them to the public.

    So fuck them. Xerox was sitting on a goldmine for a solid decade and failed to grab a pick ax, so I can't blame Apple or Microsoft or GeOS or anybody else for taking it on. Snooze = lose.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Yeah, but Xerox lost their lawsuit against Apple (just as Apple lost their lawsuit against Microsoft) so it seems to matter fuck-all.

    I look at it from this viewpoint: no matter how revolutionary or advanced or forward-looking Xerox's technologies were... they weren't willing to actually put them in products and sell them to the public.

    So fuck them. Xerox was sitting on a goldmine for a solid decade and failed to grab a pick ax, so I can't blame Apple or Microsoft or GeOS or anybody else for taking it on. Snooze = lose.

    Yeah, I don't blame other copmanies, either. And honestly, the windowing GUI paradigm was really about the only way that shit was gonna go; any other direction would have been kind of silly. Still, I do think it was enormously dick-ish for Apple to sue Microsoft. It's a good example of how Apple squandered all of their advantages and ended up playing second fiddle to Windows.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Xerox was sitting on a goldmine for a solid decade and failed to grab a pick ax, so I can't blame Apple or Microsoft or GeOS or anybody else for taking it on.

    It's a textbook instance of the survivor bias (aka the "FBI AND CIA KNEW ABOUT 9/11" logic). For every good R&D idea Xerox were probably swimming in a busload of shitty concepts that nobody talks about anymore. A GUI was not in the value stream of their core business (copiers) while it was a central concept for Apple and Microsoft so there is no wonder those two made a better use of it.



  • @Ronald said:

    For every good R&D idea Xerox were probably swimming in a busload of shitty concepts that nobody talks about anymore. A GUI was not in the value stream of their core business (copiers)...

    Were Ethernet or Smalltalk part of their core business?

    Regardless, I don't know what you're trying to get at. You're basically just restating what Blakey already said: Xerox failed to monetize the GUI and everybody else moved in. Xerox's loss and it's hard to feel that bad for them.

    Edit: I should also point out that one of the reasons Xerox failed to monetize the GUI was because the DoJ was pursuing anti-trust claims against Xerox at the time, which made building a software business tough. Irony abounds when the ultimate benefactor of this anti-trust action--Microsoft--ended up being hounded, too.



  • @Ronald said:

    It's a textbook instance of the survivor bias (aka the "FBI AND CIA KNEW ABOUT 9/11" logic). For every good R&D idea Xerox were probably swimming in a busload of shitty concepts that nobody talks about anymore. A GUI was not in the value stream of their core business (copiers) while it was a central concept for Apple and Microsoft so there is no wonder those two made a better use of it.

    They had an entire (large) LAB dedicated to coming up with new computer/printing technologies. Nothing came out of it. They were sitting on some pretty fucking amazing stuff, printing, networking, programming*, computer interaction, etc. And how many computer-related products did Xerox sell? The fucking Xerox Star? A shitty overpriced word-processor only made after Apple proved the concept for them? So yeah, maybe 75% of the shit they made wasn't very good, but that's no fucking excuse. By all rights, the computer on my desktop should have a Xerox logo on it right now.

    I mean, people criticize Microsoft for not productizing their R&D programs very well, but at least Microsoft DOES EVENTUALLY GET AROUND TO IT. Most of the time. Xerox never did.

    ---

    *) LISP is shitty, but those PARC Lisp Machines could do "edit-and-continue" long before anything else. And most current-generation development environments can't at all. Except Microsoft's, natch.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Regardless, I don't know what you're trying to get at.

    Google was not making a lot of money before the beancounter took over and started to slash moneypits. Same with GE. Most successful companies dabble in R&D but know better than going all out with every good idea that comes out of the lab. Xerox failed to see the value in what they had (not just the GUI) and they should have seen a licensing opportunity. But they are a copier company, not ACME or OCP, and they did well in that business.



    Of course they are now worth 2% of Apple (and that's after the Apple stock freefall of the last few days) but even if they had ventured in the computer business I doubt they would have made it that big.



  • @Ronald said:

    Google was not making a lot of money before the beancounter took over and started to slash moneypits.

    Last time I checked, "money pits" was the primary ingredient in Google Stew.

    @Ronald said:

    Same with GE.

    They've known how to be a good welfare queen for awhile now. No Boeing, mind you, but they do okay, especially for a company which always ends up with a ridiculously-low tax liability.

    @Ronald said:

    Xerox failed to see the value in what they had (not just the GUI) and they should have seen a licensing opportunity. But they are a copier company, not ACME or OCP, and they did well in that business.

    Well, as I pointed out, they actually did want to monetize it, but were somewhat stymied by the DoJ. Remember, this was the 70s and you couldn't run a business in America unless your mom, wife and sister were all taking turns rimming Teddy Kennedy's swollen, puckered asshole. (Yay freedom!)

    Hell, look at all the trucker movies there were back then. I mean, an entire genre of movies with plots built around how bureaucratic and insane interstate trucking was. Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another? (Although I'm sure the people on the East Coast didn't mind being deprived of Coors..)



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another? (Although I'm sure the people on the East Coast didn't mind being deprived of Coors..)

    In the 2nd movie they smuggle an elephant. In the 3rd movie "the Bandit" is absent and the truck driver keeps saying "I'm the bandit! I'm the bandit!" so the audience gets it. Not sure if that supports your bureaucratic nightmare theory but those sequels were plain terrible. Even worse than Resident Evil sequels.



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another? (Although I'm sure the people on the East Coast didn't mind being deprived of Coors..)

    In the 2nd movie they smuggle an elephant. In the 3rd movie "the Bandit" is absent and the truck driver keeps saying "I'm the bandit! I'm the bandit!" so the audience gets it. Not sure if that supports your bureaucratic nightmare theory but those sequels were plain terrible. Even worse than Resident Evil sequels.

    My favorite was Convoy. A weird, quasi-anarchic parable, based on a country song, about truckers shutting down the US economy, with Kris Kristofferson playing a Christ figure? Sign me up.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    ... about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another?

    What do you mean was?

    Apparently in PA it's still illegal to bring alcohol into the state.



  • @russ0519 said:

    Apparently in PA it's still illegal to bring alcohol into the state.
    I can't be bothered to actually read the articles, because I don't really care, but I'd guess it's probably only illegal if you don't have some state license and/or pay tax on it in the state you're transporting it to.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    My favorite was Convoy.

    Not for the drinkers-of-girly-beverages, that movie.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another? (Although I'm sure the people on the East Coast didn't mind being deprived of Coors..)
      Way back in the olden days, Coors was only available in the western U.S. which somehow led people in the eastern U.S. believe it must be something special.  And so people in the eastern U.S. were always trying to get Coors.  Don't ask me, people did a lot of weird things in the 70's.

    From what little I remember of the movie Smokie and the Bandit, I don't believe the plot had anything to do with transporting the Coors being illegal.  I remember it as a couple of guys were hired to get a truckload of Coors from somewhere to somewhere else and they had to do it in only a couple of days, which meant they had to drive really fast, which was the illegal part that resulted in various police chases.  And the entire movie was pretty much just them driving a truck really fast and being chased by the police.  And talking on the CB radio.  Which for a short time was the 1970's equivalent of the cellphone.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    From what little I remember of the movie Smokie and the Bandit, I don't believe the plot had anything to do with transporting the Coors being illegal.  I remember it as a couple of guys were hired to get a truckload of Coors from somewhere to somewhere else and they had to do it in only a couple of days, which meant they had to drive really fast, which was the illegal part that resulted in various police chases.

    Yes and no. They had to drive fast to keep the beer cool (or it went bad) but it was also illegal to cross the state line. The Bandit was there as a diversion to keep the cops ("Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car) away from the truck. Nowadays drug runners on the I-29 and I-35 use a similar approach, sending cars with out-of-state license plates to do a bit of speeding and flush out the cops. Or so I heard.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another? (Although I'm sure the people on the East Coast didn't mind being deprived of Coors..)
      Way back in the olden days, Coors was only available in the western U.S. which somehow led people in the eastern U.S. believe it must be something special.  And so people in the eastern U.S. were always trying to get Coors.  Don't ask me, people did a lot of weird things in the 70's.

    From what little I remember of the movie Smokie and the Bandit, I don't believe the plot had anything to do with transporting the Coors being illegal.  I remember it as a couple of guys were hired to get a truckload of Coors from somewhere to somewhere else and they had to do it in only a couple of days, which meant they had to drive really fast, which was the illegal part that resulted in various police chases.  And the entire movie was pretty much just them driving a truck really fast and being chased by the police.  And talking on the CB radio.  Which for a short time was the 1970's equivalent of the cellphone.

    According to Wikipedia, it was illegal to transport Coors to Georgia in 1977, which was the reason they were paid to transport it.



  • @Ronald said:

    "Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car

    Noooo!!! It's CB slang, because highway patrolmen wear those silly hats like Smokey the Bear. Hence why cops were "Smokeys" or "Bears". (Which brings to mind the line in the song Convoy about "a Bear in the air", which meant a cop in a helicopter.)



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ronald said:
    "Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car

    Noooo!!! It's CB slang, because highway patrolmen wear those silly hats like Smokey the Bear. Hence why cops were "Smokeys" or "Bears". (Which brings to mind the line in the song Convoy about "a Bear in the air", which meant a cop in a helicopter.)

    That's not what they say in the movie!



  • @Ronald said:

    ("Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car)
    "Smokie" is a slang term that refers to the State Highway Patrol.  It is meant as a sort of insult -- that the uniforms worn by State Highway Patrol officers look like the cartoon character Smokie the Bear (particularly the hat).



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I mean, people criticize Microsoft for not productizing their R&D programs very well, but at least Microsoft DOES EVENTUALLY GET AROUND TO IT. Most of the time.
    I'm still waiting for the Kinect/Office/IE integration, so I can literally give you guys the finger without having to type something rude. Maybe one day.


     



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Ronald said:
    "Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car

    Noooo!!! It's CB slang, because highway patrolmen wear those silly hats like Smokey the Bear. Hence why cops were "Smokeys" or "Bears". (Which brings to mind the line in the song Convoy about "a Bear in the air", which meant a cop in a helicopter.)

    That's not what they say in the movie!

    Then the movie lied and I disown it.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    According to Wikipedia, it was illegal to transport Coors to Georgia in 1977, which was the reason they were paid to transport it.
    Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with Wikipedia.  However, the movie was really just about driving a truck fast and being chased by the police.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ronald said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Ronald said:
    "Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car

    Noooo!!! It's CB slang, because highway patrolmen wear those silly hats like Smokey the Bear. Hence why cops were "Smokeys" or "Bears". (Which brings to mind the line in the song Convoy about "a Bear in the air", which meant a cop in a helicopter.)

    That's not what they say in the movie!

    Then the movie lied and I disown it.

    El_Heffe provided the right explanation: it's clearly a reference to Smokey the Bear. You disowned the movie based on unreliable intel, fool.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    According to Wikipedia, it was illegal to transport Coors to Georgia in 1977, which was the reason they were paid to transport it.
    Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with Wikipedia.  However, the movie was really just about driving a truck fast and being chased by the police.

    And shotgun weddings!



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Ronald said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Ronald said:
    "Smokey" since they are always in the smoke behind his car

    Noooo!!! It's CB slang, because highway patrolmen wear those silly hats like Smokey the Bear. Hence why cops were "Smokeys" or "Bears". (Which brings to mind the line in the song Convoy about "a Bear in the air", which meant a cop in a helicopter.)

    That's not what they say in the movie!

    Then the movie lied and I disown it.

    El_Heffe provided the right explanation: it's clearly a reference to Smokey the Bear. You disowned the movie based on unreliable intel, fool.

    I give him credit for knowing the "Bear in the air" line from Convoy.  I had forgotten about that one (I try to forget shiity songs from the 70's).



  • @Ronald said:

    A hacker has exploited Facebook’s Graph Search to collect a database of thousands of phone numbers and Facebook users

    Forget Facebook, have you see the Phonebook!? Names, numbers, addresses! Can you imagine what would happen if this hacker got ahold of this information!?



  • @Ronald said:

    El_Heffe provided the right explanation: it's clearly a reference to Smokey the Bear. You disowned the movie based on unreliable intel, fool.

    That's what I said, you son of a bastard!



  • @Soviut said:

    @Ronald said:
    A hacker has exploited Facebook’s Graph Search to collect a database of thousands of phone numbers and Facebook users

    Forget Facebook, have you see the Phonebook!? Names, numbers, addresses! Can you imagine what would happen if this hacker got ahold of this information!?

    Telemarketing.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Was it Smokey and the Bandit which was about the guy trying to smuggle Coors across the Mississippi because, at the time, it was apparently illegal to transport beer from one part of the country to another?

    I visited a Napa Valley winery in 1995 and they were explaining to a couple of customers how they could send wine to anywhere in the country - except one or two particular states.

    @El_Heffe said:

    I remember it as a couple of guys were hired to get a truckload of Coors from somewhere to somewhere else and they had to do it in only a couple of days, which meant they had to drive really fast, which was the illegal part that resulted in various police chases. 

    And all inspired by (non-comedy) The Wages of Fear - no cops, but a load of nitroglycerine on the back does add some spice. Best film ever. The cigarette paper scene is pure gold.



  • @Hatshepsut said:

    I visited a Napa Valley winery in 1995 and they were explaining to a couple of customers how they could send wine to anywhere in the country - except one or two particular states.

    States (and localities) of course have their own alcohol laws, but I believe Coors was prohibited from distribution by Federal law. Although for what reason, I have no idea.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Hatshepsut said:
    I visited a Napa Valley winery in 1995 and they were explaining to a couple of customers how they could send wine to anywhere in the country - except one or two particular states.

    States (and localities) of course have their own alcohol laws, but I believe Coors was prohibited from distribution by Federal law. Although for what reason, I have no idea.

    According to IMDB (hence impeccable) they're trucking across [i]county[/i] lines, pursued by a "pesky sheriff". (Is there any other kind?)



  • At the time, Coors had just the one brewery in Colorado. ("It's the water....") and their insistence on keeping it cool in transit limited the range of distribution.

     It was hard enough to get that I once schlepped a six-pack home in my carry-on through two airports and 10 hours of flying as a christmas present for my dad.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ronald said:
    Same with GE.

    They've known how to be a good welfare queen for awhile now. No Boeing, mind you, but they do okay, especially for a company which always ends up with a ridiculously-low tax liability.

    I would say that they put Boeing to shame. Engines are a significant fraction of the cost of an airplane, and Boeing subcontracts out for most of the components and then assembles them. And GE has their nose in more rice bowls than most people would believe exist.



  •  Breaker one-niner Are there any smokeys with ears on?



  • @dhromed said:

     Breaker one-niner Are there any smokeys with ears on?

    Might want to hold the throttle, think I spotted me some Kojaks with Kodaks, over.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    LISP is shitty

    I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, but Paul Graham does, and he made several fucktons[1] of money with LISP.

    Plus, there's Emacs. No, seriously, right over there.

    [1] which kind of ton? Who cares. It's like the second episode of Futurama: "The temperature here on the moon gets to a hundred below at night." "Really? Fahrenheit or Celsius?" "First one, then the other."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    those PARC Lisp Machines could do "edit-and-continue" long before anything else. And most current-generation development environments can't at all. Except Microsoft's, natch.

    Except Java. Which supports it even on 64-bit machines, unlike .Net.



  • @FrostCat said:

    I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, but Paul Graham does, and he made several fucktons[1] of money with LISP.

    Ray Kroc make fucktons of money with ground bone painted to look like beef, what's your point?

    @FrostCat said:

    [1] which kind of ton? Who cares. It's like the second episode of Futurama: "The temperature here on the moon gets to a hundred below at night." "Really? Fahrenheit or Celsius?" "First one, then the other."

    Hilarious.



  • Back to the original point. The data is public; and actually freely available using a public api. But if you take TOO MUCH of this data all at once, then you get it trouble. Seems to me that the guy is not at all at fault; FB is. They should have throttled the ability to use the API; and probably should not have made that data public in the first place.



    Seems to me that people are getting blamed for doing exactly what FB allows them to do.



    Computer (n): a device which allows human beings the ability to make mistakes thousands of times faster than prevoiusly possible.



  • @DrPepper said:

    Back to the original point.
    I don't think you're allowed to do that.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @DrPepper said:

    Back to the original point.
    I don't think you're allowed to do that.
    It's not actually forbidden, just discouraged:
    3.17.12 Subsequent posts should not return to the original topic of the thread.
    Should, not must.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    3.17.12 Subsequent posts should not return to the original topic of the thread.

    Should, not must.

     

    You work at the W3C, right?

     



  • @dhromed said:

    @HardwareGeek said:

    3.17.12 Subsequent posts should not return to the original topic of the thread.

    Should, not must.

     

    You work at the W3C, right?

     

    No, otherwise he would not have jumped from Should to Must, he would have included Should !important


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Ronald said:

    @dhromed said:

    @HardwareGeek said:

    3.17.12 Subsequent posts should not return to the original topic of the thread.

    Should, not must.

     

    You work at the W3C, right?

     

    No, otherwise he would not have jumped from Should to Must, he would have included Should !important posted so quickly without getting the necessary buy in

    FTFY



  • @toon said:

    @dhromed said:

     Breaker one-niner Are there any smokeys with ears on?

    Might want to hold the throttle, think I spotted me some Kojaks with Kodaks, over.

    I am going to take both of you home, wrap you up in a little bow and never let you go!



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Ronald said:
    @dhromed said:

    @HardwareGeek said:

    3.17.12 Subsequent posts should not return to the original topic of the thread.

    Should, not must.

     

    You work at the W3C, right?

     

    No, otherwise he would not have jumped from Should to Must, he would have included Should !important posted so quickly without getting the necessary buy in

    FTFY

    It's a draft spec, anyway, so only those on the short bus are implementing it yet.


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