Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by rmorrison on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:26PM
(#1288781)
I don't mean this to sound snarky but I'm having a hard time understanding the basic utility of blippys service.
It's the easiest way to share your credit card information with the world.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by mattmaroon on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:38PM
(#1288829)
I was just thinking on the way into work this morning that not enough people have my Discover Card number.
(OT/X-Post Just getting to this now:)
Silly, everybody knows you don't have a Discover card, because you're on Facebook, where all of us friends know this about you....
1) Get your discover card number as a tattoo (make sure to include your name as it appears on the card, expiration and 3 digit code from the back).
2) Submit photo to hacker news
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by blitzo on Saturday April 24, 2010 @12:00AM
(#1290289)
i hope you mean it in sarcasm way...
btw i cant believe nobody point a finger on google yet, this part of their fault too. there should a 'proper' mechanism on their webmaster tool an option to excluded a sensitive data Or make it an opt-out features Or add one regex line to detect an anomaly data on their search.
ffs they have billions to tinker around with it
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by fauigerzigerk on Saturday April 24, 2010 @08:35AM
(#1290776)
There is such a proper mechanism: robots.txt. Whenever I put all my users' credit card numbers on a public web server I make sure the URL is properly protected by robots.txt. If I want to be absolutely sure everything is safe I use CSS to make the numbers invisible on top of that! ;-)
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by mattwdelong on Saturday April 24, 2010 @11:20AM
(#1290986)
Why on earth would you let credit card numbers be publicly accessible; furthermore, one can simply view source to see those numbers. Security through obscurity is not a very good approach - you should read up on PCI compliance by starting here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu....
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by fauigerzigerk on Saturday April 24, 2010 @12:38PM
(#1291106)
Obscurity? Pffft. Simplicity! Nothing beats an HTML page right there in htdocs. You can store anything there and it's totally NoSQL as well. Anything else would be premature optimization. Do the simplest thing that could possibly work! Agile! I've got it all covered by unit tests so there can't be a problem. And if there's a breach I'll just rewrite it all in Haskell. Who are you anyway to tell a seasoned professional how to deal with credit card numbers securely? :)
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by nitrogen on Saturday April 24, 2010 @07:19AM
(#1290725)
Google shouldn't bear responsibility for indexing something sensitive, as the sensitive information should not be reachable via any link anywhere, let alone on the public Internet. It's about as sane as expecting the government to clean up after one's own mistakes, and just as damaging to the concept of personal or corporate responsibility.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by smokinn on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:16PM
(#1288743)
It's only for the most exhibitionist type of people. Think of sci-fi books with people being "life actors" or some such where people can tune in to them 24/7 and see what they're doing. It's basically just a stepping stone to that. I don't see this ever becoming even close to mainstream.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by bsergean on Friday April 23, 2010 @04:52PM
(#1289441)
This reminds me of a scanner darkly where the hero spy himself.
It makes about as much sense as twitter does.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by mattmaroon on Friday April 23, 2010 @03:30PM
(#1289231)
I don't think that's entirely fair. Twitter has some purposes other than sheer vanity. Sharing links, 1 to many communication, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care for Twitter myself. I don't use it, and I do find most of it to be trite and little more than navel gazing. But I can see some useful signal on Twitter, I just cannot see how it could not get buried under an avalanche of noise.
Blippy seems totally vacuous.
Sharing details of things you've purchased is immediately monetizable. If they can get users using it, it's trivial to make it insanely profitable.
I can see it catching on with kids definitely.
I can definitely see the value from a sales/marketing perspective, but the trick is getting people using this. They're going to have a pretty big challenge consistently delivering value to their users and not becoming at best an ephemeral fad.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by raintrees on Friday April 23, 2010 @06:49PM
(#1289718)
From comments I have heard Leo Laport making on his TWIT podcast, he uses the service and has found several products he has happily bought when other users on Blippy brought them to his attention.
I am also keeping in mind that there are many jokes in the podcasts about Mr. Laport's proclivity to purchase tech items, at times in quantity, as an early-early adopter.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by bad_user on Friday April 23, 2010 @05:15PM
(#1289515)
> I can see it catching on with kids definitely.
Kids that don't have a credit card?
By kids I mean people in their 20s. Now I feel old.
Yup. I'm just amazed that these companies keep finding capital. Didn't we learn anything from the dotcom bubble?
I think what we learned was that its really hard to tell 'which' crazy idea will make it. Even google was dismissed as a feature, not a company.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by messel on Saturday April 24, 2010 @12:24PM
(#1291082)
Is Twitter that much different than HN? They're both collective link sharing filters albeit we get sweet threaded comments and peanut gallery points here
I'd assume the inspiration for the service is grounded on the idea that your social circle influences things that you buy.
If you buy something and then a number of your 'followers' buy the same item a few days afterwards, that information is very valuable.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by mattmaroon on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:41PM
(#1288848)
The problem is it's not really valuable to you or your friends. It's valuable to people who want to sell you crap.
Yet, strangely, the people who want to sell me crap never let me cash in directly on my personal information. They always want to buy through some middleman that claims to be offering me some other service.
A Blippy analog that monetized and promised you 10% of the take would probably be insanely popular.
If I could put a dollar amount on my internet reputation that would be very valuable to me. I reckon that's something I could put to good use.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by mattmaroon on Friday April 23, 2010 @03:27PM
(#1289225)
This does the reverse. It doesn't put a dollar amount on your internet reputation. It develops an internet reputation based on your dollar amounts.
Then they will monetize by giving it to the only people who really care how much you spend at Starbucks: Starbucks (and competitors).
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by leftnode on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:15PM
(#1288736)
I was wondering the same thing, it just seems like a service where they'll be able to sell your data to companies down the road, or advertise you stuff you might be interested in.
Even if this turns out to be test data, it's still pretty shocking and will tarnish the service forever.
It's definitely an example of what can happen to your financial info if a website you give it to makes a mistake or gets greedy. It's why I'd never use a service like that or mint, et al...
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by johnrob on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:11PM
(#1288720)
I don't use the service, but I see it as a blog like tool. If you have one, you only use it in scenarios you'd like to tell everyone about. If you're at a baseball game, you use it to buy beers and they automatically post something like "John Doe bought 4 beers at the Giants game".
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by angelhaze218 on Friday April 23, 2010 @10:53PM
(#1290176)
It could also be financial therapy for the serious shopaholic, to have all spendings be public for critique among friends and family... much like calorie counting/blogging for those on diet
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by bgnm2000 on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:27PM
(#1288785)
I use it - not the credit card part - and its fun. I don't check it often, but every now and then. I guess the appeal is that its unique, new, and has potential.
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by malloreon on Friday April 23, 2010 @02:36PM
(#1289074)
Forgive my naivete, but how do you use it without using the credit card part?
Re:Blippy Publishes User Credit Card Numbers
by billclerico on Friday April 23, 2010 @05:36PM
(#1289575)
you can share purchase history from online merchants without connecting your credit card - like amazon, itunes, zappos etc
Why would you want to automatically share information about every purchase you make with your credit/debit card with the world? It just sounds like a recipe for disaster with very little upside.
Can anyone who uses this service (if any HN members do) explain the usefulness of it to me? I might just be misunderstanding the purpose.