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I think "pwn3d" does but refer to a security issue in the article, but to social networks claiming to have millions of users and outsiders being able to proof t
by chronial 9y ago
I think "pwn3d" does but refer to a security issue in the article, but to social networks claiming to have millions of users and outsiders being able to proof that it's far less via user ids.
- belorn 9y agoI don't understand how that would be proof. Imagine that the social network does a rewrite, and rather than converting all the old accounts/data it just uses an additional flag to indicate which database to use. In that case a user id would not be globally unique for the website, but it would be unique for the specific database. This is actually more likely than it sounds. The company can hire a fresh new team to make an experimental new site, and if it's a hit, they can make some ugly hack to do calls to the old website using web APIs to get any old users from that system. This way the new team doesn't need to learn and figure out how the old system was built, which likely lacks any documentation and where the original developers has left the company. Without a full understanding of the layers of indirection it would be impossible to determine with certainty the number of users a social network has.