3 ms·

>We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve. Perhaps you were just ordered to start... and pluggin

>We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve. Perhaps you were just ordered to start... and plugging in that little black box from the G-Men somehow, umm, killed the canary process. Somehow.

StavrosK 10y ago
Perhaps, but, if that were the case, I think our security officer (who is a great guy and great at his work) would have quit immediately on moral grounds. It's more likely (and I'm just grossly speculating now) that the business weighed the relatively small chance of us being ordered to give the virtually zero amount of data we have on everyone with the chance that something will go wrong updating the canary and there will be a bunch of bad publicity again. Keep in mind that, while one may think "you're just uploading a text file, how hard can it be", it's much more resource-intensive than that. You need multiple redundant people to make sure the world doesn't freak out because your CSO was on vacation, you need them to coordinate about updating, you need them to (crucially) know how to store the PGP keys securely, you need to keep that number low to make sure the key isn't stolen from one of them, you need good tooling to minimize the chance that there's a mistake while uploading, you need to keep the machines that host it running even after a move, the DNS entries up, monitoring to tell you if the canary is stale, etc. It's a lot of things to get right and a lot of things that can go wrong, and the failure case for that is "your stock goes down", which is a heavy price. I think the mistake here was that there wasn't a bigger, more explicit and pre-emptive announcement (something like "we'll take the canary down in X weeks because Y"), which I think would have more successfully assuaged fears.

3 ms·

>We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve. Perhaps you were just ordered to start... and pluggin

by noonespecial 10y ago

StavrosK 10y ago
Perhaps, but, if that were the case, I think our security officer (who is a great guy and great at his work) would have quit immediately on moral grounds. It's more likely (and I'm just grossly speculating now) that the business weighed the relatively small chance of us being ordered to give the virtually zero amount of data we have on everyone with the chance that something will go wrong updating the canary and there will be a bunch of bad publicity again. Keep in mind that, while one may think "you're just uploading a text file, how hard can it be", it's much more resource-intensive than that. You need multiple redundant people to make sure the world doesn't freak out because your CSO was on vacation, you need them to coordinate about updating, you need them to (crucially) know how to store the PGP keys securely, you need to keep that number low to make sure the key isn't stolen from one of them, you need good tooling to minimize the chance that there's a mistake while uploading, you need to keep the machines that host it running even after a move, the DNS entries up, monitoring to tell you if the canary is stale, etc. It's a lot of things to get right and a lot of things that can go wrong, and the failure case for that is "your stock goes down", which is a heavy price. I think the mistake here was that there wasn't a bigger, more explicit and pre-emptive announcement (something like "we'll take the canary down in X weeks because Y"), which I think would have more successfully assuaged fears.