499
From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
(www.engadget.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
499 points (98.1% liked)
Privacy
31912 readers
539 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.