mediated history

The security flaws article was pretty good, but not really “epic.”  The Amazon / Apple conflicting security policies are pretty funny and dumb, but the rest of the basic stuff he puts down could have been avoided. There are more holes in his story then just not having the two way authenticator.  For his home address, those websites need to be given the permission to show the billing information to your home address.  It’s not the default option.  White Pages has the ability to find someone, but it’s not a reliable site.  His backup email was also the gmail he used to hold his name, which is really dumb.  The entire cloud idea seems pretty dumb to me, it’s supposed to convenient but it really just makes it really hard for when you try to separate any of your accounts and information.  The strange assumption made by web designers is that the internet is this holistic entity where you just mash together everything, but there is a large portion of people who have their information separated for a variety of different reasons besides security, and there are tools and programs made for easy use of that, so forcing on something like the cloud to hold everything seems very strange and unnecessary to me, I didn’t think anyone actually wanted to have all their accounts hooked up for no reason.

I didn’t like how the author used “Lulz”

The best part about the article was definitely the reasoning behind the hack.  Getting that sweet, sweet 3 letter username.  People who have been around on the internet know how precious getting the right handle is.  I personally hold some “Alex” handles on popular websites, and I’ve name sniped a few people on gmail. It’s nice that they talked to Mat after the fact they hacked him to give him this information, and they probably thought the hack was mostly harmless.  Mat Honan did lose digital information, but  it could have been worse. Much worse.

~ by aledere1 on September 30, 2012 .