3 ms·

There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. They say confidently "(It was a picture of a cat!)"

by bch 15y ago

mhartl 15y ago
They clarified this in a comment to the original post (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers?58#comments http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers...): Razvan Tirboaca 12 Jan 12 And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!) Are you looking at your users photos? And the response: Taylor 12 Jan 12 Razvan, absolutely not. The file was named cat.jpg and that was logged, which was what we saw. We do not look at user’s files.
- biot 15y ago
  And it couldn't have been a picture of a catalog, CAT construction machinery, someone named Catherine, etc.? I guess we have to take them for their word on this one.
  - evan_ 15y ago
    what if it was a picture of a catalog? The file was called cat.jpg so they said it was a picture of a cat. Maybe it was a catalog. They still said it was a picture of a cat.
  - ufo 15y ago
    This is the internez. Its perfectly fine to expect a random jpg to be a picture of a cat accompanied by the obligatory caption)
- bch 15y ago
  What does "cat" mean? Was the next file "bnc.jpg", "grep.jpg" -- even if it had something to do w/ felines -- was it in a dir of gfx of DNA visualizations, where the image would be a GATACA sequence or something? I don't know, but these are questions that immediately come to mind for me.
  - mhartl 15y ago
    Your response is a non sequitur. You stated There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. My comment merely quoted a 37signals employee giving the filename, both basename and extension. You can believe them or not, but they did explain the situation, and they explicitly denied looking at the image.
tripzilch 15y ago
Further down in the comments they try to save themselves by saying "Of course we didn't look at it, it's just that the pic was called cat.jpg". So, no, I don't believe them at all when they say they did never look at the file. They say--with confidence--it was a picture of a cat. Sorry but going from "cat.jpg" to such a conclusion is IMO quite a leap. It's just three letters, it could be a CAT scan, a screenshot of the Linux `cat` command, three DNA nucleotides, a picture of a tiger, something else named "cat" or something related to but not involving cats. I don't know if I see a filename like that I'd say "It was called 'cat.jpg', so probably a picture of someone's cat." because it can be anything that somebody named "cat.jpg" for any number of reasons and I won't know for sure until I looked at it. And even then, just them looking at the filenames is not right. Of course I understand that if it was `company-passwords.xls` or something more sensitive, they wouldn't have said anything. But already before they could judge whether the filename was sensitive or not, there really is no reason for why they needed to be looking at filenames in the first place! Sure some admin can always go in as root and look at everything, but you don't need to tie the proverbial cat to the bacon, by putting the filenames right up someone's face who really has no business looking at them since they're just collecting statistics. ⊗

There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. They say confidently "(It was a picture of a cat!)"

by bch 15y ago

There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. They say confidently "(It was a picture of a cat!)"

mhartl 15y ago

They clarified this in a comment to the original post (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers?58#comments http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers...): Razvan Tirboaca 12 Jan 12 And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!) Are you looking at your users photos? And the response: Taylor 12 Jan 12 Razvan, absolutely not. The file was named cat.jpg and that was logged, which was what we saw. We do not look at user’s files.

biot 15y ago
And it couldn't have been a picture of a catalog, CAT construction machinery, someone named Catherine, etc.? I guess we have to take them for their word on this one.
- evan_ 15y ago
  what if it was a picture of a catalog? The file was called cat.jpg so they said it was a picture of a cat. Maybe it was a catalog. They still said it was a picture of a cat.
- ufo 15y ago
  This is the internez. Its perfectly fine to expect a random jpg to be a picture of a cat accompanied by the obligatory caption)
bch 15y ago
What does "cat" mean? Was the next file "bnc.jpg", "grep.jpg" -- even if it had something to do w/ felines -- was it in a dir of gfx of DNA visualizations, where the image would be a GATACA sequence or something? I don't know, but these are questions that immediately come to mind for me.
- mhartl 15y ago
  Your response is a non sequitur. You stated There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. My comment merely quoted a 37signals employee giving the filename, both basename and extension. You can believe them or not, but they did explain the situation, and they explicitly denied looking at the image.

tripzilch 15y ago

Further down in the comments they try to save themselves by saying "Of course we didn't look at it, it's just that the pic was called cat.jpg". So, no, I don't believe them at all when they say they did never look at the file. They say--with confidence--it was a picture of a cat. Sorry but going from "cat.jpg" to such a conclusion is IMO quite a leap. It's just three letters, it could be a CAT scan, a screenshot of the Linux `cat` command, three DNA nucleotides, a picture of a tiger, something else named "cat" or something related to but not involving cats. I don't know if I see a filename like that I'd say "It was called 'cat.jpg', so probably a picture of someone's cat." because it can be anything that somebody named "cat.jpg" for any number of reasons and I won't know for sure until I looked at it. And even then, just them looking at the filenames is not right. Of course I understand that if it was `company-passwords.xls` or something more sensitive, they wouldn't have said anything. But already before they could judge whether the filename was sensitive or not, there really is no reason for why they needed to be looking at filenames in the first place! Sure some admin can always go in as root and look at everything, but you don't need to tie the proverbial cat to the bacon, by putting the filenames right up someone's face who really has no business looking at them since they're just collecting statistics. ⊗