The best part about running a cybersecurity company: lots of easy, free marketing. It's a really good time to be in the industry. It is unfortunate that people are trusting companies to protect their information and it ends up being really hard to do properly. Every able-bodied security engineer really should get in the game since there's money to be made as well as good to be done.
In a way I'm glad they got hacked. They'll learn the lesson by losing customers and $$$$. I'm guessing there was someone who said they should invest in security but management decided to save money.
I can say with some confidence that the blame lies almost entirely with the stewards. Until we learn how to converge faster towards consensus, things are going to remain painfully broken for long stretches of time. The inhibitor here isn't technological and it has nothing to do with the people on the ground relying on the web. It has to do with how things get run at a top level.
So they just started a campaign of attrition? They're going to lose unless other companies get on board. I'm assuming Canada was chosen intentionally, based on the data, to minimize losses. But this is going nowhere unless others follow suit.
This is one of the better responses. Issues that arise: low # of data points at macro timescale, time series data (and local correlation between individual data points) making it hard to extract training/testing sets, and the overarching structural shifts in the market over time that invalidate older data (depending on context).
This whole incident has convinced me to actually use a tool like this, so I'm going to write one and distribute the extension code for free. I promise you won't be able to detect it, so good luck.
I think anyone who wants the ability to obscure their search footprint should have it. And if you think otherwise, I'm doubly convinced it's necessary.
Do any of these people understand that the autocomplete algorithm takes many other things into account? Like your personal search history, Google's internal dossier built on top of your usage of all their services, and even things like location, type of device, etc.
It's very difficult to get an unbiased autocomplete suggestion and actually requires some nontrivial degree of experimentation/the appropriate setup.
What's especially shameful about all of this is that a ton of smart people rushed to condemn Applebaum before we had a complete accounting. If this many intelligent people can prematurely convict someone in the court of public opinion, what hope is there for the rest of society?
