4 ms·
The intersection of 'evil enough to do something truly malicious', 'read a tech blog in the right 24-hour period', 'didn't already know the problem existed', an
by jfager 16y ago
The intersection of 'evil enough to do something truly malicious', 'read a tech blog in the right 24-hour period', 'didn't already know the problem existed', and 'in enough cafes to pair with enough potential victims' is too low to cause "millions" more to be impacted by this, I promise.
Your implicit definition of 'highly motivated' (someone willing to put in 5 minutes of Googling) makes me sad.
I'm agitated because you're trying to hang someone for doing A Good Thing: putting real pressure on the bigs to finally actually fix a well-known, longstanding problem.
[Response to your edit: Facebook, Twitter, and other big sites know about the problem. How would explaining to them how Google secured Gmail change anything? They know how Google secured Gmail, and they know how to secure their own services. They just simply aren't, because it saves them money and their customers aren't demanding it. But the only reason their customers aren't demanding it is because the vast majority of their customers don't know the threat exists. This tool makes the threat clear as day to the most unsophisticated layperson, which makes it real, effective pressure, far more than yet another blog post asking nicely for SSL by default].
- bonaldi 16y agoIt might make you sad, but it's spot on. People were sharing MP3 files on usenet pretty easily, back in the day. It would have taken 5 minutes or less to work out how -- even easier than grabbing cookies. It wasn't until Napster made that 0 minutes of googling that MP3 filesharing really took off. For something like this to end up on millions of desktops, you have to be able to explain it to a half-stoned frat at a party. "Five minutes of googling and then some nerdery"? No chance. "Install this, go to the quad and you can sign into the facebook of any other person there?" Yup, that's going to spread like wildfire.
- daten 16y agoThe responsibility is with every admin that setup an insecure access point, not with every security researcher to stay quiet about widely known and widely exploited vulnerabilities. This isn't new. Point and click tools for doing this existed 10 years ago. Making a firefox plugin just pushed it back to the top of the headlines. This is actually a good thing because if word spreads more people will be aware of the already existing risk and will be more security conscious. Does this mean everyone should stop logging into their personal accounts over unsecure wifi at school or starbucks? ABSOLUTELY. Hopefully this new attention on an old hole will motivate more admins to fix their networks and more users to realize how vulnerable they are.
- wnoise 16y ago> It wasn't until Napster made that 0 minutes of googling that MP3 filesharing really took off. (a) network effects (b) autosharing, spurring more (a) Neither of these apply here.