X "Yes, but when we do it, it's not doxxing"
Q "Why not?"
X "Because we would never do it for any nefarious reason"
Q "What about that time we scraped the data of those groups that were linked to that reporter, so that one company could do oppo research and prepare a PR counterattack, targeting specific journalists"
X "That wasn't nefarious. We made a lot of money doing that"
Was this just you making up someone's response? Because neither of those companies listed in the title sell people's info.
Your comment is just a terrible strawman.
The phonebook is full of ‘doxxing’. Who cares.
After a public backlash, ICE recently suspended its Extreme Vetting Initiative, which would scan social media history and automatically flag people for deportation based on the exact criteria from the original Muslim ban. The Brennan Center discusses why this is bad: https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/ice-extreme-vetting-i...
ICE will still require five years of social media history: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/immigrants-social-me...
That does not mean you have to make it easier
He’s calling attention to the appalling policy choice made by his government. In this case I think he would have to make it easier.
I mean, surely you can't expect a site like GitHub with thousands of projects happening every day to be able to keep track of each one and make sure that something bad isnt being done with the project.
GitHub has a slightly different dynamic, being work focused, and there being no reason for most people to delve into random repositories and flag inappropriate ones.
Heck, even the underlying tech assumes problems fixed with patches rather than repository deletion, so if anthing it’s half way between Wikipedia and Geocities.
Hey, people are still going to kill each other, so I'm going to leave this gun in here
Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world.
In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the wrong employer (they might not even be involved in any of the bad crap you see on TV but who cares, wrong employer!)
In other countries or, for example, the EU, such behavior would be a crime, end of story. And you'd be responsible for the damage that comes from doxing people.
Saying "the information is already out there" is no excuse. It's like a swatter saying "it was just a prank".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/10/21/t...
b) it certainly is not illegal in germany, france
ah, my other comment got flagged immediately. what a shame, @dang
And still, this gives you or anyone no right to violate the privacy and endanger their rights. That just puts you on the same level as them, willingly destroying the lives of others because it brings you pleasure, because you believe it to be justice.
Regarding a), I recommend to examine the syntax "Other countries or, for example, the EU", which specifically does not refer to the EU as a country due to the occurence of the word "or".
Such behaviour is also certainly a crime in germany (§238 StGB and related Articles); if your actions cause someone to die or injury or the threat thereof, you can be prosecuted for it (though you need to actively sue either a specific person or against anonymous).
But what do I expect from a community where there’s at least one thread daily speaking favourably of breitbart.com? Lastly, ICE employees should think hard about the direction their upper ranks are going. They absolutely have a choice to not become 21st century Gestapo. It’s not too late.
Either you:
1. Don't care
2. Use this information in a bad way, like harassing or stalking the individuals that are doing their job (I'm assuming).
I don't understand people who do this kind of things and also expect support and sympathy. You have none from me at least. It is great that Medium and Github removes such databases to protect individuals that probably are innocent.
Edit: Because really otherwise they should remove the information from LinkedIn (or make it non-searchable) which also makes it very easy to get and they don't do that.
That said, we must protect people that are having their information leaked with a nefarious intent. In Sweden for example, you can take this information find out their addresses and social security numbers since all of this is basically public information.
Github and Medium simply don't want their platforms to be used to harass and stalk people, which is a real problem that anyone with experience can attest to.
Mega.co has an okay track record at this point, though it's centralized obviously.
Tor hidden service offering a link to the files + bittorrent magnet link may be the best option.
(No not Blockchain)
Both sites use PII to target people and companies: how many annoying emails have you received from LinkedIn this week? And I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be spammed?
But I guess if a user does it, it’s doxxing. I wonder if this is political, or maybe Medium and GitHub are just trying to avoid a potential fight with a federal agency.
None at all. The only emails I get from linkedin are friend requests and message notifications. That's how I set the thing up.
I'm not sure that's super creepy?
The real casualty here is going to be Linkedin. They don't publicize much how easily their data can be acquired in bulk.
I didn't look at what format the "database" is in, or if the size would make it (im)practical to simply zip it up and email it around, but if the format isn't readily consumable by non-technical people, there wouldn't be any reason to not utilize a tool like git anyway.
`git clone --bare` is enough.
- hosting on AWS is not free for super high traffic (assuming the free tier can't keep up) - serving files from S3 is not free (though it's cheap enough at low read levels, it adds up)
At a typical level of traffic, the author's current host may be sufficiently inexpensive. Assuming the author was assuming many, many times the usual traffic (even if everyone is kind enough to bare clone), it would be a pointless expense.
Of course, third party hosting can take the content down... and this is where git became relevant. Assuming the author was more interested in distributing the content than the prestige of being the distributor, even though Github etc. took down the repo, every person who has since cloned is now capable of re-publishing to any new upstream repository of their choosing, on any server.
Assuming, again, that all of this was the goal, it probably made sense to utilize the free, fast, scalable third party hosting as long as possible rather than risk self-hosting slowing down or collapsing under traffic, or creating a massive spike in cost.
That's a whole boat load of assumptions, any of which could be wrong. In the realm of possible motivations, though, I think it's a fairly logical conclusion.
