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Sorry, why are we believing this story? The technical details make little sense; e.g. moving a ml processing pipeline to a different cloud just by "editing a Ch

by jsnell 4y ago

Sorry, why are we believing this story? The technical details make little sense; e.g. moving a ml processing pipeline to a different cloud just by "editing a Chrome extension" doesn't seem very plausible. It isn't even internally consistent, the hallmark of a sloppy fabrication. At first the accounts were sourced from the darknet, then they were created by the Chrome extension. Creating a million Google accounts is pretty hard. And buying so many accounts from the markets would probably cost his whole $50k price. Also, it was a million accounts and the savings were about 500k. Each account spent 50 cents worth of compute out of the $300 free trial? I assume you need to give a credit card number for the free trial. I wonder how many of those were needed for this to work...

advisedwang 4y ago
Your skepticism is warranted, but just to note: > At first the accounts were sourced from the darknet, then they were created by the Chrome extension The article says they bought Google Accounts on darknet and _created GCP accounts_ from the chrome extension. Presumably "GCP Account" here means a new GCP project/billing account with free trial or using the always free usage. So it's vague and difficult to believe but not actually contradictory.
zerocrates 4y ago
It looks like the story is just something the author of this post pulled from a Twitter thread (linked at the top). The thread seems (I'm relying on Google Translate since it's in Ukrainian/Russian), to just say there was a big list of a boatload of email addresses sourced from the person's previous work, and it pulled from those to keep registering new Google accounts (or maybe log into them as there's mentions of passwords being included, and simply sign up for GCP on them). There's also nothing about AWS vs. Google in the original thread I see, nor specific numbers on numbers of accounts, amount saved (tens/hundreds of thousands a month is as specific as it goes), etc.
acdha 4y ago
Skepticism is warranted but the original tweets weren’t SEO-d down and seem more believable. This one makes it sound like this was a list of valid Google accounts which could be signed up for GCP: https://twitter.com/xanf_ua/status/1608121336190357504?s=20&t=uUaKLLPP4rAMBdwIWJbSrw https://twitter.com/xanf_ua/status/1608121336190357504?s=20&... That makes more plausible: start with a list of Google accounts, try to use it with GCP, and cycle accounts until you find one which hasn’t exhausted the free tier. It would be very easy to believe that the 1M account number was winnowed down rapidly by the ones which had changed passwords, tripped some kind of suspicious activity alert, etc. or been used for anything else if that wasn’t the only copy of that list in existence.
mardifoufs 4y ago
Last time I've used GCP, the trial required a valid credit card that wasn't used for another trial before. They didn't take preloaded card either. So yes, this story is definitely... hard to believe.

by jsnell 4y ago

advisedwang 4y ago

Your skepticism is warranted, but just to note: > At first the accounts were sourced from the darknet, then they were created by the Chrome extension The article says they bought Google Accounts on darknet and _created GCP accounts_ from the chrome extension. Presumably "GCP Account" here means a new GCP project/billing account with free trial or using the always free usage. So it's vague and difficult to believe but not actually contradictory.

zerocrates 4y ago

It looks like the story is just something the author of this post pulled from a Twitter thread (linked at the top). The thread seems (I'm relying on Google Translate since it's in Ukrainian/Russian), to just say there was a big list of a boatload of email addresses sourced from the person's previous work, and it pulled from those to keep registering new Google accounts (or maybe log into them as there's mentions of passwords being included, and simply sign up for GCP on them). There's also nothing about AWS vs. Google in the original thread I see, nor specific numbers on numbers of accounts, amount saved (tens/hundreds of thousands a month is as specific as it goes), etc.

acdha 4y ago

Skepticism is warranted but the original tweets weren’t SEO-d down and seem more believable. This one makes it sound like this was a list of valid Google accounts which could be signed up for GCP: https://twitter.com/xanf_ua/status/1608121336190357504?s=20&t=uUaKLLPP4rAMBdwIWJbSrw https://twitter.com/xanf_ua/status/1608121336190357504?s=20&... That makes more plausible: start with a list of Google accounts, try to use it with GCP, and cycle accounts until you find one which hasn’t exhausted the free tier. It would be very easy to believe that the 1M account number was winnowed down rapidly by the ones which had changed passwords, tripped some kind of suspicious activity alert, etc. or been used for anything else if that wasn’t the only copy of that list in existence.

mardifoufs 4y ago

Last time I've used GCP, the trial required a valid credit card that wasn't used for another trial before. They didn't take preloaded card either. So yes, this story is definitely... hard to believe.