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what happens when one of those 1000 engineers decides to leak the FB database to wikileaks?
by adrianbye 16y ago
what happens when one of those 1000 engineers decides to leak the FB database to wikileaks?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tortilla 16y agoLots of divorces and breakups. More media and public attention on the data than past leaks by wikileaks.
- didip 16y agoExtracting terabytes of data is difficult to go un-noticed. How do you transfer the data? rsync through external network is too slow. The most convenient way would be to mount physical drive on one of database server and copy things directly. But that would require cage access, which I assume not many employees have.
- yannk 16y agoThat's an excellent interview question! "How do you get the maximum of data out before getting noticed?". I guess the most effective way is to tamper with source code and smuggle data out along with legitimate traffic.
- didip 16y agoTampering the source code is an interesting idea. I think it cannot be the PHP code because that's peer-reviewed by 1000+ employees daily. It would have to be code rarely seen by others, e.g. Apache's mod_rewrite.
- khafra 16y agoOr you could simply produce a php version of a winning entry to the Underhanded C Contest: http://underhanded.xcott.com/ http://underhanded.xcott.com/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- zeemonkee 16y agoYou don't need to extract the whole lot. "Thousands of random users' data has been downloaded from Facebook and published on Wikileaks" would be enough for a good media scare story.
- te_chris 16y agowe'll finally know the extent of just how pointless facebook is - but we'll all keep using it.
- prayag 16y agoWikileaks exercises caution in what it leaks. I highly doubt wikileaks would leak personal information of millions of users. Their aim is to open up governments and public agencies, not people's personal lives.
- kenjackson 16y agoChange Wikileaks to 4Chan.
- hugh3 16y agoThat was their story last week. This week their story is "We're going to leak a bunch of folks' Swiss bank account details because some of them might be avoiding taxes!"
- ebaysucks 16y agoYeah, that story confirms my suspicion that Assange is anti-authoritarian rather than just anti-coercion. I think he'll be losing some of his libertarian fans if he publishes information of people who simply want to be more free.
- nroman 16y agoThey didn't redact informants and collaborators names from many of the documents they leaked. I would hardly call that exercising caution. I understand that in some cases redacting names weakens the impact of the leak and its political statement. However, releasing the name of some random informant working on the ground in Iraq has no substantial effect on the impact of the whole leak, but can have an enormous effect on that person's life, especially if he's killed.
- theli0nheart 16y agoAssange asked the US government to specify which names and identities should be anonymized prior to the leak, but the US refused to cooperate.