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From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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It was never not creepy and wrong.
NEVER. Just because it's been two decades of people not thinking about it doesn't change that.
I remember, at that time, I was more worried about how admins in my local ISP spend their time than some far away company.
I still remember being a young kid (11-12) and running a program to scan my local ISP in my small town (back then small ISPs could easily get government grants and become a monopoly) for insecure SMB servers or something. I suddenly got a flood of results like
/private/passwords.txt
/administrator/USD###-users.txt
All kinds of tasty things. Very excite. Then the results started pouring in by the thousands...
YOU-ARE-VIOLATING-CFAA
FBI-DOORBELL
FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.EXE
PWN3D-LMAONOOB
Things like that. I immediately shut my computer down and that was probably the first time my dad saw me not eat for a day. Didn't ask why I wasn't sleeping much the week after that ๐
Also I Googled for the filenames and found nothing. So if you're the 50-70 year old who wrote that script and happen to see this, I'd love to get a message with the ISP name. They are in a number of small-medium size towns around my hometown now.