5 ms·

I am guessing there is a user Hash Collision. Google uses hashes for a lot of things. Hash tables are very fast, and great for database look up. In Python if

by drakaal 14y ago

I am guessing there is a user Hash Collision. Google uses hashes for a lot of things. Hash tables are very fast, and great for database look up. In Python if there is a hash collision both entries are compared and resolved by comparison. This is still fast because doing a compare against 4 collisions is still much faster than doing a compare against 1Billion user names. That said... The odds get to be beyond astronomical. What percentage of people are journalists? I mean if they said someone contacted us to let us know, that would be believable, but "I am a journalist, and this is happening to me" seems a lot less likely. I'm not ready to side with Google that this is impossible, but even the response from Google doesn't sound like the Google I know. While Google is hard to get a hold of for tech support and resolution of things, if you do get them to respond to a privacy concern they are swift. With a Teen Girl they would be even swifter. One naked Bathroom pic and they are suddenly in the Child Porn distribution business, knowingly infringing (since they have been told now) on a teen with out her knowledge. That's the kind of thing that an employee goes to jail for, not just gets some big fines.

eksith 14y ago
I thought the same thing. When I first created a Google+ account, when I went to YouTube, it was just a hash. I imagine your gallery would be the same since it's all now one linked platform. And this is indeed not the Google we're all familiar with. Google could land it real hot water; not the wrist slaps for privacy/monopoly violations we've seen so far that could actually be chalked up to oversight... if you tried hard enough. This would be a real low point in the company if pans out to be some sort of auto-upload feature that got enabled and to the wrong account.
- doobley 14y ago
  Umm...how do you know it's a hash and not a unique id? By your rationale, UNIX is broken because my uid is a small integer.
ams6110 14y ago
The odds get to be beyond astronomical The odds of winning the lottery are pretty poor too. Yet people win them every day.
- dvanduzer 14y ago
  That is a facile analysis. The lottery is a massively distributed brute force attack against a fairly weak hashing algorithm. The odds of you winning the lottery are astronomically small. The odds of someone winning the lottery are not.
- pjscott 14y ago
  Let's not hand-wave; the numbers actually matter here. One-in-a-million chances happen every day. One-in-2^128 chances do not. If you're exclusively using a hash for identifying someone, then you'll make sure it's big enough to prevent accidental collisions. This is not expensive.
- qu4z-2 14y ago
  The odds of winning the lottery are not "astronomical" in the sense people usually mean when speaking of hash collisions.
dmoy 14y ago
This does not look at all like a hash collision. Any hash table worth a damn does not rely solely on hash value for retrieval. There's a separate comparison for dealing with collisions on lookup.
- doobley 14y ago
  Agreed, this does not sound like the bug. Even if it was a realistic design pattern, what are the odds that not only that a collision occurred, but also occurred between two users in the same geographic area (i.e. Norway)? Here is a more likely scenario: They're using the same ISP, and that ISP has some poorly configured transparent HTTP cache that is serving Cache-control: private responses to multiple users. I would bet a significant amount of money on this being the problem. To test this theory, the journalist should logout (invalidating his cookies), and then only use HTTPS with Google Plus (Install the HTTPS Everywhere extension to be certain https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere). If the pictures keep coming, I'm wrong. If they stop, then they're going to another user with the same ISP until they fix their broken cache.
  - gbl08ma 14y ago
    It is said in the article that the journalist and the girl are from different continents... is there any ISP that operates on multiple continents and uses the same cache infrastructure for all the geographical locations?
    - doobley 14y ago
      It says they're both norwegian, and she was visiting another country..returned from vacation and uploaded her pics? Using her norwegian cellphone while abroad (i.e. norwegian APN)? Emailing her pictures to mom who uploads them from home? Who knows, but the fact that she visited another country doesn't invalidate it.
- emmelaich 14y ago
  Perhaps multiple hash collisions? I had a mysterious document appear in my Google docs once. I assumed it was due to a hash collision. I reported it to Google but never heard back from them.

by drakaal 14y ago

eksith 14y ago

I thought the same thing. When I first created a Google+ account, when I went to YouTube, it was just a hash. I imagine your gallery would be the same since it's all now one linked platform. And this is indeed not the Google we're all familiar with. Google could land it real hot water; not the wrist slaps for privacy/monopoly violations we've seen so far that could actually be chalked up to oversight... if you tried hard enough. This would be a real low point in the company if pans out to be some sort of auto-upload feature that got enabled and to the wrong account.

doobley 14y ago
Umm...how do you know it's a hash and not a unique id? By your rationale, UNIX is broken because my uid is a small integer.

ams6110 14y ago

The odds get to be beyond astronomical The odds of winning the lottery are pretty poor too. Yet people win them every day.

dvanduzer 14y ago
That is a facile analysis. The lottery is a massively distributed brute force attack against a fairly weak hashing algorithm. The odds of you winning the lottery are astronomically small. The odds of someone winning the lottery are not.
pjscott 14y ago
Let's not hand-wave; the numbers actually matter here. One-in-a-million chances happen every day. One-in-2^128 chances do not. If you're exclusively using a hash for identifying someone, then you'll make sure it's big enough to prevent accidental collisions. This is not expensive.
qu4z-2 14y ago
The odds of winning the lottery are not "astronomical" in the sense people usually mean when speaking of hash collisions.

dmoy 14y ago

This does not look at all like a hash collision. Any hash table worth a damn does not rely solely on hash value for retrieval. There's a separate comparison for dealing with collisions on lookup.

doobley 14y ago
Agreed, this does not sound like the bug. Even if it was a realistic design pattern, what are the odds that not only that a collision occurred, but also occurred between two users in the same geographic area (i.e. Norway)? Here is a more likely scenario: They're using the same ISP, and that ISP has some poorly configured transparent HTTP cache that is serving Cache-control: private responses to multiple users. I would bet a significant amount of money on this being the problem. To test this theory, the journalist should logout (invalidating his cookies), and then only use HTTPS with Google Plus (Install the HTTPS Everywhere extension to be certain https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere). If the pictures keep coming, I'm wrong. If they stop, then they're going to another user with the same ISP until they fix their broken cache.
- gbl08ma 14y ago
  It is said in the article that the journalist and the girl are from different continents... is there any ISP that operates on multiple continents and uses the same cache infrastructure for all the geographical locations?
  - doobley 14y ago
    It says they're both norwegian, and she was visiting another country..returned from vacation and uploaded her pics? Using her norwegian cellphone while abroad (i.e. norwegian APN)? Emailing her pictures to mom who uploads them from home? Who knows, but the fact that she visited another country doesn't invalidate it.
emmelaich 14y ago
Perhaps multiple hash collisions? I had a mysterious document appear in my Google docs once. I assumed it was due to a hash collision. I reported it to Google but never heard back from them.