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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by throwup238 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @02:33PM (#41249125)
> While the specifics of the data breach remain unclear, the trove of data was put up for sale on the dark web for $3.5 million in April, the complaint reads.

I guess they failed to sell it because links to the leaked data on usdod.io have been available on Breachforum/Leakbase for over a week now. Someone created a magnet link yesterday and it's fully seeded so speeds are fast.

The data in the breach is irreversibly public now.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by toomuchtodo on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @03:18PM (#41249551)
Ahh, cool, pour the corpus through GPTs and start tweeting Congressional rep personal info at them until they pass a law to outlaw data brokers (in keeping with historical precedent [1] [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

[2] https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/dodging-the-thought-poli...

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by conductr on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:14PM (#41250032)
For argument sake, instead of outlawing data brokers wouldn’t it be better to design a better ID system that renders one’s name, dob, and SSN as harmless information?

I don’t know what that would look like but if I had congresses attention I’d like them to fix the problem rather than playing whack-a-mole with banning data sources. I don’t think any actual solutions come from that.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ljm on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:20PM (#41250083)
In many countries in Europe, your ID card contains a chip with a cryptographic key, much like chip&pin on a debit or credit card.

Those bits of information are worthless when you need to create a cryptographic signature with your ID card to do almost anything important.

If the card is lost or stolen they can just remove your old one from the keyserver. It's literally just public key crypto.

Identity theft is rampant in the countries that don't have such a system and basically require you give them increasing amounts of private information to prove who you are. In the UK that's every address you've lived in for 5 years, your council tax bill, your energy bill, your bank statement for a month... all because British people think an ID card means you'll get stopped on the street to show your papers.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by dotancohen on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:16PM (#41250590)

  > Identity theft is rampant in the countries that don't have such a system
No, fraud is rampant in the countries that don't have such a system. Calling it identity theft makes it sound like the onus on preventing the practice is on "whoever's identify was stolen", instead of correcting pinning the onus on the bodies issuing accounts and loans without verifying information or identity.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Workaccount2 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:20PM (#41250639)
The US has three dumb points pushing back on this.

The first is religious nuts who think it would be a "mark of the beast"

The second is anti-government types who are, well, anti-government anything.

The third is many business owners, because it would become much harder/risky to hire illegal immigrants to work.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by autoexec on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:59PM (#41250951)
The "mark of the beast" types are pretty much fine with cards that have chips in them, but they really hate it when you threaten to implant those chips into people and they want cash to remain an option - same as the anti-government types. I don't share their apocalyptic or anti-government concerns, but I'm actually kind of grateful for their passionate opposition to both of those things anyway. I don't really want an implant and the option of using cash is a very good thing.

The anti-government types do hate the idea of a national ID, but they're already forced to carry a drivers license/state ID, and SS card so they've pretty much lost the battle already.

I'm afraid that it's the business owners who are our biggest hurdle.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bobthepanda on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:28PM (#41251201)
Eh, depending on the flavor, the mark of the beast types don’t even really like barcodes. Allegedly Hobby Lobby does not use a barcode inventory system for this reason.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bmelton on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @07:16PM (#41251575)
Hobby Lobby's CEO provided a handy list of reasons why they do not use bar codes, none of which have anything to do with them being marks of beasts

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hobby-lobby-mark-of-the-be...

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by autoexec on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @07:53PM (#41251945)
I will say that their list of reasons is deeply flawed.

> Human beings can't read a bar code.

- they can, and more importantly they almost never have to

> A lot of our product comes from cottage industries in Asia that couldn't mark their goods with bar codes if they tried.

- They can be added at the store/warehouse level, not every product needs one, and I've never seen a store that worked entirely on bar codes 100% of the time anyway.

> Inventory control by computer is not as accurate as you think.

- This assumes what I think, and it only needs to be more accurate than your current method. If it actually weren't more accurate, I don't think they'd have to fall back on "as you think" in their argument.

> Employees take more pride in their work when they know they are in charge, not some faceless machine.

- this doesn't even make sense.

> Customer service is better.

- questionable, but not impossible to support

> The time savings at check-out is minimal — and easily squandered.

- possible, but time savings at checkout is only one benefit.

- Reprogramming the computer for sales would take a huge effort in our case, because we put so many individual items on sale each week.

- It would take effort, but stores with much more inventory manage it just fine, even when new products are constantly coming in and sales are weekly.

> Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.

- I have no idea from the article what this is in reference to. Maybe the amount it would take for them to make the the switch? It's hard to say how much money it would save them so it's fair to say cost is a concern. I will say that over a long enough time period, it'd probably save more than it costs.

None of this means that concerns over "the mark of the beast" is really the reason, but the reasons they gave don't make a lot of sense either. It could just as easily be that poor record keeping and manual entry at the register allow them commit fraud or something.

I suspect that if the mark of the beast plays any role at all, it's that no having barcodes panders to the christian customer base they've always heavily pandered to. Even just the rumor is basically viral marketing for them to that crowd.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by quohort on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:42PM (#41252158)
How about this: without barcodes, you can't replace your clerks with self-checkout machines
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by autoexec on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @09:11PM (#41252276)
I'm not sure that's true, but it would make it more difficult since it'd be easier for customers to cheat. You'd need more monitoring than most stores at the very least.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by HKH2 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @10:29PM (#41252638)
Decathlon has RFID tags.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by harimau777 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @10:37PM (#41252673)
Personally, Hobby Lobby's poor inventory management is a major frustration for me as a customer. Unlike other stores, they don't have any way for me to check online whether the product that I want is at their store. Granted, I avoid shopping at Hobby Lobby in general due to their owners regressive views; but at those times when I couldn't find something at a competitor it would have been helpful to be able to see if I could get it from them.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by quohort on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:39PM (#41252143)
It doesn't need to be a national ID, it could just operate on a state-level like drivers licenses currently do.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by nine_k on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:08PM (#41251030)
Correct. But not insurmountable.

Make the ID card optional, so that it simplifies things if you have it, but still allows operation without it. If 80% of law-abiding population has the card, only the stubborn deniers will remain targets of easy identity theft and fraud based on it. Partly it will stop being worth the effort, partly it will serve as a good control group.

Allow but do not require to use the card for employee identification. Whoever insists on hiring undocumented immigrants, could continue. Most industries don't do that, and would reap the benefits of a more secure identification.

Don't make the card universal. A bank card with a chip does not identify you for governmental agencies, but prevents a lot of PoS fraud. It could prevent credit fraud if banks allowed me to require the card to take a loan in my name, or to make a transfer larger than $10, and provided the card identity check service to each other and to credit unions. Phones with NFC can read bank cards, so it's a good way to say "it's me, I confirm" in a secure way.

Evolutionary, opt-in, piecemeal solutions often have higher chances to succeed than abrupt all-at-once changes.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hattmall on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:28PM (#41251203)
>Most industries don't do that

They absolutely do, but most of the immigrants have a form of ID that gives the companies some measure of deniability. As long as the I-9 goes through, not my problem. If it doesn't, well that's where contractors come in. Official numbers say around 14 million illegal immigrants. Reasonable estimates are closer to 22 and some non-hyperbolic estimates go as high as 40 million.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by croemer on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @10:48PM (#41252739)
If it's optional, then one would need to be able to have a central database of people who have IDs and want providers to require them.

Otherwise there's no protection against impersonation if IDs aren't mandatory.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by nine_k on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @11:17PM (#41252857)
Indeed. But a federated database is fine, too; this is how Visa and MasterCard work.

Imagine having a bunch of ID cards in you wallet, like you already have (driver's license, library card, office access card, store loyalty card) that all have interoperable smartcard interface, and a QR code of their built-in public key.

They would be much like contactless bank cards you also keep in your wallet.

Banks and phone network operators are uniquely positioned to sell a validation service for such cards, being highly connected and already having data about their existing customers, which would be an easy initial audience pool.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by nobody9999 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:11AM (#41253277)
>Make the ID card optional, so that it simplifies things if you have it, but still allows operation without it. If 80% of law-abiding population has the card, only the stubborn deniers will remain targets of easy identity theft and fraud based on it. Partly it will stop being worth the effort, partly it will serve as a good control group.

Kind of like RealID[0]? It exists right now in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by nine_k on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:17AM (#41253764)
Yes, this is a step in a right direction.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 77pt77 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:26PM (#41251194)
> The third is many business owners, because it would become much harder/risky to hire illegal immigrants to work.

Big one, but even though employing illegal immigrants is a crime, it's almost never prosecuted.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Workaccount2 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @09:16AM (#41255645)
It's trivial as an immigrant to get a (stolen) SSN. Business owners are not responsible for checking if the SSN is stolen or not.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by sneak on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @09:26PM (#41252354)
There is another group: those of us who think the trend of requiring ID to transact is a dangerous one.

One doesn’t need to be anti-government to fear governmental intrusion on one’s rights without due process. Our current government does that now.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mistrial9 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @11:06PM (#41252817)
> those of us who think the trend of requiring ID to transact is a dangerous one.

agree and second -- history shows that this sort of thing goes badly due to "humans"

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by willmadden on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:11AM (#41253029)
Governments murdered hundreds of millions of their own people during the 20th century, and the 21st is shaping up to tell the 20th to hold its beer.

Any proposal for modern ID needs to have Constitutional protections, checks, and balances or it will eventually devolve into a digital police state.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by XorNot on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:58AM (#41253222)
How?

Everyone's like "a government went on and extermination campaign" and for some reason what would've stopped them is the difficulty in identifying who to exterminate?

As though genocides much care about accuracy.

The big secret of Nazi Germany that isn't a secret at all I is that they put a lot more then just Jews in those camps.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by willmadden on Friday August 16, 2024 @10:22AM (#41266713)
There are key differences between today and the 20th century that you are ignoring. Widely enforced digital ID not only makes it easier for them to identify who to genocide, it forces total compliance with the state, because if you do not fully comply, you risk death, imprisonment, or having your freedom and bank account revoked.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by XorNot on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @05:49AM (#41298456)
I mean surely then nations with little in the way of digital or personal ID are definitely immune to genocides and do not in fact make up the vast majority of extant genocides committed in recent years or throughout history...[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:28AM (#41253340)
A lack of national ID cards would not have hindered the Nazis in carrying out mass murder one bit.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by willmadden on Friday August 16, 2024 @08:12AM (#41265616)
More apropros to the current situation, Henryk Jagoda and the bolsheviks killed/starved between 29 million to 113 million people, depending on estimates. They certainly ID's people, based on ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and class status.

My point is to not make it easier for them.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Friday August 16, 2024 @07:00PM (#41271140)
Stalin killed around a million people in the purges. Several million people died in a famine in the early 1930s, which was partially due to Stalin's economic policies.

Figures like 29 million (not to mention 113 million, which would hardly leave anyone in the USSR) are simply not credible. I suspect the 29 million figure comes from counting the victims of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but those deaths are on Germany's balance.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by willmadden on Thursday August 22, 2024 @06:34PM (#41324872)
They are credible. That estimate was directly from perplexity.ai with sources. It aligns with what I've come across in my own reading as well.

If you think the holodomor and red terror only killed a couple million people, I've got some beachfront property to sell you in Idaho.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by calculatte on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:12AM (#41253281)
You're forgetting the entire political left, who claim only whites are intelligent enough to get IDs.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ygjb on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:33PM (#41250202)
> all because British people think an ID card means you'll get stopped on the street to show your papers.

That's probably because all of the anti-immigration and anti-foreigner people who are asking the government to stop people and ask them for their papers... this is not unique the the UK, Canada, or the United States either, and some of the countries plan to do more than just deport people.

Strong identity is increasingly a meaningful technical requirement, but glossing over the human impact of strong identity controls by the government is not going to have good outcomes either.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by pasc1878 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:16PM (#41250595)
Not really in Britain. Labour tried to introduce some national id in early 2000s, the right wingers were the ones who objected the most. The same right wingers who are most anti-immigration
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by wsc981 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:49AM (#41253172)
I think most of those right wingers are against illegal immigration. There's a big distinction here.

I think very few of those so-called right-wingers are -say- against doctors immigrating to one's country if there's a doctor shortage. As long as immigration is all done using legal means. And with proper checks and balances.

I'm a right winger (but not born and raised in the UK). And I am very much against illegal immigration. I also don't want to be required to wear an identity card / passport with me at all times.

Actually, with proper immigration policies in place, the state can be sure that most people inside the state are legal, law-abiding citizens. I don't think in such cases it does make sense to require people to wear an id card with them at all times.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by pasc1878 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:06AM (#41253968)
Yes they are against all immigrants.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:33AM (#41253363)
There were just a series of mass race riots by right-wingers across the UK, in which they went around smashing up shops owned by immigrants and beating up people who don't look white. This isn't about illegal immigration. It's about racism.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by akimbostrawman on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:31AM (#41253578)
conveniently emitting the fact that this is a reaction to immigrants going around randomly attacking birtish people. If you aren't already consider workong for MSM.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Dylan16807 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:35AM (#41253842)
That doesn't make it any less racist!

But please give some more details on that. The only case I've heard about was a single attacker who was incorrectly called an immigrant.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by akimbostrawman on Thursday August 15, 2024 @07:52AM (#41254928)
It adds context which people who manipulate the overtone window for political games and name calling like to exclude.

The person was a immigrants child. Considering there obvious (violent) refusal to integrate they are too an immigrant.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Dylan16807 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:29PM (#41258420)
It's completely bonkers to have retaliation like that against a single attack that isn't part of a pattern.

Like, that context arguably makes it worse than if there was no inciting incident, because it's so blatantly blaming a huge group for one person.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @07:48PM (#41261707)
It's like justifying pogroms against Jews because one Jewish person committed a crime. It's racist and utterly disgusting.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by akimbostrawman on Friday August 16, 2024 @04:37AM (#41264452)
are you implying that there are jewish grooming gangs that operate above the law?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Friday August 16, 2024 @06:38AM (#41265104)
Are you implying that small numbers of Muslim criminals justify mob violence against random Muslims on the street?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by akimbostrawman on Friday August 16, 2024 @04:25AM (#41264371)
its not a single attack but not like the news you listen to would report that.

it is a pattern.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Dylan16807 on Friday August 16, 2024 @01:33PM (#41268460)
So is your goal here to see how many times you can make bigoted claims without evidence before someone comments on your very name being "strawman"?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by themaninthedark on Thursday August 15, 2024 @09:30AM (#41255841)
To bring up more things in the broader context, were there not several "grooming gangs" that were active in Britain recently and the police were reluctant to investigate/prosecute them as it might appear racist?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by defrost on Thursday August 15, 2024 @08:18PM (#41261855)
Police were reluctant to investigate celebrity grooming gangs, Rolf Harris, Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, etc.

Police were reluctant to investigate political grooming gangs, those in the House of Lords, nobility, etc.

Police were reluctant to investigate religuous grooming gangs, Christian Brothers ets.

I can't see how immigrant pedos are infinity worse rather than just more of the same.

The reluctance to investigate seems to be the issue, now it's compounded by scapegoating.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by akimbostrawman on Friday August 16, 2024 @04:32AM (#41264419)
there are literal no go zones the police will not touch out of fear. If you can't figure out how law less zones and being socially untouchable could make doing crimes easier and harder to prevent, then there is nothing that could convince you.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by defrost on Friday August 16, 2024 @08:07AM (#41265578)
> there are literal no go zones the police will not touch out of fear.

GPS coords then? Street names?

Any chance of a decent curry?

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @07:44PM (#41261686)
No, it's not based on that.

It was based on a false rumor that spread on social media that the perpetrator of a recent triple murder was a Muslim asylum seeker. It turns out that the perpetrator is a British citizen who was born in Britain and is Christian.

What this reminds me of are pogroms in Eastern Europe, which were often sparked by false rumors about Jews.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by BlueTemplar on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @07:13PM (#41251539)
Yeah, id cards aren't mandatory in France either because the precedent when they were comes from literal Nazis. (At least theoretically, in practice you will face a lot of pressure...)
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ethbr1 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:17PM (#41250607)
The US has infrastructure, but it's only issued to military and federal employees.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_201

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by crote on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:40PM (#41250792)
> Those bits of information are worthless when you need to create a cryptographic signature with your ID card to do almost anything important.

That depends on the type of attack you're protecting against. It might prevent an attacker from filing your taxes for you, but many companies are still going to use this kind of information as primary key. But it's not going to stop an attacker from pretending to be a bank employee, calling a genuine bank employee via a secret internal-only number, and claiming they've got Mr. Doe in their branch trying to do a critical transaction but their phone broke so they can't use the bank app. Yeah, the Mr. Doe living at 987 Main Street, that one. See, you even verified their ID, and it has a SSN of 123456 printed on it - just compare that to our customer database to make sure it's legit!

It also opens up a whole new type of attack. The problem with those smart cards is that there isn't really a way for the user to know what operation is actually happening. You're using a regular PC or smartphone to interface between the smart card and whatever entity you're trying to communicate with. But that could just as well be a phishing website pretending to be that entity, or malware doing a MitM. Or even just a random website pretending to need a signature for "age verification" when it's actually applying for a loan behind the scenes.

There's no "Do you really want to sign over your house to XYZ?" message on the card itself. And suddenly the government/bank/whatever is getting a request with a cryptographic signature which can obviously only be made by you - why would they have to double-check it if it cannot possible be fraudulent?

I agree that we should be moving to more secure systems, but those ID smart cards aren't a one-size-fits-all solution.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by nine_k on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:21PM (#41251143)
As a potential Mr. Doe, I'd love to have an ability to opt in to a stricter mode of banking. I would voluntarily ask my bank to refuse certain types of transactions in my name unless my identity can be confirmed by secure machine-readable means at my presence; internal phone calls should not qualify. It could be a bank card, or a passport — yes, both can be physically stolen, but it's much harder to pull off, and I would immediately warn my bank when I notice.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mynameisvlad on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:06PM (#41251005)
That seems entirely like an implementation detail that doesn't have anything to do with the smart card interface itself.

It's not like it's rocket science to have the reader application detail what the request is used for, and encoding it in the request/response, verified when used, so that it can't be used for anything but the approved purpose.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lmm on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:43PM (#41252164)
> It's not like it's rocket science to have the reader application detail what the request is used for, and encoding it in the request/response

The reader application can, sure, but what ensures that that "reader application" is genuine and can't be subverted? The card's own processor is supposedly tamperproof, but all the display etc. is in the reader which is probably owned and controlled by whatever third-party you're identifying yourself to, or at best it's a random application running on your PC/phone with whatever malware you have.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @07:52PM (#41261732)
This is already a more restricted type of attack than the common identify theft that's rampant right now in the US.

What you're describing requires the actual terminal you're interacting with to be malicious, and it can only be used to authorize individual transactions.

As things stand in the US, a much broader class of attacks are not only possible but common, in which the attacker takes over the identify of the victim and can authorize any number of transactions in their name.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lmz on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:55PM (#41252216)
Why do you trust the reader though? It could display one thing and send another. Although I guess this also happens with payment card terminals. Who's to say the €3 displayed is not charged as €300...
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:38AM (#41253378)
This is a solved problem.

If the ID is on your phone, you can make it so that the transaction details have to be digitally signed by the person authorizing them in order to be valid. Then, if 3€ shows up on your phone, that's what you're authorizing, not 300€.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lmz on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:12AM (#41253750)
Sure, given an advanced enough device anything is possible. But I think here we are still discussing a "card" form factor for ID? (Being an "unperson" simply because you don't have a smartphone or have a rooted one would be "interesting").
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @07:46PM (#41261694)
You wouldn't be an "unperson" without a smartphone, but your financial transactions might not be as secure.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mynameisvlad on Saturday August 17, 2024 @02:25PM (#41276712)
Most places with digital IDs use either a phone card reader or the phone’s own NFC terminal to read a contactless smart card. The cryptographic key comes from the smart card, with the phone as a payment terminal.

Nothing advanced is required. And sure, your phone can be hacked, but there’s only so much fearmongering to go around.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lmm on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:40PM (#41252146)
> There's no "Do you really want to sign over your house to XYZ?" message on the card itself. And suddenly the government/bank/whatever is getting a request with a cryptographic signature which can obviously only be made by you - why would they have to double-check it if it cannot possible be fraudulent?

My country's version uses separate mechanisms with separate passwords for "identify me, revealing my name/DoB/number" and "sign something". Obviously not impossible to pretend that you're signing an innocuous document and have you sign something else, but it at least removes some of the low-hanging fruit.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by artursapek on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @10:16PM (#41252568)
How is key revocation authenticated?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by toomuchtodo on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:19PM (#41250070)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249568

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40961834

TLDR Login.gov, and publishing a circular to allow businesses to use it to identity proof. Push all liability onto the business for losses if this method is not used to identity proof. ID card as ljm mentions, such as a passport card. Very similar to credit card EMV chips and the liability shift from magstripe.

> I don’t know what that would look like but if I had congresses attention I’d like them to fix the problem rather than playing whack-a-mole with banning data sources. I don’t think any actual solutions come from that.

Aggregating data means it can be lost. You must therefore make aggregating and storing data toxic, and impossible to be leaked through eventual mismanagement.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by haswell on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:23PM (#41250658)
I’d replace “instead of” with “in addition to”.

Going after data brokers seems like low hanging fruit, and necessary even if the ID system needs to be replaced. This is a top level issue that need to be addressed regardless.

While I think it’d be great to design a system where the information you mention is harmless (I’m curious how this would work without just shifting the problem to whatever new identifier is established), the reality is that this information is not harmless, and will continue to be dangerous to leak for the foreseeable future due to the myriad of systems that use this data in its current form. Any theoretical project to replace this would likely be a long and drawn out undertaking. Addressing the information environment in the meantime seems like a good idea.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by kube-system on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:54PM (#41250912)
It's politically a non-starter in the US. US states have a lot of power that is derived from their ability to maintain their own ID systems. The states have fought for almost 20 years on requirements as simple as REAL ID.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 77pt77 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:25PM (#41251184)
Plenty of countries have smart cards with chips and RSA keys that can be used to verify ID with much higher level of certainty, but then they usually don't use it.

Even just name, DOD and last 4 of the SS number and you are done.

It's ridiculous.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by photonthug on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:26PM (#41252101)
> I’d like them to fix the problem rather than playing whack-a-mole with banning data sources

We should fix the problem and ban the data-sources. Whack-a-mole makes it sound like we're talking about a ban on one company, but what clearly needs to be done is a categorical ban on super sketchy business practices, and that seems simple enough. Data-brokers, if they are going to exist at all, need to accept the burden of proof to establish that every single row involves consent, and they need to acquire new consent for every single resale of the information. If that makes the whole industry unprofitable, too fucking bad. And if this looks bad for business, it gets even worse: good luck getting consent for reselling what is mine without offering me a cut.

Since the above kind of common sense looks crazy these days, let's throw in something even more radical. For anyone looking to fund UBI, ^ here's a start. The trouble with the often-mentioned idea of "tax the data" as a solution for privacy concerns is that these taxes are just redistributing wealth from corporations to governments, while all of profit is made with our information. Who wants the monetized details of their personal life to pay for the next unjust war, or even the roads in some place they don't live. If we are so valuable, put some of that money back in our hands, and if the price doesn't sound fair to us, then let us opt out of the sale.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ggm on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:32PM (#41252124)
Funny you should say that. Australia is trying to launch TEx -designed on open-source models to do this kind of thing. It's hitting the usual roadblocks of public acceptance of government mandated ID, in an economy which trashed the "australia card" idea back in the 80s. We're wiser now, we've been frogs boiled slowly: the downsides of central safe ID/auth are outweighed by the risks of loss of info giving everyone 100 points information.

The government now knows what we do most of the time anyway: layer-2 logs on our phones are constant. We lost any privacy some time ago. So now, getting security back might be a net win.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-13/trust-exchange-digita...

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by tacticus on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:39PM (#41252142)
Except it's being implemented by the people who brought you robodebt.

So i imagine the "Number of people driven to suicide" KPI is going to be pretty high. They're not going to want to ship something that performs worse.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ggm on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:44PM (#41252170)
Yes. There is that. But it's only true to the extent all government things are brought to you by the government. If the underlying IMS system used for datamatching by ATO and Centerlink is the product of the same s/w development group I'd be a bit surprised. It's different code.

But I am by tendency an optimist, and the open-source part (if they do that) means we can have eyes on their crypto assumptions behind the protocol and whats on the device.

MyGovID, which I think they're baking into it has been pretty solid. thats distinct from your mygov account, many of which have been hacked, in part because so few people used MyGovID.

(if you've got better info always happy to see it)

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by tacticus on Friday August 16, 2024 @05:40AM (#41264785)
I mean it's literally being built by services australia with all the baggage of that organisation.

The execs are mostly the same. the product contracts run by the same people and even the minister is now the same again. they have no interest in changing or correcting.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ruthmarx on Thursday August 15, 2024 @09:21AM (#41255720)
> layer-2 logs on our phones are constant.

Huh?

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ggm on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:48PM (#41260742)
Every phone provider has a log of the IMEI binding to cell tower and triangulation over multiple towers. Call logs are one thing, carrier cell connect and disconnect is another.

If your phone is on, your position in time and space to some circular error is also known, continuously.

To say nothing of Bluetooth that's with the advertising hoardings and inside the store mainly.

Basically, any privacy nut with a phone and simcard is in denial.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ruthmarx on Friday August 16, 2024 @03:08PM (#41269393)
Someone concerned about piracy could just keep their phone in a faraday cage case and take it out only when needed, no?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by e_y_ on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @09:15PM (#41252297)
We should be doing both, for different reasons. Ban data brokers because they allow anyone with a credit card to stalk people, more or less legally. Fix the SSN identity system because even if you ban data broker businesses, dark web brokers don't abide by the laws anyways.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Tanoc on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:08AM (#41253259)
The uneven availability of information means that no, it's not better to just design a better ID system. Data brokers give corporations far more advantages than a normal person could ever protect themselves against, because even if the data broke doesn't have your government issued credentials they can still easily designate who you are buy collating all the data from other means such as purchasing habits, cellular, and service guest lists.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by yallpendantools on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:19AM (#41253060)
Err, why do you need a GPT for this stunt? For a quarter of the price of a 2010s mid-range HP laptop, I have a Python script for you.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by dang on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:29AM (#41253343)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249125.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by toomuchtodo on Thursday August 15, 2024 @09:25AM (#41255775)
I thought it was a legitimate proposal to the problem at hand, but respect and understand the decision. My apologies for taking the conversation potentially off topic.

https://paulgraham.com/founders.html

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

While scoped to founders, I think it broadly applies to a subset of curious people who are wired to solve problems, imho.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bhaney on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:11PM (#41250018)
> Someone created a magnet link yesterday

Are you against simply sharing the infohash here? I'd like to download the leak to see what information it has on myself and my family, but I don't really relish the idea of signing up for a breachforums account and sifting though its posts if I can avoid it.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by flockonus on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:33PM (#41250201)
fyi that is likely to be a crime, at the very least has been cases of websites being punished for linking to illegally distributed IP (even if not hosting it).
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bhaney on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:38PM (#41250247)
I'd be worried about legal repercussions if we were talking about the latest Disney movie, but this is merely the private information of a billion people. Never seen IP law give much of a crap about that before.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ethbr1 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:19PM (#41250623)
Private information on people is Equifax's IP.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Zuiii on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:49AM (#41253171)
A collection of facts is not and can not be copyrightable, especially when it was mechanically derived/collected (no human creativity). So, no, it is absolutely not "Equifax's IP".
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by dtech on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:49AM (#41253422)
Only in the US. In the EU and other jurisdictions is does have protection [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_...

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hulitu on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:50AM (#41254390)
Yeah, in the EU it does have Palantir's protection. /s
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by adolph on Thursday August 15, 2024 @10:56AM (#41256870)
So I could copyright my SSN in the EU and sue Equifax et al.?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by rjmunro on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:19PM (#41258909)
Not on an individual basis. If you collected a large number of them and someone copied them from you, then you could have a database right claim, which is sort of similar to copyright, but much less powerful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by basch on Thursday August 15, 2024 @11:21AM (#41257111)
which has yet to leak. as far as we know, the equifax data never became public.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Dalewyn on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:44AM (#41254136)
1 pirated Disney movie is a tragedy.

3,000,000,000 leaked Social Security Numbers is a statistic.

-Joseph "Social Credit" Stalin

...Is it obvious I, as an American who can confirm my SSN (and whatever else) was leaked by this, sincerely couldn't care less because this is leak incident number 897165176548795647564576415671?

That $10 UberEats gift card from CrowdStrike would be more valuable than another batch of Free Credit Monitoring(tm).

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by rqtwteye on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:37PM (#41259085)
UberEats gift cards are the ultimate passive aggressive “fuck you”. To use them, you need to spend at least another 10 to actually get something
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jmprspret on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:40PM (#41250260)
Is this NPD's "IP" though? Is my personal information that company scraped, now that company's intellectual property?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LorenPechtel on Thursday August 15, 2024 @08:48PM (#41262030)
Where's the IP?

It's like phone books--a collection of data, no creative content.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lynndotpy on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:48PM (#41250354)
BitTorrent uses something called a "distributed hash table", for which there exist services to search it (btdig, etc). You can use one of those alongside the torrent name (NPD) to find it.

I haven't downloaded it, but my understanding is that the data comes compressed and with a (weak) password.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:06PM (#41251002)
Here is a strongly encrypted base64 version to keep hackers out:

bWFnbmV0Oj94dD11cm46YnRpaDozY2FhNzFmM2VjOGNiY2NjNmZjYTRmZWI3MTg1ZGEyYmFiMTQ5YmE3JmRuPU5QRCZ0cj11ZHA6Ly90cmFja2VyLm9wZW5iaXR0b3JyZW50LmNvbTo4MCZ0cj11ZHA6Ly90cmFja2VyLm9wZW50cmFja3Iub3JnOjEzMzcvYW5ub3VuY2U=

Allegedly, the password (also base64 encrypted) is:

aHR0cHM6Ly91c2RvZC5pby8=

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:39PM (#41252141)
Has anyone been able to reverse this base64 encryption? Whatever am I going to do with this?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by acidburnNSA on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:57PM (#41252228)
It can't be reversed, unfortunately. base64 has been peer proven as mathematically unhackable.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by harshreality on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:46AM (#41253638)
Username checks out.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by meowface on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:13AM (#41254249)
Same for base16. That's why those pesky hash digests always use it.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LadyCailin on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:43PM (#41260684)
rot13 is way faster though.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jzemeocala on Monday August 19, 2024 @11:35AM (#41291929)
do you still hang out with CrashOverRide?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by acidburnNSA on Saturday August 24, 2024 @12:03PM (#41339158)
Only in phonebooths during slow-motion, rotating hack montages.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 29athrowaway on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:20AM (#41253061)
It's not encryption it's encoding. It can be trivially decoded
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by oxidant on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:22AM (#41253323)
I'm not sure. There are 64 bases. Probably quantum proof.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bool3max on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:50AM (#41253426)
How about you post the decrypted version then genius?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:39AM (#41253613)
https://www.base64decode.org/

Just paste in and decode and tadah

Sincerely I hope you are not in a technical IT role.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by vlovich123 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:49AM (#41253654)
Sincerely I hope you don’t try reading Jonathan Swift - you may start trying to eat children.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:26AM (#41253799)
Yeah ok I was stupid
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by saintradon on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:58AM (#41253686)
Dude it's just a joke
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:41AM (#41253865)
Yeah I'm dumb and was having a bad day
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by spacebacon on Thursday August 15, 2024 @06:27AM (#41254533)
Happens to the best of us. Life is a dance not a maze.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:41AM (#41253618)
https://www.base64decode.org/

I hope this helps you

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by qwertox on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:05AM (#41253960)
Wasn't it a joke?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:18PM (#41258289)
I just knew someone was going to take it seriously xD
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:19PM (#41258306)
It was a joke, but thank you. The internet needs more helpful people.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by AmpsterMan on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:33PM (#41258470)
I get it now, but I have so much imposter syndrome that I wasn't sure if this was ACTUALLY something I needed to figure out -__-
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Vicinity9635 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:43PM (#41258553)
I dug into this a little and one of the files is 164GB. How do you even work with these files? That is, how would I search for my SSN on my windows box?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by diggan on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:29PM (#41258995)
That's not even that big? `cat big_file | grep -v my_term` would go line-by-line and show any lines matching your query. If you're doing a lot of queries, you'd probably want to index it, so you throw it into a sqlite database with the usual SQL utils.

Edit: I missed you said Windows. Probably Powershell have similar utilities, so you can do `ReadFileLineByLine \r \d big_file | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s my_term` or something similar.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by kaiwenwang on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:21PM (#41259441)
Using sift on a 100GB txt file still takes multiple minutes. I haven't tried ag, but grep is supposedly slower.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by kelnos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:03PM (#41259814)
If the desire is just to grep for your name, email address, whatever, and then throw the rest of the data away, I don't think waiting multiple minutes is a big deal.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 6031769 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:54PM (#41260273)
You absolutely do not want to use "-v" with that grep.

Nor do you want to use cat (UUoCA) but that's very much a minor point in comparison.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by SahAssar on Friday August 16, 2024 @09:36AM (#41266303)
UUoCA: https://porkmail.org/era/unix/award

I hadn't heard of it before.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Vicinity9635 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:52PM (#41260781)
>ReadFileLineByLine \r \d ssn.txt | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s trampas ReadFileLineByLine : The term 'ReadFileLineByLine' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1 + ReadFileLineByLine \r \d ssn.txt | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s tra ... + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (ReadFileLineByLine:String) [], CommandNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

:(

All I know about powershell I just learned by accident: ls works

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by majorchord on Thursday August 15, 2024 @11:14PM (#41262827)
I can't believe HN mods think it's ok to leave this comment up. I don't know of a way to report it myself unfortunately.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Saturday August 17, 2024 @03:17PM (#41277153)
Excuse me, why is linking to something bad? Especially when it contains your own data?
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ranger_danger on Saturday August 17, 2024 @08:40PM (#41279241)
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Sunday August 18, 2024 @05:29AM (#41281221)
Doxxing involves targeting an individual, as mentioned in the first line of that wiki page.

I'm not publishing or leaking any data either. I'm linking to something that was already made public which contains my own data.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ranger_danger on Sunday August 18, 2024 @10:09AM (#41282475)
Linking to personal information may be considered publishing in some areas.

Also it's just a really crappy thing to do IMO.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by robustcollector on Friday August 16, 2024 @07:32AM (#41265363)
Elsewhere in this thread I posted a detailed commentary on what the torrent contains.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by e40 on Friday August 16, 2024 @12:51PM (#41268094)
Anyone know the size after the 50GB file is un7zipped?

EDIT: answer: 2 files, 176GB and 120GB, total is 298GB.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by e40 on Friday August 16, 2024 @03:44PM (#41269677)
Entire family is in the list, with every address they've lived at in the last 40 years.

Freeze your credit reports, folks.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LorenPechtel on Saturday August 17, 2024 @12:11PM (#41275534)
FYI: This is only the two social security files, not the whole breach.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by eks391 on Saturday August 17, 2024 @09:33AM (#41274473)
You can check to see if you were in the breach here:

https://npd.pentester.com/search

This will save you the effort of a 30min search per `grep` on the original breached files.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by qingcharles on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:21PM (#41251142)
Do you know if the Rhysida ones get torrented?

https://www.ransomlook.io/group/rhysida

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @10:36PM (#41252669)
Now everyone just needs to send their email addresses to HIBP, i.e., email HIBP, so he can connect these identities with IP addresses and working email accounts. For peoples' protection of course.

After everyone "has been pwned" then there is no need for HIBP. The answer is always "yes". Yet I am certain sites like "HIBP" will never go away. Something about email marketing.

Some HN commenter(s) will inevitably try to defend HIBP. But this comment also refers to sites "like HIBP" that use data breach dumps opportunistically to generate web traffic, collect IP and email addresses. Some folks just do not see what is wrong with the idea.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by dtquad on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @11:01PM (#41252796)
HIBP has been audited by independent 3rd parties.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by MattGaiser on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:44AM (#41253625)
> After everyone "has been pwned" then there is no need for HIBP.

You can be repeatedly pwned with updated/different information. It is not a one and done thing.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by vlovich123 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:51AM (#41253658)
And people are born and die
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lazide on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:07AM (#41253726)
Allegedly /s
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:26AM (#41253797)
Using data breach dumps to get web traffic and IP/email addresses under the guise of "helping" is lame. Then partnering with so-called "tech" companies that collect data as a "business". Data collection is the cause of the problem not the solution.
Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jve on Thursday August 15, 2024 @08:59AM (#41255442)
There is trust involved here. And people trust Troy Hunt.

And of course you can download SHA ranges and do lookup offline: https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-v...

He even previously encouraged to download via torrent, but now it seems there is a custom tool to download that data.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by shkkmo on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:29PM (#41258996)
The offline lookup is just for passwords (the pwned passwords service) and is used to prevent people from using known breached passwords.

There is no offline availability for the Have I Been Pwned data on which emails were present in which breaches. Access to thus data is rate limited and paid API keys are needed for bulk access.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:52PM (#41260786)
The downloads are the way to go IMHO. But this is coming a little too late. "HIBP" is already making money from "paid API" and other commercial nonsense. Profiting from data breaches. While posing as a hero, catering to a dedicated following. This is, IMHO, everything that is wrong with the web.

The issue I am raising is not whether a particular website operator claiming to be in posession of data breach dumps, that any web user can download themselves, is "trustworthy" or not. The point I am raising is the unnecessary data collection. If these downloads were available from the website from day one, then there would be no "paid API" nor partnerships with so-called "tech" companies or HN HIBP following. There would not be "HIBP" proponents trying to suppress any criticism of it, defending its every move despite its past mistakes. Most importantly, there would less/no need for "trust".

HIBP is a particularly ugly symbol of the problem of web intermediaries/middlemen and everything/anything "as a service". As expected, HN commenters will not like this viewpoint as they may themselves be trying to profit from such intermediation and the data collection it enables. They may have even convinced themselves they are doing good.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jve on Friday August 16, 2024 @04:07AM (#41264254)
He actually tried to sell the company at one point in time. He got a stressfull time, approaching burn out. Around 2019 he tried to sell HIBP: https://www.troyhunt.com/project-svalbard-the-future-of-have...

> ... but it was the first time since the overhead of managing the service had gone off the charts.

Around 2020 he decided not to: https://www.troyhunt.com/project-svalbard-have-i-been-pwned-...

He then reveals source of stress and the way it impacted HIBP: https://www.troyhunt.com/sustaining-performance-under-extrem...

Just think about it: HIBP hinges on a person doing his stuff, putting in his time and finances. That affects personal life. However that is a very valuable utility that guy is doing. Good that CF donates cache and help is here and there... but do you think you would have managed that service better?

Would it have been better if HIBP was sold and managed by a real company? Who knows. But long term it is of course healthier if HIBP isn't affected by a single person personal life situations.

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by aa_is_op on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:09AM (#41254235)
Nobody's gonna pay that much money for it when you can get it from ad companies for pennies