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Yesterday I was cold-called by a firm that said that it could do things like this. I asked about their methods, and was told that they could find and remove tra

by dsr_ 5y ago

Yesterday I was cold-called by a firm that said that it could do things like this. I asked about their methods, and was told that they could find and remove trademark infringement, secrets and embarassing material from all social media and "the dark web", typically within 48 hours. I asked if they had contracts with any of the social media companies, to which the salescritter responded that they had an excellent track record. I asked why the social media companies would pay more attention to their requests and take-down notices than they would to mine, and got no particular reassurances. I suggested that if they could come back to me with proof that they had contracts with three social media companies, then I would consider them. I don't think I'll be hearing back.

ceejayoz 5y ago
"There's a picture of me in the Bitcoin blockchain, can you get it removed?" would be a fun litmus test for these folks.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I wonder if that could turn into a government justification for shutting down the blockchain, something they don’t want in there.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    There's already one piece of CSAM in there. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu... Anyone with a full Bitcoin node is in theory in significant violation of US law; child porn is a strict liability scenario, where intent doesn't matter.
    - mrlemke 5y ago
      I have had concerns about this possibility. Would it be possible for a miner to reject transactions containing this crap?
      - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
        Encrypt arbitrary data, put it on-chain, and then publish the key on-chain at a later date. No real way around that unless all miners opt to drop that metadata, which amounts to a fork
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Blockchain has a lot of mythology around it right now, but really no special status. For these purposes, it's a distributed database. If you opt to put a distributed database with criminal materials on your computer, you could very well break the law. People have been criminalized for bittorrent, music sharing services, etc. Uninformed people I know hesitate to use Tor clients due to its reputation; well-informed people hesitate to run Tor exit nodes. Why would blockchain get special status? For example, imagine a blockchain explicitly intended for use by drug dealers to exchange money or CSAM users to exchange materials (maybe they read on HN that it's anonymous, impossible to censor, etc.): Could the government shut that down? Would they? Would you dare allow any such thing on your computer (ignoring that you probably have no interest in either service).
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      There are interesting experiments using torrent streaming, tor, and riffs on ipfs exploring the possibilities of distributed data storage. The existing tech is resilient and resists censorship at the highest level of skill and resources. Blockchains allow structure and incentive beyond the data in itself. If someone published all the leaked pii of us citizens from the last decade to the bitcoin blockchain (which would probably exceed high 6 figures in fees,) the financial incentive would effectively permanently protect it. It's about as far from ephemeral as data can get. Governments could hamper the use of bitcoin, shut down exchanges for fiat, but it's effectively impossible to get rid of the data once it's published to the blockchain. Non blockchain distributed data systems can theoretically be censored, but in the same sense that tor users can be tracked - the resources needed aren't trivial. Building in a consensus based way of eliminating garbage from non-functional blockchain data might prove legally necessary, as bitcoin nodes are effectively hosting all sorts of nasty and illegal data even now. Transaction size limits and fees prevent meaningful abuse or use of bitcoin as a data sharing platform, but there are solid cryptocurrencies designed for arbitrary public distributed data. I'd love to see a scihub blockchain, or a better steemit type system. It'll be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies evolve, and how long it takes governments and cultures to adapt.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  They could approach the intermediate services that are usually used to access the blockchain. Moxie had his NFT removed by one of the market places and gone it was from the wallet, gone for all practical purposes. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  - throwaway22032 5y ago
    This is a super interesting article. I'd avoided looking into NFT's because the concept strikes me as being just, well, cringe, but I'd assumed at least that the chains stored the hash of a jpeg or something. You're telling me that they're not even immutable? They really just store urls with _no checksum of what's on the other end of the url_!?
    - bsamuels 5y ago
      it's up to whoever created it. there's good permanent storage solutions out there like arweave, but if you're just trying to grift people, imgur should be fine.
      - throwaway22032 5y ago
        I suppose the point is that you should use an url that's content addressable right?
      - jcun4128 5y ago
        That's an interesting claim "permanently" > protocol matches people who have hard drive space to spare
    - donmcronald 5y ago
      That’s the way I understood it and I was stunned. I absolutely love that he used a poop emoji for the NFT that you’d see in your wallet. Haha.
  - guelo 5y ago
    So decentralized lol!
- martin_a 5y ago
  > would be a fun litmus test for these folks. I always thought the same about those companies who pose themselves as some "domain registration office" and tell me that they have a customers request to register $firstname$lastname.$tld but that they found out about me and would like to offer me the domain, because I'm $firstname $lastname obviously. What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and then order them to do so? On the other hand: I already bought too many domains while being drunk, so I won't get deeper in to that.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and then order them to do so? Nothing's stopping that; you're just not the mark they're looking for. They're looking for people with little experience with domains who'll be told because of the other person's interest it's gonna cost $500 and you should act quick or forever lose it.
  - pstuart 5y ago
    There really should be a breathalizer requirement for domain purchases.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      I'm so glad this isn't just me.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yes! I don't if there's a name for it, but that's a technique for vetting potential frauds -- ask them to do something impossible and see their reaction. It's arguably what the British MP was doing when he asked Charles Babbage if the Difference Engine would still give the right answers when you put the wrong numbers in.
- memish 5y ago
  PirateBay would be a good test too. Can they get things removed from there?
  - fyver 5y ago
    Well, IBM was able to remove Z/OS the TPB.
- rideontime 5y ago
  It's actually pretty easy, you just have to DMCA the service the image is actually hosted on.
metacritic12 5y ago
Would you actually buy their services or are you just baiting them / trying to figure out how it work and would never actually buy? I think salespeople at these sorts of companies are probably really good at filtering out the second.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I think salespeople at these sorts of companies are probably really good at filtering out the second. Why would they be "really good" at "filtering out the second", as opposed to them just being a minimum viable outsourced sales department?
- dsr_ 5y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, while the company has various secrets, none of them would be particularly embarassing. We wouldn't bother buying one of these services in advance of having a problem. In my experience, the vast majority of salescritters making cold calls don't know much about the product that they are selling. They have about three paragraphs of information at their fingertips, and that's it. They often don't know whether it runs as a service or as delivered software, what operating systems it uses or can support, and in many cases they don't understand what it does or why someone would want to buy it.
woah 5y ago
If this was something that you wanted done, I think it would absolutely make sense to pay someone experienced to do it. They will know the right places to submit the requests, follow up on it, etc. It all depends on how valuable your time is and how interested you are in doing it yourself.
robk 5y ago
If they were good they may have support or ops people on payroll. I was surprised no one had done this at Google. Would have been easy to get away with back in the day.
ren_engineer 5y ago
>I asked why the social media companies would pay more attention to their requests and take-down notices than they would to mine, and got no particular reassurances it wouldn't be hard to go on LinkedIn and find some of Twitter's content managers and bribe them by paying them on the side to prioritize certain requests. Amazon had an issue with this related to their product ratings https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-allegedly-taking-bribes-insider-data-deletion.html https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-alleged...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by dsr_ 5y ago

ceejayoz 5y ago

"There's a picture of me in the Bitcoin blockchain, can you get it removed?" would be a fun litmus test for these folks.

Guest42 5y ago
I wonder if that could turn into a government justification for shutting down the blockchain, something they don’t want in there.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  There's already one piece of CSAM in there. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu... Anyone with a full Bitcoin node is in theory in significant violation of US law; child porn is a strict liability scenario, where intent doesn't matter.
  - mrlemke 5y ago
    I have had concerns about this possibility. Would it be possible for a miner to reject transactions containing this crap?
    - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
      Encrypt arbitrary data, put it on-chain, and then publish the key on-chain at a later date. No real way around that unless all miners opt to drop that metadata, which amounts to a fork
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Blockchain has a lot of mythology around it right now, but really no special status. For these purposes, it's a distributed database. If you opt to put a distributed database with criminal materials on your computer, you could very well break the law. People have been criminalized for bittorrent, music sharing services, etc. Uninformed people I know hesitate to use Tor clients due to its reputation; well-informed people hesitate to run Tor exit nodes. Why would blockchain get special status? For example, imagine a blockchain explicitly intended for use by drug dealers to exchange money or CSAM users to exchange materials (maybe they read on HN that it's anonymous, impossible to censor, etc.): Could the government shut that down? Would they? Would you dare allow any such thing on your computer (ignoring that you probably have no interest in either service).
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    There are interesting experiments using torrent streaming, tor, and riffs on ipfs exploring the possibilities of distributed data storage. The existing tech is resilient and resists censorship at the highest level of skill and resources. Blockchains allow structure and incentive beyond the data in itself. If someone published all the leaked pii of us citizens from the last decade to the bitcoin blockchain (which would probably exceed high 6 figures in fees,) the financial incentive would effectively permanently protect it. It's about as far from ephemeral as data can get. Governments could hamper the use of bitcoin, shut down exchanges for fiat, but it's effectively impossible to get rid of the data once it's published to the blockchain. Non blockchain distributed data systems can theoretically be censored, but in the same sense that tor users can be tracked - the resources needed aren't trivial. Building in a consensus based way of eliminating garbage from non-functional blockchain data might prove legally necessary, as bitcoin nodes are effectively hosting all sorts of nasty and illegal data even now. Transaction size limits and fees prevent meaningful abuse or use of bitcoin as a data sharing platform, but there are solid cryptocurrencies designed for arbitrary public distributed data. I'd love to see a scihub blockchain, or a better steemit type system. It'll be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies evolve, and how long it takes governments and cultures to adapt.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
UweSchmidt 5y ago
They could approach the intermediate services that are usually used to access the blockchain. Moxie had his NFT removed by one of the market places and gone it was from the wallet, gone for all practical purposes. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  This is a super interesting article. I'd avoided looking into NFT's because the concept strikes me as being just, well, cringe, but I'd assumed at least that the chains stored the hash of a jpeg or something. You're telling me that they're not even immutable? They really just store urls with _no checksum of what's on the other end of the url_!?
  - bsamuels 5y ago
    it's up to whoever created it. there's good permanent storage solutions out there like arweave, but if you're just trying to grift people, imgur should be fine.
    - throwaway22032 5y ago
      I suppose the point is that you should use an url that's content addressable right?
    - jcun4128 5y ago
      That's an interesting claim "permanently" > protocol matches people who have hard drive space to spare
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    That’s the way I understood it and I was stunned. I absolutely love that he used a poop emoji for the NFT that you’d see in your wallet. Haha.
- guelo 5y ago
  So decentralized lol!
martin_a 5y ago
> would be a fun litmus test for these folks. I always thought the same about those companies who pose themselves as some "domain registration office" and tell me that they have a customers request to register $firstname$lastname.$tld but that they found out about me and would like to offer me the domain, because I'm $firstname $lastname obviously. What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and then order them to do so? On the other hand: I already bought too many domains while being drunk, so I won't get deeper in to that.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and then order them to do so? Nothing's stopping that; you're just not the mark they're looking for. They're looking for people with little experience with domains who'll be told because of the other person's interest it's gonna cost $500 and you should act quick or forever lose it.
- pstuart 5y ago
  There really should be a breathalizer requirement for domain purchases.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    I'm so glad this isn't just me.
SilasX 5y ago
Yes! I don't if there's a name for it, but that's a technique for vetting potential frauds -- ask them to do something impossible and see their reaction. It's arguably what the British MP was doing when he asked Charles Babbage if the Difference Engine would still give the right answers when you put the wrong numbers in.
memish 5y ago
PirateBay would be a good test too. Can they get things removed from there?
- fyver 5y ago
  Well, IBM was able to remove Z/OS the TPB.
rideontime 5y ago
It's actually pretty easy, you just have to DMCA the service the image is actually hosted on.

metacritic12 5y ago

Would you actually buy their services or are you just baiting them / trying to figure out how it work and would never actually buy? I think salespeople at these sorts of companies are probably really good at filtering out the second.

coldtea 5y ago
>I think salespeople at these sorts of companies are probably really good at filtering out the second. Why would they be "really good" at "filtering out the second", as opposed to them just being a minimum viable outsourced sales department?
dsr_ 5y ago
To the best of my knowledge, while the company has various secrets, none of them would be particularly embarassing. We wouldn't bother buying one of these services in advance of having a problem. In my experience, the vast majority of salescritters making cold calls don't know much about the product that they are selling. They have about three paragraphs of information at their fingertips, and that's it. They often don't know whether it runs as a service or as delivered software, what operating systems it uses or can support, and in many cases they don't understand what it does or why someone would want to buy it.

woah 5y ago

If this was something that you wanted done, I think it would absolutely make sense to pay someone experienced to do it. They will know the right places to submit the requests, follow up on it, etc. It all depends on how valuable your time is and how interested you are in doing it yourself.

robk 5y ago

If they were good they may have support or ops people on payroll. I was surprised no one had done this at Google. Would have been easy to get away with back in the day.

ren_engineer 5y ago

>I asked why the social media companies would pay more attention to their requests and take-down notices than they would to mine, and got no particular reassurances it wouldn't be hard to go on LinkedIn and find some of Twitter's content managers and bribe them by paying them on the side to prioritize certain requests. Amazon had an issue with this related to their product ratings https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-allegedly-taking-bribes-insider-data-deletion.html https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-alleged...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]