8 ms·

Information accessible here was SUPPOSED to be all public, with sensitive information located elsewhere, however a handful of improperly redacted documents were

Information accessible here was SUPPOSED to be all public, with sensitive information located elsewhere, however a handful of improperly redacted documents were also published to the site. Here's a more technical article: https://evandentremont.com/some-information-on-the-freedom-of-information-hack/ https://evandentremont.com/some-information-on-the-freedom-o...

munk-a 8y ago
So this is a classic case of a subcontractor doing substandard work, leaving a security hole big enough to drive a truck through, and then trying to sue someone to save face... Sigh. If some of those documents weren't appropriate to be viewed by the general populace then the company was criminally negligent in their handling of the data, the "hacker" saw an open door with a sign reading "free information" on it and didn't know any better before running a crawler over the documents to grab them.
- cnniris393 8y ago
  And the cries by old geezers in charge, yet clueless of what it is they’re “in-charge of”, that he stole it are eye rolling It’s ageism but at this point I’m pretty convinced old people should be term limited from office The problems we seem to be facing are almost entirely due to their inability to move on Youth shouldn’t spend their lives kowtowing to geezers that quit thinking and are simply peddling what’s become etched in their neurons and “the rules”
  - jinfiesto 8y ago
    I'm not sure about age-limiting old people, but I'm starting to think a basic technological literacy test might not be out of place.
    - Sean1708 8y ago
      If there's two things people in tech seem to vastly underestimate it's how many old people are technologically literate and how many young people are technologically illiterate. I wouldn't be surprised if there are correlations but you're right, age itself isn't the issue.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    > It’s ageism but at this point I’m pretty convinced old people should be term limited from office Resource depletion from overpopulation aside, the lack of social progress we will see once we manage to extend life to the point of immortality is one of the more depressing outlooks I can imagine. Old ideas will never die.
    - naasking 8y ago
      Restoring neuroplasticity is a necessity for true immortality, so I'm not sure it will be much of an issue to be honest.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    You should've stopped yourself at "it's ageism." Surely you wouldn't have had the audacity to be like "It's racism but at this point I think black people should be kept out of office." The problems here are the usual problems within governments: venality, vanity, laziness, posturing and a certain bureaucratic indifference to human life. Which are traits well established among young and old alike. Age isn't what's keeping anybody from understanding the technical issues here, either. A computer isn't some kind of magical oracle that only reveals its secrets to the young. Peel back the layers and I'll bet you $100 CAD it boils down to a failure of the institutional hierarchy and the communication therein. With uninformed-electorate-flavored sprinkles on top. Young tech nerds rarely get voted into office because very few of them have done enough living to be able to assemble a coherent vision of reality and a way forward for an entire, let's say province. Don't get me wrong, a lot of successful older politicians do a shitty job of this too. But anyway, anyone who can do all that, or fake it well enough, quickly finds that messing around with computers is below his pay grade and not worth squandering his attention on. But they will still presumably have such people in their organization somewhere, and should be able to get from them a summary of WTF's going on and why. EDIT: I guess what I'm even further saying is that this is yet another example of what's become a mantra of mine lately: The missing ingredient is almost never tech and almost always leadership.
    - emj 8y ago
      > The problems here are the usual problems within governments: The problems is with humans, you have those problems in courts, companies, charities, churches, clubs and small gatherings of people. The only protection we have against it is to recognize that this will always happen and strive to correct it before and when it has happend. I feel this is a closely related to Meetoo, you need to able to ask for forgiveness, but often the people accused never really get what they have done wrong and belittle their actions.
  - hermitdev 8y ago
    It's not ageism. It's incompetence. If the content he was allowed to download sans-credentials was publicly available, the host/admin fucked up. If I do a wget for {random_url} and it returns a 200 range response code - that's not my fault - that's the admin. If I'm not supposed to see it, it should return a 403. Not Canadian, but I expect this teen to be let off completely free. I write this as I'm trying to recover my wife's website by scraping archive.org and respecting various 400 & 500 level errors.
walrus01 8y ago
I'm just surprised they didn't "redact" the documents by drawing black boxes over top of text in the Adobe Acrobat PDF editing tool... If their web presence is that clueless it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would happen. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/pdf_radacting_f.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/pdf_radacting...
- lysp 8y ago
  Something similar happened in Australia last year. Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-hundreds-of-parliamentary-mobile-numbers-were-leaked-online https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-hundreds-of-parliamentary-mo... The contractor redacted the phone numbers in this instance by changing the font colour to white (same as the background) in the PDFs uploaded to the government disclosure website. So if you exported to text, or highlighted text, the phone numbers were clearly visible. So most federal members of parliament, the former prime minister (Australia's equivalent of president) and opposition leader all had their numbers leaked.
  - logicallee 8y ago
    >Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed Why?
    - beobab 8y ago
      Because they want a phone line that they can talk to their spouse and children without having to field thousands of calls from well-meaning people who want to wish them a good day?
      - keketi 8y ago
        > who want to wish them a good day I see what you did there.
      - 8y ago

munk-a 8y ago

So this is a classic case of a subcontractor doing substandard work, leaving a security hole big enough to drive a truck through, and then trying to sue someone to save face... Sigh. If some of those documents weren't appropriate to be viewed by the general populace then the company was criminally negligent in their handling of the data, the "hacker" saw an open door with a sign reading "free information" on it and didn't know any better before running a crawler over the documents to grab them.

cnniris393 8y ago
And the cries by old geezers in charge, yet clueless of what it is they’re “in-charge of”, that he stole it are eye rolling It’s ageism but at this point I’m pretty convinced old people should be term limited from office The problems we seem to be facing are almost entirely due to their inability to move on Youth shouldn’t spend their lives kowtowing to geezers that quit thinking and are simply peddling what’s become etched in their neurons and “the rules”
- jinfiesto 8y ago
  I'm not sure about age-limiting old people, but I'm starting to think a basic technological literacy test might not be out of place.
  - Sean1708 8y ago
    If there's two things people in tech seem to vastly underestimate it's how many old people are technologically literate and how many young people are technologically illiterate. I wouldn't be surprised if there are correlations but you're right, age itself isn't the issue.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  > It’s ageism but at this point I’m pretty convinced old people should be term limited from office Resource depletion from overpopulation aside, the lack of social progress we will see once we manage to extend life to the point of immortality is one of the more depressing outlooks I can imagine. Old ideas will never die.
  - naasking 8y ago
    Restoring neuroplasticity is a necessity for true immortality, so I'm not sure it will be much of an issue to be honest.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  You should've stopped yourself at "it's ageism." Surely you wouldn't have had the audacity to be like "It's racism but at this point I think black people should be kept out of office." The problems here are the usual problems within governments: venality, vanity, laziness, posturing and a certain bureaucratic indifference to human life. Which are traits well established among young and old alike. Age isn't what's keeping anybody from understanding the technical issues here, either. A computer isn't some kind of magical oracle that only reveals its secrets to the young. Peel back the layers and I'll bet you $100 CAD it boils down to a failure of the institutional hierarchy and the communication therein. With uninformed-electorate-flavored sprinkles on top. Young tech nerds rarely get voted into office because very few of them have done enough living to be able to assemble a coherent vision of reality and a way forward for an entire, let's say province. Don't get me wrong, a lot of successful older politicians do a shitty job of this too. But anyway, anyone who can do all that, or fake it well enough, quickly finds that messing around with computers is below his pay grade and not worth squandering his attention on. But they will still presumably have such people in their organization somewhere, and should be able to get from them a summary of WTF's going on and why. EDIT: I guess what I'm even further saying is that this is yet another example of what's become a mantra of mine lately: The missing ingredient is almost never tech and almost always leadership.
  - emj 8y ago
    > The problems here are the usual problems within governments: The problems is with humans, you have those problems in courts, companies, charities, churches, clubs and small gatherings of people. The only protection we have against it is to recognize that this will always happen and strive to correct it before and when it has happend. I feel this is a closely related to Meetoo, you need to able to ask for forgiveness, but often the people accused never really get what they have done wrong and belittle their actions.
- hermitdev 8y ago
  It's not ageism. It's incompetence. If the content he was allowed to download sans-credentials was publicly available, the host/admin fucked up. If I do a wget for {random_url} and it returns a 200 range response code - that's not my fault - that's the admin. If I'm not supposed to see it, it should return a 403. Not Canadian, but I expect this teen to be let off completely free. I write this as I'm trying to recover my wife's website by scraping archive.org and respecting various 400 & 500 level errors.

walrus01 8y ago

I'm just surprised they didn't "redact" the documents by drawing black boxes over top of text in the Adobe Acrobat PDF editing tool... If their web presence is that clueless it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would happen. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/pdf_radacting_f.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/pdf_radacting...

lysp 8y ago
Something similar happened in Australia last year. Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-hundreds-of-parliamentary-mobile-numbers-were-leaked-online https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-hundreds-of-parliamentary-mo... The contractor redacted the phone numbers in this instance by changing the font colour to white (same as the background) in the PDFs uploaded to the government disclosure website. So if you exported to text, or highlighted text, the phone numbers were clearly visible. So most federal members of parliament, the former prime minister (Australia's equivalent of president) and opposition leader all had their numbers leaked.
- logicallee 8y ago
  >Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed Why?
  - beobab 8y ago
    Because they want a phone line that they can talk to their spouse and children without having to field thousands of calls from well-meaning people who want to wish them a good day?
    - keketi 8y ago
      > who want to wish them a good day I see what you did there.
    - 8y ago