Josh Wieder

I'd like to tell you a story. Its a story that doesn't particularly make me look very good. It was at a point in my career where I still had a lot to learn, and like many young people I thought I was smarter than I was. But its a true story and there is an important point to it, so I'm telling it here even at the risk of looking a bit like a schmuck. To tell the story, we have to go back in time. The year was 2006. There were still movies in the theaters that didn't have a single comic book character in them. George W. Bush was still best known for destroying the middle east and not for his adorable stick-figure self-portraits. No one that worked outside of telecommunications or that didn't wallpaper their house in aluminum foil believed that the NSA was wiretapping everyone and everything. And I had just received a promotion. I was working within the primary data center of an internet service provider. The company I was working for had a tiered engineering...

Five days ago someone on Hacker News pointed out that Google's Safe Browsing system labeled Wikileaks.org a "dangerous site" . At some point the Google warning was rescinded, however Google continues to (accurately) point out that pages within Wikileaks.org will "install malware on visitors' computers". I've been contacted by many companies over the years who have discovered their web server was compromised after receiving a warning from Google's Safe Browsing system. What I have never seen before is Google labeling a website safe while that website continues to host malware. Has anyone else seen this before? Does anyone at Google confirm this was algorithmically determined behavior and not manual intervention on the part of Google? What possible justification could there be for labeling a website safe that hosts malware? When I first found malware in content hosted by Wikileaks last year, one of the most frequent negative responses I receiv...

Five years ago, someone by the name of Hacker Croll acquired a large amount of sensitive internal corporate documents from Twitter employees . Hacker Croll took 310 of these documents and sent them to the website Techcrunch . Techcrunch decided to use the information, publishing a series of stories based on the documents and the reactions of Twitter and Techcrunch's readers to the release of the documents. The documents themselves were not all that terrible. Twitter, it seems, is not an internet Enron. The release of the documents did not result in any serious consequences for Twitter - no flight of investment, no investigations, no indictments. Techcrunch summarized the contents of the documents as: "executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs." For a crooked company such documents would be an absolute disaster. But few outside of the Internet and journalism industries noticed what happened....